Rosalind Benjet

Full Transcript

hello Ross so nice to be in your home today I'm Ruthie Andrus and I'm interviewing Roslyn manjet for the Dallas Jewish Historical Society and it is May 15 2008 Ross tell me about your parents where were they born my mother who was born Dorothy children was born in Connecticut her family had six children and they when she was a child they moved to Redding Pennsylvania from Stratford Connecticut she grew up there and my father was born in Philadelphia Leonard greenberg his family was in the bakery business my grandfather is shortly after World War one my grandfather was in the army although as a baker he

hardly spoke any English at that time I'm told and they moved to miners Ville Pennsylvania where my grandfather ran operated bakery throughout my father's childhood they had three sons my parents met my mother lived in Redding Pennsylvania my father lived in miners Ville Pennsylvania he was a member of aza and my parents met at an aza event that they had in Reading Pennsylvania and he courted her and they got married in 1940 and moved to Pottsville Pennsylvania which was another small town outside of miners ville and my grandparents still lived and I was born in 1941 in Pottsville Pennsylvania now just to backtrack a little

bit my my mother's family we are not sure about her father I think that he was born in the US or came to the US as a small child her mother came from Lithuania and again we don't know where on the Greenberg side we know a great deal more both Greenberg's and they were they were my grandmother and grandfather were first cousins which apparently was not unusual in Europe at that time they came from Lithuania in two small towns outside of what is now known as cornice but they called Kufner and they emigrated probably a rat we believe that it was around 1912 or 1913

and they emigrated there the ship came directly to Philadelphia they did not go through Ellis Island yeah anyway my Greenberg grandparents were always very close to us where they played a really great role in growing up my grandmother was a businesswoman she ran this my grandfather worked in the bakery she ran the store she was really a role model for me and what women could do because she was doing these things when most women weren't exactly what about your father did he go to the bakery business so my father got married my my parents were married very young like well I think they were both

20 or 21 21 I think as you were yes they my father was not really sure what he wanted to he was working he had opened a hosiery store nylons were pretty new in those days and then by shortly after they were married World War two began and you couldn't get hosiery so he he took a job working in a defense plant until he was drafted and my father went into the Navy and during World War two he was eventually sent to Hawaii okay so he was there after 41 in the Navy right he was at he was there after 41 in the Navy and

never saw any action but it was there until just about the close of the war in the meantime I had two brothers okay I have two brothers one is Roger who's two and a half years younger and Stuart who's three and a half years younger and today Roger lives in Greeley Colorado and Stuart lives in the Philadelphia area so you keep in touch that's nice we sure do and so a new married at 21 and I understand you were French and English teacher tell us about that from where um gradually I graduated from Beaver College which is today called Arcadia University it was an all-female

school in those days outside of Philadelphia small graduating class of about 200 250 I was a French major because I admired my high school French teacher my family really didn't have the money to send me to France to study so I never really got native fluency but I was good enough to teach seventh grade French and I found my first job was teaching seventh grade French and English in the Philadelphia area in a junior high school and back up where did you go to elementary school haha but I after World War two when my father came home from the service he went into the hosiery

business again and he started a hosiery factory but he started it in Reading Pennsylvania where my mother's family had left and we moved the family to Redding Pennsylvania and that was where I went to elementary school and also through junior high in some of high school my father was not a good business man he started a hosiery business which made Azuri with seams right when seamless hosiery was coming out and the business didn't work out then he decided that it was going to go into TV was new he was an early adopter of all kinds of things and he went into TV repair but again

although it probably could have been my father was not a good businessman and eventually he decided to go into business with his family in the bakery business which my grandparents were now running in Philadelphia and while I was in high school the family moved to to the Philadelphia area and I graduated from high school at Haverford Township High School in the Philly and Philadelphia area you make him the influence that was so strong with your grandparents did they ever actually live with you or just clothes they lived close by when when the family moved to the Philadelphia area they lived a block away and as

when I was a teenager if I ever little girls with their mothers I always walked down the street and told all my troubles to my grandmother oh that's beautiful did they your grandparents or even your parents what kind of Jewish identity did they present you with there let you model after we celebrated most of the important holidays we we were not really regular attendees at synagogue my parents liked one particular Rahway that we had in Redding when I was a child and they went to hear him my father especially liked it when he talked about the Baal Shem Tov and told stories like that well

