2014

Cynthia Salzman Mondell

Cynthia Salzman Mondell was born in 1946 and raised in Baltimore City in a large, close-knit family. She lived with her mother's parents in a two-story row house in an integrated immigrant neighborhood that included Jewish, Greek, and Italian families. Her Orthodox grandmother kept a kosher home, was active in charity work, and studied to earn her citizenship, while her Yiddish-speaking grandfather, a tailor left deaf by an earlier accident, worked hard to support the family. Her grandparents immigrated from the Grodno region in Russia. Her mother had worked as a secretary for the Army during the war and as a hairdresser, and her father, an orphan, became an attorney and served in the Army in the South Pacific during World War II.

Cynthia attended Milford Mill high school in Baltimore and went on to the University of Maryland at College Park, where she loved college life, joined a Jewish sorority, worked on the newspaper, served as president of the Women's Recreation Association, and got involved in campus politics. Raised in a politically engaged family that encouraged her to question, she became deeply active in the antiwar movement, marching against the Vietnam War in Baltimore and Washington. She met her future husband, Alan Mondell, while working at the Maryland Port Authority when he came as part of a documentary crew, and the two married in 1969. After traveling through Europe and North Africa on a budget adventure and living for over a year on a friend's farm in Vermont, where she had a baby, they moved to Dallas in 1973 when Alan took a job with a local station.

Adjusting to Dallas was difficult at first, but Cynthia found the Jewish community welcoming and formed lasting friendships, especially at her temple. She continued freelance writing and media work, and she and Alan eventually began working together, producing more than forty films over their careers. Their Jewish-themed projects included West of Hester Street, about Jewish immigration to the Southwest, and Make Me a Match, about Jewish singles, along with a film for the Dallas Jewish Historical Society and a personal film about her father and Parkinson's disease. Their broader work included films for the Sixth Floor Museum on John F. Kennedy, the award-winning A Reason to Live, Sisters of 77 which aired nationwide on PBS, and Emmy-winning films on the State Fair of Texas. She described each film as being like a child, and at the time of the interview was working on a film about women and their shoes.

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