Cohen, Roberta
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project ROBERTA COHEN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: 26 September 2008 Copyright 2015 ADST Q: Today is 26 September 2008. This is an interview with Roberta Cohen. When and where were you born? COHEN: I was born in New York City on February 5, 1940. Q: Let’s start with the family. What do you know about the origins of the family? COHEN: Both sides of the family, all four grandparents, came from Russia -- from Kharkov in the Ukraine; Minsk in Belarus; and in or around Vilna, Lithuania, all part of Russia at that time. They immigrated to the States for different reasons. One grandfather deserted from the Czar’s army in 1904/5 because he didn’t want to fight in the Russo- Japanese War. The other came because of discrimination against Jews in Russia and opportunity in America. When one of my grandmothers died, she left $1000 to each granddaughter and I used mine to visit the Soviet Union in on a citizens exchange tour and found some family members who remained. Q: Where were they at that time? COHEN: In Kharkov, the Ukraine. Originally they came from Lithuania. All family members who remained in Lithuania perished during the Holocaust. The ones in Kharkov managed to escape by fleeing to Kyrgyz in central Asia. When the war ended, they returned to Kharkov and helped rebuild the city and that is where I found them so I know a bit more about my mother’s side of the family than my father’s in Belarus. But one overriding sentiment I felt in the case of all four grandparents was that they sought a country where they could feel safe and make a better living. So the United States for them represented a place of opportunity, where they would not be subjected to government sanctioned discrimination and worse, which gave them hope for the future. Even though as immigrants they faced many problems in the United States, I believe they found the United States to be a haven, and I developed a view of the country as one that played a leading role in the world when it came to people’s survival. Q: Do you know what sort of occupations both sides of your family had back in Russia? COHEN: Well my grandfather on my mother’s side was a soldier in the Tsar’s army. I believe his parents worked at some small trade in Vilna or around Vilna. I was told by my relatives in Kharkov that my grandmother’s family had a farm in Shaulai (near Vilna) 1 which employed quite a number of people. I am not so sure about the occupations of my father’s father in Minsk except that he came to the States and seemed savvy with regard to business. None of the grandparents who came to the States had advanced education, although when I met my mother’s side of the family living in Kharkov in 1969, I found that all of them had attended university. One was an architect; another, the chief tuberculosis doctor in the city, and others, biologists and civil engineers. I remember thinking that the relatives in Russia all had university training, including the older ones, whereas only the children of those who came to the States had that opportunity. Q: Well back then quite frankly very few Americans did. In my interviews now I am still talking to people whose parents, the majority of whom, were not college graduates. This will change as the new generation comes up. But the people I am talking to now came into the Foreign Service during the 60’s and 70’s. Most of their parents, including mine, didn’t have a college education. They educated themselves, probably better learned than the present generation who were spoon fed. But were your grandparents alive when you… COHEN: Yes, very much so, my mother’s parents lived in the same building we did in the Bronx when I was growing up and my father’s parents lived nearby. They were all a part of my life and seemed very ‘authentic’ to me, especially my mother’s parents because they didn’t try to Americanize. My grandfather Rubin Israel peddled goods on the lower east side and wore high black boots while my grandmother Sarah Pearlstein Israel wore her hair in a bun, ground her own meat, and cooked borscht, tzimmes and other East European specialties. They lived in a small, darkish sparsely furnished apartment with a huge old grandfather clock that ticked all the time and rang on the hour. I remember grandma Sarah sitting in the darkened kitchen, with flickering ‘yahrzeit’ candles [which memorialize the dead in the Jewish religion] and listening to a radio station that read out the names of Jews in East European cities and villages who had been murdered by the Nazis. Some of these names were relatives or friends she knew and she would cry. I sometimes draw a line from my later professional life to that scene in the kitchen with grandma Sarah crying. My father’s parents, grandfather Nathan Cohen and grandma Molly Rubenstein experienced more of the American dream. They came to enjoy a somewhat affluent lifestyle, moving from a tenement on Rivington Street on the lower east side of New York to a large opulently furnished apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. My grandfather became successful in the real estate business and he took his family on first class tours of Europe and Egypt before the war. My grandmother Molly wore lace and silk dresses and had silver combs and brushes on a glass tray in her bedroom, which I’d never seen before and liked to look at. Nathan, as patriarch of my father’s family, was imperious. But during the depression, they suffered, and banks grandpa Nathan thought would help him did not, he said, because he was Jewish. Let me say a word about the importance of education to the family, especially to Sarah, my mother’s mother. Although none of my grandparents had a college education, and possibly not even high school, it was very important to them that their children and grandchildren go to the university. We all knew that we had to go to college, and I was 2 the first one in the family to go to an Ivy League school. My father always regretted that he didn’t go to college; as the oldest son, he was expected to join his father after high school in the real estate business. My mother on the other hand graduated from Hunter College and became a math teacher in the New York City public schools and also was a piano teacher. I found it interesting that when my Russian relatives on my mother’s side moved to New York in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, they carried the same message. Alla and Viktor arrived with little because they were not allowed to take out more than $750 per person and went through hard years in New York City but had this overriding goal that their children receive a good education. Their son Larry is now a medical doctor and their daughter Kate a physician’s assistant, married to Mattvei, a medical doctor. The value and importance of education runs strongly through this family. Q: This is a motif that goes through immigrant communities so much, and it is the answer to many things. Speaking of Russia, when you were a kid was there a Russian flavor to things? “Watch out, the Cossacks could get you.” Or something like that? How did Russia stand? COHEN: Russia was the ‘old country,’ which my grandparents left and which my parents wanted us to forget about. Yet grandma Sarah drank tea from a glass, and plucked chickens in her kitchen, especially every Friday night when family members gathered. And grandpa Rubin, although in this country for more than 60 years, saluted the Tsar in Russian when he died -- I was in the room -- and he gave me a large 19th century silver coin with Tsar Nicholas II on it. I carried it around as a good luck charm for years but one day a pickpocket at Bloomingdales stole my wallet and I lost the coin. How I miss that coin! Yet my parents wanted their children to be ‘Yankees’ and not associated with the ‘old country.’ A teacher was brought to the house to teach us good English. And my sister and I were sent to a reform Jewish temple, even though our parents belonged to an orthodox synagogue. The reform temple was progressive, men and women sat together, there was a choir and organ music like in a church, and the rabbi emphasized ethical and moral issues rather than rituals. The teachers were also anti-Zionist. They insisted that Jews had to be part of the American mainstream and that there shouldn’t be a separate Jewish state. My parents, however, were ardent Zionists. So I lived with a contradiction. Q: Did your parents realize what they were doing? COHEN: I’m not sure, but something was amiss -- my father was the president of the local chapter of the Zionist organization, my mother was the president of the local chapter of Hadassah and they went around making speeches and collecting money for the State of Israel, and urging United States recognition of the State. When President Truman extended recognition, it was a day for celebration in our house.