My mother basically saved my dad and me. When we were in hiding she used to leave the ghetto at night to look for food. She told us a story of how the Polish young people would spot her and call her “zhyd,” which is a derogatory Polish term for a Jewish woman. For a women who had me at age 23, who could hardly write and was not worldly, she single handedly saved a lot of people in the ghetto as well as our family. So I say my mother really had me twice, when I was born and when she was basically willing to give up her life to save mine. We left Poland at the end of 1946 because of the antisemitism of the Russian soldiers. We then stayed in Germany for three years in order to get a visa.  

When we came to this country when I was 11, my parents worked to run a bakery on 123rd Street in Cleveland. With my mother’s limited education, she basically ran the bakery. She monitored the income, expenses, paid the bills, and she was so interested in giving me a basic education with what she knew. Every night when we went to bed she would teach me arithmetic, and my math had been great. But she wanted to make sure that I had some education.  

– Roman

Relationship:  Im/migrant Im/migrant