Library of Congress Interview with Gerald B. Helman Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project GERALD B. HELMAN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: November 8, 2001 Copyright 2003 ADST Q: Do you go by Jerry? HELMAN: Jerry, yes. Q: It's inevitable. (laughs) HELMAN: It's inevitable. Q: Let's start at the beginning. Could you tell me where and wheyou were born and a little about your family? HELMAN: I was born in Detroit, Michigan on November 4, 1932. My father was a carpenter and later a building contractor; my mother was a housewife. My family migrated from Belarus before and just slightly after the First World War. Of course, it wasn't called Belarus at that time. It was part of Russia. Q: That's around Minsk. HELMAN: Well, yes, it was around Minsk; it was in the Pripyet area,downwind from Chernobyl, I'm afraid. (laughs) Interview with Gerald B. Helman http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000500 Library of Congress My education was in... Q: Before we get to your education, let's talk about your parents. Your mother and father - how far did they get in schooling? HELMAN: In formal education in the U.S. (United States) sense, probably not much beyond high school, if that, although I think it's hard to draw equivalents. My mother came to the United States when I think she was probably twelve years-old. My father probably was about eighteen or twenty-years old. Q: They both came from more or less the same area? HELMAN: The same area, but met, as fate would have it, in thDetroit area after they migrated. Q: Looking at migration of things, were you from a Russian family, Jewish family or... HELMAN: A Jewish family. Q: So many who came out of Russia and Poland in those days headed for basically New York or something. What got them all the way into Detroit? HELMAN: Oh, I think probably, as with others similarly situated, the first member of the extended family who came to the United States ended up for one reason or another in Detroit. I don't know what that reason might've been - found a job there and so other members of those families tended to follow and congregate, or else the other members of the community, for one reason or another, came to that area and others tended to follow because that's where those who were familiar resided. Probably nothing terribly more subtle than that. Q: Well, this is the real pattern. HELMAN: It's a real pattern. Interview with Gerald B. Helman http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000500 Library of Congress Q: Do you have brothers or sisters? HELMAN: I have two brothers and a sister. Q: Where do you rank in there? HELMAN: Oh, I'm number two after my sister, and then have twyounger brothers. Q: When you came out was it an orthodox family or was it... HELMAN: Almost by definition, yes. Very much so. The family came from an orthodox environment in Russia although I think it probably was under Polish control when my mother was born but I'm not sure, and perhaps under Russian control when she emigrated. My parents were born in David Horodok which was what is known as a “shtetl” - a Jewish village - and the family practices and the like, and the education, were orthodox. Q: Did you find yourself in a shtetl community in Detroit or had thsort of insidious process of Americanization been going on? HELMAN: It's inevitable that it always goes on. It's an interesting question, but it's true. I found myself in a shtetl-type community; something I realized obviously only after I grew up. I spoke only Yiddish until I was four-or five-years-old. When I went to kindergarten I discovered that I was the only one speaking Yiddish and I had to learn English. So you learn English and you go on from there. I wouldn't have considered speaking to my parents or my grandparentin anything other than Yiddish. That was the family language. Q: Were there tales of the Old Country in the family? Interview with Gerald B. Helman http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000500 Library of Congress HELMAN: Not really many. My parents never dwelt on the Old Country. It was not a very happy time what with persecution, war, revolution and poverty. It was not an experience they wanted to recall. Not particularly from my mother, but occasionally from my father, we would learn something about his life in the Old Country, but more from his siblings, particularly from one of my aunts. My father came from a rather large family, my mother from a smaller one. But when I grew up we had aunts, uncles and the like that formed an extended family with the cousins and so forth. In later years, particularly because my wife was really quite curious about it, we found out a bit more from one aunt in particular who had good recall and was willing to talk about it. But much of the time, to the extent that my parents or their siblings would be interested in characterizing life in the Old Country, the characterization was one of some misery and they really didn't want to talk about it. They made a decision to leave and of course they left. My father occasionally recalled his life because he was after all a boy at the time of the onset of the First World War. His father, my grandfather, was a carpenter and even though my father was born in 1900, was thirteen, fourteen-years-old when the war began, he was an apprentice carpenter and when he was fourteen-, fifteen-years-old, together with my grandfather and one or more of my father's siblings, would undertake construction work under contract to the Russian Army building barracks and so on. And as you know that the area of Pripyet had extensive large forests and lumber industries. So this was an experience that he occasionally recalled. He also recalled experiences with the Cossack groups - the Chmelnyiky - and the others would come to the village and cause havoc. And he also recalled during the Russian revolution when he saw Trotsky who came through and made speeches intending to rally the population to thBolshevik cause. My father did recall that Trotsky was quite an orator, capable of handling several different languages; and, of course, in the area in which Interview with Gerald B. Helman http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000500 Library of Congress my father lived, Trotsky would speak in Yiddish and my father attests that he was very impressive. My father also recalled that one marauding Bolshevik gang threatened to kill him as the son of a Kulak and not a worker. When my father protested that he was a worker, the gang leader asked to see his hands. Seeing they were calloused from carpentry, my father was spared. It's almost like a story out of Isaac Babel. My father migrated not initially to the United States. He migrated instead to Argentina. And from Argentina - I think in about 1922-3, he got a visa and came to the United States. He worked as a carpenter in Argentina. He never dwelt on his experiences there but did learn and remember a fair amount of Spanish. I have an address book and brief diary that he kept and one of my retirement projects is to translate it. He did recall towards the close of the First World War when his father was away on some sort of contract work, the family and the village itself was starving because they couldn't harvest their crops, and couldn't trade, with the chaos of the revolution. My father was charged by the family to take a sack of beet sugar, a very valuable commodity, and go to Moscow and try to sell it, I suppose on the black market. He recalls hopping the freight right behind the coal-burning engine and riding to Moscow only to find that the sugar had been blackened by the soot off the engine. He nevertheless managed to sell his sugar. He never said what he got for it, but it must have been less than expected. There's not a great deal more than that except the recollection of poverty and misery and danger, constant danger which led the family, and of course many other villagers, to grab the opportunity that presented itself to migrate to the United States and start a new life. Q: Well, let's talk about Detroit when you were growing up there.You were born right when the Depression really hit. HELMAN: That's right. Interview with Gerald B. Helman http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000500 Library of Congress Q: And in the place where the Depression hit probably hardest. It was a big industrial city and all of a sudden the money wasn't there. What were your earliest impressions of life in Detroit? HELMAN: Well, my earliest impressions of life weren't particularly shaped by knowledge of the Depression. I really didn't know any better since I was born in 1932. Times were tough and the fact that, in retrospect, we lived on a reduced standard was not something I was conscious of when I was two-, three-, four-, five-, six-years-old because that was the only standard I knew and that was the only standard that my acquaintances - others in the neighborhood and the like - had.