Miriam Creemer
Miriam Creemer was born in 1936 in Calgary, Alberta, the first generation of her family born in Canada. Her parents had immigrated from Poland, drawn by advertisements offering free homestead land in Alberta. As family members arrived, each worked to send for the next, eventually creating a large and close-knit clan; at a 1995 reunion, 450 relatives gathered in Calgary from across Canada, the United States, and Israel. Her mother's memories of Poland were painful, marked by antisemitic violence and the loss of her own mother, who was killed after being pushed from a train. Miriam grew up in the Jewish day school she calls the ILP school, surrounded by lifelong friends and relatives. Her father, a secondhand store dealer who also performed on the Yiddish theater stage, taught her to treat every person with dignity.
Miriam graduated from high school and earned a teaching degree from the University of Alberta. She taught at one of the largest elementary schools in Calgary and became head of the English department at the Jewish day school she had attended as a child. After meeting her future husband in Vancouver and courting for a year by mail, she married and began a life of frequent moves as he worked for Mobil Oil. The family lived across Canada and in Larchmont, New York, where she started a small Jewish day school, worked with seniors at the JCC, ran a music school, and was active in Hadassah and the PTA. When immigration rules kept her from teaching in the United States, she volunteered full time for two years at a home for aged Hebrews, discovering a lasting love for working with seniors.
In the late 1970s the family moved to Dallas, where Miriam offered her many talents to the local JCC. What began as one hour a week teaching Yiddish grew into leadership of the JCC senior adult program, which she directed for 20 years, serving about a thousand seniors with drama and choir groups, a reading club, worldwide trips, and a kosher food program she founded. Retiring at 62 so she could spend summers in Canada with her husband, she has stayed active teaching and translating Yiddish, including love letters and other family documents, and leading programs such as Laughter is the Best Medicine. A member of the conservative Beth Torah congregation, she treasures her family, her two children and five grandchildren, and her long life in the Dallas Jewish community.
Full Transcript
miriam kramer and from calgary canada tell me what it was like growing up i was born in 1936 my parents immigrated from poland my great-grandfather had 12 children and my mother was a product of his son Jacob and my great aunt came to Calgary Alberta Canada because in Poland they had an ad but said if you come to Alberta you get free land for homesteading and like all other immigrants of that time as soon as she arrived and could make some money she sent for the first cousin and told him you get a job and when you make money you send for the second it's
a wonderful story because in 1995 when we had one of our family reunions we had 450 members of my family in Calgary Alberta Canada and at that time my son-in-law said mum are we related to everyone in this room and I said yes and we come from all over Canada the United States Israel most of them have left Europe and it was a wonderful wonderful reunion so I grew up in a very close-knit family that were immigrants I'm a first generation born in Canada I grew up in a Jewish day school called the ILP at school and I grew up with wonderful friends that I
have kept since I was three years old we had everything imaginable in the Jewish community and what was nice is it was such a small community that half of them were my relatives my father was a secondhand store dealer so I learned to deal with cowboys Indians hutterites prostitutes drunks and each of them as they came into the store my dad used to give them a quarter so they could get a meal not enough to buy a drink and used to say to me Miriam I want you to know that each of these people that come in are human beings and we need to help
them so I grew up appreciating everyone whether they were quote up or down i graduated from high school went on to the university of alberta and Calgary and Edmonton and got a degree in teaching I became a teacher at one of the largest elementary schools in Calgary and then I was head of the English department of the Jewish day school that I myself had gone to when I was a child and one night when I was giving my daughter a bath and her hair was flowing in the water I'll never forget this she said mommy can you help me with a song I have to
sing at the Hanukkah concert I said sure and she began to sing a song that I had sung at her age on the very same stage at the very same school so it was an amazing growing up and it was a wonderful community how did I my father who was a secondhand dealer was also on the Yiddish theater stage and Calgary he sang he danced and when he needed a child he would drag me onto the stage sometimes that was a boy sometimes I was a girl but we made it and we had a very happy life how did I end up in Dallas Texas
well my aunt lived in Vancouver and I went out to visit she said we have a young man we want you to meet he went to university with my cousin I met my husband in vancouver british columbia we courted for a year by mail and then we got married and it's been 52 years of marriage we traveled across Canada and then ended up in Larchmont New York he was with Mobil Oil and he was in charge of the computing centers for mobil oil and it was the American government that helped me change my career at age 40 when we were moving to the United States
they rejected my application because I was a teacher and in the States at that time in the late 70s they had too many teachers so I came in on my husband's executive visa and the children as well and I had no right to work I had no green card so I said okay what do you know and what can you do I can sing I can dance I can play the piano i can speak Yiddish I went to a Jewish folks home old folks home which has the worst name I've ever heard of this was the United home for aged Hebrews I told them they
