Hillel “Hy” Pearlstein
Hy Pearlstein's grandparents, Morris and Jenny (both born in Russia), came to the United States young. His father, Max Pearlstein, was born in Romania, and his mother, Dora, was born in Louisville, Kentucky; the couple married in Dallas and raised three children there. Hy was the second of three, with an older brother, Israel, and a younger sister, Eve. Born on May 14, 1919, at 3137 Ross Avenue, Hy spent his early childhood there before the family moved around 1929 to a home his father built at 2630 Park Row in South Dallas, where many Jewish families had settled.
Max Pearlstein made his living in a kind of dry goods business, driving a truck loaded with bolts of cloth, needles, thread, and ribbon to sell to homeowners in the Black neighborhoods, where people did their own sewing. He later opened store accounts on his own credit at Sanger's, Titche's, and other shops so his customers could buy on credit, then collected payments himself on weekends. He built friendships with both Jewish and Italian neighborhood merchants and shared a love of classical music. Hy attended Brown School and Forest Avenue High School, from which he graduated in 1938, the same year he won a city tennis championship.
After high school Hy worked briefly for a uniform company, then joined Morris Bleich's plumbing business, where he stayed some fourteen years across his time before and after military service. Drafted in the mid-1940s, he served in the Army, was sent overseas to Germany and France, and was wounded by shrapnel near the junction of the Rhine and Moselle rivers, spending nearly sixty days in the hospital. He later guarded prisoners in New York before his discharge. He met his wife in Kansas City and married in 1946, and they raised two sons. The family belonged to congregations including Temple Emanu-El, and his father helped found the Hebrew Free Loan. He carried lifelong sorrow over a childhood accident involving a gun that took a friend's life.
Full Transcript
today is friday march the 18th 2011. my name is clint reisner the interviewer and the videographer and the interviewer's name is uh well hillel hammond hyman and welcome to the dallas jewish historical society and we will now proceed with our oral history right here first i'm going to ask you about your family your parents your grandparents where and when were you boarded how did you happen to settle in dallas and what did your parents do for a living you asked the questions i'll give you the answers best i can okay let's elaborate on that for right now your family tell us about your family your parents and when and where were you
born and how did you happen to sell well let's see first of all my grandparents were jerewick j-e-r-w-i-c-k morris and jenny chairwick both born in russia and they were born in russia they were both born in russia came to the united states at a fairly young age okay my father's name was max pearlstein mother's name was dora pearlstein father was born in romania mother was born in louisville kentucky and they were married in dallas and uh that's where they raised the family now at a young age of course they had my brother who was israel i was second and born in dallas on ross avenue
3137 ross avenue and my sister was eve pearlstein and we lived on ross avenue there for a number of years and i think it was 19 1926 or 27 they built a home in south dallas where so many of the jewish people had moved to we lived at 2630 park row which my father had built at that time and um that is where the three of us three children uh were raised right there in south dallas um and you just tell me any other questions that you might want to ask now okay now which side of your family was from no my grandparents my grandparents
were both from russia my father was from romania my mother was from louisville kentucky i see okay and uh you were born here in dallas i was born here in dallas okay what year were you born in 1919 may the 14th i see on ross avenue cross avenue 3137 ross avenue across from fishburn's laundry at that time okay tell us something about your childhood and you lived on ross avenue as a child right as a child we lived on rossdale you as a child at uh i think it was a 19 somewhere in the neighborhood of 1929 close to 30 my father built a home
in south dallas where most of the jewish people were at that time at 2630 park row my brother was had already been born of course my sister was born just a year or so later and uh i went to school at six years old at brown school at that particular time and uh graduated the school that got out of school in 1933 and then went into high school in 1934 and was in high school until 1938 when i graduated 1938. which high school was that four staff that was forced forest avenue high school which is now a black school madison high school what was your neighborhood like there on park road my neighborhood was a very quiet neighborhood almost all the homes out in there were brick at that time some of the people had already started to suffer the depression at that time my father was not hit until a few later years but that was a neighborhood where like i say we're all mostly jewish people and everybody seemed to have gotten a long sign there wasn't any mischief going on like you have today you were
in in the evening when it got dark and most everybody had people to do their black people to do their yards and to clean the houses and things like that it was a fairly nice neighborhood that's very nice and what did your father do for a business my father uh i would have to say sort of a dry goods business he had bought a truck and in that truck he carried mostly bolts of goods needles and atoms like that and he used to make the colored neighborhoods only the homeowners and at that particular time most everybody was doing their own sewing making their own clothes
and uh he would take the bolts of goods in or they would come out to the truck and see what he had and he would sell them the goods measure it off the threads to match the needles and so on and so forth the ribbons and stuff that all went with it and all they had to do was do the sewing and then in a few later years this uh some of the stores started actually opening up their credit a little bit better and what daddy did uh daddy went to sanders tychus volks and a few of the other stores and he opened up accounts
in his name and as these people started buying certain stuff as their own dresses or items that they needed you know in that line that my dad carried he would give them a slip they could take that slip down with a set amount on it no more than that and they could pick out a dress they could pick out underwear they could pick up whatever they wanted up to that amount it was charged to my dad then my dad did the collecting and i used to go with him on saturdays and sundays to collect and i eventually say that he lost very very little money
