The Columbus Jewish Historical Society

Hello, this is Bill Cohen with the Columbus Jewish Historical Society and we’re here, in the home of Liz Kamlet on Parkview Blvd. in Columbus.  We’re going to interview her about her memories of the Columbus Jewish community and just some general memories of her life.

Interviewer: Liz, can you start by telling us how far back do your memories go in terms of your parents or your grandparents?  Can you trace your family back somewhat, a generation or two?

Kamlet:  Yes, I can. My father was born in Nashville, Tennessee.  Believe it or not, his father came from the Russian, Polish area.  At one point, Russia and Poland were so close together that, half the time, one city was in Poland and the next time it was in Russia.  My grandparents, all of them on my side, came from the Russian Polish area, not necessarily the same two areas, but they were there.  Both my parents were first generation Americans.  They were both born here.  My mother was born in Rochester, New York.  My father was born in Nashville, Tennessee.  My father’s earliest recollection that he remembers is, when he was eight years old, his mother was struck by a car, and she died, and he was raised by his father.  His mother was my grandfather’s second wife.  She was out of his life when he was very young, and my grandfather raised my father.  He grew up going to school and being raised by a man who owned a grocery store.  My grandfather was a grocer, and he would give food away to the Jewish community or anyone who was hungry, and he would also give them clothing and money.  My father would, many times, go to bed hungry because my grandfather had given away the food.  He would also have hand-me-down clothes because my grandfather didn’t buy him new clothes because he was giving the money to the other people.  When my father grew up, he was, I would like to say he was a clothes horse because he really loved clothes and that, to him, was the greatest gift in the world, to get new clothes, and he loved that.

Interviewer:  Now this is your husband’s grandfather?

Kamlet:  No, my husband’s father.  No, my father’s father.  My father was still in Nashville.  His father was a grocer.

Interviewer: The grandfather’s name?

Kamlet: Was Herman Oseff.  There are maybe two families in the United States with that last name, and they don’t spell it the same way we do. Unfortunately, my father’s only relatives were older than he was, and they didn’t have any children.  A couple of them didn’t marry.  So, as far as I know, there was one Oseff that lives in New York, and he was adopted.  We did connect with him but he’s not a blood relative.  So, that leaves my nephew in Las Vegas as the last surviving relative and his son will carry the name, and that’s Carson, and he’s seven years old right now.

Interviewer:  Do you know anything about other grandparents?

Kamlet:  On my other side, my mother’s parents, my grandmother also owned a grocery store.  My grandfather was a tailor.  They lived in Rochester and moved to Detroit when my mother was out of elementary school.  She went to high school in the Detroit area.  My grandmother ran a grocery store, and my grandfather was a tailor.  They raised six children.  My uncle Hy was killed in WWII.  Two of my other uncles, one birth and one by marriage, were in Germany during WWII.  They both, thank God, survived, and they came home.  One uncle had been in dental school when he was drafted, and he dropped out of dental school when he came back.  He didn’t want to go back for the last year.  So, he ended up working odd jobs, never really found a career that he liked.  He tried different things, but he never really did much.  Then, at age 52 he dropped dead of a heart attack

My other uncle that was in WWII, my uncle, Harry, he came back and opened a coin laundromat, and his son ended up growing it to a multi-million-dollar business.  He was doing laundry machines at all the universities.  He was at the University of Michigan, I remember, because one of my cousins was going to school at one of the schools where he owned the concession, so he would give them slugs to put in the laundry machine, so they didn’t have to pay.  He never did that for us, but he gave it to my own son.

Interviewer:  Did that laundromat empire, did that start in Michigan?  Where was the home base?

Kamlet:  He started in Michigan, and he continued in Michigan.  My cousin eventually sold it.  He’s now retired and living very happily in Florida and traveling all over the world.  His brother became a Rabbi, was a Rabbi in upstate New York for most of his life, and he passed away.  Richard is still alive. The empire is now sold because neither one of his children wanted it.  My other uncle, my uncle Saul  (Saul Colton), the baby of the family, married into a family that owned a linen supply, and he was made a partner in the linen supply company, along with his brother-in-law, whom he bought out.  He turned that into a multi-million-dollar business.  It’s called Domestic Linen. They have facilities all over the United States.  He wanted one in Washington D.C. so that he could clean up Washington.

Interviewer: (Laughs)  Give us the names of your parents.

Kamlet: My mother’s name was Sarah Cohen.  Her real name was Sarah Colton. When my grandfather came over to the United States, the immigration officer could not spell Colton.  My father said he was Jacob Colton.  The guy said, “No, I can’t spell that, you’ll be Jacob Cohen,” and he made him Jacob Cohen, so my grandfather was Jacob Cohen.  My grandmother was Leah, I don’t remember her maiden name.  It’s my sister-in-law’s (name) but I can’t remember it.  She was originally from Rochester though my grandfather’s family went to Canada first and then came into Rochester, and that’s where they met.

They had, as I said, six children.  My mother was the second oldest.  She also was the one that survived the longest.  She died at 88.  She was older than any of her brothers and sisters.  My uncle Harry died of bone marrow cancer at 56.  Six months later his brother died of a heart attack at 52.

Interviewer: Again, your father was Colton?

Kamlet:  No, my mother was Colton.  She was Cohen.  She was born a Cohen because they couldn’t spell Colton. When my uncles found out about it many years later when my grandfather told them what his real name was, they all changed their name to Colton.  However, my grandfather said he’s been a Cohen for that long, he just stayed that way.  So, in the cemetery his grave is labeled Jacob Cohen, and my grandmother is Leah Cohen and my aunt and my mother kept the Cohen name, but all my uncles became Colton.

Interviewer: That’s an interesting story because usually the stories we hear about the immigration are that people came over with Jewish names and perhaps, as things got muddled, they became more Americanized names. In your case this is the opposite.

Kamlet:  Yes, my father had a brother who was twice as old as he was.  He has a nephew who is three months older than he is and his name was Stone because he didn’t like the name also, probably couldn’t spell it, so he became Jack Stone.  I don’t even know where they are because there are so many Stones in the United States, and he was twice as old.  My uncle died and my aunt Millie died also so I haven’t kept up with that family.

Interviewer:  When your parents got married, they settled down in what city?

Kamlet: My parents met in Detroit, and they settled in Detroit except, during WWII, my father did not want to go overseas, and my mother didn’t want him drafted so they moved to California.  My dad worked in the shipyards during WWII.  My aunt Rose came out to California to visit them, and she joined the Marines.

Interviewer:  She joined the Marines?

Kamlet:  She joined the Marines.  She met my uncle Wally in the Marine Corps.  Unfortunately, a little black sheep in their family, she got pregnant before they were married, so they had to get married.  She was kicked out of the Marine Corps because you couldn’t be married and in the Marine Corps.  She was one of the first women Marines in the United States.

Interviewer: Wow!  I didn’t think women could join the Marines all the way back then.  Wow!

Kamlet:  During WWII my aunt was a Marine, not for long, but she was a Marine.  My uncle Wally stayed in the Marine Corps during WWII.  Then he got out, and they moved to Detroit to be with the family.  My parents moved back to Detroit because my dad didn’t have to work there anymore.  So, they all moved back to the Detroit area, and the family lived all around my grandparents.  We grew up with all my cousins and aunts and uncles.  You know, we had extended family around.

Interviewer: You were born what year?

Kamlet: 1941.

Interviewer: In Detroit or the Detroit area?

Kamlet:  I was born in the Women’s Hospital in Detroit.  I have a twin sister and a brother who was five years younger.  He was born in California because my parents, as I said, moved to California during WWII.  My dad wanted a son, so my mother said: “Okay, we’ll try.  If we have one, you get one try. If you’re lucky we get one.  If we don’t, we don’t.”   She had twin daughters and was very content not to have any more children.

Interviewer: What do you remember of your early years as a child in the Detroit area?

Kamlet:  I remember walking to school.  We lived in a Jewish section near Dexter Davison which is where a lot of Jews grew up.  I remember on all the Jewish holidays we stayed out of school because nobody was there.  Even the Blacks who were in our class stayed out of school on the Jewish holidays.  I remember one year my mother said, “If you’re not going to Services, you’re going to schools.”  So, we went to school, and we were the only ones there.  The teachers had us putting up bulletin boards and reading books.  We had a great time.  We thought it was the greatest thing in the world.  We weren’t doing any work, and it was fun, and we were helping the teachers.  My mother decided that we did not have to go to school to help the teachers so, on the next Jewish holiday we stayed home but we did not have to go to Services.

Interviewer: You had the best of both worlds in your mind.

Kamlet: Absolutely.  My mother told one story.  She wanted us to have a Jewish education, so she put us in Sunday School at the nearest synagogue, which happened to be Orthodox.  They were very, very strict about Shabbos.  I remember that my mother said that we stood behind her car on Saturday morning and wouldn’t let them drive because we were told it was a sin to drive on Shabbat.  So, we dropped out of the Orthodox congregation at that point.  My mother said, “No more.  Nobody is going to dictate to me how I live my life.”  I do remember, when we were in California, my mother said that she was keeping kosher, and she was going to a kosher butcher in California.  She had very few ration tickets because there’s only the two of them and we were too little that we would qualify for much.  We were between two and five, so we didn’t get much.  She was waiting in line, and it was her turn.  A woman came in with a mink coat and hands dripping with all these ration tickets.  The butcher dropped taking care of my mother and walked over to this woman and started taking care of her, and he was giving her better cut meats than he was giving my mother for the same ration tickets, of course.  My mother got very annoyed, and she walked next door to the local A&P and discovered that she could get more food, better quality food, for the less ration tickets, and she became unkosher at that point, and never went back.

Interview: Fascinating.  So, your mother and father began fairly observant and Orthodox but quickly …

Kamlet: No.  My mother was raised Orthodox, but remember, she was a woman, and she didn’t get much of an education.  They didn’t send her to school to get the Hebrew stuff.  Her brothers were observant, but she was sort of more modern than the others.  She, of all my family, there was only one brother, the oldest brother, that kept kosher.  The rest of them did not keep kosher.  I remember one story, when we were in Detroit, we were growing up.  My aunt Rose was making ham for dinner.  We were visiting.  My aunt Rose loved us because we were the only girls in the family.  There were three of us that were girls, the three oldest grandchildren were girls.  There was one boy in between us.  My cousin, Marilyn, she didn’t have a girl first, she didn’t have a girl in our family.  What happened was that we were staying for dinner.  She happened to be making ham.  My cousin Larry was also visiting.  His father was the only one that kept kosher.  Larry said, “Can I stay for dinner too.”  Well, my aunt was serving ham and she didn’t feel she should invite him to stay but she couldn’t figure out a way to say no.  So, she said, “Okay, but clear it with your mother first.”  So, he called his mother and said, “Marilyn, Elizabeth and Lenore are staying for dinner, can I stay too?”  My aunt Jo said, “Sure, why not.”  So, he stayed, and he went home, and he told his mother he had the most delicious pink chicken that he’d ever eaten.  It was very interesting.  My aunt said, “What am I supposed to say?  I can’t tell him.  My brother would kill me.”  So, she told him it was pink chicken.  So, my aunt Jo picked up the phone and called my aunt Rose and said, “Can you give me the recipe?  Larry’s been raving about this.”  My aunt said, “I don’t know what to do.”  She said, “I told her that I just used a little bit of this and a little bit of that and I really didn’t write it down, and every time it turns out differently, and I’m sure, but she used barbecue sauce and that turned it pink, and she doesn’t remember some of the other ingredients.  She just used whatever she had at hand.”  That satisfied my aunt Jo, and later on in life, when we were older, we told Larry the truth about the pink chicken.

Interviewer: A wonderful story.  Let me ask you, you were growing up in a public school that had a lot of Jews in it, you were saying.  There were obviously some non-Jews there.  How did the Jewish kids get along with the non-Jewish kids?

