Tina Wasserman
Tina grew up in Hempstead, Long Island, where her family's life became strongly centered on their synagogue after her mother joined the choir when Tina was five. Her father, an automotive painting and repair specialist who ran the largest independent auto paint shop in Nassau County, later served as synagogue president, and Tina attended services faithfully, becoming a familiar face there from childhood. Her mother, who had lost her own mother at five and lived through the Depression, treated food with reverence and taught Tina to present it beautifully. A neighbor, Mrs. Wood, took Tina under her wing and taught her to bake, sparking a lifelong passion. She attended Hempstead High School and then Syracuse University.
Tina met Richard at a USY convention in Laurelton, and his maturity and honesty won her over. Richard attended medical school at Mount Sinai and pursued a PhD, which first brought the couple to Dallas in 1974 when his advisor took a position at Southwestern. After Richard finished his medical training, they left for internship, residency, and a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Philadelphia before returning to Dallas in 1982, where they have lived ever since. Tina recalled the culture shock of early Dallas, where ethnic food was scarce, and later marveled at how cosmopolitan the city's food scene became.
In Dallas, Tina turned her love of food into a vocation. Inspired by an experience at Temple Emanuel and an editorial in Reform Judaism magazine, she wrote a letter urging the magazine to include a food column, which led to ten years and forty articles as its food columnist. She wrote two cookbooks exploring the Jewish diaspora and Jewish cooking with children, teaching that Jewish food reflects the whole world, not just brisket and bagels. A proud mother who cherished the births of her son and daughter, she attended President Obama's first inauguration and remains active on a Reform Jewish camp board in northern California, believing that passing on recipes, stories, and ethics is a family's greatest legacy.
Full Transcript
Tina 1948 Hempstead Long Island New York let's go back it's not too far back when you were a young girl what was life like for you in New York life was actually very good it was the days where you know that that they comment from your mother on a weekend was make sure you're home for dinner you know and you ride your bikes around the neighborhood and play with friends and it was it was very interesting the neighborhood where I first grew up in changed a lot and when there was an we walked to school on there was a bar in the area so my
parents noticed that more and more people were hanging outside the bar in the middle of the day so we moved to the other side of town and which was great because it was also closer to our synagogue and so that you know for rosh hashanah and yom kippur we would walk to synagogue and my father and I so it was very it was it was good our lives became very Jewish oriented when I was five my mother joined the choir in our synagogue and in order to accompany he didn't want my mom father did my mother to go alone so we he would schlep us
all you know to my sister and I to synagogue and of course we had Pugh's we didn't have seat so what people would see me falling asleep or whatever but so I became the darling of the synagogue they knew me since I was five and I went every Friday night my parents were not they were always identified strongly is or identified his Jewish but they didn't have strong Jewish backgrounds they grew up or during the Depression my father said he was bar Mitzvahed in his grandfather's old age home you know and so we got involved in the synagogue and to the point that my father
became president of the synagogue I went every Friday night and Saturday morning the year I was bat Mitzvahed i was there seven days a week between us why I in Hebrew school lessons and Hebrew you know and Bat Mitzvah lessons and services so it there the synagogue was my home away from home where's your dad do for a living my father was an automotive painting and repair person he was a very good-natured very you know Hale and Hardy with you know look a barter system way of life he literally took a weekend course on how to paint cars and mr. Sokoloff who I was I don't know how he met mr.