now after so many years he got out of that business what was the climb too like in those days what was the climb tale mostly african american no sir the clientele was all black all black no white no hispanics everything everybody was white blows the fabric and textiles and everything that is right yes yes yeah now what dad didn't have of course he would open up the accounts at the stores for these people and they would do the charging they would charge it and then the bills were sent to my dad then my dad would kept a set of books and he would go and
enter into the book and then as he made his rounds on saturdays and sundays he would collect from these people in other words he provided a service that was provided definitely needed for the blind that is correct but like i say own it to homeowners and at that particular time most a lot of these people also instead of being at home when he went to collect they would be at work and of course he knew where they worked and he always had made arrangements with the people that lived there why he was there you see never to the front door always to the back door
and that's how he made his living for a number of years until he decided that so much of that had gone strictly to the stores it opened up accounts for these people and backed them which he never had to pay on anybody's account they all paid themselves they were all homeowners and you helped your dad on weekends you helped your father well i really didn't help him at that time i was still fairly young i just used to go with him and i would sit in a truck unless he asked me or one of the colored women came out and asked him where your son
was or something like that you understand but it was real nice hi what did you do for abusement as a child as a child i played a lot a lot of tennis of course i rode my bicycle like everybody else that's in the neighborhood and i would play like anyone else uh hockey in the streets on skates you know the tin can and uh then i guess it must have been around so i don't know 13 14 years old is when i started playing tennis and uh i used to play tennis from sun up in the morning until sundown at night and then it uh
went through high school that way and then in 1938 i became city champion right at that particular time and how old were you at this time well let's see i get out of high school let's see i think i got out of high school at 19. and then i played tennis through school that's that's actually when i made a city championship when i played forest avenue high school at that particular and uh i stayed with it until i graduated and now and your education you went to elementary school i went to elmira elementary school brown school right now in south dallas there a couple of blocks in the house and then from brown school i went to forest avenue high school okay there was no junior high school or middle school no there were no junior high schools just went from elementary to high school into high school yeah yeah yeah and in
the meantime what i used to do on sundays i would always go to the what they call the arbiter ring which was a jewish school on forest avenue and that is where i learned the jewish language learn to speak it read it and write it hebrew or yetis jewish not hebrew oh yes yes strictly yiddish but i used to speak it fluently i used to read it and write it fluently but no one after my parents being from uh with my father when he and his mother had something to talk over they were usually talking jewish you know if they didn't want the children to
understand you know but then they had to stop that not too long after i started hater or rather hebrew school there because i could understand what they were talking about okay tell us about this school this is interesting they would teach the yiddish they would teach strictly yiddish well and what was the name of this the arbiter ring okay that that's the workman circle okay that's what it is and i went there for several years and most of most all of the jewish children in south dallas went there and it was located where and saved that peggy where in south dallas wasn't located on forest
avenue yeah yeah and the name of that school the arbiter ring that's interesting about how many students attended that school how many children well they had several different classes i would say that uh it'd be a wild guess i would say that there was something probably in the neighborhood of let's say 50 maybe 55 close to 60 children but in different classes you see and they taught yiddish they saw yiddish not the yiddish no no all right now when i finished there then on park road there was a hebrew school that i went to okay a fellow by the name of mr levine i cannot
remember cannot forget that name there was a mr levine that was head of that school all they taught there was hebrew now i never took i never took up the hebrew like i did the yiddish but i still went to school and um of course they had a baseball diamond there at the school where you played baseball before class after class or something like that and i think i attended that probably for maybe two two and a half years so you could speak yiddish and read at that particular time i could read but like i say my fam my father modernized himself so quick in
this in dallas he modernized himself so quick and my father was a very very smart man very very smart come on install and uh mother mother and daddy used to speak jewish around the house all the time oh yeah yiddish rather if you want to call it that so when you said your father modernized himself he became assimilated into very much very much so yeah did you speak yiddish with your parents if you after you learned yiddish you did and my grandparents until they both passed away oh yeah now we didn't speak much yiddish but uh you know my father was so glad to be
in this country modernized himself so quick that he preferred really speaking american culture when you graduated from forest avenue high school what did you do after graduation did you have a call no no no i did not go to college i immediately went to work for a uniform company they were looking for a young person to come in and work with a uniform company and i worked there for possibly a year a year and a half and i found out that uh there was a jewish fellow here in town that owned the plumbing business a fellow by the name of morris bleach and how my
