Reid Heller
Reid Heller was born in 1956 in Norfolk, Virginia, to charming, good-hearted parents who had risen from poor immigrant families and carried an enduring sense of gratitude and possibility. He was especially close to his maternal grandmother, who grew up in poverty on the Lower East Side around Orchard Street. His families' roots reached deep into Europe: his father's line traced to the city of Lvov and to Moses Heller, born in a small town near the Slovak-Hungarian border, while his mother descended from the Sweschein and Alcan families of Metz, Strasbourg, and Nantes, with genealogy pushed back to sixteenth-century Prague. His father served in the U.S. Navy in Norfolk between World War II and Korea, where he met Reid's mother.
Reid's family moved from Norfolk to Tampa in 1962, and he attended Jesuit school and Plant High School before leaving after his junior year for college. He studied historical linguistics, classical languages, and Hebrew at the University of South Florida under Albert Gessman. Drawn to a European-style classical education, he eventually chose law as a path that valued writing, thinking, and independence. His family moved from Tampa to Atlanta and then to Dallas around 1974, and Reid attended law school at Southern Methodist University. Having moved often as a young person, he chose to build a stable life in Dallas. He met his wife, Karen, at a gathering after Shabbat, and they married in 1982.
Deeply committed to Jewish learning, Reid taught history at congregations including Shearith, Temple Shalom, and Beth Torah in the late 1970s and 1980s, and created a medieval Jewish studies curriculum. Frustrated by an atmosphere he found stifling, he developed seminars modeled on Jewish great books, editing hundreds of texts over some twenty years, with several groups continuing for decades. In the mid-1990s, while active with the Dallas Jewish Historical Society, he and David Boltz created the Dallas Virtual Jewish Community, an early web project. His genealogical research uncovered that his ancestor Moses Heller was Slovakian rather than from Lemberg, illuminating broader patterns of Jewish migration. Reid and Karen have two grown daughters and, at the time of the interview, a grandchild on the way.
Full Transcript
read 1956 Norfolk let's go back when you were a little kid what was life like when you were just a little kid the only thing I can remember or my earliest memory is uh walking along Norfolk Beach probably in the Autumn with my parents I think being held probably by my father and I remember the lights on the boardwalk um there's a beautiful board walk very oldfashioned people have gone to Coney Island you know until maybe recently you know what a boardwalk like that is and uh somehow those lights and that cool evening impressed me as a two or threey old you remember your grandparents
at all yes very well my I was very close to my grandmother my grandmother um had a huge impact in my life a woman um who grew up up in uh poverty on the low E side around Orchard Street whose father committed suicide at the age when she was maybe four um uh he was in a terrible accident uh her her father um after her father's death her mother remarried I remember her mother from when I was very little she came to visit us once in Norfolk and and she was a sweet yisha Bobby what about your grandparents on the other side uh no I
never knew them my father's father died around the year I was born and his mother died when he was 13 you remember what your grandparents did for a living uh my my grandfather on my father's side was a wood turner he learned wood turning uh from his father uh I actually have have a diploma of his that he acquired in the city of lvav in the8 1890s I guess uh he later turn went from wood turning into pip making and my family was connected with pipe making well into the 50s although my father's father my grand his my grandfather on his side was more I
think his primary contract was to do umbrella handles and uh he had a hearing problem so I understand but somehow he got along in life did you ever hear stories about how they came to this country yes they on my father's side they came a little later than on my mother's side they came in 1907 and we were able to find the ship that they came over on uh I believe it was a royal Hamburg line it is posted at the uh Ellis Island website um and most of the children are listed there but a very traditional proper immigrant looking Jewish Family um urbanized because
they had the their children had been raised in the city of laab which is a quite a significant City in the western Ukraine then in the austr Hungarian empire did you ever hear stories of why they decided to come here no my father didn't know I've asked him about the the decision making I was able to rescue family documents when my great uncle died uh the lawyer had a pile of things that he said we're going to be trashed and I asked him to just forward not to throw out anything just to send me all the trash uh that was left over from his apartment
and in there I was able to find all the immigration documents uh which showed exactly the time when they were thinking about immigrating as well as a birth certificate showing the date and place my father's grandfather was born his name was Moses heler and he he was born in a tiny town in uh the area of Slovakia just near the Hungarian border there are a lot of Jews um uh who live there mainly kidik and those with the name heler generally believe themselves to be descendants of yam to of Lipman um in my case the family was highly assimilated and so Legends and descent like