sokoloff but mr. sokoloff on a handshake gave my father a hundred thousand dollars in 1950 to open up his auto panic show and my father had the largest independent auto paint shop in nassau county which nassau county at that time had the largest number of cars per capita of any place in the country so i guess it worked out for mr. sokoloff was he a banker um I don't know what he was you know I all I know is he looked on the North Shore of Long Island which was you know untouchable you know it's where the great gatsby took place literally and I never knew how that met him he certainly wasn't a member of our congregation or whatever but my father was honest and you know personable and and it all worked at knows you're dead in World War two yes well towards the end of World War two he was a radioman in the Air Force and he he had a major injury only because the
pilot of the plane one they decided he wanted to visit his mother in North Carolina and there was a big ice storm and the plane crashed so so he was he was pretty badly injured but he was also he was in Japan right after peace was declared so he was there for a while and he was in Hope in Hawaii did ever say how the Japanese people were to them right after the war um no and I'm laughing because the only thing I know about that is my father would make extra money by selling cigarettes the check I guess he got along with them very
well tell me a little bit about your mom my mother was a very interesting woman neither one of my parents had high school education although my father went on to graduate laude from adelphi university he got his GED my mother finished school sophomore year in high school she her mother died when she was 5 her father married an old girlfriend from Poland who he thought would help take care of my mother because my mother's two sisters were seven in ten years older than her and they were already out of the house by the time you know she was seven or eight and my mother's stepmother
was became very sickly so my mother took care of her and then she died then my mother took care of her father who died three months before her wedding to my father and but my mother might you know my mother had an influence with on me about food in one way that was very important because she was hungry during the Depression so you know she had ketchup sandwiches she said you know so we weren't allowed to do that she would stand outside of bakery sometimes just inhaling the aroma and she did what we see in many cultures around the world too she literally treated food
with reverence so every night we all had our own individual wooden salad bowls and it would be a radish rose a green pepper ring and four witches of tomato and to this day I feel guilty as all get out because I hate making sure because I mean especially with my profession but I hate making salads because you know it's just never is beautiful you know but she she presented food lovely you know I mean what when you were young did you understand the significance of what she was doing and probably why she was doing it I think so I think so because I know that
one of the things is our refrigerator was always full so it was always full she didn't go you know neurotic about not eating leftovers you know or we had to eat leftover she that that was never a presence in our house but the quality and the quantity of food and and she was a basic cook my it was my neighbor that taught me how to bake but she was a basic cook and her sailors were wonderful your grandparents what did they do for a living my mother's parents I never knew because they knew died before she was he married my grandmother didn't work my grandfather
worked for my father he would sit in the awe in the shop and he would use the do the little ledger and you know he would I think he had a pushcart at one time he you know he didn't do a lot of things I mean my father before he was it used to be a nursery man you know so he did odd jobs before he got into automotive my grandfather would sit at a little desk by the door to his little balcony in their apartment and he would paint and he would he would copy masters and the significance of that is when I was
11 years old he took me to the museum of modern art in new york and i wrote down all the hebrew that was on every Chagall window that was on display there and he painted the chicago windows individually from the life magazine pictures and i have them framed in my house as to this day and he would he would read a lot so my father would say that growing up he would discuss nietzsche with my grandfather and these are all people that didn't have major education you know go to high school I went to Hampstead high school amstead high school was a very racially mixed
high school right smack in the middle of Nassau County and it what used to be the hub of Nassau County people would come in to shop with people even if it was really the active center until Roosevelt Field was built which was the first um shopping mall in the country changed everything this is the first shopping mall in the country the first indoor shopping mall in the country as a result as i got older i would say probably when i started to go to college the main street of my town and his smack in the middle of Long Island was boarded up except for a
point not gonna bang now what was it in high school that used to do that parents never knew okay junior year in high school my girlfriend and I went bowling and I bought a pack of Kent's and I spoke three quarters of the pack with ever and I'm nailing and my parents world smokers and my sister was a smoker and I hated it you know and I used to bite my nails and I was I was not cheap I you know in any given time you knew you could find money in my jewelry box I would always saved up my money and I said this