brother met him i don't know but he ran into him and they were talking and uh he told morris he said i've got a son i read i've got a brother that i think would like the business and i went down and talked to morris leech i went to work and that lasted 14 years well when i went to service and i came back out of service i went immediately back to work but during the time that i was working after i'd been there for a year or so whenever he would take a vacation i was in charge of it that's how fast i picked
up the plumbing but uh it seems as though during the time that i was at service he had made so much money on black market he was able to get a hold of the bath cells and the toilets and this and that and the pipe and so on and so forth and he would sell it as a heck of a property and when i came back from service and i went back to work for him there was no way that i could please him everything i seemed to do seemed to be wrong and i just decided that i'd go ahead and quit which i did
after 14 years now that's combining the years before i went into service and the years after service and so what did you do at that time did you at that particular time anything and everything in that plumbing shop that needed to be done i did i sold i cleaned i did the floors i cleaned the yard i cut the grass and whatever's to be done there i did it during your childhood did your family belong to a synagogue they belonged to a good assassin on forest avenue forest and when belkin at that particular time and uh what was the extent of your family's participation in
this were they observant regular attendees for services no no no no lika my father went on holidays but not on friday nights uh my father was so glad to be in this particular country and he modernized himself so i don't think there was anybody on the earth that would modernize themselves any quicker than my father did i'm sure your parents celebrated the jewish holiday oh yes definitely oh yeah we celebrated all the jewish holidays you want to talk about that your memories of that well uh i don't know what there is to say about them except that we did uh we enjoyed the holidays of
course we observed all of the holidays whatever was to be done at that particular time as a child uh things were a lot different than than they are now oh now we were not uh we were not religious enough to where we would walk the show we rode most of the time uh we did not get into the real what you call real religious part of it we did not keep kosher i used to enjoy the services of course at that particular time i wasn't very old either what i used to like to wait to service this roving that i'm playing go home and change
clothes get out and play like everybody else [Laughter] oh and then we did after i got out of a good assassin then the family joined temple emmanuel oh my god and i went to temple for several where was temple emmanuel chapter emanuel at that particular time was on south boulevard and uh harwood which after a number of years until they built a new building out on hillcrest that was the first location of temple emanuel right as far as wait a minute no no no temple emmanuel saul do you was temple emmanuel at the jewish community center over no it wasn't either no no temple emmanuel
was originally there i was thinking the jewish community center over at city park so this community center was from pocahontas yeah yeah city park yeah yeah okay temple emanuel was in 1900 south park yeah boulevard in harwood did your parents belong to jewish organizations like uh my father was the origin one of the original uh founders of the jewish uh what i want to say uh free loan okay but we belong to uh for a short while we're with a good assumption and since my father was still collecting at that time you know in his businesses on saturdays and sundays he couldn't spend very much
time there but we used to we used to spend services there in younger days okay the free loan hebrew free loan the hebrew free loan yes they're still going we're going very very strong okay so your father had a lot of contact with the gentile community then with his business uh only with the department stores you might say friends that he made my father had as many italian friends as he did jewish friends and the reason for that was that in certain neighborhoods where they were all blacks a lot of the italians and had opened up at grocery stores and this is where my father
used to go in between customers and but not not not an awful lot of white people no mostly jewish people and the italians people like that and blacks a lot a lot of black friends since that's that's where he made his living so the italians and the jews had a very compatible relationship oh yeah yeah yeah yeah let's see almost at that time almost all of your almost all of your neighborhood grocery stores you didn't have uh uh the big grocery stores like you got now you had the neighborhood grocery stores and the majority italians am i right though so i'm not here no and
so there was a close relationship between the italian and yeah my father used to love classical music and so did the italians i went with my father many many times to a grocery store and the italians lived behind the stores in the end of the back rooms and i would sit there and listen to some of this classical music that they would play on their victrolas and my father at one time had one heck of a collection of classical music our president oh yeah mother daddy when they belong to the uh dallas symphony orchestra this was in later years we were already in our 20s
then mother daddy used to go once a month to the dallas symphony orchestra and they would sit downstairs and my brother and i used to sit upstairs and uh well that went on for a number of okay uh how did you meet your wife i met my wife in kansas city in 1938 my mother some of my mother's family lived in kansas city and the family on a week on a summer vacation would always go to kansas city and we would always stay with one same relatives and i met my wife she was a friend of one of the relatives daughters and i met her
there in 1938 and uh then a couple of years later i went back to kansas city with the family and i saw her again and then uh we both had an aunt here and the husband passed away she came in for the funeral and uh i saw her again and we morally got acquainted then and we started corresponding with each other and then finally finally in 1946 we decided that we would go in and get married we'd been corresponding and i had been going backwards and forward to kansas city every now and then uh with uh mother or my father and uh sure enough in
