Full Transcript
the heart today is friday march 4th 2016. i'm joan gramont and anitra kuzen is with me working the camera and we're very happy to interview you elena lester thank you so helena let's start with your south african life and your family where they came from and why they came to south africa what they did when they came there well my father came to south africa when he was about 14 years old i don't know the exact date and i know that he really wanted to come to america but he couldn't get his papers organized funnily enough his sister managed to go to baltimore and after he arrived here i'm not sure of the
date as i said but um he brought out two of his brothers to south africa jerry and aaron and when he first arrived he came by boat of course he had no money didn't speak english and he went to work i don't know how he landed in the country but he landed in the whitbank district area and he went to a place called urhis where he worked for a man by the name of mr malkin and he worked in his little general store and he slept at the room in the room behind the store so that he could earn some money and he could start
learning the english language and they didn't have electricity they had an oil lamp and this man always used to say to my dad what are you doing burning my oil my dad used to say well i have to learn my alphabet because at that stage he spoke yiddish he knew hebrew because he had done a yeshiva course for two years because his father wanted him to be a rabbi and with you anya but that was not going to be what he wanted to do so he didn't progress with that he started learning english and then he started learning afrikaans and a couple of african languages
and he knew russian he was a very brilliant man very domineering but very brilliant when he lived in lithuania he was either in riga or vulnera in fact i think he was in riga being the oldest of the family there were three boys and two girls being the oldest in the family it was up to him to support the family so he used to buy little pieces of paper and get tobacco and sit on the street corners and roll the cigarettes so that he could then sell the cigarettes and make some money which he used to buy wheat for and then he used to store
it in their loft excuse me so that he could get through the winter feeding the family because at that stage i don't think there were any parents left i never saw any of my grandparents i know for a fact that my mother's father died in her arms on a train she was also from the same area she was from vulner and i think we can go now very close to each other so my mother came to south africa a few years after my father and she was a millennia she actually came with hilton israelson's father who was her brother and another couple who were first
cousins barney and ray mare they were they were first cousins and they were brother and sister and the four of them came to south africa and because my mother was a millionaire she landed herself in mayfair which was a very exclusive area and she used to make hats and then she went to hence the sewing which i love to do etc she then went to her wedding in brackpan where she met my father and they got married i don't know the exact date either history was not my best subject okay interesting now tell us about your life growing up in south africa where did you
live where did you firstly because my father was in the country up till the age of 10 i was living in kendall which is near wet bank my father had a general dealer store and he was a farmer my sister and i went to an afrikaans school and even though english was our home language we learned afrikaans and we spoke afrikaans quite well then we moved to johannesburg and i went to leicester road primary school which was in kensington that's where we lived and the headmaster was frank braun he was a very interesting man because he was officiating at the olympics one particular year and
i remember him writing to all these students including me which was very nice and he wrote in green inc and i managed to forge his signature anyway then after that i went to gp high school then i went to college and i did shorthand tapping etc cetera and i met peter lieften we got married in 1962 we lived in rose bank the house was expropriated for the school and we moved to hard park and we lived in a very lovely house and had a lovely lap and three boys bran daryl and gregory we loved being in south africa climate was wonderful people were wonderful economy
was great but because we were living with a suppressed nation and things were not what we wanted them to be and we knew that the writing was on the wall and we watched many of our friends and family emigrate we decided that it was time for us to do the same so we sent our eldest son bran to dallas and we didn't know anything about the american cottages so we sent him to dallas because our cousins hilton and maureen lived here but he managed to get into a college in paris texas we didn't know anything about paris texas anyway any uh either anyway he went
to this cottage and after he'd been there a couple of semesters he phoned us and said you know i think you have to take me out of this college there's something wrong i said what's wrong he said i'm getting a pluses all the time anyway after that he went to denton college and then we sent daryl he was us who is our second son sent him and he came to the same cottage and we were left in south africa with gregory who at that stage was about 15. and when he was 16 we decided it was time to move after we spent many an evening discussing it lying in bed going to sleep waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning and thinking should we go should we go and we decided we'll come to america and we'll have a look so peter said what's the point of just going to america and looking around everywhere we just go to dallas and we see that we like it because we're not going to spend five years going around america trying to find the place we came to dallas i didn't know whether i liked it do i
didn't like it nor did he but we decided it was dallas and then when we arrived here everything was of course very very strange we found the people to be wonderful which they still are and um found it difficult adjusting the first 18 months two years there were lots of tears in those days we did that was uh 1986 there were no emails there were no ipads and the telephone calls were expensive so we had left at that stage peter's mother was still alive but my father had passed on and my mother unfortunately died very early in a motor smash so we came to america