had to change the name anyhow I went in and I said can I volunteer for you but you may not pay me I don't have the right to work I volunteered full-time 40 hours a week for two years at this old folks home and became very fond of working with seniors so when I was called back to Canada and my number came up two years later we got our green cards and the children and I were reprocessed but I stayed in the senior work from that day on and so when people ask me what my degree is I tell them I have a PhD in
hutzpah that means whenever you go out and look for a job and they ask you can you do it I say yes then I go home and say now how the heck am I going to do it we moved several times with mobile and our last move was from Larchmont New York where we were there for five years a wonderful little little town there were 12,000 people equally divided between Jews Catholics and Protestants I raised funds for the playground for the school near our house and I was very involved in Hadassah in PTA and at that time I had three jobs I started a little
Jewish day school I worked with seniors at the JCC and I also ran a music school so I used to get up and say what day is it in which direction am i heading into well we got transferred to dallas texas so i walked into the JCC here and i said hi my name is miriam kramer I can do this this this and this do you need me and harry rosen who was the director at that time said oh my gosh we have nothing for you now but let's see what we can do I started out in a senior department doing one hour of utich
a week I am a Yiddish teacher as well as an English teacher I do translations etc and from that one hour it became five hours and then 10 hours and then I became the assistant and the director at that time Myrna Hauser who was a widow met a wonderful man and she was getting remarried and she said Miriam I'm going to leave the department so I said ok I'm going to apply for the directorship and I said to her how much do you make so I'll know what to ask for anyhow I went in and asked for the same salary and I was hired as
the director of this JCC senior adult program it was a wonderful time I worked for 20 years as head of the department we had about a thousand seniors at that time and i had a senior drama group I had a senior choir had a senior Reading Club I did all the programming because I loved working with the seniors hands on so I used to take the administrative work home to do so I probably put in 60 hours into a 40-hour week for 20 years and I loved every minute of it I took seniors on trips all over the world we went to Russia we went
to Europe we went to Hawaii we went to up and down the Caribbean we went everywhere a boat or a train could take us and then the food program that we have here now I started 20 some years ago I hired James who was the cook he just retired and I hired and started the kosher food program I absolutely loved coming to work every day I couldn't wait to get up and come to work and now I've been retired since I was 62 I love my years at the JCC I loved working with the seniors traveled all over the world as I said with them
and it's wonderful to be part of the Jewish community I'm now active again Hadassah and very active in Yiddish I've done some amazing translations I've done love letters that someone found in their grandmother's room after she passed on that her grandfather had set the grandmother when they recording unfortunately I try I translated a suicide note that was left by someone's grandfather I have translated courting notes of others it's been an interesting life of translating in Yiddish and I t cherish I taught for years in the joys of Jewish learning and I now do a little volunteer yet is teaching and I've had a very happy
life in the Dallas Jewish community when we moved here I was very concerned I wrote a letter and said does dallas have a kosher restaurant how many Jews are in Dallas well i'd like to tell you that on my block we live in north dallas there are 10 jewish families so if i needed to have a prayer session which is a minion of 10 people i could just call in all my neighbors we belong to beth torah congregation which is a conservative congregation which accepts women as part of the prayer group orthodox groups do not and the first time i was called up to the
Torah my husband we went up together he sort of went like this with his elbow and said you're doing a call to the Torah your parents are probably turning over in their graves because they were Orthodox but I was raised in the North Atok synagogue where the women SAT upstairs and the men sat down stairs we were separated we're now part of a conservative congregation where we're all together and women have the equal rights with men Dallas is a wonderful Jewish community we've been here since the late 70s and I feel very fortunate to have been part of it and still am being part of
it I don't want to put that in the past tense why did I retire so early because my husband retired and wanted to go to Canada for three months every summer and I couldn't take three months off of the department so we have been going to Canada every summer for three months for the last 20 years but I still keep my finger in things I do a program here called laughter is the best medicine for the seniors and I do a program on Yiddish at one of the synagogue's I teach yet ish I translate Yiddish I'm back to van Hadassah I do whatever I can
in the Jewish community that's great let's go back a little bit to talking about your great-grandfather we talked about the family reunion tell us about that well my great-grandfather according to my mother was like fiddler on the roof he was a milkman he had a dairy farm and unfortunately in Poland when he used to go to the market with his horse and wagon they used to know that when he was coming home they'd be very fortunate if he still had money because the poles would wait for him and they would beat him up my mother's memories of growing up in Poland were not very pleasant
