Full Transcript
tell me about life in el paso and about your family well i was the only one at home with my parents my brother being 12 and a half years older then i had already gone off to college and started his life and got married and had kids and so on so i was reared really like can only child right which wasn't a lot of fun but that's how it was yeah tell me about your dad my father was born in lithuania a city called marion paul he was one of eight siblings however his twin brother ben was killed and we don't know much about it
because nobody talked about it so we think it was either right at the beginning of world war one or during a pogrom but we do not know my father would not talk about it my mother did not want me asking my father questions so he was the last of all the children and they all came to the u.s previous to him and his mother and he and his mother came to new york in 1920 and they came through ellis island and then they settled in el paso where my father's oldest brother sam bellman had settled and had actually brought out all the other members of
the family my father was very easy going man enjoyed a good laugh enjoyed his children he was not intellectual and he and my uncle my mother's brother had a business across the state line in new mexico called the bellman mercantile and so that's where he worked until he retired and then lived in el paso until his death at the age of 78. did did he ever tell you why el paso what happened was his oldest brother sam came to the u.s i think it must have been around the early 1900s and sam came through galveston and the reason he settled in el paso was he had a cousin in new mexico he worked in his cousin's store in the same little town la mesa new mexico where my father and my uncle settled their store and so the whole family came through el paso and one brother charlie went to chicago and two brothers lamar and alex went to arizona and actually my father's two sisters went to arizona too
your dad ever say what it was like coming to this country he never talked about it he did tell me that in lithuania he enjoyed riding horses his mother owned some kind of eating establishment but he always said that his brother sam who was actually i think maybe 12 16 years older than he was with a slight cup father to him because his father my father's father david bellman after whom i am named actually died when my father was just a baby so he never knew him did they ever say anything about why they came to america well things were bad in europe and i
think my fa my father and its mother came after world war one right because things were so bad in europe and they already had family in the states yeah so why remain there yeah yeah tell me about your mom my mother was born in a town in lithuania called pilvishke she was one of five children her father was a school principal his name was also samuel and now i've got a grandson named samuel so that's a good solid family name samuel had five kids with my grandmother yoke heaven but samuel levinson was the name actually died at a young age too and my mother's two
older brothers saul and max had come to the united states and again settled in texas so then my aunt my mother's only sister wanted to come to the states too and she came and lived with saul then my mother betsy bellman that's c levinson at that time and her younger brother mo levinson and the mother were remaining in pilvisky so they got caught in world war one and it was a very very bad time and they came to the states in 1920 my grandmother my mother and my uncle came to the states after the war but my uncle my oldest uncle saul had settled in
el paso and he was nice enough to have sent them first class tickets so they did not have to go through ella's silent they were examined i don't know either on the ship or when they got off it off they went they went straight to minnesota where my grandmother's brother had settled in the late i think 1870s wow but they didn't stay there they just visited and came down to el paso where my uncle saul had settled yeah now your folks met in el paso yes they did their mothers my grandmother you'll have it my mother's mother and my grandmother rate so my father's mother
became friends so the two of them met that way was it an arranged marriage i don't know my mother came from a family of rabbis and scholars her grandfather who lived to the age of almost a hundred was a rabbi in that little town of pilvishki he was a very impressive man his wife had died early and then he lived with my mother and her mother and her younger brother now during the war the russians would come through the germans would come through at that time remember that was uh before the nazi period my mother said the germans were very refined very elegant they would
apportion a house or appropriate a house for their officers but treated everybody very well now when the russians came through that was not the case they were more coarse they were more bullyish and one time my mother said her elderly grandfather who must have been about 96 at the time saved her from the clutches of some russian who came into the house and said oh that's a pretty young girl there my mother would psych what 14 15. so my grandfather came stood in front of my mother now 96 years old or somewhere there about and said don't you touch this girl and he backed up so she felt like her grandfather was her savior right he had gotten very ill at the age of 90 and everybody thought he was going to die they were saying the last prayers he took a turn for the better and lived 10 more years wow so he was there in the house during the war and helped my mother then after the war around 1918 he said that's enough i've lived enough and he died and then my mother's
mother you know it took a while to settle the business and all that she sold everything and they came to new york my grandmother yo habit did not want to leave lithuania as long as her elderly father was still living and they couldn't bring him to the states he was too old too frail so they waited till 1920 and uh settled everything and came now did your mom ever talk about the trip a lot she said that she was very sorry to live to leave lithuania she liked lithuania well that's all she was before the war during the war it was so bad that they
