Family Life
Frances Koral— I was born in the Bronx. I lived for a little while in Queens and then we moved back to Brooklyn. I was born in 1925.
My father was an iron man who made fire escapes and gates. He had his own little shop. It was a business in the basement. It was on something like 21st Street and Third Avenue. Above him was an optometrist's store and you went down into the basement. I don't know what materials he needed but he was a very skilled and honest artisan, and he was able to support his family fairly well. We were never hungry and we were never cold and we all were able to go to college, although my brother went to night school.
My mother was born in Pittsburgh. She had one year of high school. My father was a self-educated man, but he had no school in this country. My mother was a homemaker. I was one of three children. I had a brother nine years older and a sister five years older, and we were all Brooklyn College graduates.
Father was an anarchist atheist.
My mother was a very typical ... she was not a secular Jew. She believed in the high holidays. And although my father was violently opposed to religion, he respected my mother enough not to violate any of the rituals of the house.
Although we're all very conscious of being Jews, not one of us grew up to be religious. And my father was not a young man. But it was a loving family. It was a hard working family. We lived in a two family house. That part I remember where my mother was like the custodian.
Elliot Levine— I was born at a very early age, strangely enough, in Flatbush, Brooklyn on November 16th, 1924. We ... I remember my father built a house on East 51st Street, Brooklyn, off Linden Boulevard. My earliest memories are from there. We didn't stay there very long. The house was too much work for my mother. In those days they didn't have oil burners and she had to stoke the coal furnace and remove ashes and things of that that sort, so we moved to 1060 Union Street near Eastern Parkway and Franklin Avenue for a couple of years, and then finally to Brighton Beach. I think it was in the fall of 1930. And I remained there until years after my parents' death and finally gave up the apartment.
Phyllis LeShaw— My father worked, of course. He wouldn't let my mother work. In those days you didn't let your wife work. How do you like that?
My father worked for the National Recovery Act in 1933. And then he wound up to be the General Manager of Popular Dress Manufacturers Association. He was right under David Dubinsky who was a Union leader.
My grandparents were religious Jews, orthodox. It did not seep down to their children so the only thing we got from Judaism were the rituals which were wonderful— Seders every year with my grandfather in a white satin robe and a white satin crown and the immediate family, which was about thirty people. We would all get together at Passover for Seders. And then there was Succoth. You know about those little huts? The little huts outside. We used to feed my grandfather through the window, through the opening in the Succah. And oh, it was such fun. We just loved it.