1946 we got and you belong to the synagogue also at temple emmanuel yeah oh yeah yeah okay how many children did you have two boys okay i have one son now who's 62 i have one son that had just turned 60 just recently and how many grandchildren do you have i have two grandchildren one is married lives in a beast i can keep forgetting where she lives she has married and she is now pregnant expecting a baby in two or three months and the younger one is not married and she still lives with the parents during your working career are your activities as an adult
i believe you are a veteran right would you like to talk about that your being in the service and becoming a veteran well no more than uh i did not i did not sign up for the draft i'll let them go ahead and draft me because at that i was working at ross avenue plumbing at and had a pretty fair job i had to say and then i was drafted in 19 i got my papers there in 1945 but went into service in 1946 and i served in here in the states different replacement camps for a couple of years and then i was shipped overseas
and uh spent most of my time in germany france and around in there and then i was injured at the junction of the rhine in the moselle rivers i was hit with shrapnel stayed in the hospital uh almost 60 days close to it and then when i was released from the on the way back to rejoin my outfit which took about three weeks the war was ended then they shipped me to new york where i was on a military outfit guarding prisoners that they had gotten over here and then after that uh three or four different camps it started vague because they kept me moving
from one place to another one and then i finally got out around around the close to the end of 46. i see and you're still acting with jewish veterans right oh yeah well i uh up until here recently i uh have not been attending i got what you might call sort of stabbed in the back if you know what i mean a couple of things that went wrong and i didn't care for so i just told him i was through now in the meantime why with him saw i got sort of tired of doing so much work like saul is doing now and has done since he'd been in so i i i'm probably going to go back in okay hi you have seen a lot
of changes in dallas oh my god during your childhood as compared to now and what way has the city of dallas changed dramatically for you as compared to your childhood as compared to now well the it's changed uh i just have to say that there's been general changes the streets have changed the neighborhoods have changed uh the buildings have changed downtown everything has changed you've seen all of these changes oh my god i've seen all of these kind of changes some of them i agree with some of them i don't agree with but then this is one of those things that nothing i can do
about it and they're still making changes today but i think most all of the changes were made for the better i've seen a lot of neighborhoods that have changed from white to black i've seen neighborhoods that have changed from white to hispanic items like that some are good some are bad but i've seen a lot a lot of changes okay um who are your role models in life are throughout your childhood and all that who would say would be your role model my father would be one it was never a more honest person under the sun than my father and my mother they taught us
well uh they let us do nothing wrong we were punished for anything that we did we were not supposed to do they taught me to be kind to people they always taught me to try to be a jolly as i could i believe in conversation you told me once that you lived in the love field area at one on day loading mockingbird or something or you had a business in that area or did you share that with me at one time no alpha denton road and mockingbird okay i thought no sir huh no no what was that area like where were most of the jewish
business most of the most of the jewish people now people are businesses people in business well most everything at that particular time when if years ago businesses were all in south dallas almost everything it's not thousands of jewish bakeries uh some of the stores were jewish you had uh downtown you had oak brothers that was jewish you had taitus you had most tai chi people that worked in texas and the managers and everything were jewish congress was owned by jewish people uh a lot of your businesses here in dallas were owned by jewish people okay and run by jewish people of course what would you
describe or as the most significant events in your life i that you still remember very vividly well uh was it i have one i have one thing that happened in my life that i will never forget and i don't even dislike it with anybody i see now i don't i don't mind telling you this interview and i doubt if son even knows it there was a family here in town by the name of it's hard for me to do this there was a family in dallas by the name of zelazny that had about three sons and one daughter and we were both pretty young and
uh we lived on parklaw at that time and where my brother had gotten a gun don't ask me but i knew where that gun was and abe and i were playing at home one day now this is already i would say that i was probably 15 16 years old i don't know we were talking that i got a hold of that gun and that gun went off needless to say it killed him and i had never gotten over that it was hard for me in service to even handle a gun but i did and i just imagined i killed a bunch of germans myself with
a machine gun as well as handguns but i will never forget that as long as i live that to me is the i guess that has stuck with me longer than anything under the sun and that's been so so that's been so so many years ago but uh that's that's a deal that i will never forget looking at your life on the positive side something that you remember very well significantly that that was really had a tremendous impact well the fact that i got married and had two children and both of those children now are well they're well behaved very well mannered they're both making
a nice living and uh i think between my children my wife that's the most important thing in my life somewhere i thought i had a handkerchief well hi i want to ask you is there anything you would like to add to this interview before we close or do you have any questions you'd like to ask no i have no questions uh what what happens with this now well you will get a copy of this i'll get a copy of the new date night and i personally want to thank you for sharing and because you've had a tremendous life well i hope so and i hope
that my life is not over yet i hope the rest of it is going to be interesting as well okay saul and i pretty well make it that way like i told you earlier