The Columbus Jewish Historical Society

Hello, this is Bill Cohen from the Columbus Jewish Historical Society, April 14, 2023, and we are here in the archive display area of the Jewish Historical Society for one of our oral history interviews of Yvonne Heather Burry.

Interviewer:  So, Yvonne let’s start out by asking so many of our people have a Jewish or Hebrew name, do you have one?

Burry:   I don’t.  The reason I probably don’t have one, even though my mom had one, is that my parents were refugees in Britain when I was born. They had left Germany, hadn’t been assimilated Jews, but still Jews, and they decided not to give me a Hebrew name.

Interviewer:  Because of the general idea that they wanted to be assimilated, not stand out?

Burry: Absolutely. They had a very interesting situation.  I mean, leaving Germany in the middle of 1939 was already a dangerous time to be leaving.  They got married in January, 1939, and lived in their parents’ homes, one week with one parent, one week with another parent, until they left in about June, 1939 for Britain, and lived in Britain through the whole war, and came to the U.S. in 1948.  I was born in Britain.  They had a very interesting problem in Britain because they were Jewish, which the people were sympathetic toward, but they were also German, which the people were worried about because that’s who was dropping the bombs on them every once-in-a-while and caused their lives to be very difficult and dangerous.

Interviewer: Tell us some about your parents.  What were their names?  What did they do workwise?

Burry:  My father was Curt Tobias.  He grew up in what’s now a suburb of Cologne (Koln).  The name of that suburb is Porz in German.  His family, for some generations there, had been butchers, and they had a nice little butcher shop on a main street in this little area. Behind it there was a large yard where they could even keep cattle and a slaughterhouse.  They did not slaughter Kosher.  It was just a meat shop for the town, even though they were Jewish.  My mother grew up in Siegburg, which is another suburban area to Cologne.  Back then, of course, a separate small town because Cologne hadn’t grown to engulf the small towns around it, kind of like Columbus did.  There were all these little suburbs, and then Columbus just grew through and around and beyond all of them, like Bexley and Upper Arlington, etc.  They were all absorbed.  So that was the same thing.  My mom’s family also had a meat business, and they were on the main street in their little town.  You know, people lived above the shops, and they had nice multi-level housing above the shop, two or three levels above the shop, Their shop was on the main street and had big glass windows and very nice displays of things you could purchase, including fresh meats and sausages.  I have photos to show that.

Interviewer: Your mother’s name was?

Burry: My mother’s name was Magdalene Marget Tobias, nee Marcus.  Because their families were both in the meat business, the dads got to know each other, and the kids got to know each other.  My dad was an only child.  My mom was one of four.  They liked each other a lot.  My mom had an arranged marriage and walked away from that prospect and said, “No, I’m not going to marry that guy.”  This was very radical back then.  We’re talking about the 1930’s.  She married my dad and that was a marriage out of love, not out of arrangement, which back in that day was still not the norm, especially not in Germany.  My parents basically had to leave pretty quickly.  They were very concerned about their parents and leaving them.  One of my mom’s sisters was still living in Germany.  One had already left and was living basically underground in Italy.  There’s a whole long story about that which I don’t think I’m going to go into today.  The fourth child in my mom’s family died at age 12 of appendicitis, and that was the only boy.

Interviewer: Now, if your parents left Germany in 1939, that was just a few months after Kristallnacht in 1938.  Did they ever share with you stories of what happened in those years, just before they left Germany?  Did they tell you about Kristallnacht?  Did they tell you about antisemitism they faced?

Burry:  They told me some stories.  Now these are really good stories because my mom’s family, as one might expect, the family next door were bakers.  Their name was Schmidt, and they were good, probably, Catholic Germans.  They liked my mom’s family a lot.  As things got bad, my mom’s father was rounded up several times and taken into the police or government building somewhere, I’m not sure where.  They were questioned and beat up a little bit and bothered and warned, made to be frightened of the situation, justifiably, because it was a difficult situation for them.  Herr Schmidt said to my grandfather, “Don’t worry.  We’ll take care of you.  We’ve got a hole in the basement where you can hide.”  Until the very end, they really intended to do it.

They, like many of the people in Germany, even though they had good intentions toward Jewish people and friends that were Jews, had to back off from that for their own safety.  One of the Schmidt’s kids who would have been my mom’s generation, actually, then went in after the war and researched where my grandparents had been taken, where they’d been killed in’ the concentration camp, and provided that information to my mom where the Red Cross had not yet been able to do that.  So, it was a very kind act on his part.  On my dad’s side, he was a little older.  He was in his mid 20’s at that point in the late 30’s.  He was born in 1910.  He had lots of school chums, like guys he hung around with, you know.  They were in military groups that the Germans organized as all the young men were.  They came to him and said, “Don’t go out on this night.  It’s not going to be safe.  Stay away from the front window, close up the shop, stay away from it.  Make it dark.  Get away, pretend you’re not home, hide.” That was the Kristallnacht.  I don’t know whether their store’s windows were broken or not, but they were safe because they knew not to go out.

Interviewer: Because of?

Burry:  Friends of my dad.

Interviewer: Non-Jewish friends?

Burry:  Yes.

Interviewer: So, the parents of your mother and the parents of your father, did they all die in the Holocaust?

