Jewish Counterculture Oral History Project MONA and MICHAEL
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Jewish Counterculture Oral History Project MONA and MICHAEL FISHBANE Interviewed by Jayne K. Guberman May 12, 2017 and October 18th, 2017 A Project of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17 Jayne Guberman (JG): My name is Jayne Guberman. Today is Friday, May 12, 2017, and I'm here with Mona and Michael Fishbane, known to his friends as “Buzzy,” at the home of their son in Highland Park, New Jersey. We're going to record an interview for the Jewish Counterculture Oral History Project. Mona and Buzzy, do I have your permission to record this interview? Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane (BF): Absolutely. Mona Fishbane (MF): Yes. JG: Great. So, as you know, today we're going to explore your experiences, especially in the late sixties and early seventies, and particularly your involvement in Havurat Shalom, and then the impact that the havurah has had on your own lives, and beyond, on the larger Jewish community. I'd like to start by talking with each of you about your personal background, and your families as you were growing up, and to flesh out who you were at the point that you got involved with the havurah. So, Buzzy, we're going to begin with you. You were born in 1943 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tell me about your family when you were growing up, your parents and your immediate family. BF: So I grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. Both of my parents were part of first generation immigrant families. From my mother's side, it was from the Ukraine, and from my father's side, it was from Poland. The families lived in the Greater Boston area, and they came in various waves and settled in. They had both come from traditional backgrounds, and as they settled in America, they were sort of observant Conservative Jews. I think my grandfather continued a very traditional lifestyle, but he was part of Kehilath Israel in Brookline, which in those days was very right-wing Conservative. My father grew up in Lynn. In those days, there was a Talmud Torah and Orthodox schools at the same time, but he also became a traditional Conservative Jew. I grew up in a traditional Conservative Jewish family, as was common in the 1950s, which means that it was traditionally observant, and there was no mechitzah — there was no separation between men and women — but otherwise it was traditional. It was characterized by rabbis who had had Orthodox backgrounds, and it was also characterized by the shamesh, the sexton, both at Kehilath Israel, which I often went to, and Temple Emeth in South Brookline, where the sextons were actually people who had smicha from Slabodka. So, Conservative Judaism in those days (00:03:00) was very, very traditional, except for the phenomenon of the seating. Other than that, it was a very observant community. JG: Which synagogue did your family belong to? 1 Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17 BF: We were part of Kehilath Israel. When we moved to South Brookline, we belonged to Temple Emeth, which was a Conservative synagogue. JG: What did your father and mother do? What did your dad do for a living? BF: My mother was a homemaker. My father was involved in business and merchandise. He worked for my grandfather for a period of time. He also then became involved in stocks and other aspects, so he was a businessman in that sense, a frustrated academic. Because of the thirties and the war, and when he came back — my father was wounded in the Second World War — people had to work in a different way, so he never really completed the kind of education that he probably would have done. JG: Did you have siblings? BF: Yes. I have two brothers and a sister, all younger than myself. JG: So you said your dad was severely wounded on D-Day. BF: That's right. In a certain sense, war and Jewish persecution were part of my childhood experiences. My grandfather escaped from the Russian Army when he came to America, and all of his stories to me when I was a young child were of the persecution or the murder of the Jews, the Cossacks bayoneting children when he was growing up before. He eventually escaped through trade routes to Vienna, then to Antwerp, and then to the United States, but those narratives were very much part of my childhood history. From my father's side, the war was a constant preoccupation. My father was part of the Normandy Invasion. He was severely wounded on June 6, on D-Day, and came back as physically very much impaired because of the war. They didn't clear the beaches quickly, and by the time he got to the medical hospitals in Virginia, he had no use of his arms or legs. That's what they called in those days a "basket case" — they were just carried in baskets. He eventually forced himself to learn how to walk and so on, and he became the First Commander of the American Jewish War Veterans in Boston. So my father was — what we would now call P.T.S.D, but the Second World War was part of our mental history for that period of time. (00:06:00) JG: So you were born while he was away? BF: Right. Well, I don't remember him until he came back, and I was about two and a half or three at that time. The narratives of the war were constantly part of it. That was also part of the American Jewish experience. It's interesting that in the first public broadcast my father gave at the American Jewish War Veterans, which was a public radio 2 Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17 broadcast, he spoke on behalf of what they called in those days "Negroes." So it was — American Jews are trying to be integrated. He felt important to speak on behalf of the integration of the Negroes. That was part of that American Jewish culture. It had a certain identity, but it was also precarious in a certain sense. JG: Are we talking in the forties or —? BF: We're talking about the mid-forties, late-forties by that point. But this was American Jewish life even into the early fifties. It was a kind of identity and hidden identity, simultaneously concerned with being American and Jewish as well. Boston was a unique case. JG: How so? BF: People — there was no outward display of being Jewish. No one would wear a kippah in public, even the traditional people in the old part of Brookline. People were very much aware that they were Jewish. Many had come from Roxbury, Blue Hill Avenue, where there was a very mixed community. People kept their Americanism and their Judaism — they were intentioned, but it was kind of a cautious balance very frequently. That was very much part of the mental climate. You could be very strongly Jewish at home, but when you went outside in the street, you should remember that you were Jewish and you were accepted in America, but you had to be careful about how you appeared. JG: You were five when the State of Israel was founded, right? BF: Right. JG: What kind of relationship, if any, did your family have with Israel and Zionism? BF: Well, when I was a kid, what I remember right at the time of Israel was that one moment in the afternoon Hebrew schools. The principal said we had to stop using "Ashkinazus,” the Ashkenazi pronunciation, and we had to start using Sephardi. Of course, it was as difficult for all of us as it was for the teachers. [laughs] But this was, in a certain sense, (00:09:00) to mark Israel. JG: When are you talking about? BF: This is '48 — 3 Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17 JG: Forty-eight? So you were already involved in Hebrew school at that point? BF: Yeah. So I remember that, and then this continued into the early fifties as well. It was a very conscious issue. There was something called Israel. We didn't really know what Israel was. It's a faraway country, and there wasn't much television. It was there and it had a mystique about it, but no one quite knew. And that mystique actually lasted until the early sixties when I went there as an undergraduate. It was just like, it was a place where people came, and they worked the land and they rolled up their sleeves, [laughs] but it didn't have — Israel as a State was not very much part of the conversation in the synagogue life as I was growing up. It was there, but all that we really ever did to celebrate Israel is we all had to buy these stamps to build the forest. So kids would buy stamps, and every Sunday they would fill out these trees to buy for Keren Kayemet. That was very common for bar mitzvah presents in those days, that people would buy trees. People would sing Israeli songs, but it had no political concreteness because the political scene, or the relationship between Israel and the Second World War and the Holocaust, was not yet explicit. That waited until after the Six Day War, until it became a strong ideological component in American Jewish life, and that's the way it was for me even when I was in high school already.