Kamlet:  It was very interesting.  We were in a neighborhood that was high white collar, low blue collar type, you know, high blue collar, low white collar type of thing.  It was in a middle-class neighborhood, maybe a little bit on the poorer side.  In the more expensive houses were the rich Blacks who had children, doctors, lawyers.  They lived in the ritzier section in our school district.  We went to school with very well-educated Black students, and we got along just beautifully.  I mean, there was no problem at all.  Then the neighborhood changed, as neighborhoods do.  A lower element of Black students moved in.  The kids were a lot rougher and less interested in schooling, less well behaved.  This happened during my junior high year.  That’s when we moved.  We went to junior high in the area where we grew up in, in Detroit proper.  I remember, you know, you were walking down the hallway, and some of the Black students were coming up the stairs behind you, and they would stick pencils up your skirt, try to lift your skirt.  We had swimming so you’d change in the locker room, and the Black girls would be taking pictures of you and selling them to the boys, of you naked.  I mean it was really a different kind of kid that we were not used to, so we all moved.  We moved to the suburbs, and we went to Oak Park.  That was pretty much mostly white.  There were a few black students here and there.  There was not a preponderance of black.  It was 30% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and about 40% Jewish.  Of course, we were outnumbered, but that did not matter.  We ran most of the clubs anyway.

Interviewer:  That’s in high school?  How did the Jews and the non Jews get along there?

Kamlet: Oh, we were wonderful.  We were so friendly with everybody in high school.  We just kept in touch, one of these things.  The Jews were the intellectuals.  The others were the jocks and the sports people.  There was some intermingling because there were some Jews who participated in sports, mainly track, field.  Very few played football.  Some were cheerleaders.  We ran choir together.  We ran the newspaper together.  We did all kinds of things.  You know, we had a good time.

Interviewer:  This would have been in the mid to late 1950’s?

Kamlet:  50s, we graduated from high school in 1959.

Interviewer: Did you remember any time when you were a child or teenager, did you experience any obvious antisemitism?

Kamlet:  Not really, I don’t remember any antisemitism at all.  I do remember, there was one student in our class, she was also Jewish, in 6^th grade.  Her mother was so anti-black.  There was prejudice there like you wouldn’t believe.  She wouldn’t let her daughter own a Nat King Cole album, and she loved Nat King Cole, the daughter.  One of the girls in our class invited everybody to her house for the end of the year school party.  She was a beautiful black girl.  Her father was a dentist.  She ended up many years later on the cover of Ebony magazine.  She was absolutely wonderful.  She invited us to her house at the end of the year party.  Well, our friend Marsha’s mother was not going to let her go because she was not having her associate with blacks.  So, she took us, she invited us to go downtown to a movie.  Cinderella had just come out.  She invited us to go see Cinderella on the same day of the party so that Marsha would have company, and she wouldn’t be the only one missing the party.  My mother felt sorry for Marsha so she told us that we could go.  Many years later, she regretted that choice and said that we should have gone to the party, not because any reason that she could think of that we shouldn’t have gone to see Cinderella, because she felt that she was helping foster the prejudice and she didn’t believe in that.

Interviewer: Marsha’s mother, this was a Jewish family or non Jewish?

Kamlet:  Jewish family.

Interviewer: A Jewish family was anti-black.

Kamlet:  The mother was anti-black.  I don’t remember the father saying much of anything, but I remember the mother was very strongly anti-black because I remember Marsha really wanted to buy a Nat King Cole album.  We had it and she wanted to buy it but she couldn’t because her mother would not let her.  When she did buy it with her own money, she saved her money and she bought it, her mother threw it out.

Interviewer: Did that family stick out as an exception in the Jewish community?

Kamlet:  As far as I know that was the only family we knew, that we were friendly with, that had that extreme prejudice.  However, later on in life, one of my friends, who I’ve known since first grade, he ate my sister’s crayons, but he denies it, pathetic, or chewed on them anyway.

By-the-way, he teaches math at Middlebury College in Vermont.  He is very well educated.  He’s still teaching at 82 because he’s bound and determined to be the oldest math professor in the building.  There’s one guy ahead of him, he’s a year older, who refuses to retire.  So, he’s sticking it out too.  Going back to the story, we’ve known Mike for years and years and years.  He adopted a little girl who happened to be mulatto.  He brought her home one day to visit his parents.  Now they had, their goal was to have two mulatto children and two of their own because they felt they had something to offer.  My girlfriend, his wife, I’ve known since 7^th grade.  She teaches, or did teach, Russian at Middlebury.  She’s a linguist major.  She spoke Swahili and the Click language, Jewish girl.  They gave her $9100 from the University of Wisconsin and sent her to Kenya to learn the languages, and that was back in the (19)60’s.  That was quite unusual.  So, she’s got her PhD in Linguistics and ended up teaching Russian.

Interviewer: So, the family that adopted the mulatto children, what happened with them?

Kamlet: They brought the little girl home one day with the son. They had a son too.  The son was the oldest one.  Then they had Abby and they brought them home.  His mother obviously favored the white grandchildren over the mulatto girl.  She sort of neglected her and didn’t pay any attention to her.  Mike pulled his mother aside and said to her, “If you ever want to see us and our children again, you’ll treat Abby with respect and you’ll treat her just like the other children.”  She straightened up and that was the end of that one.

Interviewer:  You graduated high school in the late 1950’s.

Kamlet: 1959.

Interviewer: What happened then in your life?

Kamlet:  We went to the University of Michigan.  My sister and I were accepted.  We both got scholarships for tuition.  My mother and father said, “Well, we’ll try it for a year because I’m sure we can’t afford to send both of you at the same time.”  We kept those scholarships for tuition, and we went to the University of Michigan for four years, or I did.  My sister switched to the University of Illinois because, at that point, the boy she was dating was getting his PhD from Illinois.  She got married in her junior year and she finished her degree at Illinois, and he got his PhD from there.

Interviewer: Tell us about the Jewish aspect if there is any Jewish aspect in terms of your college years.  Were you in a Sorority?

Kamlet: Remember, we’re living on a shoestring.  We worked our way through school.  I worked on the switchboard, and I did waitressing just to earn spending money because my parents paid room and board and we had tuition paid.  We would work in the summer to pay for books and clothes and any spending money that we had, and then we worked during the year to get spending money.  As far as Jewish aspect goes, I don’t even remember.  I remember going to Services because we lived 45 minutes from campus to home, so we would move to home for Services. We were Reform Jews so we would go to Services.  I think there was a Hillel.  I’m not sure that we ever stepped foot in it, but we’d hang out with a lot of Jewish kids.  A lot of people in my dorm were Jewish and we sort of gravitated towards each other.  I mean I had friends from Boston and New York and all over the place and they were all Jewish and pretty much stayed with the Jewish people on campus.  We had some friends.  I dated a couple boys that weren’t Jewish.  There’s one, I remember, I was a senior in college, and my girlfriend decided to fix me up with her boyfriend’s friend, but she warned me that he was anti-semitic.  Her parents were Jewish, got into a fight with the Rabbi, left Judaism and joined the Unitarian Church.  They decided that they were going to be Unitarian and Jewish be dammed.  Turns out later her brother married a Jewish girl, and she married a Catholic boy, so full spectrum.  In any event she had a last name that sounded Jewish.  It was Sternfeld, and she had all the Jewish mannerisms.  It wasn’t that she wasn’t Jewish, it was just that she was Unitarian.  This boy looked her up on line, checked her credentials, made sure she wasn’t Jewish, and then he asked her out, so she was dating him.  He had a friend coming from another college that was coming to visit him for the weekend.  They were in a fraternity, and he asked her to fix him up.  All her friends that weren’t Jewish were going out with other people. I happened to be free that night, so she asked me if I would go out with him with the understanding that he was anti-semitic.  I said, “Okay, but he’d better not say anything in front of me.”  She said, “Please.”  I said, “Okay.”  I went out with him.  All night he told Black jokes and Jewish jokes, and I sat there, I didn’t say a word.

Interviewer: Anti Black?

Kamlet: Anti Black, anti Jewish.  I said, I’ll never see him again.  He’s not a bad person.  He’s just an idiot.  At the end of the evening, he drove a sports car, we had a nice time.  The fraternity was nice.  The party was okay.  At the end of the evening he said, “You know, I really had a wonderful time, would you consider going out with me again?”  I said, “Well it’s very kind of you to ask but I think you really should know something because I don’t like hiding under false pretenses, but I happen to be Jewish.  If you still want to go out with me again, let me know.”  I never heard from Mike again. There was no loss.

Interviewer:  Fascinating story. What happened after college?

Kamlet: After college, I had one year of teaching.  I was engaged.  At the end of college I graduated, and I came back to go to grad school over the summer so I could get my master’s degree.  I was working on my master’s degree, I was dating my husband, and we got engaged in August before I started my first year of teaching.  So, I was engaged, and we got married in June of my first year.  I was engaged during my first year of teaching, I got married, and I moved to Ann Arbor.  I taught in a farm community where they had never seen a Jew.  One of the kids, one day, kept looking at my head.  I said, “What’s the matter honey?”  She said, “I’m looking for your horns.”

Interviewer: Oh my, that’s really hard to hear.

Kamlet:   I said, “Well, why?”  She said, “You’ve seen pictures of Jews.  They have horns coming out of their head.”  I had never seen that picture.  I said, “Well, I’m sorry, I don’t have any.”  She said, “Oh, I thought all Jews had horns.”  I said, “Well, they don’t.”  They were very interested in my moods.  They had never met somebody who is Jewish. They weren’t prejudice, they just didn’t know.  They were all mostly Seventh Day Adventists.  Believe me, that was an interesting religion. Half of the girls got pregnant by the time they were in 12^th grade because they weren’t allowed to go to parties and do anything, so they would drive around in cars with boys and things happen.

Interviewer:  So, this was, you said, in a rural area in Michigan?

Kamlet:  It was a farming community.  It was called Petersburg, Michigan.

Interviewer: Was it far away from Detroit?

Kamlet:   I was in Ann Arbor.  It was 30 miles from Ann Arbor.  I couldn’t get a job in Ann Arbor because they wouldn’t hire student wives because you would pick up and leave and they wanted permanent teachers, so they wouldn’t hire student wives.  The job I could get was 30 miles away, in Petersburg, Michigan.  There were four of us that got these jobs.  We drove together.  I had an exciting time when I was driving 120 miles an hour and had a blowout going down to school.  I had a convertible.  It was fun, and we lived to tell about it.  A nice truck driver stopped and changed the tire for us.  There were four of us women in the car. Two of us were married and two were single.

Interviewer:  Did I hear you say you were going 120 miles an hour?

Kamlet: Yep, in a Ford LTD convertible, my first car, 1964.

Interviewer:  Why were you driving so fast?

Kamlet: I have no idea.  I wasn’t looking at the speedometer.  I had no idea how fast I was going.  One of the girls told me, afterwards, that’s how fast I was going.

Interviewer: How did you meet your husband?

Kamlet: We met at the University of Michigan.  My girlfriend introduced us.  She’d met him in her studies.  We were at the university, it was the night we were graduating from college, and she was invited to this party.  She was dating this boy she called “boring Bob.”  He wasn’t Jewish.  She said he’s having this party, and I was staying with her.

She said, “Come with me.”  I said, “I don’t really want to go.”  She said, “I’ll get you a date.”  I said, “Alright.”  She introduced me to Artie.  He ignored me most of the evening.  He was talking to this girl all evening about math problems. They were involved in a math thing that they were talking about.  I thought God, save me from this one.  This guy imagined himself to be very liberal, and he invited four African males to his party.  I mean African from Africa.  I don’t mean African males.