Burry: They did.  They were all rounded up.  My mother never talked about whether she got any communication from them.  There were occasional letters, I know, but they were very sparse.  I know it was typical in Germany that, when they started displacing Jews, especially in the small towns, they would concentrate them.  There’s that word again.  They would concentrate them into maybe an apartment building and say “All you 40 families, now we’re taking you out of your houses and we’re appropriating them.  We’re stealing them from you and now you’re going to live in this apartment house where there’s hardly any food or water or sanitation, and not much food, and you’re going to stay there.”  Eventually then, they took them from such places to the concentration camps.  That’s what we think happened with my grandparents.  My grandmother and father on my mother’s side went to the same concentration camp.  My father’s mother and father stayed together and went to a different concentration camp.  In 1942 they all perished.  We do know that now.  My parents did not know about that.  They were in Britain, as I said, till 1948.  They did not know what happened to their parents.  It caused my mother a great deal of anxiety, worry, you know, about where were they when it happened.  Is there anything we could do?  Can we get them out?  Is there anything?  The answer was no, there’s nothing you can do.  They tried.

Interviewer: Did your mother and father ever talk about whether or not they tried to get their own parents to come with them when they fled to Britain.  I guess the question comes up, why didn’t the grandparents flee?

Burry: It’s a good question.  The grandparents didn’t flee because they, for whatever reasons, felt it was going to be okay.  They didn’t want to leave.  You know, we had the Schmidts next door who were going to take care of us, and the other parents had their reasons.  There also was a lot of difficulty in getting out at that time.  My parents told me that the original plan was to immigrate to South America.  They had tickets.  They had spent a lot of money on tickets.  When it came time for them all to go, the tickets were fraudulent.  They’d been duped, their money taken.  So, that made life more complicated and took away financial resources.  My parents were able to get passage to Britain but it was not easy.  I think that, from what my mom had said, that they did want to get their parents to come and they wouldn’t so my parents said, “Well, we’re going to go.”  They left with very little.  Amazingly, my mother was able to take her cello.  They took some linens and some very non-descript things, you know, clothes, linens, not anything of much value, and got to Britain, took a train from where they came ashore into London.  As they got onto this train station platform, down the way somewhere was this big explosion and all this smoke came up.  My mother remembers that she was very frightened.  They spoke English.  They learned English in school.  They were, you know, educated people.  She said to someone, “Is that a bomb?”  They said, “Oh yeah, but it’s the IRA.”  That was the first thing that, even with this war going on, all those things happening within the United Kingdom and the British Isles, those things were still happening too.  I thought that was so interesting.

Interviewer:  The Irish, the dispute over the Irish?

Burry:  That was still going on.

Interviewer:  That continued, even while London was being bombed by the Nazis?

Burry:  Yes, Exactly.

Interviewer:  So, you were born in Britain?

Burry:   I was born in London.

Interviewer: That was what year?

Burry: 1946.

Interviewer:  You were there, how many years?

Burry:  Two years.

Interviewer: You don’t remember much?

Burry:  I don’t remember anything.  My parents did what all immigrants do.  You see the immigrants coming here from Bhutan or anyplace else.  Somebody gets here first.  They get sponsored or they get legally allowed in and they get a place to live and then they start putting a family in each room.  They might get two bedrooms and there will be four families living there.  They all contribute to making some money and paying for the place and watching the kids and cooking the food.  It’s a very communal kind of situation.  That’s exactly what happened when we got to Denver.  We had a relative in Denver.  She had a house.  She had a family in every room.  Mom, Dad, and I got one room in the basement.  There was a little bathroom down there.  There was a little place they rigged up, kind of a kitchen, kind of.  There was a burner in there and a refrigerator and a table.  We lived there for about four years until my parents bought a little house a few blocks away.  A little house, I mean 1,000 sq. ft. with two bedrooms upstairs, one bathroom, and an open basement, unfinished, but you could put up a partition here and there and get five families in there, which is what my parents did.  So, we had the house full of families and immigrants and no other children.  I was an only.  That went on until I was a senior in high school.  That’s when the last ones moved out.

Interviewer: The people who shared your own family’s home in Denver, they were relatives, or they were just other immigrants?

Burry:  They were other Jewish emigres.  The only relatives among them were that one sister of my mom who stayed back.  That was Grete, she also had moved to London and there she met a man and fell in love.  He was a Brit, divorced, so there’s another stigma to throw into this pile of strange things happening.  She fell in love with him and they married in London.  I was at that wedding, as a baby, so that was late 1940’s.  Then they immigrated.  They stayed in the same house we did for those first few years.  Then, when my parents bought a house, they had a bedroom in it, and they stayed there.  They did not have any children and Grete was actually the last one to move out, was that aunt.  Her husband, by then had died, and she stayed with my parents until I was a senior in high school.  That was 1964.  Then she moved out into her own little apartment and then, a couple years later, moved into the house next door to my parents and rented an apartment.  That was a duplex and she rented one of those units.

Interviewer: So, what you’ve described here in Denver is that the Jewish community, at least your family certainly did, help take care of not only family, but other refugees from WWII.