that really wasn't part of the family memory um but it's a possibility tell me about how your uh mom's grandparents now came to this country my mom has descended uh from a family known as suain uh they uh the suain is a combination of two families the alens and the suain who married around 1789 uh they were from Mets and strawberg suburbs respectively so Alas and Lorraine uh they came uh to the city of non and just before non opened up to Jews uh in the Revolutionary year 1789 and non is a very complicated situation for two reasons one is because most of the economic
opportunities in the city uh involved slave trading um the shipping uh for the slave trade was primarily out of in France was primarily out of the city of non uh secondly because non was the seat was the capital of mass murder and in during the French Revolution this is where the you mass murder of Catholics and traditional Catholics and priests in the countryside around there it was a place which was highly ideologized and um that was the area in which they made their home and they became among the founders of kns and even after the Revolution and after Napoleon they were still listed as Community
leaders the Jewish Community there the uh suain are definitely elaan uh um at least there's no reason to believe there's anything more there than that on the alens side the uh speculation that I've adopted based on the best evidence is that it's derived from the name halone and just recently that controversy was laid aside and we now know halone is in fact uh the origin of this alen uh and we've been able to push the genealogy back as the last two weeks to 1545 to a morai calen of the city of Prague who came from Prague I think in 1567 he was one of the
founding families of the city of Mets the founding Jewish families tell me about your parents I had extraordinary Good Fortune uh to be born to two extremely Charming good-hearted people um my both of them were born in circumstances that by contemporary light wouldn't be the best they were born into poor uh immigrant families and they in the course of their life they just saw one new horizon after the other it was a life of constant Discovery expansion of taste an opportunity which for them gave them a sense of infinite possibility and and and uh enormous gratitude and I was born into a family that was
filled with that gratitude did they ever tell you how they met yes they did my my father was in the Navy at that time in Norfolk Virginia my mother's family had moved to norfol Virginia uh from Brooklyn uh around the time World War II and she spent the warriors uh there she was on her way to a dance she taught dance then a very young woman and she was introduced to him while he was eating pie in some cafeteria and she started eating his pie and then I think his liver and it never stopped what's the one family memory when you're a little kid that's
your favorite one I have a memory of situations that repeated themselves that um When We Were Young my family enjoyed playing games and that was uh and then sometimes uh they would read to me um at bedtime I was a big reader but I just love the experience of being read to the games with the entire family we played games like yatsi uh we played a game called stock market um we played Monopoly and those kinds of family games which I you know nowadays really really is hard have summon up all the patients to to do that with their children they frequently did that with
us or take us to the beach when we lived in Florida we would spend whole Sundays just being there on the beach and you know once you get in the feel of you know the surf pounding you and you do that all day it's something that never leaves you now was your dad in one of the wars my dad was in between uh he was in the Navy in between the World War II and Korea okay and he met he was in the service for the very beginning of the Korean War but he was in a different he was stationed in Norfolk at that time
now your brother older or younger than you younger so when he came along how was that for you you'd have to ask GRE how how it was I remember really loving my brother and uh so there's none of that sibling sibling rival intensively rivalry intense um Rick and I are extremely close and very loving brothers and that's and that is the truth now where did you go to high school I started off at a school called Jesuit in Tampa Florida and then went to another school called plant high school and then um left after my junior year for college now did your family move to
Tampa yes they moved from Norfolk to Tampa in 1962 what do you remember from high school I was involved um in a local temple uh the good memories of high school had to do with a youth group uh I was involved in and I had a a very close friend still a close friend and who lived in the Miami area his name is Rabbi Steven Libo and Steve and I um had a very good friendship which you maintained for decades and though we didn't see each other except through Camp activity camp and and youth group related activities um those are some of the best memories
