Klau, Sadie_1976/5-7, Oral History, May 12, 2016, July 6, 1976

Tonight and I really feel privileged to have been asked to present Sadie Klau who will be interviewed this evening for oral archives by a very good friend of hers and mine, Emma Cohen. Ever since coming to the Hartford area around 1939 our paths have merged and crossed and the fabric of our activities have been interwoven in many organizations. It has always been exciting and rewarding and in the middle of where it is at. And now let’s hear the story of the evening that we came to hear. EC: For the record today is Wednesdays, May 12, 1976. My name if Emma Cohen. I am about to interview Sadie Klau, Mrs. Joseph E. Klau, for the oral history archives at a regular meeting of the Jewish Historical Society if Greater Hartford at the Hartford Jewish Community Center. Sadie, almost a Hartford native, has led a very active life in both the Jewish and general communities. Also, as the wife of Judge Joseph E. Klau, she has participated in many of his activities. She is the founder of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford and is presently its very busy speakers bureau chairman. I have known her since she was Sadie Palten, and I was Emma Pearlstein. And when she sat in front of me in our Hartford Public High School homeroom as you realize by that __________________. I will let her tell you the dates when we were ______. It’s the been a long and enduring friendship. From girlhood to grandmotherhood and more about this later. Sadie let’s get started. Tell us of your beginnings? SK: I began in Russia. I was born in the Mzsia which was called Minsk in Minska Gubernia which I think was the state of Minsk and anything that I can tell you about Mazia and Minsk would be pure hearsay. I am not sure whether hearsay is going to be aloud in this interview. I can only tell you what my parents told me and I think that since that story has probably been told many times before I think perhaps we will begin when I was brought here in 19 EC: I just want to ask you a question. What did your father do in Europe? SK: My father was a cabinet maker in Europe and he came here to escape I think what was called the Prezere which meant the military service. So that was in 1906 and he came here alone and he tells that when he came to New York and lived there in a basement room until he could make a little money I think he worked not as a cabinetmaker but began working as a carpenter. There were many lancelight who lived in Hartford. My father came from a place called Hovna Cobernia. I don’t know what the name looks like on the map but it’s Hovna and there were many people from Hovna here. Many of the Kaplan family came from Kovna. It sounded more like Hovna as I heard it. But then it may have been something else. So that after a while my father came to Hartford and it took a couple of years before he saved up enough money to send for my mother and me. And my mother, I don’t know whether she wouldn’t come without her mother, but my grandmother, my mother’s mother, came and my uncle and aunt. We all came together and as the usual story about coming over in steerage and packing enough food in a bag to last through the whole trip which took anywhere from one to two weeks, more likely two weeks to get here in the steerage and so you baked enough bread and some dried fish, herring, dried herring, and bread and because the people at that time would not, could not eat the trafe food that would be served on the ship so they carried their own supplies with them in steerage and I think it was not the most pleasant journey. Nothing like a Caribbean trip today. EC: And the price of it probably would be difficult than even that way? SK: Well whatever the cost was it took some years to get that much money together to bring, he brought four people and whatever. To keep the family together. EC: Well what happened? Do you remember how they came to Hartford from New York or SK: No my father came to Hartford by himself and settled here. EC: I know, but when your mother came SK: And then, well my mother tells wonderful stories. My father was working and he couldn’t leave the job to come to get them out of Castle Garden or Ellis Island and he sent someone else who she didn’t know and somehow or other she was lost her money and had a difficult time getting out of Ellis Island and getting to Hartford with a family. They came here and I think settled, this again is hearsay, I don’t remember this at all, Governor Street, I think is where we first settled and then we moved on from Governor Street to Market Street. Well I don’t know whether that is upper mobility because at that time Market Street as I remember it was across the street from where the Gross Bottling Company was. That was Pleasant Street I think. And as I remember it there were no indoor facilities in that and most tenements. But I think the neighbors were very friendly and got along very well. EC: Do you really remember this SK: I do remember, yes I do remember Market Street. I do remember the outhouses on Market Street and so we moved up a little bit and we got to Pleasant Street and somewhere near the corner of Main Street we lived on Pleasant Street and I’ve forgotten either my sister or my brother was born there. Well then we moved to Cortland Street. I don’t know how long we stayed at each place but we did keep moving and so we moved to Cortland Street and now we were in a six tenement house and that was a center hallway with apartments on each side and I think the doors to the apartments very often opened and the neighbors were really very friendly. Now I think that the facilities were now indoors. But the neighbors were still very friendly to each other indoors or outdoors. There was a closeness because many of the people were in similar circumstances. They had come here the same as we had. Facing the same problems of making a living and facing the same problems of not being able to ask for what you wanted. Not recognizing for instance all the food that you see here because the food was very different in Russia. And when they came here my mother often tells the story how she had never seen a tomato. What is that? What do you do with it? And moreover how do you ask for it? Because they came more literate in their language of course, English was absolutely strange and foreign to them. But the neighbors were more or less in the same predicament. EC: Were they all Jews or was it a mixed neighborhood? SK: