The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project JANET R. POTASH Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: November 29th, 2012 Copyright 2015 ADST Q: Today is the 29th of November, 2012. I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy and we’re doing this with Janet R. Potash. POTASH: I pronounce it Potash, but -- Q: Potash. P-O-T-A-S-H. And you go by Janet or Jan? POTASH: I go by Janet. Q: OK, well we’ll start at the beginning. When and where were you born? POTASH: I was born --, I say in Boston, it was actually near Roxbury, Massachusetts in the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Which no longer exists. Q: And what was the date? POTASH: June 17th, 1950. Q: OK. Did you grow up in that area? POTASH: No. That September, my parents moved to Amherst Massachusetts where my father was hired on at the University of Massachusetts as an instructor in history. And I grew up in Amherst and until the end of my foreign service career I voted in Amherst. My parents are still there. Q: Ah yes. I know Amherst. I used to go to Northampton for a while. I went to Williams for -- POTASH: Ah, the traditional college rival. Q: I graduated the year you were born from Williams. POTASH: Oh my goodness. Q: Well then, so what do you know on your father’s side about the family? 1 POTASH: Well, I actually know quite a bit. For one thing, he’s published a 38-page memoir of his parents. So I know that his father was born in Latvia in a town called Preiļi and emigrated before the First World War. I understand that his brother was about to be drafted, and so the entire family decided that they would move. My grandfather was about 14 when he arrived, I think. He was born in 1891. My paternal grandmother was born in Boston, but she grew up partly in Maine. Her parents had emigrated from near Odessa. They were alive through my college years. In fact, all of my grandparents were alive until I was eighteen. My mother’s mother was my first grandparent to die and it was the summer I graduated high school, so I had my grandparents growing up. Q: And what language did they speak at home? POTASH: Well, to us they spoke English. My grandfather spoke Yiddish, it was his first language. He spoke Hebrew later. My grandmother, I believe, also spoke Yiddish. But she grew up in New England. So they spoke English to us, but my grandfather always had a Yiddish accent. Q: Did your parents -- did they speak strictly English or did they -- POTASH: Well, they did try to speak Spanish to avoid us understanding anything. But that was a learned language. My father spoke English as a native language. He studied French and German to get his PhD. He still speaks Spanish quite well, because he’s a Latin Americanist and he spent a fair amount of time in Argentina. My mother learned Spanish, more domestic Spanish than academic Spanish. But when she came to visit me in Honduras, she knew more vegetables than I did (laughs). Q: (laughs) Well then, where’d your father get a degree? POTASH: He went to Harvard for all three degrees. His graduate work was interrupted by the Second World War. He moved around quite a bit in the States, was at Camp Ritchie for a while, and his last eleven months in uniform were in the Pacific Theater. He met my mother when he was posted to the University of Illinois, where she was a sophomore studying mathematics. He came back, married my mother, finished the master’s, and PhD, and actually heard George Marshall give the Marshall Plan speech at Harvard when he was a grad student. Apparently the speech did not impress him too much at the time. Q: What’s the background of your mother? POTASH: OK. All of my family are Central and Eastern European Jews of various kinds. My mother’s father’s parents came from Romania, but he was born in the States. My mother’s mother was born in Berlin, Germany. Her parents (my mother’s maternal grandparents) moved back and forth between Germany and the United States several times and had children born in different times in both countries. The family lived for a long time in St Louis, where my grandmother met and married my grandfather and my mother grew up, but after a family tragedy (my grandmother’s older brother was killed in 2 a factory fire while his father watched and was restrained from trying to rescue him) my great-grandparents and all my grandmother’s siblings moved to Chicago. My grandmother always spoke with somewhat of a German accent. The family legend – which is apparently not exactly accurate -- was that my great-grandfather was sent by his family to stay with his brothers in the 1860’s. And the brothers were I think in Richmond. So he arrived at their small store and found a sign on the door that said, “Gone to War.” Q: Yeah. POTASH: And he was about eight-years-old and fortunately, a neighbor woman took him in for the duration. So apparently, I have some people in my mother’s family who fought for the Confederacy, which I find extremely unusual, given that I come from New England and have always considered myself a northerner. Q: Well, Judah Benjamin was Secretary of War -- POTASH: Yeah, yeah. Q: -- for the Confederacy. POTASH: But no way did I ever think of my mother’s family as at all Southern. Well, I guess we do have some cousins that were in Atlanta, but I think they’d moved there in my mother’s generation. Q: Yeah. POTASH: My mother’s parents were great travelers. They would come by train from St. Louis to visit us in Amherst. My father’s father was a Zionist fundraiser for most his professional life and he traveled a lot overseas -- Q: I imagine he -- POTASH: Yeah. We have pictures of him with Golda Meir at her kibbutz in Palestine in 1936. In August 1939 he attended a World Zionist Conference in Geneva, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. He traveled home from France on the Queen Mary; World War II was declared during the voyage home. But my father’s mother did not travel much at all outside of New England. My parents were married in New York City because they were told that my grandmother wouldn’t have traveled as far as St. Louis even for her only son’s wedding and then my mother was rather annoyed that after the wedding my grandmother got on a train to visit her sister in Washington (laughs). Despite that contretemps, my mother had a warm and loving relationship with her mother-in-law, and we frequently visited them in Cambridge when I was growing up. My grandparents all came from large families. My parents only had one sister each, and I had one sister who died in 2005. 3 Q: In your family, sort of how Jewish was your family, you know, observance, diet, et cetera? POTASH: Well, my father’s family was literate, or at least knowledgeable in Hebrew but not at all observant, while my mother’s parents apparently knew very little Hebrew but were very observant. My maternal grandmother kept a kosher household, and her uncle was an orthodox Rabbi. But for some reason, although my grandmother was very observant in terms of keeping kosher, they had joined a reform congregation because they liked the rabbi, or they didn’t like the orthodox rabbi. So my mother grew up in the reform tradition, but with not much Hebrew. She still observes some dietary rules - doesn’t eat seafood or pork. My father, on the other hand, grew up in a family that was not at all observant, but was very culturally aware. My grandfather at least knew what the traditions ought to have been, but simply did not observe them, though they did have Passover Seders. My father learned Hebrew, but never became bar mitzvah. I missed having a bat mitzvah as a child for different reasons. I was told that when my grandfather had been in Preiļi where he was born it was thought that he should have gone to the Yeshiva. He came to the States and became highly secular and went to an American high school. And was a bit of a Yiddish scholar. Very much promoted Yiddish, learned Hebrew later in life, as I said, worked an awful lot on fundraising, and was apparently quite successful as a fundraiser. So I’m kind of -- I don’t know what I am (laughs). I grew up kind of a mix – moderately literate and moderately observant. I joined a local Conservative synagogue in 1989, and have got much more involved since retirement.. I always tried to find services for High Holy Days when I was overseas. Q: So did you have brothers, sisters? POTASH: I had one sister, my younger sister Ellen, Ellie, four years younger than I was. She died of cancer in 2005. I have three nephews and her husband has married again to a woman who has two children. So that’s the family of my generation from that side. Q: Well, so what was Amherst like to grow up in as a kid? Let’s take the early years.