um there was a lot of uh there was a lot of confusion those years and I was very caught up in reading now when you were you know a young man teenager and whatnot you know very turbulent time in this country you the hippie movement of course the Vietnam era how did all that affect you as a young kid well my mother was interested in every everything and so she would take us uh to political rallies so for example we went to a Nixon rally in 19 when he was running in 1968 and I remember they sat us in the voices for Nixon part of
audience in a huge uh Auditorium in Tampa I believe it was Tampa and uh I just remember the excitement I found it all pretty confusing I was 11 or or 12 at the time and uh um otherwise unmemorable the most memorable part of it were the uh protesters outside there were a group of people with I mean terribly dressed in torn jeans torn shirts mostly Barefoot who were carrying protest signs in a circle walking around the front that um I think that was the beginning of my awareness that that wasn't just something in a magazine it was part of a world I was coming into
now you finished high school in 3 years um in the I finished in the 11th grade okay and then it was on the college where did you go to school I uh was uh give admission to University of South Florida in Tampa Florida I wanted to study um historical Linguistics with a man named Albert gessman um long deceased now now and gessman was um from Prague and great linguist and uh he sort of introduced me into the classics Classical Languages and classical studies and then later um later I became interested in Hebrew and he was one of my um instructors in Hebrew and Semitic languages
so what what were you planning on getting into then when you were in college I was um a person who was drawn more to uh European style classical education and it didn't exist in any of the worlds that I knew there were a few places in America where you could get it but I it wasn't on my radar screen I cobbled it together mainly out of igra professors and uh my interest was in having a broad background my religious tastes I was extremely disappointed um in Judaism um Jewish institutions that I had grown up in and I was uh what you would call extremely interested
but disaffected you and I used uh I used education as a substitute for Jewish involvement so what was it that steered you into law it was it was something that I could do uh it business was very general business was very distasteful I was looking for something that required um writing and thinking skills uh and that would eventually allow me to have the independence to be an independent researcher right when I grew up and and that's what it's allowed okay where did you go to law school here in town were uh at Southern Methodist University okay so your whole family moved to Dallas at some
point they moved in 1974 I believe first they went from Tampa to Atlanta where my father was district manager and then from Atlanta to Dallas around 74 who was he working for at the time learner shops okay um he he was a senior executive and he had risen all the way through the ranks uh and Dallas was their home I had my we had moved around a lot as a a young person I had gone to many schools had a lot of different experiences wasn't believe that a stable life might be somewhat better um for me and for my children right one day and that's
why I stayed here where where did you meet Karen K I was introduced to Karen at a um after Shabbat evening at a party at a h South African friend's home and she was there and I had never had an experience like that before unfortunately she was engaged okay so there's more to this story this the story is that she W I went home I told my law school roommate that I met the woman I want to marry unfortunately she was engaged and uh he he told me Reed your nigist that's amark for Queen will will'll come to you soon and so in six months
later she came back to Dallas and uh through my mother I learned that she had returned and she was no longer engaged and I immediately started doing what I needed to do yeah when did you guys get married 1982 it took her it took her a long time agree um talk to me about Jewish life here for you guys your involvement within the Community I my interest in in Jewish life was in creating an um area of life where people were able to study and conduct independent research on areas of interest and support one another without um without a feeling being appearing pretentious or embarrassing
I I cannot tell you how stifling the atmosphere was uh when I came in the 70s I used uh I taught at sheriff and for a while at Temple Shalom and at Beth Torah uh late 70s and the 80s um just as a way to keep mainly in in history courses I created a curriculum for uh medieval study Jewish studies at Ed sherith and uh but I kept finding that the kids weren't interested in and I became aware the problem was their parents um the parents really viewed this as a luxury in a matter of indifference to their lives the rabbis had beg had simply
repeated the lectures they heard in rabic school for the most part people were really not in interested in independent work and there was a lot of unthoughtfulness about big issues in uh on the question of uh Li Judaism and the relationship between uh liberal Judaism and the Jewish past and my background was in classical philosophy as well as in history and I eventually decided uh that to overcome the atmosphere be important uh to establish something like a set of seminars Jewish the equivalent of Jewish great books I began uh editing hundreds of books over the course of 20 years uh and conducted seminars all over