obviously because my grandparents ran a Jewish bakery most of the customers were Jewish as well as the traits that they dealt with selling products to Jewish bakeries and then things like that Jewish delis and places like that but my family was not really religious my mother didn't really keep kosher strictly although her her mother had and to this day she's very conscious of what what is and it's not kosher and she's now 89 years old new mother my mother yeah good job did you pretend Sonny scores yes intended with Sunday school and Hebrew school look at how to read Hebrew was it a what common

thing was it it was an orthodox congregation but in those days Orthodox food was different than it is today what we in I think the men and women sat together in services the girls and boys learned that the same thing in Hebrew school we weren't there wasn't any of the differentiation between men and women that we see so prominently today I think in in Orthodox Judaism possibly I think it was because in and this is going back to late 40s early 50s those kinds of Orthodox congregations were in a change and probably became conservative later on I know that the one particular one where we

went did and I think it was it was a historical kind of change rather than a philosophical change did you take any Hebrew or Hebrew lessons privately no no no and were you involved in any Jewish organization such as your parents with the ACA I was be BG hmm and as a teenager and in those days when we lived in reading the reading Jewish community was smaller than Dallas but it there were three synagogues in town and there were a core there was a core of Jewish kids your own age that you got to meet we had a JCC and we had a lot of

parties and things like that among the group in town and every so often we would meet groups from neighboring towns because the towns in Pennsylvania aren't as far as away from each other as they are in Texas so we would get together with people from Lancaster Allentown York Pennsylvania Bethlehem Pennsylvania all of which were maybe 35 or 40 miles away and they would come and we have a weekend kind of BB GHC a kind of events were you host other kids in your home and there would be parties and different events for the kids to go to sounds very active did you experience any anti-semitism

there or when you came to Dallas or any of their other places of living I think in Pennsylvania it was maybe not overt but people knew who was Jewish and who wasn't and then when I went to college and Beaver College in those days was a fairly prominent socially accepted girls college one of my girlfriends who was not Jewish received an invitation to go to debutante parties none of the Jewish girls received the same invitation so yeah if you consider that and semitism you knew that you were excluded and you knew it was why it was and that was just the way it was in

your neighborhood and ready what were you like in one area such as we are in North Ellis or they used to be the South Dallas the Jewish people when I was very young not so much later on there were more families in one neighborhood than others and again my family wasn't that well-off so we weren't there but it didn't seem to bother anyone I think it bothered me as a child because I wasn't I didn't live close to my girlfriend's it was you know maybe a ten minute bus ride away but still you had to get on the bus I see you've got your master's

in literature in 78 and what did you do then we were living in st. Louis at that time you're still single no oh you're married twenty-one right after we got married was working in four Sears Roebuck as a controller trainee and working for Sears Roebuck was kind of like being in the Army because every 18 months or so they moved you to a new place so in a very short time he had been in about four different places and at one point we own two houses couldn't afford either one of them but we did anyway and he decided to leave them and he took a job in st.

Louis as a controller of a chain of discount department stores which was later by the way sold to Walmart [Laughter] and he likes to tell the story about how he went to Arkansas and they offered him a job and he looked around Bentonville Arkansas and he said no thank you and we went on but anyway while we were in st. Louis Mike my oldest son Brian was in I think first grade and the youngest one was four and when Bryce was in nursery school I decided that I was bored I wasn't really interested in volunteer work at that point I didn't have the money or the inclination I never really connected well with the st.

Louis Jewish community didn't like them they they weren't terribly interested in me we went to a synagogue and I went to a number of events and where no one even spoke to you so I gave up on them and we and I decided that I was going to go back to school and get my master's loved it started at because of my French background they I was a teaching assistant and they assigned me to teach English as a second language and this is in the late 70s and I would be in a classroom with 27 guys named Mohammed from Iran this is prior to the

