Marna S. Tucker February 17, 2006; September 8, 2006; July 9, 2007; October 3, 2007; June 27, 2008 Recommended Transcript of Interview with Marna S. Tucker (Feb. 17, 2006; Sept. 8, Citation 2006; July 9, 2007; Oct. 3, 2007; June 27, 2008), https://abawtp.law.stanford.edu/exhibits/show/marna-s-tucker. Attribution The American Bar Association is the copyright owner or licensee for this collection. Citations, quotations, and use of materials in this collection made under fair use must acknowledge their source as the American Bar Association. Terms of Use This oral history is part of the American Bar Association Women Trailblazers in the Law Project, a project initiated by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession and sponsored by the ABA Senior Lawyers Division. This is a collaborative research project between the American Bar Association and the American Bar Foundation. Reprinted with permission from the American Bar Association. All rights reserved. Contact Please contact the Robert Crown Law Library at Information [email protected] with questions about the ABA Women Trailblazers Project. Questions regarding copyright use and permissions should be directed to the American Bar Association Office of General Counsel, 321 N Clark St., Chicago, IL 60654-7598; 312-988-5214. ABA Senior Lawyers Division Women Trailblazers in the Law ORAL HISTORY of MARNA TUCKER Interviewer: Mary L. Clark Dates of Interviews: February 17, 2006 September 8, 2006 July 9, 2007 October 3, 2007 June 27, 2008 Women Trailblazers in the Law Project of the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession Oral History Interview of Marna Tucker (Part I) Senior Partner, Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell, LLP (Washington, D.C.; February 17, 2006) Mary Clark: It is Friday, February 17, 2006, and I, Mary Clark, have the pleasure of meeting with Mama Tucker, senior partner at Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell here in Washington, D.C., as part of the ABA's Women Trailblazers in the Law Project. Really a delight. We've already been talking a bit about Ms. Tucker's daughter, who is a lawyer - - about her and her reflections and her experiences in the law. Where I'd like to start now is with your family background, your upbringing. I'm interested in knowing your place in your family in terms of siblings and where you fall among them. Marna Tucker: I was the first born in my family. I was born on March 5, 1941. So I am about to enter the social security age group, which I find very hard to believe. I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where my parents lived at the time. I believe my mother was born in Philadelphia and raised there. My father was born in Philadelphia as well. They were first generation Americans. My mother's name was Bessie Gordon, Bess Gordon. She always liked to be called Elizabeth, although I saw her birth certificate and it really said "Bess." When my mother died, I made sure her grave stone said "Elizabeth" because she loved that name. But she was born Bess Gordon. She was the middle child of three children born to Harry Gordon and Manya Gordon. Manya died when my mother was nine years old, at age 39, I believe, and her father then married another woman, Anna. I remember she was alive for a while when I was very little. She used to bake honey cake, which is what I remember the most. I also remember my grandfather giving me nickels. My grandfather, Harry Gordon, was a tailor in Philadelphia, and I remember us going to their house on Sundays. We lived in Philadelphia until I was about six. MC: Downtown? MT: In West Philadelphia. Actually my grandfather lived on Gordon Street and his name was Gordon. We lived at 210 South 53 rd Street in West Philadelphia. It is still there, and I had an occasion before my dad died to go back and look at that neighborhood. It is quite changed, but I did see the house that once seemed so big to me. It seemed so little now. It was a row house. MC: When you said your mother was first-generation, where was she from? MT: Harry Gordon had come from, I believe, Germany, and my father's parents were, maybe, from another part of Eastern Europe. It gets mixed up; that generation died before I was able to find out. But there were .... I believe it was my mother's mother's family that actually came from the Russian border near Kiev. My mother's father's family, I believe, came from Germany at that time. My mother's mother's name was Manya, that was Harry Gordon's second wife. Harry's first wife died. Anna was the third wife. I was 2 named after Manya. Manya had actually come from Russia, and married Harry after she came to the United States. She brought with her two other children from an earlier husband. She had been widowed in Russia. She had been married to a man who was an egg candler, and his name was Moshe. I don't know what his last name was. Moshe was killed during the Russian revolution. MC: Did your mother consider those children to be her siblings? MT: Yes, but they didn't live with her because when Manya died very young, they went somewhere else. Actually, my mother and her two siblings were boarded out until Harry married Anna. MC: What type of mother was Anna to your mother? MT: My mother felt very close to Anna. It was a very hard life then, but they all took care of each other. But my mother suffered from the loss of her mother. My mother, all her life, was very, very shy and had odd fears of things. One of the things she used to do was, because I think she was so shy, instead of having meals with the people she boarded with, she would take her food or candy bars and stick them in the pocket of her sweater and eat it in her room. She didn't want meals with people. She didn't feel like she belonged. Mother always worried about her weight and had weight problems later on. Eating for her was something she did quietly and privately. It represented all kinds of not good things to her. But I think it was the loss of her mother at the time. She was also 3 terrified of animals. I don't know why, but we never had dogs or cats when I was growing up. My mother had a younger sister, officially named Sarah, whom I call "Aunt Sue". Her name is Sue Green. She lives in Philadelphia. My Aunt Sue was more outgoing. She was the younger one. The other one was my Uncle Carl. Carl may have been older than my mother, I don't remember, because Carl died very young, just like my mother died at age 52. They died young, while my Aunt Sue is still kicking and is in her mid-80s. So she's doing fine. But the three of them were very close. The two older siblings, who were Manya's children from Russia, were my Aunt Rose and my Aunt Gertrude, who lived in New York. Also Harry had four boys by his first wife, who had died before he married Manya. So it was a huge family. But that is what Jewish families did; people died young, and you married somebody else and they usually had children too. So there were four boys. There was Irving, Meyer, George, and Louie. But the boys lived somewhere else; they were already older by the time Bessie was born, and they always got into all types of trouble. I had met them as I got older and remember different stories about them. Uncle Meyer was so handsome and lived in Florida when he grew up. MC: Do you think this experience in part explains your son's interest in Russian history? MT: You know, my son never met any of these people. I think if there is such a thing as a racial memory, he is drawn to that. And I tease him: I say, "Your grandparents gave up everything to come to this country, and now you want to go back." But I think he feels comfortable there. First of all, because he has the light eyes, and he looks like people in 4 Europe -- he has more of a Russian look. But it could be why my son is fascinated by Russian history. MC: I have been studying Jungian psychology, about the collective unconscious, and it could be that your son has this sort of unconscious for this particular heritage. MT: I do know we didn't talk about it much. We moved to Texas; my parents decided to leave Philadelphia, so he never really knew this part of the extended family. MC: Why was that? MT: My dad, whose name is even debatable; I always thought it was Herman Harvey Tucker, was born Herman Harvey Feingold, and his father's name was Sam Feingold, and his mother's name was Naomi. Sam and Naomi got divorced, which was a big no no then. Sam fell in love with another woman and married her and went to Texas. He left my father with his mother, who then married a man named Sam Tucker. My Father was adopted by Tucker and took that name. MC: Do you think your interest in family law -- in particular, in marital relations -- has anything to do with your own family background, in terms of what you just described of both of your parents' backgrounds, widowings, divorce, and the complicated patchworks that resulted? 5 MT: I grew up with a real sense of disconnect from my father's family, which I will tell you about, why that disconnect.