There were no girls there for them to dance with.  Artie was ignoring me, so they kept asking me to dance.  While I didn’t mind dancing with them, I just thought this is the most stupid thing I’m doing, you know.  I’m graduating the next day.  Why am I bothering with this.  I looked at my friend Harriet and said, “No, no, no, this is not what I want to do.”  I said, “Never mind, I’m going to go to the library and do some research because I was talking to a friend of mine who got into an argument, and I was going to go look something up to prove I was right.”  I went to the library.  Artie took me.  We started talking, and he said, “When you come back for the summer to go to summer school, call me.”  I called. We started dating, and at the end of the summer, we were engaged to be married.

Interviewer:  Your husband’s name is?

Kamlet:  Arthur Kamlet.

Interviewer: Arthur.

Kamlet: Right.  I call him Artie.  Everybody else calls him Arthur.  I knew him, when he was an Artie.

Interviewer: How did you wind up here in Columbus?

Kamlet:  He worked for Bell Labs, and Bell Labs was here.  He was in the military.  In college, he went to Wooster Polytech, got a degree in Electrical Engineering.  While at Wooster Tech they required him to go into ROTC for two years.  He was in ROTC, and he did very well.  He was getting 100s in all the classes.  He was very bright.  They loved him.  He was captain of the Persian Rifles.  He did very, very well, so they convinced him that he could have a career in the military.  He signed up.  Then he decided he wanted a PhD, so he came to Michigan to get his PhD.  The Army said, “Okay, we’ll wait till you get your PhD. “ When he got to Michigan, he decided he didn’t really like Electrical Engineering and switched fields.  He went into Engineering Psychology which is now called Human Factors Engineers in many schools, but Michigan called it Engineering Psychology, and they taught it in the Psych Department.  He switched careers.  He’d never taken a Psych course in his life, and that led to a PhD in Psychology.  He took a couple Psych courses.  He got an A in one and a B+ in the other.  They said, “Okay, you can stay.”  He was teaching freshman Psychology when he was in grad school, and he’d never had a freshman psych course in his life, and he’s teaching this thing.  He had this degree, and he was pulled into the Army.  We spent two years in Maryland defending the source of the Potomac from the Vietnamese invasion.  He was very happy where we were.

Interviewer:  He didn’t have to go to Vietnam?

Kamlet:   He got lucky.  His degree was in Electrical Engineering, so they were going to send him to Fort Gordon and send him overseas to set up electrical systems.  He said, “But I’m a PhD psychologist.”  So, they were going to put him in the Medical Service Corps because they used psychologists to do psychological testing.  But, he was a scientific psychologist.  He was not what he called a Freud Psychologist.  He was not interested in anything that he called mumbo jumbo.  He said this was not real science.  I’m a guidance counselor and I do the real mumbo jumbo.  He said, “It’s just crap.”  So, I said, “Well, I understand all that, but you’re stuck with it.”  He said, “Well, he didn’t want to do that.” So, he found a lab in Baltimore, Maryland, well at Aberdeen Proving Ground, that was doing the same kind of psychology he was, Engineering Psychology.  He went back to this lab, in Leonia,  at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.  They had slots open for two officers that were in the Medical Service Corps.  So, he got into the Medical Service Corps.  They had one opening, and they took him immediately because he was getting his PhD, and he was just what they needed.  They were doing the same research that he was doing for his thesis, at the lab.  So, they were doing the same work.  They pulled him over, and he spent two years doing what he loved.

Interviewer: Would this have been in the late 1960s?

Kamlet: That was (19)67 to 69.

Interviewer: The Vietnam War was really boiling over, but he didn’t wind up having to go overseas.

Kamlet: No, because he was in the Medical Service Corps, we met a lot of officers that were doctors and medical service technicians, and they had been to Vietnam.  In fact, one of my friends in the Army was, her husband had just come back from Vietnam.  They were at Aberdeen as well.

Interviewer:  So, Jews in the military were already a small group, 2 or 3% of the population, very small in the military.  What was that like, being Jewish?

Kamlet:  No, he was in the Medical Service Corps.  We hung out with Jewish doctors.  We didn’t hang out with the same people.  In fact, my son’s bris, my second son was born in the Army.  My second son’s bris was at the chapel at Aberdeen Proving Ground because that’s where all the Jews were, on the base, so we could get to them.  Most of our friends were doctors, and they were the ones that came to the bris.  We had a mohel come in and do the bris even though any one of the doctors could have done it.  They said, “No, the mohel does it better, so we’ll watch.”  They all came, and we had his bris.  We had it on the Bema actually is where they actually performed the bris, and we were sitting in the back of the room, the women.  My family came in from all over.  They had the bris on the base.  Both my sons were born on Saturday.  One son had his bris on a Saturday because I could bring him in to the Detroit area where the mohel lived, about a mile from my sister, and he was willing to walk, so we did it at my sister’s house.  The other one, we had to wait till Sunday because the mohel was busy on Saturday.  He wasn’t going to drive to Aberdeen Proving Ground from Baltimore, so we waited till Sunday to do the bris.

Interviewer: So, you associated some with the Jewish doctors and the Jewish professionals in the military.

Kamlet:  One of my best friends, her husband was a doctor.  She had six kids, and she would have had 12 if she could.  She ended up, I think, with seven.  All those kids were well behaved, and they all had chores, and they were amazing.  Yes, we associated with Jewish doctors, and most of my friends on base happened to be Jewish because, you know, you find your little group and go with them.  I remember one story.  I took my son to the pediatrician on base.  A lot of the women took their children off base to private doctors, but I took my kids to the base doctors.  I walked in and I signed in.  You have to put your husband’s rank.  I put down his rank, and I sat down.  Two seconds later, I’m called.  The waiting room was filled with people, and they’re calling me.  I went up and I said, “What’s going on?”  They said, “Well, honey you’re a captain’s wife, you get taken first.”  I looked at them and I said, “That’s very interesting, but my son is not a captain.  I am not a captain.  These people have been waiting longer.  Would you please take one of them first, I would feel so much better.”  They did.  I didn’t like the ranking.  I thought it was ridiculous.  Fine, it’s okay, because your husband’s a captain, that you get services, that’s wonderful, but that shouldn’t put you at the head of the line because he’s important, you’re not.

Interviewer: Again, the question of how did the Jews get along with non-Jews at that point?

Kamlet:  Absolutely there was no problem.  Some of my husband’s friends were non-Jewish.  His boss was non-Jewish.  We hung out with him.  They had a pet skunk, and it was interesting.  We never had a problem.  The Jews on base were very kind.  They took all the Christian holidays as officers so that the Christian officers could have the days off, rather than being Officer of the Day.  Art ended up being Officer of the Day on the Sunday before Easter when Martin Luther King was shot.  He was on the base, and he was the Officer of the Day.  He was getting calls all day from Baltimore.  We knew nothing of what was going on.  He was getting calls.  They were asking for the pot helmets.  They were asking for soldiers to come in to work.  He was relaying messages back and forth.  Everybody kept saying, “What do they need them for?  What’s going on?”  He couldn’t answer because nobody told him.  Later on they found out.  Baltimore was under quarantine.  You wouldn’t want to travel after a certain time.  Soldiers were calling in saying, “I can’t get back because they’re not letting me travel.  What am I going to do?”  Art said, “I don’t know,” and he called to find out.  They said, “Tell them to get here as soon as they can.”

Interviewer: You’re talking about the violence that erupted in all the major cities after Martin Luther King was killed.

Kamlet:  Yeah, in fact they came and got pot helmets, you know, the pot sticker helmets, the metal helmets that they wore, and they never returned them. They lied.  The police called and said that they were so and so.  They were a recruiting officer, in Baltimore, and they needed pot stickers.  Could they spare them?  The Quartermaster said, “Sure, we can give you some.”  So, they met a police car in the middle of the highway, on the way to Baltimore, and they gave them the pot stickers.   One day they called Artie out of the blue and said, “You know you were Officer of the day, on this day, and we never got the helmets back.  What can you tell us?”  He said, “Well, I turned it over to the Quartermaster, and that’s all I know.”  They said, “Oh, Okay.”  They never got them back.

Interviewer: You started that story.  I want to make sure I understand correctly, by saying that the Jewish officers, when there was a Christian holiday, the Jewish officers volunteered to work in place of the Christian officers so the Christian officers could celebrate their holiday.

Kamlet:  Right.  That’s why he was working on the Sunday before Easter.  They would take the Jewish holidays in return, like, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Jewish holidays we would have off.  It was just common courtesy.

Interviewer:  So that was the late 1960s.  You were in the military then.

Kamlet:  That was 1969.

Interviewer: How did you wind up in Columbus, when that happen?

Kamlet:  From the military we went to New Jersey.  Artie worked in the Morristown area.  He worked for Bell Labs.  He had a job with them.  He was working on some government missiles and some of the other military programs that they had at the time.  Bell Labs decided to get out of the military business.  They decided that they were no longer going to associate with the military and do military work, that they were going to do more humanitarian work and whatever they were doing to help the phone company as well.  They dropped all military programs, and his program was stationed in New Jersey, near Morristown, and he said, “Well, I guess we’re going to move.”  They gave us a choice of somewhere in the Chicago area or Columbus.  Columbus was closer to where my parents lived in Michigan, so we decided we lived in New Jersey near his parents in New York, and moved to Columbus and lived near my parents so that we could see them on weekends and then spend longer vacations with his parents. That’s how we used to work it.  We’d spend weekends with his parents, and then we’d spend, like a week, with my parents because it took us longer to get there, something like that.  So, for equal opportunity, we decided to move to Columbus, and he was able to find a job here.  He liked the Columbus area.  He’d come here as a telephone person and been a telephone repairman for a week, climbed telephone poles and learned what the telephone company does.  Then he went back to New Jersey and did his thing.  He liked the Columbus area.  He’d gone to the Christopher Inn, if you remember that, and they sent him one night to the Kahiki.  They told them to take cabs there and they got them the mystery drink and all, very happy when they left.  Let’s put it that way.

Interviewer: Where did you live when you moved to the Columbus area?

Kamlet:  We lived in Greenbrier.

Interviewer: Greenbrier, tell us where that is.

Kamlet:  It’s right down the street from Temple Israel.  We lived in Greenbrier Farms.

Interviewer: Oh, on the far east side.

Kamlet:  On the far east side, off of Broad Street.  It isn’t so far east anymore, but yes.  We lived off of Noe Bixby on a little street called Naiche.  Across the street from us was a horse farm.  That did not last.  The Torah Academy is out there too.  Temple Israel was on the corner, which is now a Bahai Temple.  We could walk to Temple Israel, but we joined Tifereth Israel because we were Conservative.

Interviewer: This would have been, your move was sometime in the 1970s.

Kamlet:  1976, we moved here, so I guess I’ve lived in Columbus longer than any place.  I’ve lived here 47 years.  We never moved.  I thought we were going to move.  I was greeted by one of my neighbors across the street whose husband also worked for Bell Labs, and she said, “Well, the rumor is we’ll be moving to Indian Hills in five years, so enjoy it while you can.”  I said, “Fine, I’ll wait and see.  I don’t mind moving. I’ve been moving every two years or so now because we went from college to the military, and then to New Jersey, and we were in New Jersey for seven years.” I thought that was long.

Interviewer: You have children?

Kamlet:  I have two boys.

Interviewer:  Did they kind of grow up in temple Tifereth Israel?

Kamlet:  They grew up in Tifereth Israel.  A lot of their friends were at Temple Israel because of the area where we lived.  When we moved into the neighborhood, we were adopted by six or seven families.  We had a pool and we had people over.  When we first moved, we moved in May because we wanted the kids to be in school a little bit before the school let out so they’d meet some kids, so they wouldn’t be all alone in the neighborhood.  As it turns out, the neighborhood disappears at the end of school.  I don’t know where the kids went.  We put our kids in the Jewish Day Camp immediately.  They went to JCC for six or seven years and they loved it.  They learned how to swim.  We had a pool, but they never learned how to swim, and they did.  Art said, for them to be able to swim in the pool by themselves, they had to be able to swim two or three lengths of the pool by themselves, safely, before he would let them swim on their own.  They did dog paddling, but they did it.  They were better swimmers than I was.  They loved the pool.