Burry:  Yeah, exactly.  In Denver it’s not a place you think where a lot of Jewish people would go, just like Columbus.  You think people are going to go to New York, New Jersey, and places where there are big evolved Jewish communities, you know all types of Jews, from the ultra-orthodox all the way though very liberal reform, non-observant, you know, a little of everything.  Denver had a big Jewish community.  It had a big émigré community.  The German Jews started a group called the Club 1946 because that was on the average the year that most ended up in Denver.  For my parents, it was about two years later.  This was a German Jewish cultural club and that lasted for a couple of decades at least.  That’s where we did everything.  They got together and had Seder.  They got together and had parties.  I modeled clothes from a clothing store that was owned by a Jewish lady.  You know, all kinds of things, played cards, you know.  They didn’t have their own building.  They rented space in other buildings.  There were a lot of places like, one place they had, was an office building that had a conference room.  Well, If you’re going to be there on Sunday, with your club, you could have all the space you want. So, they would do things, like on Sundays, maybe all day in that space.  So that was the environment and, of course, all the kids kind of just ran around like little banshees and we had a great time together.

Interviewer: You say you were in Denver pretty much though high school?

Burry:  Yes.

Interviewer: Your family at that point, you and your parents, you were Reform Jews?

Burry:  Yes, we were.  We joined Temple Emanuel which was a big Reform congregation.  They had a beautiful old, almost North African style building near downtown Denver, a beautiful old building with minarets and rococo, that architecture, and then they moved to a brand new modern, modern building in east Denver where all the Jews were moving to as they made enough money to afford a house in a better area.  So, we were a member of that congregation but, honestly, we only went for the High Holidays.  It was that kind of thing.  My mom did insist I go to the Sunday School, and did insist I get confirmed, which I did.  I was valedictorian of my class.  So, the push to excel academically, of course, was always there, you know.  This happens with a lot of immigrants.  I have a Korean friend and she tells me about how her parents were on her at every instant to perform.

Interviewer:  So, after high school, you moved out of Denver?

Burry:  Yes.

Interviewer: Just you, yourself, or you and your family?

Burry:  No, my family stayed there.  I went to college, first at Boston University, and then at the University of Colorado, Bolder, where I graduated.  I had a summer job, after my sophomore year, at the National Jewish Hospital in Denver because my best friend’s dad worked there, and he got me a little summer gig there.  There was a guy working in the laboratory across the hall who was working for that doctor, and that turned out to be my husband.  So, we met and fell in love and all that stuff.  I got married a couple years later.

Interviewer: His name?

Burry:  His name is Richard Burry.  He’s not Jewish.  His family was Lutheran and Episcopal.  It seemed to work out fine.  We’re still married.  It’s 55 years, oh my goodness.

Interviewer:  Now, just to be clear.  Yvonne is your first name.  Your maiden name…

Burry: Was Tobias.  That was my dad’s name.

Interviewer: Heather is your middle name.

Burry:  Yeah, back up and talk about my name because that has some significance too.  Because my parents didn’t know what happened to their parents, 1946 I’m born, and they didn’t know if they could name me after somebody.  They wanted to do that, but they didn’t because they didn’t know and they still held out hope that some were alive somewhere, and they couldn’t name me for someone who was alive. They named me Yvonne because they liked it.  It was a French name.

They named me Heather because it was a Scottish thing, a flower, you know, in Scotland.  They thought it would tie it to Britain a bit.  So, that’s how I ended up with my name.  We, in turn, when we had our two sons, the first son, Jonathan, has the middle name Albert.  Albert was the name of both my grandparents.  Both my grandfathers were Albert.  So, we kept that going.  The younger son, we named him Daniel Tobias Burry.  He, in turn, has named his son Isadore Tobias Burry.  So, we’ve kept that name going a couple more generations.  You know, that’s what we could do because we wanted to, you know, at least do something to honor the name.

Interviewer:  So, you got married what year?

Burry:  1968.

Interviewer:  This was after your college?

Burry: Yes, right after college.  We did the thing people did back in that time.  We graduated and then walked down the aisle, you know, in my case, within a week.  Because my husband, Richard, he goes by Dick, is not Jewish, we had a good friend of ours, Sherman Finesilver, who, of course, that’s a good Jewish name, was a Judge in Denver at that time and he performed the civil ceremony for us.  So, we did that.

Interviewer: What happened after that?  You, a newly married couple, where did you wind up living after that?

Burry:  We stayed out in the Denver area for just a little while.  My husband went to graduate school and I had a job in the Denver Public Schools.  I was teaching science. Of course, that was Vietnam.  He got a little letter from his draft board saying, we got your number, kiddo.  It was before the lottery actually.  It’s your turn to go.  They let him finish his semester and then he was drafted.  After about nine months or so, then he was allowed to live in off-base housing and I could join him.  I stayed in Denver teaching.  I lived by myself.  I just stayed in an  apartment and lived by myself.

Interviewer: He was stationed where?

Burry: He was stationed various places but he ended up at Madigan General Hospital which is part of Fort Lewis in Washington state.  He had been in Texas for a while.  He had been at Fort Ord for a while, in California.  He got meningitis there and almost died, and then got reassigned to a different MOS (military occupation).  Eventually, then he got through all the basic training and went to Washington state.  We were there for about a year and a half together and our oldest son was born there.  He was born in a military hospital.  We came back to Denver, and he finished his graduate work.  During that time the second son was born.  Then we looked for a place for a post doc.  That turned out to be Memphis.  We had some really interesting Jewish experiences in Memphis.  We were there for two years and then we got the next job and that was here at Ohio State, and we’ve been here ever since.