I think it was a mixed neighborhood because for some reason I remember a name of the Veseme which was a Targon but I remember that there was a lot of talk about that and I think my mother was very friendly with this Veseme or Vesemio, I’m not sure which it is, family. And so there we were on Cortland Street in the midst of the Jewish immigrants and beginning again to move. Windsor Street was a very good place to live near because the markets were there and it was easy to get your supplies there. I think from Cortland Street I went to the Henry Barnard School which was then on High Street. I think it is where the Board of Education is now. And there was as I remember, I don’t remember the name of the street that went by the side that walked out there into the kindergarten. EC: Until what grade were you in that school? SK: Well I don’t remember actually but now we were moving up, leaving that neighborhood. EC: Let me stop you for a minute. What was your father doing at this time and what about your mother? How did she learn the English language? What was happening with your grandmother? SK: Well, as far as I know my mother did not learn, go to school to learn the English language. But not too long ago I found in the my bookshelf a book that I think it belonged in the family and it was a Yiddish-English dictionary. And I don’t think I had seen that ever before. So that that would be one way they could find out what the English words meant because it was Yiddish-English and then you picked it up, practically, when you had to go out and the people who worked were in contact with other people and they just learned it with great difficulty. And my grandmother is a whole story in herself. I’ll just tell you. My grandmother never learned English. Never learned to speak English. Because I have a feeling she considered that it was trafe. And so as we were growing up and grandma could not speak English and Dababa was a very strong person she insisted that everyone in the room speak Yiddish so she would know what was going on. EC: Smart SK: Well I think she was smart. Because in Rabbi Silverman’s book in the list of the people who were on the Constitution Committee for the old people’s home in 1917 most of the constitution was written in Yiddish there were few pages in English. My grandmother was on that Constitution Committee. Most of it was written in English and some of it was translated into English. Also, while I am talking about my grandmother, we moved. Now I will have to tell you. Now we have made the next move. Now we are on Belevue Street. Up until this time we lived in tenement were you paid a landlord for rent. Well then evidently I was not too involved in the financial affairs of the family at that time but evidently my father had done well enough now to buy a house with my uncle who is also a builder, Uncle Sam Offengant, who was also a builder. So they bought a two family house on the corner of Belevue and Suffield Street on the hill there. That really was a nice neighborhood then. Very high class. We had some very nice neighbors there. A week or so ago I was shopping and met Pauline Margolis and I said Pauline I was just thinking about you. And I was thinking about Belevue Street and Pauline has total recall. So she told me about all the neighbors that I had forgotten about,. David Ward. The Wards lived next door to us. Frank Rabinowitz, you know Billy Rabinowitz,. They lived next door to us. The Rosenblums who turned to be Betsy Ross. A big writer. And the violinist all lived on Suffield Street. From Suffield Street we walked to the Northeast School, and the Northeast School was quite a distance and one of my strongest memories was walking there when the temperature said 8 degrees. And walked that whole distance from Suffield Street to Westland Street which was quite a good walk. But obviously I survived it and I don’t know whether it did me any good or not. EC: I think you mentioned that your grandmother was the first superintendent of the Hebrew Home is that right? SK: Yes. It was still on Belevue Street. I don’t know whether it was the first building but was an early building of the old peoples’ home on Worcester Street. My grandmother with Mr. Diwinsky, some of you may remember him, he had a delicatessen store on Windsor Street and they were volunteers, they were the first superintendents of the old peoples’ home on Worcester Street. My grandmother devoted a great deal of time to that and sometimes through the, shall I say not regret, but objections of her children. She continued in that and of course it was a very rewarding thing but they were concerned with food and sheets and everything they had to be done there. EC: Basic necessities? SK: The basis necessities. EC: Sadie, you had told me about your home life and how everybody kept up with the times, tell us about that? SK: Well, we have to come up to Earl Street now. Actually I said we had bought. Now my father and my uncle Sam Offingan were owners of this house on Belevue Street and they had made much progress in spite of all of the panics. I remember that every few years there was a panic. There was panic in 1905. There was a panic every few years and my mother used to say sometimes it was a schtillwick crisis, a stiller crisis. A quiet panic. Sometimes it was a loud panic. But there was never an evenness about the economy. They seemed to have as many up and downs as we have now but in spite of this they built, each built, my father and my uncle, each built themselves a home on Earl Street and it’s still a very nice home and I think it was rather forward, advanced for its time. There they built a big kitchen and thought there were just three children, my brother Paul who is here, by sister Ina Bess who lives in Long Island and I. And do I am trying to remember why they had to build a kitchen table that seated 10 people. But that they did because the house was always open to everyone who came and everyone was welcome. My mother had some very interesting friends. She them in Russia and when she came here they came too and they were often at the house and some of these people were revolutionaries in Russia. Some of them had served in Siberia. Some of them had bullets in their chest. And one man, I remember particularly, had a tacheotomy and so he could only talk. The doctor will know, an artificial voice box or something. He could only talk by pressing a button. All these people were revolutionaries in Russia and