is stupid unless paying 35 cents for a pack of cigarettes so I never smoked again and that was it there you go no high school you met her future husband as I did at aus by convention in laurelton because his mother broke her hip and she was planning a surprise party for him and then he found that nice as well is this penis I don't really know what it is but can I go and she says sure and I was a as he would put it a big muff and us why for NASA kami so I met him and what happened for after that me
well um we talked on the phone a lot I had a driver's license and a car because my father would fix up wrecked cars you know and Richard didn't have his driver's license yet and he didn't feel it was comfortable going out with me driving he didn't want to do that you know so when he finally got his driver's license we went out but he he won me over when he said to me about two months after we admit he says you know I almost stopped calling you he said because I felt uncomfortable that we were talking so much and I enjoyed it but I
couldn't take you out and I realize this was quite a young man and he was very mature and I loved him and that was it I never dated anybody else well even did he we went to school 50 miles apart so yeah college now after high school where did you go on the cop I went to Syracuse I went to Syracuse University and he went to hobart and william smith which was in Geneva New York and I was in Syracuse it was about 50 miles down the road no were you when you were in college did you already know what you wanted to get into
I already knew what I wanted to get into when I was 12 years old ok when I was first of all I had when we moved to the other side of town there was a neighbor who mrs. wood who was 41 years old when she became a widow she was a German background and she had three boys and she was a phenomenal Baker and she took me under her wing is her surrogate daughter and I would walk across the street and it was a small little Street but I walked across the street and I would sit in her little garden room with a typewriter typing out recipes on index cards I still have all of us recipes and so I really loved baking and it was my creative outlet nobody in my family baked so it was something that I could do differently and
then when I was 12 years old I had a Jewish home economics teacher who was you know I thought she was old she probably was 28 but she had to the young kids you know were 32 but she was cool and I decided then that what I wanted to do when I grew up was teach home economics it's to the point that for my bat mitzvah when the entire congregation was invited in five hundred people showed up my parents gave me a choice of a big party or a sewing machine I still have that sewing machine and it wasn't that I was nerdy practical I
just love to so I mean I sewed my heck entire true so when you're a young woman in your 20s was very turbulent time in the country and yet Nam war was raging there's a lot of demonstrations across the country you know we the Kennedy assassinations you know John and then his brother Robert all this affect you significantly I did like I think anybody who was alive and over the age of 12 probably remembers when Kennedy was shot I remember where I was sitting in chemistry class in high school I remember being glued to the TV the entire weekend I was brought up to believe
that people should be judged by who they are not by the color of their skin or their religious beliefs or what country they come from so I was a very upset you know at the order racial tension in the 60s especially since I lived in a community that was at fifty percent african-american you know growing up I didn't say I'm inviting visit allium friend in this black friend in this you know Jewish friend to a party I said I'm inviting jennifer and jessica you know or whatever i was up kind of a pacifist you know my husband was more politically as to not involved in
stt or anything like that but he did march on Washington after Kent State you know I had already graduated early cuz i wanted to get a job and do what I wanted love doing but I I am very active emotionally and wherever I can physically in and in justices okay I ran a while now talk to me about writing the cookbooks and when did that start it started well you have to really go back about 14 years ago I was my family was invited to daven Torah on Yom Kippur at temple emanuel and i wore my father's tallied and it was like an epiphany I
think I never I never leave temple on Yom Kippur I stay there I often go to the library and read cookbooks ER because I love history and you know and I was reading Reform Judaism magazine and there was an article there was an editorial by the then president of the URJ we talked about the perfunctory kiss and how you know things can stay with you you know and help keep the foundation but you have to it was basically an argument for you can't show up at synagogue once a year but you need to have a good foundation and that night or the next day I
wrote a letter to them saying you are missing the boat if you do not have a food calm in this magazine because the olfactory senses are the closest connection to memory and they wrote me back and they said well we really don't have room for a column but we will entertain you writing an article well that was 10 years and 40 articles later I I became the food columnist for reform judaism magazine and then the i put in a proposal for a cookbook and they it took a while because it's expensive to do a cookbook especially if you want to do it right with photographs