Interviewer: During all this, Dick was in the military?

Burry:  He was in the military for two years.  He got out about almost two months after Jon was born.  There we were with this, we laugh at how bad the car seats for kids were back then.  It was more like a shoe box made out of plastic and you dropped the kid in it, sit it in the car seat with that in the front seat, all kinds of shudders of terror on that.  We drove back in the middle of winter from Washington State to Denver with this baby.

Interviewer: Your husband, though, never wound up in Vietnam?

Burry:  No, he didn’t because he had gotten his vision damaged by the meningitis and he couldn’t properly sight a gun.  Because of that, he was removed from, he had actually been on a levy for Vietnam and his commanding officer said, “First of all, he can’t see out of that eye properly and secondly I need him to be here.”  This was a mensch, this guy, a really good guy.  He kept Dick from going to Vietnam, otherwise he would have gone.

Interviewer:    So, his job in the military here in the states, his basic job in the military was?

Burry:  Lab tech for the Blood Bank.  They drew a pint of blood out of every young man who got dragged through that military operation at Fort Lewis.  They had literally hundreds of units of blood each week.  They would load them on a C140 transport plane at AFB (McChord), that was an air force base next to the army base.  They’d load them on a plane Saturday night and fly them over to Nam, the blood from these recruits, once a week.

Interviewer: The blood was not for testing.  It was to pump into the arms and bodies of wounded people in Vietnam.

Burry: Right.  So, they took these new recruits, as they came through Fort Lewis, went through the blood bank, you know, they drew a pint of blood out of each of these guys and then sent them on their happy way.  The blood was processed.  You know, they have to cross match it, and they have to make sure it’s pure, and type it, and do all these things they have to do to make sure that they can actually put it into somebody.  Then all these hundreds of refrigerated units of blood were put in the back of the transport plane along with whatever else, including troops, perhaps, was going over, once each week.  So, we never got to go anywhere on a weekend because he was there all night, Saturday night, getting everything ready until they came to pick up their boxes of blood that was stored in a cooler box with ice, dry ice and whatever else.

Interviewer:    Then we’re into the 1970s.  What happened with you as a couple and a family?

Burry: Oh gosh.  Well, we’re in the 1970s.  We stay in Denver till 1976 when Dick gets his PhD and he finishes his grad school work.  Then we go to Memphis, Tennessee, where he does a post doc.  He’s a neuro scientist so he’s studying nerve cells and how they grow and how to encourage them to grow after an accident.  That’s really what he spent a lot of his early time on.  We lived in a neighborhood in Memphis that was near a synagogue.  It was a very middle to lower class neighborhood, not very integrated.  You know, Memphis wasn’t doing too well on the integration.  This is the late 70’s.  It was kind of getting some momentum but certainly was not the case then.  The neighborhoods would be integrated.  We lived in this neighborhood and there was a shul about six blocks up Vollintine Avenue, which was the street next to where we lived, down the hill.  We noticed that things were buzzing there on the weekend.  They’d have services and we’d see people running in and out, lots of activity, then during the week, nothing.  So, what’s that?  We found out that all, not all, but most of the people who were congregants there had a big house in Germantown on the east side of Memphis.  They kept, and still retained their little house, little bungalows around the shul.  On Friday afternoon, they’d go over to the little house and stay there for the Sabbath.

Interviewer: You mean so they could walk to the shul?

Burry:  Yeah.

Interviewer: That way they could walk to the shul and obey the idea about not driving during the Sabbath.

Burry:  Exactly.

Interviewer:  So, they were pretty observant.

Burry:  They were pretty observant.  I thought that was a very interesting solution.  That way they could live in their nice houses.  Everybody wants to live away from the city center.  This is how it goes, the donut effect.  You abandon the city center and you move farther and farther way to nicer neighborhoods, right, like here in New Albany now.  How far out is that?  So, it’s that type of thing.  Anyhow, we stayed in Memphis for two years and then we moved to Columbus.  We bought a house in Upper Arlington only because we still had just one car and Dick was riding his bike in to work and we didn’t want to live too far away from the university.  He had a job in the Anatomy Department at Ohio State, and he could ride his bike in.  We were happy because they had good public schools.  Our kids, at that time, were about 7 and 4.  So, we bought a little house here, in Upper Arlington, and moved in there.  I went back to school and got a Masters degree.

Interviewer: In?

Burry: Science Journalism and Law.  That was great fun.  I loved it, you know.  The kids were in school.  Our little one tested out very well and so he started school a little early, so I could do that.

Interviewer:  Now this would be the 1980’s?

Burry:  Yeah, we’re about the early 80’s at this point.

Interviewer:  You bought a house in Arlington.  You’re Jewish, your husband is not.

Burry:  Right.

Interviewer:  At that point, I’m sure there were Jews in Arlington, but not many.

Burry:   Right.

Interviewer:  Was there any problem?  Did that issue come up at all as you bought your house?

