Library of Congress Interview with Mr. Stanley Zuckerman Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project STANLEY ZUCKERMAN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: July 26, 2004 Copyright 2010 ADST Q: Today is 26 July, 2004. This is an interview with Stanley Zuckerman. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. You do go by Stan? ZUCKERMAN: Yes. Q: Okay, to begin with, when and where were you born? ZUCKERMAN: I was born in Brooklyn, New York September 7, 1933. Q: Right in time for the depression. ZUCKERMAN: I arrived with the depression and Hitler's rise to power. And Roosevelt's as well, and only a couple of months before the end of prohibition, an event my father used to say was the real secret to Roosevelt's popularity. Q: Well, Stan, let's get a little bit about your background. Starting first on your father's side. Where do the Zuckermans come from and what do you know about them? Interview with Mr. Stanley Zuckerman http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001674 Library of Congress ZUCKERMAN: I don't know a great deal about my forebears on either side. My father's father and mother came from Hungary in about 1880. My grandfather came first, and she arrived later. He was poor and ill and died young of lung disease. His birth certificate indicates that his parents, Herman Zuckerman and Tillie Richards, were also from Hungary. Unfortunately the census doesn't indicate what city people are from. One of the things on my list to do is discover more about my family history. On my mother's side, her parents on both sides came from somewhere in Russia to New York from somewhere in the Russian pale of settlement, I think around Minsk, now capital of Belarus. Q: Both families were Jewish. ZUCKERMAN: Jewish on both sides, yes. Q: What were your grandparents doing, both sides as far as they all settled in the New York area? ZUCKERMAN: My father's father was described as a tinsmith. I think he was pretty much a door to door peddler on the lower east side who would repair pots and pans. Q: He probably had scissors. ZUCKERMAN: Clicking scissors yes. He had some sort of cart. My father describes the family as being very poor. His father died in his early 40's and my father left school at the age of 15 or 16 to support the family. He described a childhood in which he would fight other kids for lumps of coal that fell off the East River barges when they were being unloaded onto trucks, sort of a Dickensian youth. But somehow he made his way into the textile business. He was never very successful as a salesman. My mother's side was more substantial. Her father was a tailor who, I am told by uncles, was quite good at his trade. They say the son wants to remember what the father wants to forget, and so I never got much out of my parents, but I did get some out of collateral relatives. Interview with Mr. Stanley Zuckerman http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001674 Library of Congress My mother's father, Meyer Rosenberg, was drafted into the Russian army, which meant 25 years and very likely death before discharge. If you returned from it you got a special seat in the synagogue near the Eastern wall. Fortunately he was working in some sort of protected position with an officer for whom he served as a batman and tailor. But the officer was transferred, my Uncle Al told me, and my grandfather was sent to a Cossack regiment where they beat him nightly for exercise. He decided to leave the Czar's army. His brother was going to London. He gave him his money, stole a horse and left Russia. This may be apocryphal, I don't know, but apparently there was a long trail from London to South Africa to Mexico to New York, searching for his brother with his money. He found his brother in New York, but the money was gone, but there he was in New York. He got a position with one of the boutique department stores. I believe it was either Henri Bendel or Bergdorf Goodman, one of those two. He raised a family of five in some comfort. He then left New York City to go to Florida to open a business in Jacksonville. The closest I have been able to determine as to why he and his wife, my maternal grandmother Ida Blum, went to Jacksonville was that my mother had a cousin named Celia Safer, and there was a Rabbi Safer in Jacksonville as well as a substantial Safer family. That is probably why he and his wife ended up there, opened a ladies' garment business, and made a living. But he fell ilhe had diabetes — and wanted my mother, who was the oldest of five children — two boys and three girls — to come with my father to run the business. My mother was also in textile sales. But my father didn't want to leave New York, which to him meant the known world, and so my mother's sister and brother went down, took over the business, quarreled and split into a men's wear store and a women's wear store, and both prospered. When my father died in 1962, my sister and I calculated that he had been outside of the city limits of New York four times in his life of 72 years. He couldn't imagine why anyone would want to be anywhere else at any time. Q: Where had your mother and father met? ZUCKERMAN: In New York. Interview with Mr. Stanley Zuckerman http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001674 Library of Congress Q: In the textile business essentially? ZUCKERMAN: I really don't know how they met. They both were kids on the lower east side. But as my maternal grandfather prospered, my mother's family moved first to Harlem and then to the Bronx. A photo I have of her with a family friend makes it look almost rural in those days. She began to teach at the Henry Street Settlement on the lower East Side, teaching immigrant girls how to sew and how to design. My parents must have met somewhere in that period and in that place. Q: Well then what was it like growing up for you as a kid, growing up in New York? Was it Brooklyn? ZUCKERMAN: Yes. In Brooklyn. It was a very nice place to grow up. We lived in the south of the Borough, not far from Coney Island, in an area called Gravesend Bay, which was within the Bensonhurst part of Brooklyn. We had an apartment on the fifth floor of a six story building just two blocks from Lower New York Bay, and I loved to watch from my parents' bedroom window the great ships passing through the Bay on their way to Europthe Queen Mary, the Normandy, and others. We lived on Bay Parkway, which was quite green, and the area was very heavily made up of immigrant or first generation Jews and Italians. Before I left to study in Wisconsin I thought that was all there were, Jews and Italians. Not literally, but those were my friends. Our sports clubwe played basketball and baseball — were a mixture of Jews and Italians. Q: How did the mix go? ZUCKERMAN: It worked pretty well. Emotionally I think, Jews and Italians are very similar. But of course there were religious differences. I remember incidents of anti Semitism. There was some difference, some economic difference, not total, but the Jewish kids tended to come from lowemiddle or middle class families. The Italian kids tended to come from working class families, probably because their parents were more often immigrants. Interview with Mr. Stanley Zuckerman http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001674 Library of Congress But most of my friends, Jewish or Italian, went on to college and became businessmen or professionals. Q: How Jewish were you in the home? ZUCKERMAN: We were strongly identifying Jews, but not observant. On the High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, we went to the synagogue, but didn't attend weekly services. It was a requirement that I be bar mitzvahed, the Jewish form of confirmation, which traditionally meant you had attained manhood and could fully participate in the weekly services. That meant going to Hebrew school every day for an hour after going to public school, which was a serious encroachment on my free time. When you were bar mitzvahed, once you were at the age of thirteen, and had gone through the ceremony, gone through the studies that enabled you to recite the prayers and make your parents proud of you, and have an enormous celebration in your honor, nobody cared if you broke open another prayer book. Yet, the family did not send me to a reform temple to study, because that was considered too non- traditional since all the prayers were in English. It wasn't thought of as being truly Jewish, since it lacked the traditional Hebrew prayers. And yet as I've noted, their own observance was very relaxed, although all of the rituals of life, of birth, of circumcision, of going through bar mitzvah, of marriage, of death were observed. All of these were done in a religious context.