Iranian Revolution and learned a whole lot about different cultures that I never knew before and focused on American literature my master's thesis dealt with three Jewish American women writers and started that interest which really led to my doctoral work later on but I didn't know that I was prepared at that time to go on to get a doctorate but that was when Merv's company was sold to Walmart and he took a job with the Wix furniture company in Chicago we moved to Chicago in 1978 and when did you come to Dallas and why we came to Dallas in 1991 when Murph was offered one of

those jobs that you couldn't refuse although we've been very comfortable we lived in Highland Park Illinois which was a lovely community and I really did was not thrilled about coming to Dallas but it was one of those opportunities he didn't want to turn down he became chief financial officer of copy USA which was just starting out at that time they had 20 stores when he came and he was with them until 1995 and when he left they had over 200 stores and we're doing well what happened after that was not so good but had nothing to do with him when I came to Dallas it

was very very different I felt at some point like I had stepped back into the 50s and I expected to see all the women wearing white gloves and hats because everybody was so for him improper where I lived in Chicago people were women especially or into well what are you doing in your career and where do you work and what do you what's important to you and not anything else and then I came back to Dallas where that wasn't so and I was a little taken aback now how would you say has Dallas changed would you say today in that respect I think for the

younger people yes it has when I talk to people who are 20 years younger than I am I think it has and then I think society's changed too because when I'm on my kids were young it wasn't in to be a stay-at-home mother it was well what does your mother do and being out doing things was really much more important than staying at home and I think society's changed a little bit today and that's probably responsible for some of those changes well your children already finish with school when they got here Brian was my oldest son was in law school okay at that time Bryce

had just graduated from high school so he was 18 when we moved here and he lived with us of course in the summer he was going to Brandeis University and he worked during the summers while he was in college he worked at the JCC as a lifeguard Brian when he finished law school lived here for a year he had a clerkship with a Dallas judge judge Maguire for a year but he had already met his wife who was living in Washington DC and he said no he didn't I live in Dallas and he moved to Washington took a job there Bryce continued to come back

and he decided to go to law school at UT fell in love with Austin immediately calls it his spiritual home and he and his family today live in Austin what the synagogue did you attend or do you now Sharath Israel which is a conservative synagogue conservative synagogue I'm active in our sisterhood I'm currently the community vice president and I've taken on and I don't know how this will work out that I am the regional editor of the newsletter that's going to be happening with a newly formed region which will include everywhere from I think Calgary and Winnipeg through Texas the entire middle section of the

country and Canada of conservative of conservative congregations yes wonderful what about some of your other charity work soon after I moved to Dallas I took a course at UT D and I enrolled in my PhD work and one of the courses I took was a drama course and I'd always really liked it a lot and I decided that I really would like to see what was going on in local theatre and our local theatre was then called the Addison Center theater and I volunteered there and I went to the board and help them with fundraising and different events a few years later it became watertower

theatre and today I think it's one of the finest local theaters in the city and all their productions who don't do traveling shows all of their productions are locally produced and used for the most part local actors and they once Aurora Raven many many retirement Awards young well you've seen it grow you were using it grow excite well I know how active you've been in the Dallas Jewish Historical Society but you tell me when I started my coursework at UT day I entered an interdisciplinary program and I had never really taken any history courses before that and one of the courses I took was with

professor Harvey graph and it was called Dallas the course and basically it was doing finding some niche about Dallas history and doing research on it and I had never done any historical research before I was really nervous and I got somehow interested in looking at the Jewish community in Dallas and the Ku Klux Klan in the early nineteen and I did fascinating research I loved the work and after that I was really fascinated and learning a lot more about the Jewish history of Dallas and I had met Harriet gross it was become a very dear friend she and I shared an office and she was

on the board and she said well you have to join us and I did and it's been a love affair ever since well I will thank you for the organization because you have done tons of these oral histories and built the whole department and you also were excellent past president who inspired me so you can feel very good about that you were the past you were the president before me I hope you're right I didn't realize I hooked you okay well although I know that you all sorry involved in special care and services tell us yes special care and career services first ask my husband

to be on the board he said he didn't have time please get my wife I was still in graduate school but I it's not a big commitment other than financial they do absolutely wonderful things for children and young adults they have an early childhood intervention program that takes cognitively and physically children and helps them before they enter school and they have a program for these children when they are finished with high school and they counsel them about jobs and train them and have job coaches and it's just wonderful to see what these kids can do very worried and I know now you're on the new