Burry:  You know, that’s a really good question because there had been covenants, are they called, that are in real estate transactions that prevented Jews and Blacks or dark-skinned people, probably too, from buying in Arlington.  By the time we bought, there was not that problem.  I didn’t meet a lot of Jewish people living in Arlington till a little bit later, but we did go up to Beth Tikvah often, especially when Gary Huber was the Rabbi there.  We liked him a lot and we went up there for Friday night Services and holidays with our kids a lot, actually.  So, that was as Jewish as we got, I guess.  We didn’t go to church.  My husband really liked Gary, especially liked his sermons which were so thoughtful and humanistic.  I think we find ourselves, if we want to have a category, I would say I’m ethnically Jewish and I’m humanistic in terms of any kind of relationship with people or deities.  I probably would call myself agnostic, if anything, because I still feel where was God when six million people were being killed.  I can’t get past that.  So, I’m happy to enjoy the liturgy of the Jewish faith.  I celebrate the holidays.  We do some crazy things at our house and celebrate a lot of Jewish holidays, and tell the stories.  We feel that telling the stories is a way to keep that part of the heritage alive without getting tangled up in the social and political nuances of being part of a congregation.

Interviewer: But you have a times felt at home in a Reform Jewish temple?

Burry:  Yes, very much Reformed.  My cousins in Denver, these would be children of my mom’s sisters.  They all ended up in Denver eventually. There are several of them.  They’re all Conservative, but several of them married non-Jews also, so we have this mish mash going on, you know, we’re getting a little mongrel.  My own children, one married a lapsed Catholic, and one married a lapsed Eastern Orthodox.  So, we celebrate all these holidays just to tell the stories.  You know, we do things to let them know their heritage, let them know ethnically who they are.  They haven’t, well basically they are not observant at this point.  They haven’t done much in terms of attending any kind of religious gathering.

Interviewer:  But they know their roots?

Burry: Absolutely.  We did things in Columbus, especially in the early days, of we go back in the 80’s.  There were these regular runs to Blocks Bagels.  We were always on the lookout for good lox.  If we could find herring pickled in wine sauce, I could make my mother’s wonderful old recipe for herring salad which includes everything you would probably have in a root cellar, in about February, but you could make it into something that was pretty and tasty.  You know, it’s like stone soup, you make something out of nothing.  So, she had this wonderful recipe.  Food is a big thing for us.  You could see, I’m not dying of starvation here.  We eat a lot.  We enjoy a lot of Jewish foods.  We do a lot of traditional things.  We had, for example, last week we had a Passover Seder.  We have a very short version of a Seder.  We read and we talk about it, you know, including even Elijah and Elijah’s cup.  We talk about that part of the history.  We have traditional foods and we make my mother’s matzo ball soup recipe, which after I go back and research it, is more Sephardic than Ashkenazi.  Even though I’ve done the DNA thing with Ancestry and 23andMe and I’m 100 percent Ashkenazi, my father always said we are Spanish.  If you think about how many generations back that would be, that if there were Spanish genes, they’d be so diluted they might not be picked up.  What’s interesting is, in my test with one of those genetic organizations, lately, a couple years ago, they said, “Oh now we’ve redone your sample and we see that you’re one percent North African.”  I’m going okay, bring it on, because that then begins to say, yeah there might be some Sephardic in the background.  The food culture of my family, living in far west Germany, they’re almost in Alsace-Lorraine. They’re in Cologne, you’re almost in France.  You’re almost in Strasbourg there.  Their food culture is not the food culture you find from someone who was from, let’s say Berlin. It’s not the traditional Ashkenazi, it’s different.  The matzo balls are not made with matzo meal.  They’re made with matzos that you soak in water and then mix with cilantro and ginger into a dumpling that you then cook in your soup.  The soup is not chicken soup.  It’s corned beef that you boil and make a broth.  So, it’s a different food culture.  If you talk about things like gefilte fish, mom and dad never ate it.  It’s a foreign food to them.  They’d get to Denver and people would say, “Oh my goodness, you’re immigrants from Germany, here, have some gefilte fish.”  My mother went, “Oh my God, what is this?”  Okay, acquired taste, you know, what you grow up with is what you love.

Interviewer: It sounds like you say you’re not particularly theologically Jewish, but you are definitely gastronomically?

Burry:  Oh yeah.  Oh absolutely.

Interviewer: Culturally, you have an appreciation for your historical roots.

Burry: Yeah.  I have a wonderful friend.  Her parents were also German immigrants.  They ended up in New York and Chicago, you know when they came over to the states but eventually ended up also in Denver. She, too, is an only child.  We’re a couple years difference in age and we’ve been friends since we were knee high.  We are still very good friends today and we consider each other sisters.  She married a guy who is a lapsed Catholic, so here we go.  They weren’t able to have children and adopted two Hispanic kids so we just keep making ourselves more mongrel by doing these things.  They do the same things at her house.  They have not only the Jewish tradition, but they then do the Hispanic Catholic tradition to honor her children.  So, they have some of those things mixed in.  The April holiday is Easter and Passover in this mish mash that includes cultural things, reading of Haggadah, cultural foods, Easter eggs, talking about Jesus and how, you know, he was a martyr and then came back to be a Prophet.  It’s without calling Jesus a Christ, but just saying he was a Prophet, Elijah was a Prophet, and you start drawing these similarities.  Again, it’s the stories.