grandmother was pushed off a train because they said there's a Jew and she was killed so my mother lost her mother when she was 12 years old memories of Poland were not terribly great because the poles didn't like the Jews and that was the beginning of years ahead and then later the Holocaust but our family stuck together and I helped my cousin make a family tree which is the size of one of the doors it's huge and we traced as much as we could and then the my mother's aunt who had brought everyone to Calgary was still alive she was close to a hundred and
we spoke to her and she gave us as much detail that she could and then we started having these family reunion and in Calgary we had 450 at our first family reunion and we've had several sense but not as many people have come because unfortunately the older generation has passed on but the younger ones keep us all together so I'm very proud to come from a very large happy intimate family in Calgary Alberta Canada who spoke it is the entire time I was growing up and as a matter of fact we moved to Dallas when my son was 12 and we were going to have
his Bar Mitzvah and I thought can't bring Calgary to Dallas will bring Dallas to Calgary so I used to lead a choir at the synagogue in Calgary so I called the rabbi and said may we have my son's Bar Mitzvah at your synagogue and they said of course so we went home to Calgary and of course you know when you come home every relative has you for dinner so we went to this antes and miss antes in this antes and finally after the third house we came out and my son said to me Mom I got to ask you a question I said what David
doesn't anybody in Calgary speak English because we spoke Yiddish the entire time but fortunately my children both went to the Yiddish day school that I did before we moved away so they can understand yet it my daughter used to be able to write it but she doesn't write it very much anymore he said you have used to have a brother that's living right in Israel yes I had a sister named Ida who lived in Calgary and she and I used to write all the shows that were put on we were great in writing shows and parodies and she was national vice president of Canadian Hadassah
I was very very proud of her unfortunately she passed away three years ago she was my older sister my younger brother whose name is Alan's is black retired four years ago and for 20 years he was the assistant attorney general of Israel the Attorney General's are always the elected positions but he was the meat and potatoes he was the one who did a lot of the workings he's lived in Israel since he graduated from law school and I remember the letter he wrote to my sister and I he said the reason I'm moving to Israel is that when my children walk out the door they're
Jewish I'll be living in a Jewish homeland little did he know that his son when he turned 80 would be walking out the door with a gas mask on his face and fighting in the Israeli army but thank goodness he has three children one lives in Indonesia he's a film director one lives in New York and one lives in Vancouver British Columbia so that's my brother's family that's amazing so you have two children of your own and you have five grandchildren right so what advice would you leave your grandchildren's family is the most important thing in the world stay close to your family share everything
with your family I think they know the difference between right and wrong I don't have to teach them that my daughter in Dallas has three children she has an MBA and business and advertising and now when her kids are grown and she's gone back to work my granddaughter the oldest one just went off to Northwestern University in Chicago she's taking pre-med and engineering her father is a doctor her grandfather is a doctor and she wants to do and orthopedics together she said she wants to create new things in medicine my son lives in palo alto california and he's very much into technology of computers unfortunately
his first child was born with something called Usher syndrome you're born deaf muscular delay and you'll eventually become blind my little grandson has two cochlear implants one on either side of his skull and when he's hooked up he has like a hearing aid and then a wire with a magnet the magnet finds the chip in his head and his sound just turned on it's like a miracle he speaks and here's like you and I when he's connected but when he's off the air so to speak I would call and say to my granddaughter his little sister let me speak to Brenda and she said bubby
he's off the air right now but he lips reads well too after thousands of hours of physical therapy this was a baby who couldn't hold his head up couldn't crawl couldn't stand he now rides a bike swims and is an amazing young man he's now in high school unfortunately his eyes are now going and that's something that we're praying with all the technology that someday we'll have he goes to high school with a white cane and the kids are kids know him he's been in the same school system since he was little and he's functioning quite well and he has a little sister who is
fine thank goodness and really relates beautifully to him so I have five grandchildren and we really work hard for Brendan we go in the foundation Fighting Blindness walk vision walk here in Dallas and my friends are very supportive we pray that something will be found because it's like retina Titus pick mitosis I guess it's called it's not like a cornea that can be replaced its retina and they're working on it whether he'll be able to be the result of that technology I don't know but that's my children of whom I'm very proud thank you so much Miriam you had amazing stories thank you for sharing
with it's my pleasure thank you