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TI: So let's go back to your childhood, and what are some early memories of growing up in Monticello?

JO: Monticello, right. We don't put the "cello" in.

TI: Okay, Monticello.

JO: Well, cold, lot of snow. And we grew up on the main street of the town because my mother was a city girl. She came from New York, and she wasn't going to live on a side street. My grandfather was retired by then, my grandmother died when I was a year old, so I didn't know her. But we walked to school, we walked home for lunch, we knew everybody. There were three thousand people in our town, so everybody knew everybody. I always thought everybody liked everybody. I didn't find out until later that wasn't necessarily true. [Laughs] There were a significant number of Jews in our community so that they closed the schools on our high holy days. But everybody was not equally observant; there were many people who (were not). Most of our programs in school centered on Christian holidays. Of course, growing up during World War II, we were not unaware of what was happening to Jews during that time, so that there was a certain amount of fear that we lived with through that period. A fear that what was happening in Europe to Jewish children would happen to us.

TI: So talk about that. So there was actually, you felt that it could happen to you in Monticello, the same things?

JO: I know. You're saying it almost the way my brother said it. [Laughs] But I remember the day that, I remember December 7th. We were reading the comics on the floor, my father being an engineer, had a facsimile machine already. But facsimiles was sort of like ticker tape. It came in on sheets of paper with the news, and we were lying on the floor. The comics didn't come that way, they came on regular newspaper. When the news came in, I became frantic. I was terrified because we did know about the war in Europe, and I remember my brother went and got his globe, and he was four years older than I. And he showed me how far away Hawaii was, had no reason... and then he said, "And why would anybody come to Monticello anyway?" But then my grandfather in New York manufactured drapes, and he sent drapes with blackout curtains on the back of them, which were then put up in our living room and bedroom and all the other rooms of the house. And my father got so serious about civil defense that I was convinced that there must be the threat, almost it was imminent. And I had book, a history book, which showed the Revolutionary War with the soldiers lined up facing each other with their guns, the red coats, and the revolutionary troops. And I used to have this dream that that was going to happen on the main street in Monticello, and I was I would be just... it would happen right there.

TI: Now, were other families doing the same things in terms of blackout curtains?

JO: Oh, yes. Yes. And during that time, (...) when shortages started happening, my mother actually did canning, and I remember she tried to make us ketchup because you couldn't buy ketchup. And what do they call that boiler that has a steam thing on it? A pressure cooker. The pressure cooker exploded and the ketchup went on the ceiling. And we had the worst-tasting ketchup in America, but we had to eat it because that was what was available.

TI: Before we move on, I forgot a couple questions. What was your given name when you were born?

JO: My name was Joanne Fleischer. Joanne Faith Fleischer. (...)

TI: And your parents' name, just for the record.

JO: Helen Jasym Fleischer and Abe Fleischer.

TI: Okay. I'm sorry, that was part of the questions I forgot to ask.

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