Interviewer: Any memories that you have of the (19)70s, 80s, and 90s in terms of the Jewish Center, or Tifereth Israel, or other Jewish institutions?

Kamlet: Tifereth Israel was the hub.  Our first experience with Tifereth Israel was interesting because we went to Services and found, you know, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur.  We were coming home on the first day of Rosh Hashanah and we were in a five-car car accident.  Somebody hit us from behind.  Behind us were also members of Tifereth Israel that we had never met.  You’re standing outside waiting for the police to come, you get to meet people.  The car directly behind us was the Epsteins, Janet and Michael Epstein.  Janet was the school librarian where my kids went to school.  I never met her.  I met her and I volunteered to work in the library when I was talking to her then.  I came in one day and, before I knew it, I’m teaching a class at the elementary school.  I was a teacher, but I was not certified in Ohio.  I was certified, I had a permanent certificate from the state of Michigan, but I was not an Ohio licensed teacher.  The principal asked me if I could teach a math class. I said, “Sure, what kind of math, what are you talking about.”  He said, “Well, our math scores at Old Orchard are high in 4^th grade and 6^th grade.  In 5^th grade they drop.  We don’t know why, so we’re thinking that maybe you should teach a gifted class, 5^th grade math kids and keep their scores up so that our scores will look better.”   I said, “Fine, but get me statistics.  Tell me what they’re lacking, what they need to learn.”  While he was doing that, he decided he couldn’t get that, so maybe I should teach science because science was a subject that most of the teachers did not teach.  You taught six or seven subjects.  When it came to science, most of the teachers said, “Well, we’ll put it at the end of the day.  If we get to it, fine.  If we don’t get to it, we’ll do it another day.”  They pretty much did it another day.  He decided that it would be a good idea if somebody came in and taught science to gifted kids so they would have some science background.  He was always looking for kids, for volunteers to teach classes for the gifted.  They now had Special Ed classes, the LD and the DH classes at Old Orchard, but they didn’t have, and they had gifted classes.  They were pulling them out for great books reading.  They were pulling them out for a typing class.  They were pulling them out for all kinds of extra things that he thought they would need.  I looked at him and I said, “You know, Harry, this is not what you should be doing.  The thing is, what you’re doing is not allowing the teachers to teach a full class.  You keep pulling the kids out, and you’re taking their better ones, and you’re leaving them with the other ones, but you’re not giving them any help or support. So, if you really want me to teach science, I will teach the whole class science, not just the gifted, not the lower end, but the whole class, and let them all benefit from it.  He said, “Let me talk to the teachers.”  Of course, the teachers that he asked all jumped on it because they were getting a break.  They didn’t have to teach science and they were actually getting a class period free where somebody else was going to be teaching, and they didn’t have to be in the classroom if they didn’t want to be, because I was a certified teacher, not necessarily in Ohio, but I was a certified teacher.  I had two or three classes and I taught science the first year.  One of them was my son’s class, and we made a deal.  I told the kids, you know, that Michael would probably call me mom and they’d deal with it, and there would be no special privileges, and they were all fine with it.  We had a great time, and I taught science the first year.  The second year, when they asked me back, I had the whole school, the LD classes.  All the teachers wanted me to do science, so I was teaching five days a week.  I had my own classroom.  The only thing I wasn’t getting was paid.

Interviewer: You weren’t getting paid at all?

Kamlet: No, they couldn’t pay me.  It was volunteer.  I was teaching five days a week.  I would take my kids out to lunch, it was costing me money, but I was having a ball.  The kids loved it.  The teachers loved it.  I did this for four years.  I will tell you the funny part about it. One of the science teachers at Yorktown, the school where my kids were transferred to.  After they finished Old Orchard, my kids would go to Yorktown.

Interviewer:  Yorktown was a middle school or junior high?

Kamlet: It was a middle school.  They came to middle school when my older son was 7^th grade.  They switched from junior high to middle school.  They started taking 6^th graders.  The thing with my kids that was interesting is that the science teacher said to me one day, “I know which kid came from Old Orchard.”  I said, “How do you know?”  She said, “They know science and they love it.  You were a great teacher. The kids love science, and they are very interested in what I have to say. Can you give me some suggestions for activities I can do with them?”  I gave her a few, and she did it, and she loved them.  It was a fun thing to do.  I had her take a walnut shell, have them fill it with as many things as they could, you know, one of everything, but they couldn’t use more than three spices because you could only put a little bit of each one in there.  If they put in two drops of salt, two drops of thyme, you can really fill it up with all the spices, but you have to limit to what they can do.  They put in a speck of dust, very ingenious things, a piece of bread.  Some of the kids got 100 things in a little walnut shell, half a walnut shell.  They thought it was fun.

Interviewer: What happened after that very successful stint as a science teacher?

Kamlet: I got the Mayors Award for volunteerism.  One of my friends nominated me for that.  She thought I did above and beyond.  When my younger son finished elementary school, I have a story about that one too.  My young one finished elementary school and went into junior high.  I decided at that point I should really get paid for what I was doing, so I became a substitute teacher because my kids were older, and I felt I could leave them.  I didn’t have to be in the same building with them, know what they were up to.  If they were sick, I could stay home.  I didn’t have to take a job that day.  So, I taught until they graduated high school.  I was PTA President.  I did other things too, but I was, you know, a volunteer mommy.  What you have to understand is, when I was growing up, most mothers stayed home.  They were stay-at-home mommies.  It was very rare that a parent worked.  My mother worked, but most parents stayed home.  We had a different kind of childhood, an upbringing where most of the parents were around.  We’d come home, we’d drop our books off at home, run out and play till it got dark.  Then we’d go home and do homework and everything else.  We had an ideal childhood.  We played a lot of baseball, a lot of sports outside, had a great time.  Our parents, some of them played Maj, but most of them would stay at home.  They didn’t really volunteer.  They were PTA Presidents or PTA things.  That was probably standard, room mothers and that kind of thing.  When my generation came around, we were still stay-at-home moms.  Kids were told, girls were told that there were two professions you go into, nursing or teaching.  Teaching because you could be home with the kids.  Nursing because you could arrange your hours so you could work around the kid’s schedule.  Those were the two.  So, most women did not venture into anything like college professor or dentist, doctors, nothing like architecture.  One of my friends wanted to be an architect, and she was discouraged, They said, you know, teach.  Turned out she ended up teaching math at Mt. Holyoke for her career, very well respected mathematician.  She’s very well known.  I went over there one day and found out she was very bright, but I knew that.  She wanted to be an architect, and they told her that it involved art and math.  She was all excited.  She loved math. Turns out that architecture is not math.  It’s plugging numbers into formulas.  When, she found that out, she switched and became a mathematician and never bothered with architecture.  Then she ended up teaching at Mt. Holyoke.  Her husband taught at New Mass Amherst.  She’s the one that introduced me to Art.  Back to my story.

Interviewer: You were saying women were discouraged from….

Kamlet: Absolutely.  We were discouraged from any profession other than teaching and nursing, and I didn’t want to empty bedpans.  I said, point blankly, I would not empty bedpans.  They said, “Does that mean you won’t marry a doctor?”  I said I could live with that.  That was the end of that.  I did marry a doctor, but it was a PhD.  So, I got my doctor.  So, they were wrong. (Laughs)  It was funny,.

Interviewer: Let me ask you about maybe other Jewish institutions that you liked, frequented over the many decades, Martin’s Foods.

Kamlet:  Martin’s, I kept kosher all the way through until we moved here, to Kensington.  I kept kosher in my house, not out, because my parents, I told you my mother gave up being kosher when she discovered rationing.  I was never raised kosher. I would eat all the wonderful things in life like lobster and shrimp and crab.  I once tried frog legs, which was very interesting.  My cousins were eating frog legs on day, and said, “Here, try some.”  They tasted like chicken, and I actually thought that the frog legs were pieces of chicken shaped like frog legs, and that they called them frog legs because that was the way it looked.  One day my cousin said, “No, they’re real frog legs.”  I said, “Oops,” and I never ate another one again.  I was an adventurous eater, but not really.  My son eats bison and all kinds of wonderful things like that, but I won’t.  He tried rattlesnake. He’s adventuresome.  My other son is a gourmet.  He spends $500 at a restaurant to try out all these wonderful foods, not for me, $500 is too much to spend on food.

Interviewer: You returned to keeping kosher as an adult?

Kamlet: My husband was kosher.  My husband was raised Orthodox.  My in-laws were lovely people and treated me like a daughter, who raised me right, asked me if I wouldn’t mind keeping kosher so they could eat at my house.  I said, “No problem.  I can do that.”  From the time I was 23 till I turned 81 or 80, I kept kosher.  We did all the holidays, did everything by the book.  In fact, it was really hard for me not to give up some of that stuff.  When I came here, you know, it’s not a Jewish facility.  I asked Artie if he wanted to move to Creekside.  He said no, so we moved here.  He liked it here.  I told him that we would not keep kosher here because I couldn’t.  He didn’t have a problem with it.

Interviewer: You’re here at Kensington which has some Jews, but it’s a mixture of Christians and Jews.

Kamlet:  It was the way I was brought up.  I haven’t seen any prejudice here towards Jews or anything else.  All the people are lovely, and everybody gets along.

Interviewer:  You mentioned keeping kosher for a few decades now as an adult, so you were over at Martin’s Kosher Foods.

Kamlet: I was at Martin’s.  When Irv started, we went to Irv when he had his little kosher store until he passed away.  Then I was at kosher Kroger’s.  I never ordered food from Cleveland or Cincinnati like some of the other Jewish families did because I felt that, if we didn’t support the ones that were here, it would dry up and then there wouldn’t be one in town.  You need them in emergencies.  I always thought we should have had a kosher butcher.  I’m sorry that they really don’t now.

Interviewer:  You started out on what was Columbus’s far east side, but you’ve been here now three, four decades.  You’ve seen the Jewish community which used to be just on the east side, Bexley, Berwick, Eastmoor.  You’ve seen it scatter now.

Kamlet: There was a group that was up north from the very beginning.  There was a whole bunch of university professors up there.  They were up in Upper Arlington and Worthington, and some, a few, in Westerville.

In fact, there was an organization called the, it was a Jewish west side Worthington Jewish couples’ group that met once a month.  They celebrated all the Jewish holidays together.  We lived on the east side, but we were allowed to join the group.  We hung around with some of the college professors up there and socialized with them.  They were a lovely group, and we celebrated the Jewish holidays together.  There was a group of young Jewish people up there.  The Jewish Center did move up to the New Albany area because there were Jews there.  They’ve got to go where the Jews are.  The Columbus Day School is up there.  It has spread out, but there’s always been a small faction of Reform Jews up around the university area because they are more liberal than the rest of us and not as religious, but they still believe in practicing the Jewish holidays.  We always got together, and we celebrated.  It was another group. When you don’t have family in Columbus, and we didn’t, my kids didn’t.  We moved away, so you don’t have family.  You form your own little group with the people that you find, and you make your family.  This year, for the first time, we moved in three years ago, they never really celebrated any of the Jewish holidays as a group because of COVID and all this other stuff that interfered.  This year I sponsored Break the Fast for all the Jewish residents at Kensington.  About 30 people were invited.  Some were going to family, so they didn’t come.  Everybody who didn’t have family came. We actually celebrated Break the Fast, and it was nice.  They have Services for us.  They have all kinds of activities.  The Rabbi comes once a month and talks to us about some topic of Judaism.  He comes every month, and he entertains as well.  He plays the guitar and sings, secular songs, of course.  I always thought that Cantors were frustrated singers.  We would go for Passover to the Nevele every year when the Catskills were still around.  A lot of the Cantors entertained during that week.

