harold a. katz memoir volume 1 - University of Illinois Springfield

Q: How did he pick up the language?
A: With great difficulty. They didn't have any Berlitz courses in those days. He simply
did the best he could. As a matter of fact, I was surprised that he was able to pick up enough
English so that the Metropolitan Insurance Company hired him in the 1930's. Yet he man-
aged. Despite loneliness, struggle, poverty, and back-breaking labor, he picked up enough of
the language to get along. Of course, he said that people were very nice and kindly to him,
in a way that maybe they wouldn't be now. When he was young and he traveled around
Pennsylvania, selling notions to farmers, the farmers would offer him food and lodging for
the night. There was a general familial feeling toward every member of the human race
in rural areas in those days. And people were not as suspicious of strangers. They had
no hesitancy in offering strangers the opportunity to stay overnight with them. So he got
along, being not only his own translator and his own salesman, but also his own horse. He
couldn't afford to buy one, and so, for many years, he had to carry the material that he
sold in a pack on his back.
Q: Now, did he have his own capital to purchase this material that he was going to sell?
A: He came destitute. It was a different kind of a world; people trusted other people. He
found people who were willing to trust him with merchandise that he would take on
consignment. And he would pay his bills promptly. It was a hand-to-mouth operation, and
it probably couldn't be duplicated in our current society. His uncle, I think, helped him a
little. But his uncle was also not a man of wealth.
Q: Did he ever speak of the old country?
A: Yes he did, he spoke of Russia. First of all, he came from a long line of rabbis. He
decided not to be a rabbi, He had a gentle nature. He remembered the Cossacks terrifying
the Jewish community. And that was the main reason that his parents sent him away. The
Cossacks would ride into a town and beat and loot the Jews.
He was one of three children at that time. He came over, subsequently arranged for his
sister to come over, and then for his half-brother. As a matter of fact, it was only a few
years ago that we discovered what happened to the rest of the family. His father remarried,
and, with his second wife, had a number of children, a fairly extensive family. And every
one of them was killed by the Nazis, with one exception. We learned of one half-brother
by the name of Kalman, who was in the Russian army at that time. By being away in the
army, he avoided being killed by the Nazis. But there is simply no one else left in the
family. I mean every cousin, every aunt, everyone was killed by the Nazis, with the excep-
tion of Kalman. This was the Holocaust.
Q: How did this come to light?
A: Well, my uncle had thought that everyone had been killed. And my uncle heard from
somebody else who had come to the United States that Kalman was living. And my uncle
wrote to him. That was probably about five or six years ago. Since then, there have been
communications with Kalman who is now in a retirement community in the Crimea in
Russia, The letters from him have a certain pathetic quality because he is always writing
about the members of his family, the brothers and the sisters and the others who were born
out of the second marriage of my grandfather. And he is very lonely, as you can well under-
stand.
Q: Well, of course, I guess you never met your grandparents.
A: No, I never met my grandparents on my father's side.
Q: You say there was an uncle and an aunt who came to the United States.