came here and they were often in the house and so we heard many stories of what happened and what they thought about that. During this time when we were going to high school and that’s probably during that Earl Street period that I met Emma and our names, we were always seated alphabetically and I was Palten and she was Pearlstein and so we were forever tied together. ___ ask he about how people kept up with the times. How did the family know? They couldn’t read English that easily, they were learning. But the language they read in was Yiddish of course. Whether it was the newspapers or books it was in Yiddish. I have very strong feelings about the Yiddish newspaper, especially the Forward which we always got. There were other papers, The Jewish day, but the Forwards was I think a socialist paper. You did have someone come to collect for the Forward, that was a Mr. Pollack who came. He came to collect for the paper and spent half the day visiting and discussing the news. But in that Forward I think we should move along really. But in that Forward I have given talks on the Bintle ____ in the Forward and I think that is probably familiar to many of you. The Forward itself was a means for educating the immigrants who came here. On Monday, for instance, the Monday Forward would always have in it a synopsis of the leading articles from the English newspapers, the New York Times. The leading, whatever the world, whatever English papers were important and any important articles that they had were reprinted in the Forward so you could read them. And they kept up with the news and I think that we cannot overestimate the influence that the Forward had in helping the immigrants get acclimatized here. EC: Sadie, I think you did tell me that you did have some interest in some clubs and also what was your early Jewish education? Was your home religious? Could you just briefly tell us about that? SK: In our home we had, maybe I can use this word, it took a long time for me to know what it meant, there was a dichotomy in our home. EC: What happened? SK: After all, my grandmother lived with my uncle in his house but he moved to Taunton so my grandmother came to live in our house. But since we were not closer enough for her, she conducted her own kitchen and we conducted ours. And my grandmother, I think, was more religious than anyone I’ve ever heard of. Her very EC: Did you have any Jewish education? SK: Now I just have to finish one thing. I keep coming back to my grandmother. But I do want to mention this. That one of her, a person she had admired most, was Rabbi Isaac Hurwitz. He was a grandfather of Uncle Joe. Joe Hurwitz. And if ever there was a cautious, is a question, and when you opened the chicken up and there was something that wasn’t just right there, you took that chicken to Rabbi Hurwitz to see if it was safe to eat. And so my grandmother was a very good friend of Rabbi Hurwitz and thought a great deal of him. And if you ask what the conditions were in our home with my grandmother shabbos began on Sunday. And you laugh and you think that’s a joke. I tell you it’s no joke because on Sunday she would just about recover from shabbos and if I would say to my grandmother that let’s do something on Monday or Tuesday she says she can’t it’s getting to be erev shabbos. Well now that is really not so funny as you think because on Tuesday she had to go to all the butchers and the grocery to collect food that she was going to distribute to her poor families that looked out for. So Tuesday was the day that she got the food together and then, maybe Wednesday, she had a little time off, but Thursday she had to begin getting her home, her chicken ready and Friday, of course, everything had to be washed and cleaned and ironed. Erev shabbos and Saturday was shabbos. EC: Very good. You still had, you did mention that you did belong to some club during these early years. Any particular ones, Zionist clubs or anything? SK: No, no. EC: I SEE. Well let’s move on a little bit. You graduated high school and going onto college and where and also I think we ought to begin to think about telling how you met your future husband. SK: That’s still Earl Street. EC: Well you were on Earl Street a long time. SK: We were on Earl Street a long time and many things happened on Earl Street actually. On Earl Street I was a big sister with the United Jewish Charities. EC: Was this before you were married? SK: No. This was a few years after we married. We were married in ’28. EC: One thing I think you have to tell me, how you met? Did anybody ever hear of Keney Park. What was SK: I don’t know if this is a matter of community interest. EC: Well, only in this much, the thought was what was there to do in those days? SK: Well, actually it was a blind date. We were having, I had a big New Year’s Eve party and Joe came to that and it was EC: Okay, hold on. Tell us about your early marriage? SK: I think we really have to move on but I have to tell the story. I did graduate high school and decided to go to college and I notified my parents that I was going to college. I went to Storrs which was then Connecticut Agricultural College and it’s a long story about Storrs at that time and comparing to the present but I don’t think we can go into detail until all of these things but Storrs made a tremendous impression on me. I thought it was the most beautiful place. It really had no cars, it had very few buildings and it was a marvelous place to be. Be didn’t run home every weekend. You stayed these and absorbed what they had and surprisingly enough they had some very, very good professors there. And so in my sophomore year, was when I had this New Year’s Eve party that we are coming back to now, and friends brought friends. And Joe came that night and it was a very good long party. It adjourned to Keney Park with sleds and sliding and came back for breakfast. My mother was very accommodating, had breakfast at home. And that was the beginning of a very long courtship. EC: Tell you what, can we go on really because there is so much for you to tell us? After you were married you lived, I believe, in the ___________, am I right? SK: After we were married we still lived on Earl Street for a few years. And as things happened then, I think it was during that time that I did some Big Sister work. I worked in a well baby clinic at the Northeast School for a couple of years and I found that somehow my education at college did not touch any part of