and everything and it got accepted so my first book I researched it was it's an international cookbook essentially but my you know when I give talks now very often the title of my talk is beyond brisket and bagels I wanted Jews to understand and I wanted people to understand then the foods that we associate with Jewish cooking are not necessarily representative of the whole world jewish world but more importantly as i did research and for the magazine i had to research everything I mean I couldn't say the Sabbath Queen without researching who was the first person to coin that phrase so I found myself reading
Tom and I found myself reading the Jewish encyclopedia I was you know searching the internet for all good Jewish sites I never as my daughter reprimanded me should never use Wikipedia I never used wikipedia you know and I really saw what happened after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 from Spain and how it really affected world cuisine and I and I I liken it to what happened when came down to dallas in 1974 when I came down here the first time I remember Rosh Hashanah I was looking for advertisement saying you know place your take a locking your follow orders now for the hiatus
and most people didn't know what I was talking about with tape LA and and I really then went on to teach tail off here and when I was here for a number of years i was invited to teach a manhattan at the JCC and what did they ask me to teach fajitas and the idea was exactly and the idea was that you take that which you know you know before nine eleven i had to go to visit my son at USC and the fraternity with about 30 pounds of barbecue in the overhead compartment because that's what you brought from Texas so I saw that happening
when the Jews were expelled and I research that history more and I saw what was happening and I wanted to teach that I wanted people to understand you know so I love my first book and that's what I took us why I'm horse now that's what I've taught this weekend in Florida you know is the history in the connections and the stories behind the food right right Sabourin how many books have you written I have now written to the second one came out this fall it's the first one was on traded Judaism aculon area exploration of the Jewish Diaspora the second one is untreated Judaism
for families Jewish cooking in kitchen conversations with children because i want the recipes which are adult recipes and are from all parts of the world although i have a section on just for fun which is meet old myth meatballs from around the world and things like that I wanted to give an opportunity for parents and grandparents to share their stories with their children on 70 what brought you down here my husband was in medical school at Matt Sinai and a doctor who is his advisor they're convinced them to get a PhD in the middle of medical school and traditionally you do your research after the
first two years of basic training and the doctor got a job offer down in southwestern so it's who you do your research with rather than what you do it in so we came down here with the understanding that if Richard wanted to a place would be made in the third year medical school class at Southwestern so he finished up his MD from southwestern and his ph.d is from ensign but then you left again yeah we left for internship and residency we were in Philadelphia and then he did a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute and then he was off for two jobs one was very prestigious
with nothing to offer in terms of equipment or lab space or anything and the other was at Southwestern so we came down here in 82 and we have been here ever since is it a culture shock for you at first the first time it was nineteen seventy-four the only reason to have sour cream in a supermarket was to put it on top of nachos they had no concept of maybe putting it in fort or anything you know I mean it really was not ethnic in and when we were leaving in 77 they were voting to make Addison wet and I could not understand that but
to me I said you know if the pipe if the people who own the planes at the Addison Airport want to serve alcohol let them serve alcohol what's the big deal because in 1977 the only thing on beltline was the the Addison schoolhouse and the palest cash ways and then I moved back in 82 and I go holy mackerel and now i will say that there is absolutely no food ethnic food contemporary fruit any prepared food and restaurants no food that's available in this country that you can't find in dallas so you're saying else is terrible about it very cosmopolitan and the food scene there
are actually more recipe rights in Dallas per capita than any other place in the country genomic happiest time in your life probably when my eye son was born he was my fifth pregnancy my daughter was my ninth pregnancy if they weren't easy and having him and finally you know succeed it was wonderful they was the first I did not expect to try to get pregnant again and circumstances with a friend losing a child you know I wanted another one but my husband had really dealt with the loss you know of the of the other children and he said to me one day if you want