Interviewer:  You use the word mongrel but you’re using it in a very positive way.

Burry: Oh absolutely.  It’s the hybrid vigor.  It’s the way to appreciate the other cultures, and you know, that’s really where we are.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about your career from the 80’s onward, here in Columbus, a writer, a journalist.

Burry:   Thank you.  For a couple of years in Denver, when Dick was in Grad School,  I did have a teaching credential and did teach school.  So, we did that.  I taught science in middle school, junior high back then, at Gove Junior High School in Denver.  That building Gove was in was one of those very old red brick school houses without a huge number of rooms.  It was fairly small.  When my kids were very little and we were still living in Denver, the building caught fire.  We drove over and sat on the lawn at National Jewish Hospital which is kind of across the street and watched it burn down.  That was an interesting thing.  Anyhow, we got to Columbus.  I got a Masters degree in Science Journalism, in Science Writing and Law and I got hired right away at Battelle to be a technical writer.  I spent 30 years there.

Interviewer: Your writing, is the audience for this kind of writing the general public, or is it the scientists within Battelle?

Burry: Good question.  Some of it, a little bit, of it, was the general public.  They have like a communications department that did more of the interface with the public.  I was, for about the first half of my time at Battelle, in a special group where we had a membership of big companies internationally who wanted reports about emerging technologies.  So, we would use Battelle’s staff as the resource for like what’s happening in monoclonal antibodies, for example, or polymers, or batteries, and really hot topics then, and they’re all hot topics now too. These were very important things.  We used the Battelle staff.  We produced these reports.  We produced a little newsletter.  All of this is print.  It’s hard copy, nothing electronic yet.  Computers were just emerging. We had meetings where we’d have talks, speakers, presentations, and we’d have 20, 30, 40, 50 people from these companies come to Columbus or sometimes we would do them other places and take the show on the road so to speak and provide information kind of like a good solid briefing on a level that a business person could understand, so evolved language but not overly technical.  We’d explain a lot of the technical things so that they could apply it to a business, decide for that company how they would use it, how it would fit into their budget, and things like that.  So, we did that for a long time until the program, itself, hit red ink.  It was going on for a long time, then all of a sudden, boom, we started losing money.  We didn’t have enough members.  We couldn’t afford to run the program and, poof, we were gone.  At that point, then, I left Battelle, and I started my own little consultancy.  I started doing technical writing and instructional design.  I would develop coursework for companies that would hire me as a freelancer.  I did that for about a year.

Interviewer: What do you mean coursework?

Burry:  If you do training, let’s say I did a lot of work for the big pharmaceutical manufacturers, several of them, and let’s say they had a new product coming out for people with kidney failure, and they needed to train people.  What does this product have?  How does it work?  What do practitioners tell their patients about it?  How do you sell it to a practitioner so that he or she could use it for their kidney failure patient?  I would put together slides, or handouts, or brochures, things like that for them to use.  That’s called instructional material.  I would have to be able to figure out what they were talking about and then translate it into language suitable for, let’s say, a sales rep so they could take it to a doctor’s office and say, “Here, we’ve got this new stuff and you might be interested in it.”

I was doing that kind of thing.  About a year into that, I was out for lunch one day and, on the front porch of the restaurant, I ran into somebody from Battelle that I knew, and he said, “You, where did you go?”  I said, “Oh I left a year ago.”  He said, “I need you in my group.”  I said, “Well, let’s talk.”  So, we did, and I joined his group and went back to Battelle.  So, in the end, I was there a total of 30 years.  I continued my freelance work on the side.  Battelle, at that point, allowed you to do it as long as you were transparent about it.  You say I’m not doing more than x number of hours a week,  They gave you a number you couldn’t exceed.  That would be the number you put in there.  You fill out the form.  You tell them what you were doing.  You say I swear that by my signature I’m not giving them any Battelle secrets or intellectual property or any of that stuff which was easy because I was working with my clients’ information, and I had to tell them I was not going to tell anybody I’m looking at your stuff and talking about it and I know about it.  I had to keep their confidence too.  So, there were lots of nondisclosure documents signed back and forth in many directions.  I did a little bit of freelance, but I stayed at Battelle a total of 30 years.  Then Dick retired and I let him have a year at home figuring it out what he wanted to do with himself and then I retired.  I was 66 when I retired from Battelle.  Then, at my retirement party at Battelle, someone came over and said, “Hey would you like to teach technical writing in the College of Engineering at Ohio State?  We need some more people?  Low and behold, I ended up doing that for five years.  I stopped doing that and was doing just consulting with two really good resources, two really good companies, and then COVID hit, and they stopped using any freelance and had to keep their own people employed and working.  My son and his wife said, “Well, the wife has a health situation where it would be very dangerous for her to get COVID, could you take care of the boy?  Pulled him out of nursery school, pulled him out of all his pre-school stuff, and we started doing childcare.  So, for most of COVID, it wasn’t every day, it was only days when she was teaching.  She was teaching on line, but she needed to have the house quiet so she could be on her computer and talk to her students and do all of that.  So, we had him at our house two or three days a week.  He’s still at our house at least two days a week, after school one night and usually on the weekend one day.  There’s just one grandchild so here we are in the world of only children again.