we started acclimating as the americans say started getting into life and meeting people and peter started looking for a business and he opened a couple of retail stores which did not do well and then he went into home protection which is a security company here we are we've been here nearly 29 years 20 30 years i think lovely so tell us about um in what way were others helpful when you arrived did you find the community welcoming to you as a new immigrant well because brown and daryl we were here before and they knew what many of the people we were very welcomed in fact
we used to stand outside most people's front doors and peter used to say to me quickly tell me their names which is true and i used to stand there with my box of chocolates and then we used to go in fact so many people invited us that i can see the three couples that never invited us that stand out in my mind which i certainly will not mention because it's not important but we had purchased the house after we'd been to dallas and we moved straight into this house this very same house and we were waiting for hired furniture because our lift had not arrived
and hedley and the nekrokusen walked into our house and they saw this fold up bed mattress and they said no ways you're not sleeping on that and they went home they had a spare mattress and they came with their mattress with their little girls holding the top of the windows open and the little girls holding the mattress on top of the roof and brought the mattress in for us and of course maureen and hilton were outstanding i went with maureen to sam's which is a wholesaler like a macro and she took me around and showed me where everything was and they they helped us tremendously
and everybody helped us what kind of work have you done here since you've been in dallas well when i first came i didn't work i didn't have a car and everybody used to come and fetch me and schlep me and take me wherever i needed to go and then eventually i got a car and i'd met some american people and i met an interior designer who asked me if i would work with her so i uh managed to organize my license for interior designing and i worked with her until she moved away from dallas her name was uh forget her name hold on a second
let me think of it anyway that's not important then after that i worked with susie k and i did quite a lot of homes which i enjoyed and then finally i decided i'd much prefer to play bridge and not work so i retired okay tell me how do you compare a jewish life in south africa to dallas well in a way even though dallas is not a very big jewish community it has become more religious and bigger now um in a way it was sort of more jewish because we needed other people on friday nights whereas back in south africa we had the families that
was a sort of taken for granted thing and coming here and only having hilton and mourinho's family other friends became family and jewish life became sort of closer in a way but a lot of the people were not afraid with the traditional jewish foods that we had in johannesburg and didn't know how to make them and one thing led to another i had made up my mind that kickle and bulkers were going to continue living forever and a lot of the girls have now taken on learning that and everybody makes the traditional dishes when they are the holidays what so those are the south african
jewish cultural traditions you've maintained them yes okay so the shabbat and celebrating the holidays and how important was israel to you growing up in south africa it was very important because firstly my brother jack and my sister ronan i belong to the beta group and we were very involved with israel and then rona immigrated to israel in 1967 so i spent many uh took many trips to go to israel to see rona became very ingrained in israel prior to that my husband peter worked for the rua which is the israeli appeal for israel and for the zionist organizations so we were always involved in supporting
israel and israel is very meaningful to us as jews tell us where your children are today bran aged 51 is in dallas not married and he's in the roofing business daryl who is divorced was married to a dutch girl in dallas and they decided to immigrate to amsterdam when their children were about five and one and a half two boys which broke our hearts but daryl is now in amsterdam living with these kids samuel is 20 and alone is 17. and fortunately daryl has met a very nice jewish girl daphna and gregory lives in dallas and works with peter and he's married to linda and they have the most wonderful girls natasha who is 14 and shania who's 10.
okay now tell me what what traditions rooted in your south african jewish heritage do you see your children following or continuing i think they will always observe the jewish holidays i think that always observes shabbat i think they will observe a lot of the jewish laws as far as eating the correct foods so once you were here did you arrange or did other family members join you here um no two children uh boys came ahead of us and then we came with gregory our youngest and then hilton's sister sharon and joel came with their two boys and do you still have family in south africa
i have a brother living my brothers living in south africa in benoni with their wife and he has three sons and what if anything do you miss about life in south africa i don't really miss very much anymore i miss the weather but then we do have good weather in dallas i'm getting teary i don't really miss it anymore do you visit often yes and how are you your feelings when you visit just difficult to explain because my brother's not well so it's upsetting okay so are you a u.s citizen yes okay and do you think of yourself as an american and what does it
mean to you means that we have a certain freedom and that we live in a country that's a first world country which south africa isn't anymore so are you glad you came here thrilled is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to tell us about well obviously when my parents came to south africa they didn't have very much but my mother came and brought the samovar with her and i inherited the samovar which is very meaningful to me and i'm sure my kids would enjoy it one day good good i don't know what happened to the top at the top sort of got lost
all right thanks alina thank you so much thank you joan
