INTERVIEW WITH TAMAR ROSS June 17, 2014

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Professor Ross, we are very grateful to you for participating in this proj- ect. We are going to start by asking you to tell us a little bit about your life and about your intellectual trajectory. How did you come to be the person that you are today?

I was born in in 1938 to a family that was very intensely Jewish. My father was a , and the experience of being a rabbi’s daughter was certainly very formative. My parents were what you would probably call modern Orthodox. Although totally acclimatized to their American sur- roundings, they were interested in all things Jewish and brought me up in a way that went consciously against the grain of the surrounding culture. For example, they both already decided even before I was born that they would be speaking to me only in Hebrew, which was very unusual in those years. And my father was like Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and insisted on Hebrew-only at home. Even my non-Jewish girlfriend who lived just next door learned at a very young age how to tell my mother “I want ice cream” in Hebrew and to sing zemirot at our table, whereas I learned English only when I went out into the street and played with other children. Since there were not many Hebrew speakers living in Detroit at the time, my father would invent Hebrew terms looking in the traditional sources for words that he didn’t know a parallel for in Hebrew. Everything in the house was Jewish. The art was Jewish, the books were Jewish, and so being Jewish was the most basic and critical element of my identity. I remember when I first learned how to read in English, the capital letter “J” always jumped up out of the page as the first thing of interest. My education went against the grain in another sense as well. My father, who was probably the most prominent Orthodox rabbi in Detroit, founded an educational system for that community that encompassed all levels, from nursery and elementary school, through high school, to post-high school and , yet he didn’t send me to this day school sys- tem that he himself founded. This could have brought him up for a lot of criticism among the parents he was trying to persuade to send their children 234 INTERVIEW WITH TAMAR ROSS there, but his reason for doing so was because he abhorred the idea that I would learn in translation. Therefore he sent me to public school for my general education while undertaking to teach me privately everything belonging to the Jewish sphere. He used to pull me out of classes that he didn’t think were important (for example, physical education) and with permission of the principal he would use that time to teach me privately. Every day, he would take time off from his busy schedule to sit with me in his study for two hours. Together we studied mainly Tanakh, Pirkei Avot, and a few other offshoots. For other more “secular” topics, such as Hebrew literature, Jewish history, grammar, Yiddish, and creative writing, he hired private teachers, but only on condition that the language of instruction would be Hebrew. So this rather unconventional education was the main reason why I always felt myself as an “odd bird” in public school, the right peg in the wrong hole or however you want to call it. But that experience of living two different cultures simultaneously was very formative in my upbringing.

How did you manage socially with that sort of hybrid education?

During elementary school it was somehow less of a problem, but by the time I reached adolescence, it began to be more problematic. I remem- ber that one day when I was in junior high school, I came home with my loose-leaf binder. In those days there was a fad in school that the students would decorate the dividers of these binders with their favorite limericks and slogans. So I, as an innocent teenager, quite naïvely followed suit and copied out one of the jingles that was regarded as “cool” and popular at the time, which read: “I wish I were strong/I wish I were mighty/I wish my paja- mas were next to your nightie/but don’t excited and don’t get misled/ I mean on the clothesline and not in bed.” Well, my father saw that, and as you might imagine, this flashed a red light for him, causing him to conclude that it was not enough that he teach me privately. He would also have to provide me with some sort of social life or suitable peer group. Otherwise, I would be sucked up in the American dating scene and all the traditional Jewish knowledge and values that he was struggling to impart would be of no avail. And so he arranged for an emissary of Bnei Akiva (the religious of what was then known as Hapoel Hamizrahi) to be imported to Detroit, in the hope that this would provide offer an alternative social environment. And that move of his turned out to be very successful. It not only reinforced the education I got at home, but also instilled in me the strong sense that I had