Interviewer: You mentioned that you’ve been at Beth Tikvah sometimes, any other Jewish institutions or businesses that you have some contact with?

Burry: Well, I have a lot of friends that go to Tifereth Israel, and I’ve been there for many occasions, you know, Bar Mitzvahs and, even one of my friends, at 85, decided to redo a Bat Mitzvah, and so I know a lot of people in that congregation.  That would be the other place that I probably go to a lot in Columbus, and it’s usually when there are friends who are having a special event.  People from Dick’s department, when their kids have Bar Mitzvah, and friends we met through this and that.  I’m very, very active in music in this community.  I’ve been on a lot of boards.  I do a lot with, at the moment, chamber music in Columbus, for a while, and at the moment, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra.  I’ve been doing board work and raising funds, and doing all the things you need to do when you help an organization, having musicians stay at my house when they are in town so they don’t have to pay for a hotel, all that stuff.  Beth Tikvah is the congregation that I’ve gone to the most.  I’ve gone to the gift shop at the Jewish Center buying gifts for my Jewish friends all the time.  I love that place.  Friends we met that are of Jewish ancestry, then again non-observant.  They’re French and from Strasbourg.  She was here several times because her husband did collaborations with OSU’s Math Department.  At one point, she was doing her creativity.  She does large works of paper and I arranged for her to have a show here.  So, she had a show, you know, in the Jewish Community Center.  I know the Folkerths.  There are neighbors and good friends.  They lived a couple blocks from us for a long time.  We were over there, and we went there for Jewish occasions a lot, as well.

Interviewer: It seems like a lot of your Jewish connections have to do with art, history.

Burry:  And food.

Interviewer: Food, yeah, which symbolizes your own Jewish identity.  That’s what is important.

Burry:  You know what a Jewish mother does.  She feeds everybody, okay, and I can’t get loose of that.  So, there I am.  During COVID I cooked so much.  I got to a point, May of the second year, I said, “I’m done.  I cannot cook anymore.  I need a break.”  We tried to do more takeout for a month just to give me a break.  I was cooking like a devil, batches of everything, to give to the family that has the little boy.  She would make some things and bring them over but, you know, I was cooking, cooking, cooking.  I have a 30-year old, no its even older than that, almost 40-year-old sourdough starter and I cultivated it from the concord grapes growing on the vine in my mom’s back yard.  There’s a really easy way you can take wild grapes, you know, wild grapes out in the air, and from that derive a yeast culture.  See, I’m a biologist.  This is easy for me.  I even found a write up in an Italian cookbook.  In Italian, it’s called a biga where you take the wild grapes and you let them sort of loose their yeast cells into some water and you just derive from them a sourdough culture.

Interviewer:  I thought you were going to say you make a wine culture and from that you make wine.  Instead, you’re taking grapes and making the yeast from that into bread.

Burry:  Exactly, but we do, or did, at our house, make wine for about 30 years.  That was Dick’s thing.  He made wine and he even got boxes of fresh grapes that were shipped in a big 53 ft. tractor trailer, a refrigerated tractor trailer from California to one of the produce wholesalers there by the airport.  There’s a whole bunch of them that have their warehouses over there.  All the little winemakers would line up and buy boxes of grapes.  He did that for years and make wine.  We have a wine cellar slowly depleting from the stuff he made.  We’re almost done with it all now.  He hasn’t made wine in a while, but we did make wine.  We always made a Passover wine and we would say, “This is blessed,” and set it on the table.  When my mom was still alive, we’d have to add a bunch of sugar to it, or she wouldn’t drink it.

Interviewer:  You needed to make it taste more like Mogen David.

Burry:  Mogen David, yeah.

Interviewer:  Is there anything that we haven’t talked about here that you think it’s important for people to know about you and your family,  your Jewish connections,  your Jewish spirit?

Burry:  Well, the connection I think is important is my mom had a cello that she took with her out of Germany.  If I double back onto my parents’ history before things got bad with the Nazis, my mother was attending the Conservatory in Cologne.  She’d take the train in from Siegburg to Cologne, and she studied piano, and cello, and art.  They probably don’t do that anymore, not that many things or that diversity.  When Hitler came to power, he said, “No more, you’re out, you can’t attend.”

Interviewer:  No Jews.

Burry:   No Jews, out.  My father was studying, apprenticing would be the better word, to be a banker in Cologne, and of course the same thing happened to him.  You know, traditionally, the Jews had done a lot with money and investments and banking.  You know, in this country you see that too.  Out, no Jews, so he went back to his father’s butcher shop and said, “Teach me how to be a butcher.”  That’s what he did ’til he left.  When he got to England, he got a job at the Sainsbury store which has grown into a huge supermarket chain in Britain now, but he was a butcher for Sainsburys, and my mom did domestic work because that’s all they would let her do.  When they got to Denver, my dad found a job as a butcher again and eventually bought his own little butcher shop from an Italian friend in what was then the Italian part of Denver, north Denver, which then became Hispanic and then became gentrified.  Now the beautiful old houses there are saved, and remodeled, and gorgeous, and single family again. They were all chopped up.  The same thing happening.  My mom took the cello out of Germany.  I don’t know if she played it in Britain. I know they lived in unheated apartments at times.  That cello went through a lot for a string instrument.  They got to Denver.  She started playing again and was in Antonia Brico’s orchestra in Denver. Antonia Brico was one of the first female conductors.  She was German by ancestry, and she had this orchestra called the Denver Businessman’s Orchestra.  It had women playing in it.  My mom played cello in it.  After a while, I studied violin, and I actually played at the back of the second violins for a while in that orchestra, as well.