the bible or had no Jewish education at home. I was taught to read and right Yiddish and so I enrolled in the Theological Seminary right here in Hartford and took a course in the Old Testament with Dr. Payton who was a wonderful professor. Although Dr. George Ross Wells, was very popular at that and giving psychology courses. I had took the other course and that was during these years when I had no other commitments. Another interesting thing, now 1930 was the beginning of the depression years. You had the crash in ’29, ‘30 was getting pretty bad and I ad been working in politics. I did a lot of leg work and rang door bells and somehow I think I found that children were not being adequately nourished and so in the summer of ’31 we got a group of people together and raised some money and ran a free milk station at the Northeast School where we gave the children at the beginning of the year, and where everybody said, ha, how are you going to get children to come on hot days for a glass of milk and a cookie and I said we would try it. And to this day I have the names of the children who came, a 102 children came to the Northeast School twice a day to get a glass of milk and a cookie. We weighed them at the end of the year, I don’t know whether they gained weight from just growing or from the milk, but anyhow we had a great party with them there and ice cream and whatnot at the end. And that was an interesting thing. EC: What other involvement did you have for instance in politics at that time? SK: Well we wanted to get started in politics. Well, because politics is a duty of every citizen and so we joined the party and became very active in it and of course, one of our first political activities was a Third Ward school fight. And that was a marvelous experience for us. People who had never done any work in politics and we were trying to oust the school committee that had been in there, Walter Camp, for I don’t know how long, and I forgot who our candidate was. I think it was Ichamod B. Davis. Yes. Well there were Jews on the Republican side, Jews on the Democratic side and it was a very exciting, thrilling thing to do even if you lost. And we lost. That was our first attempt to accomplish something in politics and so I learned the whole neighborhood the Third Ward and went up and down the stairs and rang door bells and tried to get people interested in voting and whatnot and I did it was many, many years afterwards. EC: Would you say that the Jewish community was very much involved in politics during those years in those areas? SK: Well, my political mentor tells me that Front Street was the dividing line in the early days and between the Jews and the Irish and mostly the Jews moved North and many of the Jews moved toward the South. Well when we moved North gradually from the Second District from Second Ward to the Third Ward to the Fourth Ward to the Twelve Ward Jews became very politically active in all of those wards working with the Irish and the Yankee bosses. And one of the people we worked very closely with was Peter Connerton. Some of you might remember Pete Connerton. So that I think the Jews felt that as long as we had the privilege of voting and taking part they did to the greatest extent . EC: Now you moved on to Washington. Will you tell us about the hay day of the New Deal? We are going to move along. SK: Yes, we did. We went to Washington in 1933 where my husband was an attorney in the Public Works Department and we had one little boy then we took to Washington and found another one in Washington. Our second son was born in Washington. Well I don’t know what could have been more exciting than being in Washington in the New Deal days. It was an altogether different atmosphere from what we have today. All the young men who went down there were just full of hope and they were sure that if they carried out their programs the problems would be and so you could drive around and see lights in government buildings all hours of the day and night and when a group of people, I remember particularly a group of people in a home and the conversation would be so intense and there was no cynicism there. There was a genuine hope that we could accomplish something to alleviate the dreadful conditions that then prevailed. So the people who were the lawyers who were interested in housing had such great plans for public housing, it was going to eliminate crime, it was going to give a better life to everyone. Of course things didn’t turn out as they had planned but it was a wonderful time to be in such a vital, exciting community and I always feel that any city that I live in the papers reflect the activities and so the papers were interesting to read. What could be more exciting than driving down the street and having Mrs. Roosevelt drive along right next to you driving along the road. But there were people that we knew Senator Lonagan was there, Dorothy Levitz, Secretary to Herman Koppelman, we’re still friends. I sent Dorothy a notice of this meeting. I thought she might enjoy hearing about it. We also met some people there, the Cannings, who we are still friends. He was Secretary to the Secretary of Agriculture. He wrote Wallace’s speeches for him and so you felt somehow that you were very close to the movement and the center of things in this big city that was the center of the country. I was a little sad at leaving Washington and I felt I had to get used to living here again but I did and I like EC: When did you get back? SK: Back in ’35. EC: In ’35. Now when you came back I believe you came back for a reason? Was there a change in the administration here in Connecticut? Or what did it had to do SK: No. We came back because he wanted to work in this State. Joe began to work in the State. EC: Joe began to work in the State, is that correct? SK: Yes. He came in to work in the Public Works Department in the State. EC: I see. And to where did you move? SK: Well we moved to Westbourne Parkway where we had an apartment. I believe at that time when we moved to Cornwall Street EC: After that, right. SK: Yes. And I think EC: Did you get involved in Cornwall Street. SK: This is the Twelfth Ward and where right back into politics again. I was ringing doorbells again and I became a Justice of the Peace in order to simplify changing of voters’ registration from Republican to Democrat. EC: You talk about your SK: And I don’t know, one election I think we did a pretty good job. We converted many