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Chapter 8. 1939 and 1940
- The University of Tennessee Press
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C h a p t e r 8 1939 and 1940 In the summer of 1939, there was bad news and good news. If my mother— and I—had early on voiced concerns that summer business would be hard to come by, we were proven right year after year, and the year 1939 was no exception. Even the winter season had only “huffed and puffed,” as my father would say, but our summer business in 1939 did not huff and it did not puff. It just lay there. That was the bad news. I started off the summer of 1939 by graduating from high school, and I didn’t know if graduation would bring me good news or not. Ruth had already had taken off for school in New York with her shoe store money, so there was good news there. Minna was married, so good news there as well. She had married Mike Langer, whose family operated a wholesale fish business in the Catskill Mountains, a place well known for Jewish summering—the place where the Subermans had spent their summers— just as Miami Beach was known for Jewish wintering. And because Mike would be joining his well-established family business, my mother figured that even with the Depression, it wasn’t going bust tomorrow. So Mike was deemed an eligible candidate, and my mother gave her blessings. On the national stage that summer, big things were happening. In August the Nazis and the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact—the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—and as everybody seemed to be making a fuss, I charged over to my Communist friends to hear the news behind the news, and I found them in a state of bewilderment and outrage. “Double-crossed,” they cried to me. “We’ve been had.” As Americans, they felt deceived by the Soviets, and they said, “How could they? How could they shake hands with our enemy?” Of course they were not “our” enemy yet, but the sympathy 100 1939 and 1940 of most Americans was not with the Nazis. Furthermore, my Communist friends also felt a sense of betrayal as Jews: they were incensed that the party in which they had placed such hope had buddied up to “that piece of anti-Semitic dreck.” Still, as we read in the papers, Communists and nonCommunists were protesting on behalf of the Soviet Union, saying in essence that maybe the Soviet Union knew something we didn’t know, which implied a method to the Soviets’ madness. As it turned out, this was indeed the case, for the pact protected them for some months against the German assault that the Soviet Union most certainly knew was coming their way. The truly bad news was yet to come. In the late summer of 1939 we woke up one morning to discover that the troubles in Europe had turned truly scary. Germany had invaded Poland, and “Uh oh,” my father said, “we’re in for it now.” The Cardboard College And what about the personal front in the summer of 1939? I had graduated from high school, but I was already convinced that I was not going to college. I had known that despite the words to my mother—“Rebecca, now don’t get your britches in an uproar about girls going to college”—from her intimidator, Miss Bookie Caldwell of Union City, Tennessee, my mother remained uninterested in the proposition. In the end, however, I did go to college. It was not because my parents had a burning desire to see me there but because Miss Anita Sternberg of the NYA had delivered them a persuasive lecture. She had informed them with her usual certainty that being a girl did not disqualify me for college and that girls could have careers as well as boys. Still, it was not Miss Sternberg’s message that caused the change of mind; it was Miss Sternberg’s job: my parents had never wavered in the belief they had acquired as immigrants —that those who worked for the government did important work and what they advised should be heeded. The University of Miami was the logical choice: I could live at home and save on dormitory expenses. Another no surprise. The university seemed to me the logical choice for another reason. Did I plan a career as a professional ? No, I did not. If anything, I was going to spend my life in a store, in a retail business. And as an institution...