They would come to the various hotels and perform.  They would sing secular songs, opera, and show tunes.  They were all frustrated Broadway actors.  A lot of them couldn’t make it on Broadway, so they became Cantors.  It was a lot of fun.  It was a nice time.  We wore nice evening gowns every night.  My kids grew up with most of their Passovers, until they were 18, were spent in various hotels in the Catskills.  They’re all gone now.  You see pictures of them in books. Most of them became hotels, it’s a shame.  Our honeymoon was at the Concord.  It was a happy time.

Interviewer: Looking at the Columbus Jewish community, are you pretty optimistic about its future?

Kamlet:  I think it’s going to be different.  When we were growing up, families joined congregations so the kids could be Bar and Bat Mitzvah’ed.  As soon as the Bar and Bat Mitzvah happened, and the families were not that religious, memberships dropped, and the families disappeared. A lot of the families stayed.  We’re one of the few families that joined the congregation before kids.  My husband was very strongly Jewish, and we were religious enough because we kept kosher, that we felt that we needed to belong to some place.  Our kids went to school.  It was a different time.  As I said, when I was growing up, we were supposed to stay home.  It was a rare woman that worked, and she worked only if she needed to because her husband died, or there was some reason why.  We were stay-at-home moms.  My mother’s generation played Maj, cards, and things like that.  Our generation volunteered, and we formed a lot of activities.  This was when the Hadassah groups rose, and the B’nai B’rith groups were active.  There were all these groups and things to join.  ORT was very prominent, National Council of Jewish Women.  I was a member of all of them, life member of two or three of them.  You joined them, and you were active, and you volunteered.  You actually went out and you did some work for them.  You had fundraisers.  You did activities overboard.  I volunteered for Hadassah.  My mother-in-law was very involved in Hadassah.  We are a four generation Hadassah group, life members.  My mother-in-law, God love her, was a Founder twice over.  She donated lots of money to Hadassah.  That was her thing.  Their names are on the wall in the hospital in Jerusalem for being Founders.  I was very proud of her for that.  That was one of my goals, someday to become a Founder.  I may or may not do it. It depends on if the kids want the money or not.  It was a different time.  We were volunteers.  It was second nature for us to volunteer.

Interviewer:  You do not see that today?  Are you worried that it’s not happening?

Kamlet: Today is a different kettle of fish.  Today, a lot of mothers are working, some from necessity, some from just because fulfillment.  They feel that they have a higher purpose.  They want to work.  They want to be a productive part of society.  Some mothers, the mothers that do stay home, the mothers that don’t work, usually are involved in activities around their children.  They become mother-centric.  The kids at soccer, the soccer moms are in the school meetings.  They become active in the school program.  My grandson was in the marching band in high school.  My daughter-in-law became a marching band booster.  She’s still raising money for them.  My son got involved in my grandson’s scouting troop.  My grandson is an Eagle Scout.  He’s now 23, but he still goes back and volunteers for scouting.  He’s very active in scouting.  My son is active in scouting.  My son never was involved with scouting as a young kid.  I put my foot down because the parents all wanted me to be the Den Mother and take care of all the kids in the neighborhood.  I said, “Wait a minute, I’ve done this.  It’s everybody’s turn, we should rotate it.  I’ll help, but you need to rotate it.”  None of them stepped forward and volunteered, so we never had a scouting troop.  My son was deprived.  Now he’s very active.  He’s in Pico Rivera.  He’s 54 years old, and he’s running the scouts in his area of California.

Interviewer: Are you saying you’re worried that there is not enough volunteering?

Kamlet:  No, I’m saying volunteering is changing.  They’re volunteering where their kids are.  They’re volunteering for their family, and they’re not, because they’re working, a lot of them don’t have the time to be running the organizations.  A perfect point is our auxiliary at Heritage House.  We had the auxiliary there for many, many years.  I was president of it for two or three.  The last three years of the organization’s intention I was president.  I had to close it down because we couldn’t find anyone to be president.  We could find people that would take a job here or there.  I’ll do this project, but I’m not going to bepresident of the whole thing.  Actually being president was the easiest job because you just delegated everything.  They didn’t feel that way.  They felt that they were the person that was holding it all together, and they couldn’t do it.  They didn’t want the responsibility.

Interviewer: So that organization doesn’t exist anymore?

Kamlet: The auxiliary does not exist as an auxiliary.  That does not mean that people don’t volunteer at Heritage House.  We raised a lot of money, and we put the money in Federation.  Federation is now giving them money that we raised, in increments because we set it up so that, when we would close down the organization, whatever money is left, they’re getting it piecemeal to pay for some programs that we wanted.

Until the money went down, they’re getting that money.  The auxiliary is gone.  There was an auxiliary here for the Jewish War Veterans.  That’s gone, they closed that one went down too.  I closed it down as President, as President of the Department of the State of Ohio for Jewish War Veterans.  Nobody wanted it.  I ran that from about 2008 till 2017, 2018 when I closed it down because nobody wanted to be president.  I was driving to Cleveland four times a year because the Cleveland group had 200 members.  They had an organization.  We had 11 in Columbus that actually stayed with the Jew War Veterans Auxiliary.  That organization is dying out.  A lot of the wives didn’t want to join.  In Cleveland they had this huge, active, group, 200 people.  They couldn’t get a person to be president of the state.

Interviewer: The state group.

Kamlet:  I was president of the state group.  They had the vice-president.  All  the groups and the treasurer, secretary, and everybody were all up in Cleveland.  They did all the work, but I had the title, President.

Interviewer: So you put your finger on a real dilemma that maybe other people haven’t spotted.

Kamlet: It’s an interesting dilemma.  They closed down the Hadassah chapter here because Emily Hinden was the one that was running most of it. She was the one that really would take the presidency until Barry ? went down and said “Enough, you’ve done it so many years, you need to spend time with us.” They had this organization that, and every group has had this problem, they had this organization, but they had nobody that wanted to be president.  They had people that will do little jobs but nobody wanted to be president.  You pay your dues, and there’s a lot of life members that are out there that pay their dues and continue paying their dues forever, but they don’t want to be involved.  They’ll give you money, but they won’t be involved.  What they do now in volunteerism is very interesting.  I think it’s what is going to save us.  What they’re doing is they’re offering you opportunities to volunteer on a one-time basis.  They’ll put a call out to the community and say we need ten volunteers to pack goods for the servicemen overseas.  They’ll get the ten volunteers.  They may even get 20 volunteers.  There will be people that will sign up.  They’ll do a one-time deal, and they’ll bring their children to show them that being a volunteer is important, but they’ll only do it once, and then they’ll do something else.  They may volunteer twice a year, three times a year doing something because they think it’s important, and they think that they need to be involved, but they don’t want to commit their life to going to meetings because meetings can be very boring and very time consuming.  You don’t really accomplish anything.  In my day, when we had meetings, you went out to lunch afterwards, you socialized, it was part of your existence.  It was what gave your life meaning.  You didn’t have jobs.  You didn’t have other things that you were involved in.

Interviewer: Liz, we are talking to you the day after there’s been horrible news in Israel.  War has broken out between the Palestinians.  Hundreds of  people on both sides have died.  Hostages have been taken.  Do you  have any thoughts at all about Israel and your identity as a Jew and  that whole arena?

Kamlet: We’ve been to Israel twice. We took our kids.  My granddaughter went on Birthright Israel.  I have family in Israel.  I haven’t been in touch with them for years.  I’m sure some of them have passed away. I still identify, and I imagine my family still identifies with Israel and the importance of the Jewish state.  We send money.  That just isn’t the same.  The Rabbi’s son is over there.  He’s living there, Rabbi Berman’s son.  Jack Chomsky has moved to Israel.  I’ve been following him on Facebook to see what’s going on, you know, from his perspective. It’s a very scary time.  I think it’s very important that Israel survive.  I think it’s important that we support Israel as we can.  I think that, before it’s over, unfortunately, there will be more deaths and more destruction, but I sincerely hope that Israel survives all this.  There are a lot of countries that are paying lip service, but how much actual help we get, I don’t know.  Israel is strong and they’re resilient.  One of my cousins worked for the Irgun when Israel was first forming.  She was on a kibbutz, and they made the ammunition for the fighters.  They now make Melnor sprinklers to show you how far they’ve come.  The kibbutz is beautiful.  They make lots of money.  They make millions of dollars a year selling the sprinklers.  They’re a resilient group and they will find a way of surviving.  I’m just hoping that there isn’t much more bloodshed.  This morning I read that there were 500 killed and over 4,000 wounded.  How much can you take, I don’t know.  Somehow or other, they will manage to survive. Hopefully God is on our side.

Interviewer: Liz, as we wrap up our interview with you, is there anything that you haven’t been able to say that you think is important for people to  know about your own life, your Jewish identity, or the Columbus Jewish Community as a whole?

Kamlet:  I think there’s hope for the Jewish community.  I think it’s going to be different.  I think that it’ll come full cycle.  Right now, there’s a lot of interest in being Jewish, and there’s still the desire for your kids to have an education and to know their identity.  The Jewish Birthright Israel is a fantastic trip for the kids because it really reaffirms their Judaism, and there’s hope for them.  The parents still send their kids to the Jewish Day Camp.  Ramah gets filled.  My kids went to Ramah.  I think as long as people identify as being Jewish, and still feel that there’s some benefit to being Jewish, you know, just carrying on the traditions.  Kids are learning, they’re getting the traditions from school.  It may be a different look in the community than what we’ve had.  That doesn’t mean that there isn’t the interest or the desire to be Jewish.  I think people tend to get complacent and something like this terrible tragedy in Israel will pull them together for a little bit anyway.  They’ll be working towards a common cause.  It will eventually die down again, and then there will be a lull.  My grandson is at Perdue, and what got me very thrilled was the fact that, his first few weeks at Perdue, he spent a lot of time at Hillel.  He got involved in the group at Hillel.  He was going to Services every Friday night.  He was going to the dinners.  He felt that, if you were going to dinners, you should go to Services as well.  He was one of the few that went to Services and dinner.  He joined a Jewish fraternity.  He joined ZBT.  He’s very impressed with the fact that two of their goals are scholarship and volunteerism of any kind.  He likes that spirit, and he may be a volunteer doing something somewhere.  He says he’s still active in Hillel and he goes to Services, and a lot of his friends go to Services.  He’s living his Jewish life.  I just hope that the kids are doing that.  As long as there are organizations like Hillel
and groups that I know are very active on campus, going after the kids.  That’s the important thing that kids have a feeling about Judaism, and they don’t get it from their parents, they might get it from college with their other friends.  There’s hope.  People have not turned away from Judaism.  They turned away from the organizations.

They don’t feel the need to be affiliated, but they feel they’re Jewish, and they still have some feeling.  There’s hope.

Interviewer: With those words, we’ll end our interview with Liz Kamlet, here at Kensington, on October 8, 2023.  I’m Bill Cohen with the Columbus Jewish Historical Society.

 

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LIZ KAMLET

 

Hello, this is Bill Cohen with the Columbus Jewish Historical Society and we’re here, in the home of Liz Kamlet on Parkview Blvd. in Columbus.  We’re going to interview her about her memories of the Columbus Jewish community and just some general memories of her life.

Interviewer:      Liz, can you start by telling us how far back do your memories go in terms of your parents or your grandparents?  Can you trace your family back somewhat, a generation or two?

Kamlet:              Yes, I can. My father was born in Nashville, Tennessee.  Believe it or not, his father came from the Russian, Polish area.  At one point, Russia and Poland were so close together that, half the time, one city was in Poland and the next time it was in Russia.  My grandparents, all of them on my side, came from the Russian Polish area, not necessarily the same two areas, but they were there.  Both my parents were first generation Americans.  They were both born here.  My mother was born in Rochester, New York.  My father was born in Nashville, Tennessee.  My father’s earliest recollection that he remembers is, when he was eight years old, his mother was struck by a car, and she died, and he was raised by his father.  His mother was my grandfather’s second wife.  She was out of his life when he was very young, and my grandfather raised my father.  He grew up going to school and being raised by a man who owned a grocery store.  My grandfather was a grocer, and he would give food away to the Jewish community or anyone who was hungry, and he would also give them clothing and money.  My father would, many times, go to bed hungry because my grandfather had given away the food.  He would also have hand-me-down clothes because my grandfather didn’t buy him new clothes because he was giving the money to the other people.  When my father grew up, he was, I would like to say he was a clothes horse because he really loved clothes and that, to him, was the greatest gift in the world, to get new clothes, and he loved that.

