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RD: I was very close to my grandmother, who was very much Jewish. But again, she was not, she lit candles on Friday night, and sometimes had a seder, but was not associated with any synagogue in New York where she lived her entire life. And she lived for a long, long time.

TI: And when you say you were close with your grandmother, what would be an example? Did she watch you?

RD: Well, I was born very, very sickly. My grandmother spoiled me. I was, of all her many grandchildren -- some dispute about the number -- but I was the only male. Which meant if there was a dinner at her house, and the children sat at one table and the adults sat at another, I got served before the others although I was, of the grandchildren that were there, there were some left back in Hungary who did not survive the Second World War Holocaust. Of all those who were in the United States, I was the second youngest but the only male, and she doted on me, and I was very important. My grandmother never punished me in any way except once; it was quite a shock. I was at her house and in her care, the precise time I don't know, but it was wintertime and it was in the depths of the Depression, whether before... no, it was clearly while Hoover was President. And I remember complaining that it was snowing, and I said, "I wish God would make it stop snowing so I could go out and play." And she leaned over and gave me, not a hard slap, but a slight slap on the side of the face, and said something like, "That would be a wicked thing to ask for. Because it snows, hundreds of men will get work that they need very, very badly, clear the snow away. So don't ever say things like that." My nickname in the family was Toby for complicated reasons that we need not go into here, but that's what she called me.

And later, when I was a young man, I spent a couple of summers, part of two summers in New York in her house and in her care. And although she couldn't speak English very well... she spoke fine, but it was clearly, she had a fairly thick accent. But when I was a teenager and my mother and I lived in her house for a while, and I had a book of German poetry with English on one page and German on another. She asked me what it was, and I told her, and I began to read. She said, "Oh, no, that's not what it says. It's like this." And my word, she knew German. She read a German newspaper, German American newspaper every day. And she had strange, she wasn't well-educated about geography. I'd heard her stories about coming to America, which always interested me. Sparked my interest very early in immigration. My mother had no memory of any of this, she was a babe in arms, less than one year old when she arrived in the United States. But it was a terrible journey for my grandmother, and her husband was ill, and in fact he died on the ship and was buried at sea. And she always spoke about how horrible it was in the port, she had a sick husband, she was pregnant, she had a babe in arms, and then they spoke funny German there and everything was mixed up, but eventually she got on the ship. And later in life, when I finally saw her papers, I had to burst out laughing. Because remembering that story, and I saw from her papers that her port of embarkation was Rotterdam, and what seemed to her "funny German" was Dutch. Today, everybody in Holland can speak English it seems, but in 1900 that was clearly not the case.

And then many years later, Judith and I were visiting Europe and then Holland, and we were in Rotterdam and we took a very nice -- which we loved to do -- very nice cruise in and out of the city, a one-day cruise. And on the way back, we were sitting on the deck in chairs, not paying too much attention, and my eye caught a sign as we were just coming back at the end of the trip, that identified that pier as the former pier of the Holland America line. And I realized that it was here that my grandmother, my pregnant grandmother, carrying my mother, and with a sick husband who would not survive the trip, it was here that they left Europe and came to America. It was so weird; I believe I shuddered. What a strange moment this would have been. Sometime in the 1990s, so it's almost a century after that had happened, but it was one of those moments where you sort of shudder.

TI: And what kind of thoughts were going through your head? What were you thinking?

RD: Well, by that time, of course, I have a detailed understanding of the immigration process. I've written a book called Coming to America, I've talked about this process. But this was -- and I've known that this was the case, that I'm the son of immigrants, one of whom came through this place, but that it was right there, as we're going by, I suddenly see this. And I think my hand shook a little, and I sort of shivered. They used to say somebody's walking on your grave or some such thing, but it was quite a moment. I talked about it to Judith and explained what that was. How much of that particular story I had told her at that time, I'm not at all sure, but it was quite a moment. But my grandmother was the person who connected me to Europe. I could hear Europe in her voice and in things she would say. She spoke often about her life in Europe, in Hungary.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.