Republicans to Democrats. I worked very hard and eventually I received my reward. I was made a co-chairman with Bill Cully of the Twelth Ward. EC: You really are a politician. I never realized that. SK: Oh yes. But that didn’t last too long because that was ’56 and in ’57 my husband was appointed to the bench, Jack Zaiman, who I am sure you all know or have read, very quietly said to me, Sadie, he says, don’t you think you ought to resign now. He said your husband is on the bench and I too his advice b4ecause I thought he knew and resigned so my really formal activity in politics ended with that. EC: I believe you made friendship of a certain man who was at Trinity at that time. You became close friends. SK: Well, actually when I was at Storrs I read a book. I don’t remember any other book that I read but that one made a particular impression on me. It was called “The Harvest of a Quiet Eye.” I don’t know whether it’s in print or not. I don’t know whether I fell in love with the title or whether I fell in love with what was in the book. It was a story of Odell Shepard walking through Connecticut but the “Harvest of a Quiet Eye” somehow seemed a very wonderful title. It meant that you could do things quietly and didn’t have to rush around. I remembered that book. The reason I go back to that is that later when somewhere in the 40s when Governor Hurley was going to be a candidate there was another book came out, “Connecticut, Past and Present “ which was written by Odell Shepard. That showed him to be a man who might be a good candidate for Lieutenant Governor and I think you’ve heard the story on another tape. He became a candidate for Lieutenant Governor and we became very close friends and I think of interest to the Historical Society might be the fact that he was almost telling us, because he lived so much in the past, he lived so much in early American history that I felt Jonathan Edwards might walk into the door at any moment. He seemed so real and alive. Anyhow, he said you don’t realize how much the Colonists owe to the Jews and their bible. And that was always a recurring thing. You don’t realize how much influence the Old Testament had on the thinking and the formation of foundings of the country. We had a lecture on that to. But as they say I heard it first from Odell Shepard. EC: Let’s go on. You got involved with the American Jewish Congress and particularly you did meet Steven Wise so maybe we can start with that? SK: Well, there were many activities taking place at that time and Joe was very active in the American Jewish Congress in the city and in the state and so that I was exposed to a great deal of the thinking and of the American Jewish Congress and also I had heard Steven Wise and I think, no one who heard Steven Wise could help but he influenced by his thinking. One of the things that I remember most clearly about Steven Wise was his saying that first you must find justice for our people because without justice and then justice and equal rights for us. If we have that most of our problems would be solved and so these were days when stories were coming out of Germany of the concentration camps and Rabbi Wise was one of the first, among the first people, to have knowledge of this and to go to the State Department and tell them this is what ‘s happened but the State Department couldn’t believe it. Who could believe such stories? No body could believe it. Except he had verified information on that. And so I thought that the situation as regards Jews in every way was very critical and American Jewish Congress Mens’ Division was very active and it seemed to me that the women could do something to help and though I never was an organization woman and then could never talk or speak up I was so moved by this and I felt the urgency so strongly that I got a group of women together in my home and we in that day organized the Womens’ Division of the American Jewish Congress. EC: What year was this? SK: That was about 1942. And Mrs. Silverman was there and Mr. Silverman called me and said that there is a new rabbi’s wife in town and she would like to bring he. And that was Minnie Rosenberg. So she brought Minnie Rosenberg over to the meeting and Minnie Rosenberg became the first president of our Womens’ Division in Hartford. Fortunately she was so knowable and so articulate and patient and to be able to take hold and I have to say a word about that friendship which was so important to us because when Minnie became a member of the Congress and we worked closely with her we became very friendly with her husband, Rabbi Rosenberg of the Garden Street Synagogue. From Rabbi Rosenberg I think we got information early that most people didn’t have. Because right after the war he went to Europe for Onwar and he could see what the conditions were. He went to Morocco and he came back and told us the conditions the Jews lived in, in Morocco. He went to Israel and we have very good information, actually Rabbi Rosenberg was a politician in New York and he understood what was happening in Israel and while most speakers came from Israel and talking to the American audiences telling only the big and the beautiful and the wonderful things about people till you got the impression that the people in Israel were as super with no human frailties. So I thought that we have a very good insight as to what was on in Israel through Rabbi Rosenberg’s contact. I’ve got to go back to the Congress for a minutes. Gertrude Horwitz brought me this clipping just before the meeting and it brings to mind something we did in the American Jewish Congress. This clipping tells about the Jewish Congress schedules a talk by Dr. Lamkin. I am not going to read you the whole article but I will tell you that Dr. Raphael Lamkin was a professor at Yale and he was the man who coined the word genocide and he was the man who tried to get the genocide convention into the United Nations and he was traveled and worked as hard as he could. The Genocide Convention has been adopted by many countries in Europe. As far as I know it has never been adopted here and we had, some of us, the great privilege or working for this man who was, I think, super human in his efforts to get this genocide convention ratified to save any group, any group. And so at our meeting we had a panel of experts, and this is interesting too, because in those days we didn’t know anything. We organized the Congress, the Womens’ Division., and notified New York that