Interviewer:     Now this is your husband’s grandfather?

Kamlet:             No, my husband’s father.  No, my father’s father.  My father was still in Nashville.  His father was a grocer.

Interviewer:     The grandfather’s name?

 

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Kamlet:            Was Herman Oseff.  There are maybe two families in the United States with that last name, and they don’t spell it the same way we do.

Unfortunately, my father’s only relatives were older than he was, and they didn’t have any children.  A couple of them didn’t marry.  So, as far as I know, there was one Oseff that lives in New York, and he was adopted.  We did connect with him but he’s not a blood relative.  So, that leaves my nephew in Las Vegas as the last surviving relative and his son will carry the name, and that’s Carson, and he’s seven years old right now.

Interviewer:     Do you know anything about other grandparents?

Kamlet:            On my other side, my mother’s parents, my grandmother also owned a grocery store.  My grandfather was a tailor.  They lived in Rochester and moved to Detroit when my mother was out of elementary school.  She went to high school in the Detroit area.  My grandmother ran a grocery store, and my grandfather was a tailor.  They raised six children.  My uncle Hy was killed in WWII.  Two of my other uncles, one birth and one by marriage, were in Germany during WWII.  They both, thank God, survived, and they came home.  One uncle had been in dental school when he was drafted, and he dropped out of dental school when he came back.  He didn’t want to go back for the last year.  So, he ended up working odd jobs, never really found a career that he liked.  He tried different things, but he never really did much.  Then, at age 52 he dropped dead of a heart attack.  My other uncle that was in WWII, my uncle, Harry, he came back and opened a coin laundromat, and his son ended up growing it to a multi-million-dollar business.  He was doing laundry machines at all the universities.  He was at the University of Michigan, I remember, because one of my cousins was going to school at one of the schools where he owned the concession, so he would give them slugs to put in the laundry machine, so they didn’t have to pay.  He never did that for us, but he gave it to my own son.

Interviewer:     Did that laundromat empire, did that start in Michigan?  Where was

the home base?

Kamlet:            He started in Michigan, and he continued in Michigan.  My cousin eventually sold it.  He’s now retired and living very happily in Florida and traveling all over the world.  His brother became a Rabbi, was a Rabbi in upstate New York for most of his life, and he passed

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away.  Richard is still alive. The empire is now sold because neither one of his children wanted it.  My other uncle, my uncle Saul  (Saul Colton), the baby of the family, married into a family that owned a linen supply, and he was made a partner in the linen supply company, along with his brother-in-law, whom he bought out.  He turned that into a multi-million-dollar business.  It’s called Domestic Linen. They have facilities all over the United States.  He wanted one in Washington D.C. so that he could clean up Washington.

Interviewer:     Laughs.  Give us the names of your parents.

Kamlet:            My mother’s name was Sarah Cohen.  Her real name was Sarah Colton.

When my grandfather came over to the United States, the immigration officer could not spell Colton.  My father said he was Jacob Colton.  The guy said, “No, I can’t spell that, you’ll be Jacob Cohen,” and he made him Jacob Cohen, so my grandfather was Jacob Cohen.  My grandmother was Leah, I don’t remember her maiden name.

It’s my sister-in-law’s (name) but I can’t remember it.  She was originally from Rochester though my grandfather’s family went to Canada first and then came into Rochester, and that’s where they met.

They had, as I said, six children.  My mother was the second oldest.  She also was the one that survived the longest.  She died at 88.  She was older than any of her brothers and sisters.  My uncle Harry died of bone marrow cancer at 56.  Six months later his brother died of a heart attack at 52.

Interviewer:     Again, your father was Colton?

Kamlet:            No, my mother was Colton.  She was Cohen.  She was born a Cohen because they couldn’t spell Colton. When my uncles found out about it many years later when my grandfather told them what his real name was, they all changed their name to Colton.  However, my grandfather said he’s been a Cohen for that long, he just stayed that way.  So, in the cemetery his grave is labeled Jacob Cohen, and my grandmother is Leah Cohen and my aunt and my mother kept the Cohen name, but all my uncles became Colton.

Interviewer:     That’s an interesting story because usually the stories we hear about the immigration are that people came over with Jewish names and perhaps, as things got muddled, they became more Americanized names. In your case this is the opposite.

 

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Kamlet:            Yes, my father had a brother who was twice as old as he was.  He has a nephew who is three months older than he is and his name was Stone because he didn’t like the name also, probably couldn’t spell it, so he became Jack Stone.  I don’t even know where they are because there are so many Stones in the United States, and he was twice as old.  My uncle died and my aunt Millie died also so I haven’t kept up with that family.

Interviewer:     When your parents got married, they settled down in what city?

Kamlet:            My parents met in Detroit, and they settled in Detroit except, during WWII, my father did not want to go overseas, and my mother didn’t want him drafted so they moved to California.  My dad worked in the shipyards during WWII.  My aunt Rose came out to California to visit them, and she joined the Marines.

Interviewer:     She joined the Marines?

Kamlet:            She joined the Marines.  She met my uncle Wally in the Marine Corps.

Unfortunately, a little black sheep in their family, she got pregnant before they were married, so they had to get married.  She was kicked out of the Marine Corps because you couldn’t be married and in the Marine Corps.  She was one of the first woman Marines in the United States.

Interviewer:     Wow!  I didn’t think women could join the Marines all the way back then.  Wow!

Kamlet:            During WWII my aunt was a Marine, not for long, but she was a Marine.  My uncle Wally stayed in the Marine Corps during WWII.  Then he got out, and they moved to Detroit to be with the family.  My parents moved back to Detroit because my dad didn’t have to work there anymore.  So, they all moved back to the Detroit area, and the family lived all around my grandparents.  We grew up with all my cousins and aunts and uncles.  You know, we had extended family around.

Interviewer:     You were born what year?

Kamlet:            1941.

Interviewer:     In Detroit or the Detroit area?

Kamlet:            I was born in the Women’s Hospital in Detroit.  I have a twin sister and a brother who was five years younger.  He was born in California because my parents, as I said, moved to California during WWII.  My dad wanted a son, so my mother said: “Okay, we’ll try.  If we have one,

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you get one try. If you’re lucky we get one.  If we don’t, we don’t. “  She had twin daughters and was very content not to have any more children.

Interviewer:     What do you remember of your early years as a child in the Detroit area?

Kamlet:            I remember walking to school.  We lived in a Jewish section near Dexter Davison which is where a lot of Jews grew up.  I remember on all the Jewish holidays we stayed out of school because nobody was there.  Even the Blacks who were in our class stayed out of school on the Jewish holidays.  I remember one year my mother said, “If you’re not going to Services, you’re going to schools.”  So, we went to school, and we were the only ones there.  The teachers had us putting up bulletin boards and reading books.  We had a great time.  We thought it was the greatest thing in the world.  We weren’t doing any work, and it was fun, and we were helping the teachers.  My mother decided that we did not have to go to school to help the teachers so on ,the next Jewish holiday we stayed home but we did not have to go to Services.

Interviewer:     You had the best of both worlds in your mind.

Kamlet:            Absolutely.  My told one story.  She wanted us to have a Jewish education, so she put us in Sunday School at the nearest synagogue, which happened to be Orthodox.  They were very, very strict about Shabbos.  I remember that my mother said that we stood behind her car on Saturday morning and wouldn’t let them drive because we were told it was a sin to drive on Shabbat.  So, we dropped out of the Orthodox congregation at that point.  My mother said, “No more.  Nobody is going to dictate to me how I live my life.”  I do remember, when we were in California, my mother said that she was keeping kosher, and she was going to a kosher butcher in California.  She had very few ration tickets because there’s only the two of them and we were too little that we would qualify for much.  We were between two and five, so we didn’t get much.  She was waiting in line, and it was her turn.  A woman came in with a mink coat and hands dripping with all these ration tickets.  The butcher dropped taking care of my mother and walked over to this woman and started taking care of her, and he was giving her better cut meats than he was giving my mother for the same ration tickets, of course.  My mother got very annoyed, and she

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walked next door to the local A&P and discovered that she could get more food, better quality food, for the less ration tickets, and she became unkosher at that point, and never went back.

Interview:        Fascinating.  So, your mother and father began fairly observant and Orthodox but quickly …

Kamlet:            No.  My mother was raised Orthodox, but remember, she was a woman, and she didn’t get much of an education.  They didn’t send her to school to get the Hebrew stuff.  Her brothers were observant, but she was sort of more modern than the others.  She, of all my family, there was only one brother, the oldest brother, that kept kosher.  The rest of them did not keep kosher.  I remember one story, when we were in Detroit, we were growing up.  My aunt Rose was making ham for dinner.  We were visiting.  My aunt Rose loved us because we were the only girls in the family.  There were three of us that were girls, the three oldest grandchildren were girls.  There was one boy in between us.  My cousin, Marilyn, she didn’t have a girl first, she didn’t have a girl in our family.  What happened was that we were staying for dinner.  She happened to be making ham.  My cousin Larry was also visiting.  His father was the only one that kept kosher.  Larry said, “Can I stay for dinner too.”  Well, my aunt was serving ham and she didn’t feel she should invite him to stay but she couldn’t figure out a way to say no.  So, she said, “Okay, but clear it with your mother first.”  So, he called his mother and said, “Marilyn, Elizabeth and Lenore are staying for dinner, can I stay too?”  My aunt Jo said, “Sure, why not.”  So, he stayed, and he went home, and he told his mother he had the most delicious pink chicken that he’d ever eaten.  It was very interesting.  My aunt said, “What am I supposed to say?  I can’t tell him.  My brother would kill me.”  So, she told him it was pink chicken.  So, my aunt Jo picked up the phone and called my aunt Rose and said, “Can you give me the recipe?  Larry’s been raving about this.”  My aunt said, “I don’t know what to do.”  She said, “I told her that I just used a little bit of this and a little bit of that and I really didn’t write it down, and every time it turns out differently, and I’m sure, but she used barbecue sauce and that turned it pink, and she doesn’t remember some of the other ingredients.  She just used whatever she had at hand.”  That satisfied my aunt Jo, and later on in life, when we were older, we told Larry the truth about the pink chicken.

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Interviewer:     A wonderful story.  Let me ask you, you were growing up in a public school that had a lot of Jews in it, you were saying.  There were obviously some non-Jews there.  How did the Jewish kids get along with the non-Jewish kids?

Kamlet:            It was very interesting.  We were in a neighborhood that was high white collar, low blue collar type, you know, high blue collar, low white collar type of thing.  It was in a middle-class neighborhood, maybe a little bit on the poorer side.  In the more expensive houses were the rich Blacks who had children, doctors, lawyers.  They lived in the ritzier section in our school district.  We went to school with very well-educated Black students, and we got along just beautifully.  I mean, there was no problem at all.  Then the neighborhood changed, as neighborhoods do.  A lower element of Black students moved in.  The kids were a lot rougher and less interested in schooling, less well behaved.  This happened during my junior high year.  That’s when we moved.  We went to junior high in the area where we grew up in, in Detroit proper.  I remember, you know, you were walking down the hallway, and some of the Black students were coming up the stairs behind you, and they would stick pencils up your skirt, try to lift your skirt.  We had swimming so you’d change in the locker room, and the Black girls would be taking pictures of you and selling them to the boys, of you naked.  I mean it was really a different kind of kid that we were not used to, so we all moved.  We moved to the suburbs, and we went to Oak Park.  That was pretty much mostly white.  There were a few black students here and there.  There was not a preponderance of black.  It was 30% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and about 40% Jewish.  Of course, we were outnumbered, but that did not matter.  We ran most of the clubs anyway.