were glad to leave she remembers how pretty lithuania was compared to el paso she said riding on the train coming from i suppose from minnesota to el paso she was very sad and wrote it all down about how she missed pwaina the beauty of it how she didn't like the desert she never did like desert environment yeah yeah did she say anything about the adjustment to make from one country to the next different language you would think so but right away both my mother and my father went to english classes in a catholic school i believe i mean that was first order of business and
they both learned to speak english correctly with an accent of course and they both spoke yiddish fluently at home they spoke english grammatically correctly yeah yeah yeah when did you meet jerry i met jerry at the university of texas in 1959. i had transferred from the university of texas at el paso spent my last two years at ut and then did you guys get married after you graduated we got married about five years after we met okay so it was after week graduating okay so after you graduated then you weren't getting married uh where did you go i went back to el paso and taught for two years taught english and high school and where was jerry now he was in um austin for one year and then dallas okay okay and then how did you guys reconnect or did you always stay in touch he continued to
write to me right and one day he sent me a letter and said you know this is ridiculous either we've got something going or we don't so i'll tell you what why don't you join me out at yellowstone park where i'm going to be arranger for the summer and you can i'll get you a job there i said sure so i did now meantime i had gone to europe i had gone to el paso to teach and live at home so i could buy a car and then go to europe yeah so i spent the summer of um i guess it was 61 traveling in
europe with a group and then with some friends where did you go all over western europe and then to the british isles yeah yeah loved it yeah so then came back i had a bill to pay for my trip and taught another year and then i went off to graduate school in ohio wow and um was doing a master's degree in english where was ohio state ohio state okay and that was where i was when jerry wrote well the master's degree in english did not suit me it just wasn't what i wanted to do so when he said come on to yellowstone's park with me
and we'll see what's what i was glad to do it yeah yeah yeah so when did you guys get married we got married in december of 63 and then moved to dallas the end of december of 63. now was he in the service at this time no he had been in the service previous to going to ut austin okay and that was one reason i liked him because um it was just more mature more interesting than these 19 year olds i have been dating yeah yeah yeah and you settled down in dallas what did you guys do did you stay it would stay at home or did you also work taught at herslyn academy okay for one year then i had my twin daughters and i didn't teach other than temple emmanuel hebrew school and sunday's school until they went to first grade then
i got a job teaching special ed at r.l turner in carrollton taught there for two years didn't want to do that anymore had my last child a son born in july of 73 and two weeks later enrolled in a master's degree program at twu in counseling psychology had originally planned to get a master's in special ed with a degree in diagnostic education but once i taught i took my first psychology course i thought i love it i want this so i got a degree in marriage and family therapy at twu graduated in 1977 went to work for a couple of agencies and eventually started my
own practice which is where i am now yeah yeah is there something in family counseling is there like the common thing that you see all the time that couples do not talk to each other very nicely they use bad language they label each other they call each other names jerry and i talk to each other nicely 99 percent of the time that's very good happiest time in your life i think when i had my kids yeah although when i had my daughters we went from two incomes and no children to one income and two children right so that was very hard being the wife of
a school teacher who is not working that is no fun i don't recommend that to anybody but you made it through we made it through and then once i went back to work things were on the upswing yeah yeah um what was the most rewarding aspect of your career for you you're dealing with people and it's a very personal thing obviously for them the most rewarding i think is seeing them improve i have had clients that i had no hope for whatsoever i don't tell them this but i think there's no way you two are going to make it the next thing i know they're
doing better yeah so that's very rewarding now in your lifetime you've lived through so many remarkable events i did march at san clemente tell me about that's the war we were in california visiting my brother and my brother-in-law and my sister-in-law marie caston said well there's going to be a rally in a march and this is the vietnam war you're talking about vietnam war i said i'm in so we went we marched to san clemente during the march did you guys feel empowered did you were you nervous were you afraid were the police there were nervous wasn't afraid that i feel empowered probably not but
you felt like you had to do something it was a very turbulent time in this country you know and and so did you do more or was that yeah that was it that was the only word yeah yeah and what did jerry how did jerry feel about the vietnam war since he was in the service right at the end of the korean war he felt the same way but he didn't march because he was taking care of our twin daughters so we were at the beach and i said jerry i want to go march yeah what do i do with jenny and ruth he said
okay i'll keep him yeah yeah you and jerry have the three kids and five grandkids yes what advice does grandma have for the next generation what advice well judaism is very important to me i would like to see all my children and grandchildren feel strongly about maintaining judaism however they do it i was raised as a semi-orthodox jew i am now reformed i am not orthodox at all but i'm very passionate about judaism