Tai Chi library board tell us about that library now that the JCCC remodeling is done the Tai Chi library actually is a separate entity and we've been running various educational programs we had a community book read last year where everybody in the community read the same book and we had a book discussion we're going to sponsor a number of authors help sponsor a number of authors there is going to be any Jewish book month again at the JCC in 2008 and we're going to help with that we have three or four children's programs a year at the library and we're still in the first year

of our new assistants we run a book club which reviews books one the first Monday of every month and as we see the need for new programs thank you would you could you many some kind of a comparison of similarities or differences between the Jewish community that you grew up in in our Jewish community in many respects they're similar when I talk to people my age grew up here in Dallas their experiences are very similar to what mine were because the community was so much smaller in those days although probably still larger than where I grew up I think today it's grown it's grown way

past there was one lady I met who really annoyed me all the time because she said I lived in Far North Dallas and like this was the end of the world well she's never - Frisco I don't think I think that we have to be conscious that the community is growing far far out of the traditional boundaries and I think that those who are in positions of leadership need to be aware of it much more aware I think than they are today and maybe be thinking a little bit outside the box and what kind of programming and what kind of aid people need under those

circumstances I'm not sure that we're always on the right key there and I do know there are small temples in our communities as far as Frisco do you know if they have a type believe they have yes tell me what would you consider you have many but will be your most satisfying say accomplishment in your life I think it was the PhD work that I did I started in 92 I love the coursework did not love preparing for the exams it probably took me part of the work we did was you had to have compiled a book list which was about 200 books read through

them and and you worked with four different professors two and four different subfields and you had to prepare for written tests which were four days long at that by that time my husband had retired so he wanted to travel and go places so it really took me two years to prepare for it but I made it in doubt it was basically four days of written work one day and passed it then you had to find a topic I knew basically what I wanted to write but it took a long time to solidify exactly what nuances I wanted to include and then when I did I

found that I had to study a completely different area and I had to do that before I could really start the work and then again because of schedule it took me until 2002 to finish but I did and I'm really very proud of that I still belong to a number of academic associations and especially the Jewish American literature is association and I've been speaking every year at one of their events and I will again this September I have not returned to teaching again because I can't commit to a whole semester but one of these days I will you tell me about your grandchildren we have

four grandchildren my older son Brian and his wife Kim after children Joshua's now nine and a seven the younger son Bryce and his wife Belle have two children Jeremy's four and Joseph is eight and a half months we're all mindful farming they're all delightful of course well of course I mean you're the grandma besides your grandmother who would you know could you identify someone who has really been your role model or more than one in your lifetime I was very close to my first dissertation adviser Harvey Graf who took another job in the middle and I had to change but he influenced a lot of

the way I think about what I read the other influences my husband he was also my best critic and an extremely logical thinker is there anything else you'd like to add well thank you it's been delightful and I really appreciate it and so the Dallas Jewish estoppel society thanks again rose what is my grandparents Betsy and Isadora greenberg we're not sure but we think this is probably their wedding picture which would place it somewhere around nineteen sixteen or 19 I think 1917 okay several years later they eventually had three sons this one the one on the right on my right is my father and yes

young one of his younger brothers my Uncle Sam this one would have been probably six or seven years later this one is my father in later years he had they had moved to Florida my father was a cigar lover and he was quite an interesting guy this one is my mother again several years ago at my niece's wedding this one is me and my two brothers as young children there are three been jet generations in the center is Merv on the right the shorter son is Brian Bryce's on the left a tall skinny guy and this is my first grandson Joshua his first day on

skis which is something that this is Brian my older son and his wife Kim Brian's now an attorney with a signet corporation he's vice president of litigation and this is one of their the society events that they have to attend and they're very good Brian and rice this is at prices law school graduation at UT he's wearing the yellow sunflower when is my son Bryce's wedding Merv's here I'm here it's my mother Brian Bryce and his wife Belle Brian's wife Kim and two children Joshua and Hannah what year this was 2002 okay this is Joshua he's nine Hanna she's seven Jeremy's four and baby Joseph

is eight and a half months and he's a real pudgy cutie is Brian and Kim on there at their wedding and which was in 1996 and you just saw another one of them recently still got about five seconds girl you