we had organized a chapter. They had never heard of any such thing. I remember any other way of doing it. We were able at that time to get all kinds of speakers who would come without any fees. It’s incredible today. I just want to tell you at that meeting we had Thomas Dodd of Hartford, who was the Chief Trial Council for the United States in the First Nurenburg Trial, Herbert Walk, Editor of the Courant, and ____ Duffy, Editor of the Times, Mr. Isaac Tobin of the Congress were all here discussing this thing. It carries out what Rabbi Wise’s theory was, if we can get this the law in the world it was one of the most important things we can do. Other things fall into place. EC: Sadie, you became the second president of the Womens’ Division and also you were involved in Zionist things. SK: Well, I don’t want to leave out my school years. EC: You don’t, for heaven’s sake. Go ahead. SK: Somewhere around the 50s some of my friends began saying there is a great shortage of substitutes. And so I proceeded to find out what to do to be able to become a substitute and somewhere in the basement of the State Capitol where they keep those records they found my old records and told me I needed to take three courses. Which I did in order just to become a substitute. So that I worked in the school from about 1955 to 1965 and I found that a most interesting experience, very rewarding. A substitute’s life is never an easy one and many times it’s a matter of outwitting the students in order to carry on any kind of education and I used to say to myself, well now, there must be a way, after all I’m older than they are, I’ve lived longer than they have there must be way to get along with them. And I found various ways of doing it. I think one of the greatest helps were the, I found, the principals of the schools. I have to go back, the year we were married I worked in the Hartford High School for a few months, took over some biology teacher who was leaving for three months and I took her classes over. Now in those classes, just to bring out the difference of what happens today, one boy was noisy. Think of it. One student was not sitting still and carrying on making it difficult to carry on the class. So I went down to Mr. Hyde. Some of you may remember Clement C. Hyde, Very proper. I said, Mr. Hyde, this boy is giving me some trouble and I can’t handle him. Mr. Hyde came into that classroom. I was very sorry I told him about it. Because he sat in that classroom and observed during the whole class period. I don’t remember whether that was the day I was demonstrating a car motor, which I knew very little about. I should have had David there, or Arnold to help me out. But anyhow, he sat there. Now the point I am making is that was an unusual thing that someone would carry on to the point of disturbing the class. Well, of course, times have changed. In 1955 I worked in several schools. I went back to the Hartford High School with Mr. Quirk was principal there. And Mr. Quirk would stand at one end of the hall and you could hear him at the other end. That’s right, he was very gruff. But when I heard Mr. Quirk sit down next to a boy and worry about what he was going to do and how he was going to be no longer worrying about Mr. Quirk’s gruffness and then I went through a few days at the Henry Barnard School and I thought a most interesting thing happened to me there. The principal, whose name I don’t remember at this point, came up to me and he said Mrs. Klau, now these children here come from difficult homes and probably the only quiet time they have would be in this classroom so that you make it was easy for them as possible. And he says never sit in the front of your desk and scold somebody in the back of your room. If you must correct somebody, get up and speak to him quietly. Well, I thought that was very interesting from that school, the Henry Barnard School, where it’s not supposed to be a very good school. And so I learned that lesson and then I came to Weaver and I learned many more lessons there but thereto I found it was very important for the principal to back you up. And they backed me up because when I had trouble with anybody there I remember one particular day I day I came down and there were three boys that.. by the way a substitute is fair game for anybody and so you expect a certain amount but then it can get to the point where you can’t conduct your class and there were three boys carrying on and I said to Mr. Melrose, “Mr. Melrose you’re are going to have to take these three boys out and let them stay with you until I say they can come back” and Mr. Melrose did exactly that. Until those three boys came and begged Mrs. Klau can we come back now? Unless you can come back and sit quietly and do what you are supposed to do, then you can’t come back but Mr. Melrose went along with that and everybody remembers that particular case. It was a time when ______ was changing I think it was the quality and caliber of the school was probably changing. I am going to take this one minute to tell you about my family. School was very interesting. Every year, I think Agudas Achim I think that I was there LARGE AREA UNINTELLIIGIBLE After a while you began to see a black come into the Actually one of Personally I didn’t have too many problems there. EC: All right. I think, perhaps you want to tell us about your family. That was a very important part of your life. You were having four children in the days when most of us had one or two. Right? SK: Yes. I have, besides my children, I have I think I told you about my brother and my sister and then I have Uncle Milton Case here and other uncles. And I’ve got to tell you about my own children. I started with four children, Arnold, David, Arnold and _____ were twins. That’s another story. And now I have Bobbie, Margaret and Dan, Dan Sacks. My Hartford children are here. My New Haven children are not and my daughter in Washington called tonight so she is here in spirit. So that accounts for my children and my children and blessed me with many grandchildren. We have twelve grandchildren. Arnold is my son the lawyer. David is my son the pilot. Ruthie and Ellen both are graduates of social work schools. My daughters are social workers. And Ruthie is working at the Yale-New Haven Hospital. I don’t know if I can tell this audience in the Abortion Clinic as a social worker. Ellen is at the University of Maryland teaching in the School of Social Work and worked for her Doctorate