Interviewer:     That’s in high school?  How did the Jews and the non Jews get along there?

Kamlet:            Oh, we were wonderful.  We were so friendly with everybody in high school.  We just kept in touch, one of these things.  The Jews were the intellectuals.  The others were the jocks and the sports people.  There was some intermingling because there were some Jews who participated in sports, mainly track, field.  Very few played football.  Some were cheerleaders.  We ran choir together.  We ran the newspaper together.  We did all kinds of things.  You know, we had a good time.                          7

Interviewer:     This would have been in the mid to late 1950’s?

Kamlet:            50s, we graduated from high school in 1959.

Interviewer:     Did you remember any time when you were a child or teenager, did you experience any obvious antisemitism?

Kamlet:            Not really, I don’t remember any antisemitism at all.  I do remember, there was one student in our class, she was also Jewish, in 6^th grade.

Her mother was so anti-black.  There was prejudice there like you wouldn’t believe.  She wouldn’t let her daughter own a Nat King Cole album, and she loved Nat King Cole, the daughter.  One of the girls in our class invited everybody to her house for the end of the year school party.  She was a beautiful black girl.  Her father was a dentist.  She ended up many years later on the cover of Ebony magazine.  She was absolutely wonderful.  She invited us to her house at the end of the year party.  Well, our friend Marsha’s mother was not going to let her go because she was not having her associate with blacks.  So, she took us, she invited us to go downtown to a movie.  Cinderella had just come out.  She invited us to go see Cinderella on the same day of the party so that Marsha would have company, and she wouldn’t be the only one missing the party.  My mother felt sorry for Marsha so she told us that we could go.  Many years later, she regretted that choice and said that we should have gone to the party, not because any reason that she could think of that we shouldn’t have gone to see Cinderella, because she felt that she was helping foster the prejudice and she didn’t believe in that.

Interviewer:     Marsha’s mother, this was a Jewish family or non Jewish?

Kamlet:            Jewish family.

Interviewer:     A Jewish family was anti-black.

Kamlet:            The mother was anti-black.  I don’t remember the father saying much of anything, but I remember the mother was very strongly anti-black because I remember Marsha really wanted to buy a Nat King Cole album.  We had it and she wanted to buy it but she could’nt because her mother would not let her.  When she did buy it with her own money, she saved her money and she bought it, her mother threw it out.

Interviewer:    Did that family stick out as an exception in the Jewish community?

 

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Kamlet:            As far as I know that was the only family we knew, that we were friendly with, that had that extreme prejudice.  However, later on in life, one of my friends, who I’ve known since first grade, he ate my sister’s crayons, but he denies it, pathetic, or chewed on them anyway.

By-the-way, he teaches math at Middlebury College in Vermont.  He is very well educated.  He’s still teaching at 82 because he’s bound and determined to be the oldest math professor in the building.  There’s one guy ahead of him, he’s a year older, who refuses to retire.  So, he’s sticking it out too.  Going back to the story, we’ve known Mike for years and years and years.  He adopted a little girl who happened to be mulatto.  He brought her home one day to visit his parents.  Now they had, their goal was to have two mulatto children and two of their own because they felt they had something to offer.  My girlfriend, his wife, I’ve known since 7^th grade.  She teaches, or did teach, Russian at Middlebury.  She’s a linguist major.  She spoke Swahili and the Click language, Jewish girl.  They gave her $9100 from the University of Wisconsin and sent her to Kenya to learn the languages, and that was back in the (19)60’s.  That was quite unusual.  So, she’s got her PhD in Linguistics and ended up teaching Russian.

Interviewer:     So, the family that adopted the mulatto children, what happened with                           them?

Kamlet:            They brought the little girl home one day with the son. They had a son too.  The son was the oldest one.  Then they had Abby and they brought them home.  His mother obviously favored the white grandchildren over the mulatto girl.  She sort of neglected her and didn’t pay any attention to her.  Mike pulled his mother aside and said to her, “If you ever want to see us and our children again, you’ll treat Abby with respect and you’ll treat her just like the other children.”  She straightened up and that was the end of that one.

Interviewer:     You graduated high school in the late 1950’s.

Kamlet:            1959.

Interviewer:     What happened then in your life?

Kamlet:            We went to the University of Michigan.  My sister and I were accepted.  We both got scholarships for tuition.  My mother and father said, “Well, we’ll try it for a year because I’m sure we can’t afford to send both of you at the same time.”  We kept those scholarships for tuition, and we went to the University of Michigan for

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four years, or I did.  My sister switched to the University of Illinois because, at that point, the boy she was dating was getting his PhD from Illinois.  She got married in her junior year and she finished her degree at Illinois, and he got his PhD from there.

Interviewer:     Tell us about the Jewish aspect if there is any Jewish aspect in terms of your college years.  Were you in a Sorority?

Kamlet:            Remember, we’re living on a shoestring.  We worked our way through school.  I worked on the switchboard, and I did waitressing just to earn spending money because my parents paid room and board and we had tuition paid.  We would work in the summer to pay for books and clothes and Iany spending money that we had, and then we worked during the year to get spending money.  As far as Jewish aspect goes, I don’t even remember.  I remember going to Services because we lived 45 minutes from campus to home, so we would move to home for Services. We were Reform Jews so we would go to Services.  I think there was a Hillel.  I’m not sure that we ever stepped foot in it, but we’d hang out with a lot of Jewish kids.  A lot of people in my dorm were Jewish and we sort of gravitated towards each other.  I mean I had friends from Boston and New York and all over the place and they were all Jewish and pretty much stayed with the Jewish people on campus.  We had some friends.  I dated a couple boys that weren’t Jewish.  There’s one, I remember, I was a senior in college, and my

girlfriend decided to fix me up with her boyfriend’s friend, but she warned me that he was antisemitic.  Her parents were Jewish, got into a fight with the Rabbi, left Judaism and joined the Unitarian Church.  They decided that they were going to be Unitarian and Jewish be dammed.  Turns out later her brother married a Jewish girl, and she married a Catholic boy, so full spectrum.  In any event she had a last name that sounded Jewish.  It was Sternfeld, and she had all the Jewish mannerisms.  It wasn’t that she wasn’t Jewish, it was just that she was Unitarian.  This boy looked her up on line, checked her credentials, made sure she wasn’t Jewish, and then he asked her out, so she was dating him.  He had a friend coming from another college that was coming to visit him for the weekend.  They were in a fraternity, and he asked her to fix him up.  All her friends that weren’t Jewish were going out with other people. I happened to be free that night, so she asked me if I would go out with him with the understanding that he was antisemetic.  I said, “Okay, but he’d better not say anything in front of me.”  She said, “Please.”  I said, “Okay.”  I went out with him.  All night he told black jokes and Jewish jokes, and I sat there, I didn’t say a word.

Interviewer:     Anti black?

Kamlet:            Anti black, anti Jewish.  I said, I’ll never see him again.  He’s not a bad person.  He’s just an idiot.  At the end of the evening, he drove a sports car, we had a nice time.  The fraternity was nice.  The party was okay.  At the end of the evening he said, “You know, I really had a wonderful time, would you consider going out with me again?”  I said, “Well it’s very kind of you to ask but I think you really should know something because I don’t like hiding under false pretenses, but I happen to be Jewish.  If you still want to go out with me again, let me know.”  I never heard from Mike again. There was no loss.

Interviewer:     Fascinating story.   What happened after college?

Kamlet:            After college, I had one year of teaching.  I was engaged.  At the end of college I graduated, and I came back to go to grad school over the summer so I could get my master’s degree.  I was working on my master’s degree, I was dating my husband, and we got engaged in August before I started my first year of teaching.  So, I was engaged, and we got married in June of my first year.  I was engaged during my first year of teaching, I got married, and I moved to Ann Arbor.  I taught in a farm community where they had never seen a Jew.  One of the kids, one day, kept looking at my head.  I said, “What’s the matter honey?”  She said, “I’m looking for your horns.”

Interviewer:     Oh my, that’s really hard to hear.

Kamlet:            I said, “Well, why?”  She said, “You’ve seen pictures of Jews.  They have horns coming out of their head.”  I had never seen that picture.  I said, “Well, I’m sorry, I don’t have any.”  She said, “Oh, I thought all Jews had horns.”  I said, “Well, they don’t.”  They were very interested in my moods.  They had never met somebody who is Jewish.
They weren’t prejudice, they just didn’t know.  They were all mostly Seventh Day Adventists.  Believe me, that was an interesting religion.

Half of the girls got pregnant by the time they were in 12^th grade because they weren’t allowed to go to parties and do anything, so they would drive around in cars with boys and things happen.

Interviewer:     So,this was, you said, in a rural area in Michigan?

Kamlet:            It was a farming community.  It was called Petersburg, Michigan.

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Interviewer:     Was it far away from Detroit?

Kamlet:            I was in Ann Arbor.  It was 30 miles from Ann Arbor.  I couldn’t get a job in Ann Arbor because they wouldn’t hire student wives because you

would pick up and leave and they wanted permanent teachers, so they wouldn’t hire student wives.  The job I could get was 30 miles away, in Petersburg, Michigan.  There were four of us that got these jobs.  We drove together.  I had an exciting time when I was driving 120 miles an hour and had a blowout going down to school.  I had a convertible.  It was fun, and we lived to tell about it.  A nice truck driver stopped and changed the tire for us.  There were four of us women in the car.

Two of us were married and two were single.

Interviewer:     Did I hear you say you were going 120 miles an hour?

Kamlet:            Yep, in a Ford LTD convertible, my first car, 1964.

Interviewer:     Why were you driving so fast?

Kamlet:            I have no idea.  I wasn’t looking at the speedometer.  I had no idea how fast I was going.  One of the girls told me, afterwards, that’s how fast I was going.

Interviewer:     How did you meet your husband?

Kamlet:            We met at the University of Michigan.  My girlfriend introduced us.  She’d met him in her studies.  We were at the university, it was the night we were graduating from college, and she was invited to this party.  She was dating this boy she called “boring Bob.”  He wasn’t Jewish.  She said he’s having this party, and I was staying with her.

She said, “Come with me.”  I said, “I don’t really want to go.”  She said, “I’ll get you a date.”  I said, “Alright.”  She introduced me to Artie.  He ignored me most of the evening.  He was talking to this girl all evening about math problems. They were involved in a math thing that they were talking about.  I thought God, save me from this one.  This guy imagined himself to be very liberal, and he invited four African males to his party.  I mean African from Africa.  I don’t mean African males.

There were no girls there for them to dance with.  Artie was ignoring me, so they kept asking me to dance.  While I didn’t mind dancing with them, I just thought this is the most stupid thing I’m doing, you know.  I’m graduating the next day.  Why am I bothering with this.  I looked at my friend Harriet and said, “No, no, no, this is not what I want to do.”  I said, “Never mind, I’m going to go to the library and do some research because I was talking to a friend of mine who got into an

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argument, and I was going to go look something up to prove I was right.”  I went to the library.  Artie took me.  We started talking, and he said, “When you come back for the summer to go to summer school, call me.”  I called. We started dating, and at the end of the summer, we were engaged to be married.

Interviewer:     Your husband’s name is?

Kamlet:            Arthur Kamlet.

Interviewer:     Arthur.

Kamlet:            Right.  I call him Artie.  Everybody else calls him Arthur.  I knew him, when he was an Artie.

Interviewer:     How did you wind up here in Columbus?

