Nadene Goldfoot
A well-known lady of our Portland history, Augusta Kirshner Reinhardt, was actually interviewed when she remembered her young life in the Jewish section of South Portland, Oregon. The best thing is that she remembered our family, such as it was then.
Magid: What about some of your friends, your girlfriends?
REINHARDT: Mrs. Hyman, who was at that time Mrs. Shapiro, lived across the street — there was an alley directly across the street from us — and her daughter Dina and I were very good friends. As a matter of fact, we sealed our friendship at the age of three by having a hair-pulling fight. From that time on Dina and I have always been close friends with lots in common.
Then Rose Zidell and Patsey Steinberg lived right next to the alleyway. Their house was sort of a flat that faced Second Street. Heavens knows that we’re still solid friends. And every now and then I see Bernice Winton, who was a nurse. I haven’t seen her for a year or two, and it’s always so wonderful when we see each other. Toby Rosen, who today owns Toby’s Maternity Store in Morgan’s Alley, lived in the flat right in front of Mrs. Weinstein’s home, and across the street from the flat the Kulchinskys lived. Ruth Wernick’s father and family, Rose Israel, Rose Himmelfarb, lived next door to the Weinsteins, and Goldie Jermulowski, Golda Hahn, Mrs. Arthur Hahn, lived on the corner of Second and Arthur. There was a Singer family that lived on Second Street very close by there.
Golda, born March 17, 1916 to Louis Jermulowski/e, my grandmother's brother, and Dinah Rosenfeld, had married Arthur Hahn who became a lawyer. I met Sam Singer and his wife in Israel, and we realized that our fathers, both in the kosher butcher business, had known each other. Golda was a Reed College graduate and then attended Columbia for her graduate work; our first signs of genius in the family. She went into social work.
Information Gussie remembered is invaluable. "Magid: Why did your parents leave Russia?
REINHARDT: As I said, they really left Russia because my father did not want to go to war against Japan for Russia. He was a musician, and musicians in those days led the soldiers to war, which meant that he would be in the front lines. After living in Salem, Oregon, for quite a short time, my other brother was born, and then I was born, and then my mother and father decided that it was time to move to Portland, where there was a Jewish community and where the boys, particularly, could learn the teachings of the Torah and begin to prepare themselves to be Jews in a community of Jews. This was the real reason that we left Salem and moved to Portland. That must have been around 1909-1910.
Magid: Where in Portland did you move to?
REINHARDT: We moved to 250 SW Meade Street. We moved to this little house that had a small barn alongside of it. When my father realized that a living would be difficult to earn, he decided to add a part to the barn and make it a place where the junk peddlers could keep their horses and wagons, and in that way it brought in a monthly fee to him. This served as a part of his earnings for his family. There must have been 30-35 junk peddlers who kept their horses and wagons in Papa’s stables. (My grandfather, Nathan Goldfoot, was one of them.
Nathan and my Bubba lived at 265 Arthur Street S. and attended the Meade Street Shul/Kesser Israel Synagogue.
" I remember, as a little girl, standing in front of the house and watching the poor horses as they pulled up that block to the barn, wondering if they were really going to make it. Most of the junk peddlers had horses that the fire department had given up; they could buy them for five or ten dollars. They were pretty weary horses.
Magid: What was the area called that you lived in? What part of Portland?
REINHARDT: It is South Portland, and of course, it was always referred to as South Portland. When anybody said that they lived in South Portland, you knew that they lived in a community of Jews or Italians. There were Negro people, and I can remember as a child in school that there were also Chinese people. So there was a mixture of people, but most of the people were Jewish. If there was a ghetto in Portland, South Portland would have been the ghetto. However, it was a self-imposed ghetto; they chose to live close to each other. It was a wonderful way to live, very much as we think of a shtetl, because in this small area everything that anybody needed for good living was available within walking distance. There was the library within a few blocks. There was the public school within a few blocks. There was the synagogue within a few blocks. There were the grocery stores, the laundry, the hospital, the community center. You name it and we had it in our so-called ghetto. It was sweet living, and everybody really helped each other.
Magid: Where did you go to school?
REINHARDT: Failing school. I went to the new school, which is today Portland Community College. Those were fun days. I remember so well the Rose Festival parades where we were all a part of the parades. I can remember being a butterfly in the parade. There is an old superstition that you don’t sew on people because you might sew up their brains, and that, of course, for a Jewish person would be a disaster. So my mother used to give me hard-boiled eggs to take to school when they would sew the butterfly dress on me. I would eat hard-boiled eggs so that my brains wouldn’t be sewed up. I really like hard-boiled eggs, so that was fun.
My mother was Anna Kirshner and my father was Oscar Kirshner. When they first moved to Portland from Salem, Papa was a member of the First Street Shul, which is Shaarie Torah synagogue, and at that time my brothers were very, very young. Being the youngest, I was always pretty close to my mother. At that time, the men and women sat separate as they do at Kesser Israel. Mama was upstairs and I was with her, and I can remember looking down and seeing my brothers and my father. My brother Isadore would sit on Papa’s knee — he was a tiny little fellow — and my brother Hymie would sit next to him. My sister Ora would come to the synagogue, but not as regularly as I did because she always seemed to have other things that were interesting to her.
Then the time came when Papa decided that at it would be better for us to be members of the Kesser Israel synagogue, which was only a block from where we lived, and so we joined. As a child I can remember lying in bed in the early morning and hearing somebody go through the street hollering, “Tsvay tse minyan,” or “Drei tse minyan,” or “Ainse tse minyan.” [Two for a minyan. Three for a minyan. One for a minyan.] I can also remember my father going into my brothers’ bedrooms and scolding them and saying, “Wake up! Wake up! Get to the synagogue!” Or “Wake up! There’s work to be done.” Of course, this was all said in Yiddish, This is the way the minyans were formed at Kesser Israel in the early mornings, every morning. Mama never went to synagogue on the Sabbath because she had worked a very hard week. Friday was a particularly difficult day for her, getting ready for the Sabbath, and when the Sabbath came she was satisfied to just sit quietly at home. Many times, especially when it was the Rosh Hodesh, the beginning of the new month, I would sit and watch Mama benching, praying for the new month to be a good month. The only time I can remember Mama going to the synagogue was for the special holidays. "
Resource:
https://www.ojmche.org/oral-history-people/augusta-kirshner-reinhardt/
No comments:
Post a Comment