and what not. And I am very proud to day that we do have a representative of the grandchildren, my number one grandson, Daniel. Let everybody see you. Stand up. I think we have seven grandsons and five granddaughters. EC: I call Sadie every year and tell her she is the grandmother of the year. Well maybe you can tell them a little bit, just a little bit. We won’t take too much time. But she is a very special kind of grandmother and I am trying to learn from her, I tell you that. SK: Well, what do you want me to tell you? Everyone’s grandchildren are the most wonderful. EC: Why do they want to come to your house all the time? SK: Well, I’ll tell you. One reason is that we have in our yard. Other times we have the swimming pool when it gets a littler bit warmer. So they like the swimming but in the spring they have discovered frogs and tadpoles and so they are very busy with and tadpoles in the fish bowl. I think one of the important things is I neglected to talk about are very important trips of travel and the most important trips that we took were to Israel. And in 1956 we took our first trip to Israel. We also saw Europe. I never expected to go back again so I wanted to take in as much as I could. But we went for the World Zionist Congress and that was an experience I wish everyone could have because you met all of the leading World Zionist figures there. The Zionists in and all the leading Hadassah figures. All the leading Hadassah women were there. And you got an inside into how these organizations are run, what the problems are and what we can do about them. Then we went back to Israel for the American Zionist Organization of America conventions and so I think we were there in ’63. But absolutely the most exciting trip that we took was in 1967 when the Zionists was one of the first groups that went to Israel after the war and think there are people here who were with us on that trip. This was two weeks after the war ended in Israel. EC: The Six Day War? SK: The Six Day War in 1967. There was such a euphoria there that we hadn’t seen on other trips and there again maybe I think we go back to the New Deal, they had won a war and there was a hope that this would be the end of their troubles. At the time we were there it was a feeling of such joy and such relief, of course, and such sadness for those who lost their sons in the army, a sadness for everyone who _____ the loss of the young men there as one woman said, “Every soldier is our son in Israel.” But that was a time that we wish could have lasted forever. I felt at the time I couldn’t see any patriots there for the It seemed possible to work out a solution at that time. I remember getting into a cab one morning and the cab driver was singing and I was I said what are you singing about? What are you so happy for? He said, “I am a Jew, I am in Israel, and we won the war.” And that was the feeling you got. NOT UNDERSTANDABLE EC: We probably neglected a great many things, however, either we’ll go on privately. SK: I want to add publicly that I want to ask for forgiveness of all those people whose names I have forgotten to mention. Or didn’t mention fully. It is not intentional. EC: We know that. Anyway, I do want to thank you very much, Sadie, I think you have taken us through quite a few years of life in Hartford. A busy life and life that has certainly been full of all kinds of accomplishments so I will close on the note that hopefully maybe day come to all of us here in Hartford and in Israel. My name if Emma Cohen and I have been interviewing Sadie Klau for the oral history archives of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford and today in May 12, 1976 and thank you all for coming. Thank you Sadie.

Today is July 6 and this is Emma Cohen and I am continuing my interview with Sadie Klau because she wanted to say a few special words about her mother. Sadie DSK: Everyone who knew my mother knew that she was the matriach of the family, a beautiful statuesque woman. She was admired by everyone who knew her and she kept on being the matriach to the end of her days. She was in full control of her faculties until the very end. EC: How old was she? SK: Mother was 89 years old and ,(crying) I can’t talk about her. EC: I know your mother was almost 90 but she seemed like a very much younger person to me. SK: Well she was young until the very end because she loved everything about life. She loved people. She loved to travel. She loved the theater. She loved cooking. She loved her home. She loved her children. EC: Did she read a lot, by the way? SK: We always, mother always had a Jewish library at home. Jewish books at home. EC: Oh. SK: And as I was growing up and she had a tutor come in and teach me Yiddish. I read EC: How old were you then? SK: Somewhere in the young teens, or somewhere in the teens. I was taught to read Yiddish. I had a most wonderful tutor. Yes, I was taught to read it and to write it and I still remember it. I think as well as any of the EC: Who was your tutor? Do you remember? SK: No, I don’t remember, except that she was a woman and evidently a very good tutor because it didn’t take me too long to learn Yiddish. Yiddish is a phonetic language and I languages to learn and so we had Yiddish books at home and I remember reading Sholom Alecheim and Avrum Raisin and many others. But my mother was always interested in books and of course her newspapers and EC: What were the newspapers you got? SK: We got the daily, the daily Forward, every day, of course, and then I think she also read the ____ which we didn’t get delivered to our home but y mother was always interested in the theater and in concerts. EC: In Jewish theater? SK: In Jewish Theater, in Yiddish theater, mainly and I remember being taken to parks and seeing somebody called Yuly Weisenspree who turned out later to be Paul _______. In a Yiddish play and I was taken to many concerts and I remember hearing Paderewski, of the piano and Yasha Heiffitz. EC: Did your mother play any instruments? SK: My mother never played any instrument. My mother could sing. EC: Really? SK: Yes, my mother could sing. EC: You played he piano? SK: My mother thought I ought to learn so I took piano lessons for some years with Moshe Paranov . But my other took me to see the ballet and the Swan Lake EC: Really? SK: with Anna Pavlova. I remember seeing her do the Swan Lake. So that I assume my mother was interested in lectures in those were the days when they went to