Interviewer: It was called the Businessman’s Orchestra and there were women in it?

Burry:  Of course there were women in it.  Brico, as conductor, she would insist on that.  Women should be in this orchestra.  She’s a wonderful person to look up to, by the way.  My mom was troubled emotionally.  The German thing really did its nastiness on her emotional health, so she was very manic depressive, and back then, people did not get enough treatment.  They didn’t seek it out.  Nowadays people are more willing, there’s less stigma.  She would go through manic and depressive stages.  Manic stages would include a lot of music and painting.  At one point, she even painted all the furniture in our house white.  Everything got painted white, including the piano, everything except the keys and the insides.  Then at one point, she put the cello away and stopped playing it.  She’d been giving lessons.  She had students.  She had one student who went on to be a cello professor in a university setting.  She had some good students and she taught them well.  She taught piano students and had a lot of them come to the house when we lived in the house that we owned.  After she passed away in 2001, and we were cleaning out the house, and we were going to rent it out for a while, the cello was sitting in a closet in a canvas cello shake, a bag, you know, it’s snapped shut.  It had a little handle and a little leather thing over the top to protect the scroll.  We took it to a violin shop in Denver and said, “Well, what’s this thing like?”  The guy looked at it and was astounded.  It’s an 1842 cello.  It’s a good cello.  My mom had papers for it.  It was bought by her parents in Germany, in Leipzig, for her when she was nine.  She was already taking cello lessons and showed some promise. They bought her a good cello.  At that point, we decided to loan it out.  We had it rehabbed.  It’s all fixed up.  It’s all in good shape.  We loaned it to a lady from Cleveland who was in the Cavani String Quartet, Merry Peckham, and loaned it to her in 2005, and she was also, at that point, the Director of the Chamber Music Program for the Pearlman Music Program, Shelter Island, New York.  It wasn’t Itzak that had his program.  It was Itzak’s wife.  That was Toby’s project, was this summer program, this music festival camp kind of place.  We went there for almost 15 years every summer to listen and see the cello.  She was with the Pearlmans.  We got to know them and a lot of other very nice musicians.  Then a couple of years ago, we decided mutually, that the cello should go to someone else.  Merry had moved on to the New England Conservatory, was running a chamber music program, was not performing a lot, and we agreed the cello needs to be played for people to hear.  Its mission is music, is love.  Maybe it will help the world a little bit where it went through so many things.  Maybe it can do some good now.

Interviewer:  It’s being played where?

Burry: Now it’s being played, based in Cincinnati, by the cellist for the Ariel Quartet.  The Ariels started in Israel when they were babies.  They were kids in music camp together, the four of them, two violins, a cello, and a viola.  They stayed together.  They went to the Pearlman program, came to the U.S. to come to that program.  We saw them there first in 2006 when they were barely out of their teens, maybe not out of their teens yet, and saw this lady playing a different cello, and got to know them.  After we got the cello back a couple years ago, I wanted to find a new person to play it.  We went through a selection process of interviews with multiple people, inviting them over to play the cello, getting to know them, trying to figure out, just from a gut level, who should have that cello next.  We decided on Amit Even-Tov.

Interviewer: She’s a member of the Ariel..?

Burry: The Ariel String Quartet.  I think they just call themselves the Ariel Quartet now.  They’re based in Cleveland, sorry, they’re based in Cincinnati.  They are the resident string quarter of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, part of the University of Cincinnati and they perform many times, but they also perform many other places, so we’ll  probably go many other places to hear them as well.  We’re often making a journey down to Cincinnati for an evening performance to hear them play.  It’s a very strong sounding cello.  The lowest string is very powerful and very, most cellos have that as a C string and it can really roar and the cellists really want this because, when they get down in that lower range, they want to boom that sound.  The cello is uniquely capable of doing that.  It’s very good because of that.  Amit, it took about a year for her to feel like she really had control of it and was playing it well.  She plays it wonderfully.

Interviewer:  So, this cello which was born in 1842 and which saw and experienced the early days of the Nazi reign in Germany is still getting close to 200 years old and is still providing joy.

Burry:  It is providing joy.  It has a Jewish connection from Amit who is Israeli.  She had family in Poland and had a lot of family lost in the Holocaust too.  She feels that playing this instrument is poignant for her because of her history, and poignant for her because of the cello’s history and my family’s history.  It’s like wow, how did we end up landing with that arrangement, it’s so wonderful, you know.

Interviewer: Well, I’d say that’s a pretty good way to end our interview.

Burry:Absolutely.

Interviewer: With Yvonne Heather Burry.  It’s April 14th and we’re here at the Columbus Jewish Historical Society Archive area and I’m Bill Cohen. Thanks so much.

 

Transcribed by Rose Luttinger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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