to try I'm willing to do it and I remember my mind going blank and the only my mind tends to go to music and all i remember hearing what singing was oh happy days and I go oh god I can't believe I'm doing this to myself and I said okay but there are three people I want to see before we attempt this I want to see that the gynecologist obstetrician to find out what are they going to do differently because I didn't want as i said the time of crap shoot you know well it just try another time and i was going to see my
internist to make sure i was healthy and i said i'm not going to find a therapist to take me through this because there's no way I'm going through this calmly and I was in the house for six months to with her you know and when they told me they said okay we took a chance and had the amniocentesis because i was 39 and everything was fine i did miss Carrie and they called me up they said get her Tina everything is fine and I started a cry I was so happy and he said you want to know what you're having I said no she said
you sure you don't want to know what you're having no okay tell me they say you're having a little girl and my first reaction was I can't have a little girl I don't know how to do her hair now you have to understand that obviously that wasn't this you know but I was so overwhelmed because i had had girls before the ones i have lost with boys and she was just a joy she she kept me young she but she kept me on my toes I mean she thought she taught me what well I taught her to stand up for herself and just say what
it was on her mind rather than to try to please everybody which was my big negative i think or positive of you were the recipient of my kindness and she taught me to be strong and she taught me to be but really the whole person I am now and she's wonderful and recently she needed some oral surgery and I had the opportunity to go and take care of her for five days and I cried we both cried at the end when I was leaving I said I have to tell you I love being a mommy and thank you for the opportunity to do it again
and she's 26 getting my master's degree was wonderful and having my father told me he was very proud of me i was the first member of the family to get an advanced degree i tend to look at the positive things in life in your lifetime you've lived through so many momentous occasions you touched on the Kennedy assassination she also lives through the time Martin Luther King assassination like something good the moon landing in 69 of course the tragedy of 911 was there something else that really on the national scene that stood out that really affected you one of the most momentous occasions for me was
the election of barack obama the first time and i went is inauguration and when i said i was going most people say we are you crazy what are you going there it's going to be called Dada Dada and as it got closer every but he said oh I'm so jealous i wish i was going and I said I'm going because I grew up in a community that was half african-american and I saw I remember I remember very early when I was young seeing a white only water fountain and you know that changed rapidly because it was NASA candy but I remember seeing people driving to
do well and people being stereotyped and i thought this I mean I think that everybody has makes their mistakes you know I don't think he walks on water but I was so proud to see somebody who had really educated themselves picked themselves up cared about the community you know what not knowing how things were going to you know work out but I was so proud and I was so proud to be an American and the streets were filled with people of all stripes just so happy I was elated I was there alone my daughter was in college there but she had classes and I'm walking
around the street I mean we went to the inauguration together and I can't tell you that was unbelievable what advice you want to leave for the next generation there's a quote from Big Ben Gurion that I used I using my talks and this applies to everything it doesn't it said you're not to live in the past but you should remember it for the future and whether it's Jewish cultural your connections you know we're moving away you know from some time from well we're not centered families anymore i mean i am here in dallas texas i have one son in brooklyn and another daughter in los
angeles but yet you need to know where you came from to know where you're going and I think that has to do with with everything in life when I finish my talks and I said if you're lucky enough to still have your mother alive yeah of course this is related to food you need to get those recipes and I know that people got choked up because their mothers weren't there I said and if you are a grandmother are mother you owe it to the next generation it's what we teach our next generation that really will build the people that we want to see keep this
country as great as it is and i will tell you i'm on a camp board in northern california the reformed Jewish camp it's like green family but it's my daughter went to that one and my husband will tear up and I'll tear up a lot of times when we see these kids sing or we pray with a munch about when we go up there because that's what makes a Jew for the future regardless of how they affiliate regardless of how strongly they you know that they they keep all of the laws or you know the holidays but when you can really know who you are
and really be brought up with the ethics that you want your children to have then it carries on and that's the biggest biggest legacy and I dedicated my second book to my kids because they are walking tenants of Judaism and ethics good job thanks for doing this thank you