socialists like ____ and I remember going to a lecture, some lectures on Central Row. There was some socialist called my Speed, I don’t remember his first name, but he was very popular. And so were really had seen quite a bit of culture at home considering the times and the economic condition. EC: Your father began to do very well SK: My father began to do, to better himself, and became a builder and built houses and I guess when conditions got a little better at home but my mother was a very great manager of her household. She was a marvelous housekeeper, an immaculate one and an excellent cook and collected recipes until the very end. EC: Really? SK: She was always interested in food and new ways of doing food and now that I think back she knew a great deal about nutrition and I think that was one of the reasons for the comparatively good health she enjoyed until the very end. She looked well and I think that was the result of proper nutrition throughout all her years because whenever I dropped in, her table until the last three years of her life she lived with my Uncle Nathan, her brother EC: After your father died? SK: After my father died. And so when we walked into that house, that table was set for dinner and it had something of all the five basic foods. Mother knew all about that. EC: She did this deliberately? SK: She did this deliberately. She knew what was needed for good nutrition and she had it and lived that way. EC: By the way, your uncle, you said she lived with Nathan, you had another uncle too? Didn’t he live with her for part of the time? SK: Yes. EC: What did they do? SK: Well, my Uncle Nathan and Uncle Benny came here, I think my father brought them over, and so when they came they lived with us. EC: They were your mother’s brothers? SK: My mother’s brothers until their families came over. EC: But weren’t they in the same field your father was in? SK: Yes, they both went into carpentry and building and my father built a house in his partnership. But to get back to my mother, she lived, I think a very good life, and enjoyed, she had many illnesses but in between the illnesses she enjoyed her life. While she was never as active in organizations as my grandmother was, she belongs to many organizations and enjoyed going to meetings because she loved seeing the people and she had many, many friends. EC: Did she have a bridge club or something that met once a week? SK: My mother had very card sense and they also had a bridge club that met regularly, once a week and I think nothing could interfere with that group because if one stayed out it spoiled the game for the rest. It was a loyalty to that bridge club that superceded all other loyalties. I don’t know, there are many, many things I could tell about my mother. EC: Well, as I remember she was a superb hostess? SK: She was a superb hostess and she was happiest when the house was full of people and everyone was enjoying themselves. EC: Now a situation existed with you, that not very many people have had, certainly in recent years, it used to be a way of life, when you moved to Cornwall Street, I understand, I know your mother lived two houses away from you, there was one house between you? SK: Yes. We built a house on Cornwall Street and a year or so later my Uncle Nathan built another house on Cornwall Street for my mother and father and himself. He was living with them. We lived very close together but my mother never, never included herself in our life and mother, I think, rarely came over unless we asked her to. EC: Really? SK: And that is almost unbelievable because we would all go over there, the children wold run back and forth. But mother herself never, but rarely came over to our house unless they want to come over to come see or come for supper or come to see what the children. This kept the relationship much better, I think, than EC: There is something else that comes to mind here. Not only did the fact that you lived so closely with your mother and so well, but the effect on your children of having their grandmother right next door to them, what would you say SK: How can you measure the effects of having a grandmother that close, and such a grandmother that close. EC: How did the children … What did they do? SK: The children were very, very fond of her and very devoted to her. All of the children and that includes all my in-laws, my daughters-in-law, son-in-law. Everyone was devoted to grandma. EC: I think in terms of when children are little it’s so different from what is happening today where grandparents are rarely part of the family, sometimes they are out of the city, you know. And they are even looking for Foster grandparents today. This is the area that I think you would SK: I can‘t say how we measured the effect of that. I know that I had a grandson who was two years old when my mother died and we were very astonished a year of so later to have him refer to great-grandma and we asked him, do you remember her? He said I remember great-grandma, she was a nice lady, every time we came to the house she gave us ginger ale. EC: And something to eat? SK: Something good to eat and she had a nice backyard. She was a very nice lady he said and since he was only a little over two years old at the time she died I think that she must have made a tremendous impression on him and that is just one grandchild who I think we can measure the effects of a grandmother on a grandchild. For the others I am sure that her influence was all for the good. EC: That I am sure about. The thing that I am interested in is that the children come back and forth can go in and out of the house with very SK: Well, both our homes were always open and open to everyone as a matter of fact, on Cornwall Street in those days we never had a key for about 30 years. The house was open and anyone could come and in my mother’s house the house was open too. Mother’s house was very immaculate and the children played there and she had toys for them that everybody that you left grandma’s house the way you found it. Everything was put back where it belonged. But she did have a big bag of toys for them. EC: Okay. SK: I think that gives you a small impression of my mother. EC: I think so, and a very good one. And with that, I think we will close with this portion of the interview and if you have anything more to add later, well we can. This is Emma Cohen interviewing Sadie Klau for the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, July 6, 1976.