town many of them continued for decades to there's even one that's still in existence that I you know don't participate in regularly but I talk to the the folks about in your lifetime there's been so many advancements in technology and like very rapidly um is there something that came along that you go wow how do we ever get along without that yeah it it was something that I wanted desperately it was a Digi a of books the ability to to search libraries of books was something I followed very closely all through the coming of the digital age and it let I I was so anxious
for it that uh when I was uh very involved with the Jewish Historical Society in the mid90s we're talking '94 95 uh I also utilized uh the first days of the web with a friend of mine David Boltz to create something called the Dallas virtual Jewish community and dvj C still exists and I still have the the URL I've taken it down because developments and Technology um really require complete rethinking of how it's used but my goal was to upload uh to that site all kinds of material relating to Jewish life which I did including the Poetry of Rachel Andress family generously provided the funding
uh to do that now I know you've done a lot with genealogy with your own family have you made some amazing discoveries along the way they're amazing from a family point of view many people uh in my family believe that Moses heler was born in Lumberg until I found the documents from my great uncle and we discovered in fact he was Slovakian that has that has implications uh probably for genealogy for the possibility of other close relatives also so for the it exemplifies a pattern that went on in Europe in the late 19th century during the modernization era you know there's this view that everybody
lived in Shettles um and that they kind directly to America and that really wasn't the pattern the pattern was the movement to a large city and then a feeling that this large City's opportunities have been exhausted and that the real opportunities lay in large cities in America and this is true for the people that immigrated after 1880 yeah and before that there was especially among Elations there was a tendency to become Backwoods and Southern pedlers but after 1880 the the transition was usually from um rural to local city in Eastern Europe and then from that big city to America and that was my family's pattern
now in your lifetime you've lived through so many momentous occasions of course you saw you know a young kid you saw you know some protesting going on in this country of course also when you were young the president the assassination of President Kennedy uh Martin Luther King assassination something good the moon landing in ' 69 of course the tragedy of 9/11 was there something in your lifetime that happened on the national scene that you go you know it really affected you you know exactly where you were when it happened well sure um the same way in my parents generation where everybody remembered the day FDR
died right um I remember very clearly what was going on when JFK was shot I was walking with my brother away from the school and we heard it announced over the intercom the president has been shot and then the next memory I have is my mother in front of a black and white TV set in tears watching a funeral yeah yeah um on but Martin Martin Luther King was a lot more complicated I REM the things that I remember was the strange man who shot got him just that was such an inconceivable thing it you know the Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby don't leave
as strong an impression on me as um James Earl Ray right um he really seemed to embody something about America that concerned me a lot and uh no longer seemed exceptional something something that I I had my eye on probably from then the rest of my life happiest time in your life there different kinds of Happiness the happiness that I had uh with uh camaraderie and study um combined was my summer with my friend Rabbi Libo uh Sting with uh professor oan kulan at Kenyon College he W he became one of uh the the great teachers in my life probably the greatest that I'll ever
have and um there are very he was a very rare penetrating mind a thorough thoroughly individual MH um man completely steeped In classical and Jewish learning completely and yet had a very natural ironic way of speaking and extremely generous kind to me marriage was overhyped in terms of the wedding day but the happiest I think I was was when Karen agreed uh to be engaged to me that that was a I really felt that I had achieved something amazing now you and Karen have two grown daughters yes and one grandchild on the way correct what advice does Granddad want to leave to the Next Generation
I wrote I I wrote uh something to my to my oldest daughter the day that she was born and I read it part an excerpt from it at the wedding but at that time I I can't say that I've I can't say my advice has really changed um I recommended that we don't really know what the future will hold we don't know who we will be or how we will be but or kindness will make things much easier and I've never found a better word of advice to give to anyone no matter how difficult the situation great job today man you did really well thank
you