Kamlet:             He worked for Bell Labs, and Bell Labs was here.  He was in the military.  In college, he went to Wooster Polytech, got a degree in Electrical Engineering.  While at Wooster Tech they required him to go into ROTC for two years.  He was in ROTC, and he did very well.  He was getting 100s in all the classes.  He was very bright.  They loved him.  He was Captain of the Persian Rifles.  He did very, very well, so they convinced him that he could have a career in the military.  He signed up.  Then he decided he wanted a PhD, so he came to Michigan to get his PhD.  The Army said, “Okay, we’ll wait till you get your PhD. “ When he got to Michigan, he decided he didn’t really like Electrical Engineering and switched fields.  He went into Engineering Psychology which is now called Human Factors Engineers in many schools, but Michigan called it Engineering Psychology, and they taught it in the Psych Department.  He switched careers.  He’d never taken a Psych course in his life, and that led to a PhD in Psychology.  He took a couple Psych courses.  He got an A in one and a B+ in the other.  They said, “Okay, you can stay.”  He was teaching freshman Psychology when he was in Grad school, and he’d never had a freshman Psych course in his life, and he’s teaching this thing.  He had this degree, and he was pulled into the Army.  We spent two years in Maryland defending the source of the Potomic from the Vietnamese invasion.  He was very happy where we were.

Interviewer:      He didn’t have to go to Vietnam?

Kamlet:             He got lucky.  His degree was in Electrical Engineering, so they were going to send him to Fort Gordon and send him overseas to set up electrical systems.  He said, “But I’m a PhD Psychologist.”  So, they

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were going to put him in the Medical Service Corps because they used psychologists to do psychological testing.  But, he was a Scientific

Psychologist.  He was not what he called a Freud Psychologist.  He

was not interested in anything that he called mumbo jumbo.  He said this was not real science.  I’m a Guidance Counselor and I do the real mumbo jumbo.  He said, “It’s just crap.”  So, I said, “Well, I understand all that, but you’re stuck with it.”  He said, “Well, he didn’t want to do that.” So, he found a lab in Baltimore, Maryland, well at Aberdeen Proving Ground, that was doing the same kind of psychology he was, Engineering Psychology.  He went back to this lab, in Leonia,  at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.  They had slots open for two officers that were in the Medical Service Corps.  So, he got into the Medical Service Corps.  They had one opening, and they took him immediately because he was getting his PhD, and he was just what they needed.  They were doing the same research that he was doing for his thesis, at the lab.  So, they were doing the same work.  They pulled him over, and he spent two years doing what he loved.

 

Interviewer:      Would this have been in the late 1960s?

Kamlet:             That was (19)67 to 69.

Interviewer:      The Vietnam War was really boiling over, but he didn’t wind up having to go overseas.

Kamlet:             No, because he was in the Medical Service Corps, we met a lot of officers that were doctors and medical service technicians, and they had been to Vietnam.  In fact, one of my friends in the Army was, her husband had just come back from Vietnam.  They were at Aberdeen as well.

Interviewer:      So, Jews in the military were already a small group, 2 or 3% of the population, very small in the military.  What was that like, being Jewish?

Kamlet:             No, he was in the Medical Service Corps.  We hung out with Jewish doctors.  We didn’t hang out with the same people.  In fact, my son’s bris, my second son was born in the Army.  My second son’s Bris was at the chapel at Aberdeen Proving Ground because that’s where all the Jews were, on the base, so we could get to them.  Most of our friends were doctors, and they were the ones that came to the Bris.  We had a Mohel come in and do the Bris even though any one of the

 

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doctors could have done it.  They said, “No, the Mohel does it better, so we’ll watch.”  They all came, and we had his Bris.  We had it on the Bema actually is where they actually performed the Bris, and we were sitting in the back of the room, the women.  My family came in from all over.  They had the Bris on the base.  Both my sons were born on Saturday.  One son had his Bris on a Saturday because I could bring him in to the Detroit area where the Mohel lived, about a mile from my sister, and he was willing to walk, so we did it at my sister’s house.  The other one, we had to wait till Sunday because the Mohel was busy on Saturday.  He wasn’t going to drive to Aberdeen Proving Ground from Baltimore, so we waited till Sunday to do the Bris.

Interviewer:      So, you associated some with the Jewish doctors and the Jewish professionals in the military.

Kamlet:             One of my best friends, her husband was a doctor.  She had six kids, and she would have had 12 if she could.  She ended up, I think, with seven.  All those kids were well behaved, and they all had chores, and they were amazing.  Yes, we associated with Jewish doctors, and most of my friends on base happened to be Jewish because, you know, you find your little group and go with them.  I remember one story.  I took my son to the Pediatrician on base.  A lot of the women took their children off base to private doctors, but I took my kids to the base doctors.  I walked in and I signed in.  You have to put your husband’s rank.  I put down his rank, and I sat down.  Two seconds later, I’m called.  The waiting room was filled with people, and they’re calling me.  I went up and I said, “What’s going on?”  They said, “Well, honey you’re a Captain’s wife, you get taken first.”  I looked at them and I said, “That’s very interesting, but my son is not a Captain.  I am not a Captain.  These people have been waiting longer.  Would you please take one of them first, I would feel so much better.”  They did.  I didn’t like the ranking.  I thought it was ridiculous.  Fine, it’s okay, because your husband’s a Captain, that you get services, that’s wonderful, but that shouldn’t put you at the head of the line because he’s important, you’re not.

Interviewer:      Again, the question of how did the Jews get along with non-Jews at that point?

Kamlet:             Absolutely there was no problem.  Some of my husband’s friends were non-Jewish.  His boss was non-Jewish.  We hung out with him.  They

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had a pet skunk, and it was interesting.  We never had a problem.  The Jews on base were very kind.  They took all the Christian holidays as officers so that the Christian officers could have the days off, rather than being Officer of the Day.  Art ended up being Officer of the Day on the Sunday before Easter when Martin Luther King was shot.  He was on the base, and he was the Officer of the Day.  He was getting calls all day from Baltimore.  We knew nothing of what was going on.  He was getting calls.  They were asking for the pot helmets.  They were asking for soldiers to come in to work.  He was relaying messages back and forth.  Everybody kept saying, “What do they need them for?  What’s going on?”  He couldn’t answer because nobody told him.  Later on they found out.  Baltimore was under quarantine.  You wouldn’t want to travel after a certain time.  Soldiers were calling in saying, “I can’t get back because they’re not letting me travel.  What am I going to do?”  Art said, “I don’t know,” and he called to find out.  They said, “Tell them to get here as soon as they can.”

Interviewer:      You’re talking about the violence that erupted in all the major cities after Martin Luther King was killed.

Kamlet:             Yeah, in fact they came and got pot helmets, you know, the pot sticker helmets, the metal helmets that they wore, and they never returned them. They lied.  The police called and said that they were so and so.  They were a recruiting officer, in Baltimore, and they needed pot stickers.  Could they spare them?  The Quartermaster said, “Sure, we can give you some.”  So, they met a police car in the middle of the highway, on the way to Baltimore, and they gave them the pot stickers.   One day they called Artie out of the blue and said, “You know you were Officer of the day, on this day, and we never got the helmets back.  What can you tell us?”  He said, “Well, I turned it over to the Quartermaster, and that’s all I know.”  They said, “Oh, Okay.”  They never got them back.

Interviewer:      You started that story.  I want to make sure I understand correctly, by saying that the Jewish officers, when there was a Christian holiday, the Jewish officers volunteered to work in place of the Christian officers so the Christian officers could celebrate their holiday.

Kamlet:             Right.  That’s why he was working on the Sunday before Easter.  They would take the Jewish holidays in return, like, Rosh Hashanah and

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Yom Kippur, the Jewish holidays we would have off.  It was just common courtesy.

Interviewer:      So that was the late 1960s.  You were in the military then.

Kamlet:             That was 1969.

Interviewer:      How did you wind up in Columbus, when that happen?

Kamlet:             From the military we went to New Jersey.  Artie worked in the Morristown area.  He worked for Bell Labs.  He had a job with them.  He was working on some government missiles and some of the

other military programs that they had at the time.  Bell Labs decided to get out of the military business.  They decided that they were no longer going to associate with the military and do military work, that they were going to do more humanitarian work and whatever they were doing to help the phone company as well.  They dropped all military programs, and his program was stationed in New Jersey, near Morristown, and he said, “Well, I guess we’re going to move.”  They gave us a choice of somewhere in the Chicago area or Columbus.  Columbus was closer to where my parents lived in Michigan, so we decided we lived in New Jersey near his parents in New York, and moved to Columbus and lived near my parents so that we could see them on weekends and then spend longer vacations with his parents. That’s how we used to work it.  We’d spend weekends with his parents, and then we’d spend, like a week, with my parents because it took us longer to get there, something like that.  So, for equal opportunity, we decided to move to Columbus, and he was able to find a job here.  He liked the Columbus area.  He’d come here as a telephone person and been a telephone repairman for a week, climbed telephone poles and learned what the telephone company does.  Then he went back to New Jersey and did his thing.  He liked the Columbus area.  He’d gone to the Christopher Inn, if you remember that, and they sent him one night to the Kahiki.  They told them to take cabs there and they got them the mystery drink and all, very happy when they left.  Let’s put it that way.

Interviewer:      Where did you live when you moved to the Columbus area?

Kamlet:             We lived in Greenbriar.

Interviewer:      Greenbriar, tell us where that is.

Kamlet:             It’s right down the street from Temple Israel.  We lived in Greenbriar Farms.

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Interviewer:      Oh, on the far east side.

Kamlet:             On the far east side, off of Broad Street.  It isn’t so far east anymore, but yes.  We lived off of Noe Bixby on a little street called Naiche.  Across the street from us was a horse farm.  That did not last.  The Torah Academy is out there too.  Temple Israel was on the corner, which is now a Bahai Temple.  We could walk to Temple Israel, but we joined Tifereth Israel because we were Conservative.

Interviewer:      This would have been, your move was sometime in the 1970s.

Kamlet:             1976, we moved here, so I guess I’ve lived in Columbus longer than anyplace.  I’ve lived here 47 years.  We never moved.  I thought we were going to move.  I was greeted by one of my neighbors across the street whose husband also worked for Bell Labs, and she said, “Well, the rumor is we’ll be moving to Indian Hills in five years, so enjoy it while you can.”  I said, “Fine, I’ll wait and see.  I don’t mind moving. I’ve been moving every two years or so now because we went from college to the military, and then to New Jersey, and we were in New Jersey for seven years.” I thought that was long.

Interviewer:      You have children?

Kamlet:             I have two boys.

Interviewer:      Did they kind of grow up in temple Tifereth Israel?

Kamlet:             They grew up in Tifereth Israel.  A lot of their friends were at Temple Israel because of the area where we lived.  When we moved into the neighborhood, we were adopted by six or seven families.  We had a pool, and we had people over.  When we first moved, we moved in May because we wanted the kids to be in school a little bit before the school let out so they’d meet some kids, so they wouldn’t be all alone in the neighborhood.  As it turns out, the neighborhood disappears at the end of school.  I don’t know where the kids went.  We put our kids in the Jewish Day Camp immediately.  They went to JCC for six or seven years and they loved it.  They learned how to swim.  We had a pool, but they never learned how to swim, and they did.  Art said, for them to be able to swim in the pool by themselves, they had to be able to swim two or three lengths of the pool by themselves, safely, before he would let them swim on their own.  They did dog paddling, but they did it.  They were better swimmers than I was.  They loved the pool.

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Interviewer:      Any memories that you have of the (19)70s, 80s, and 90s in terms of the Jewish Center, or Tifereth Israel, or other Jewish institutions?

Kamlet:             Tifereth Israel was the hub.  Our first experience with Tifereth Israel was interesting because we went to Services and found, you know, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur.  We were coming home on the first day of Rosh Hashanah and we were in a five-car car accident.  Somebody hit us from behind.  Behind us were also members of Tifereth Israel that we had never met.  You’re standing outside waiting for the police to come, you get to meet people.  The car directly behind us was the Epsteins, Janet and Michael Epstein.  Janet was the school librarian where my kids went to school.  I never met her.  I met her and I volunteered to work in the library when I was talking to her then.  I came in one day and, before I knew it, I’m teaching a class at the elementary school.  I was a teacher, but I was not certified in Ohio.  I was certified, I had a permanent certificate from the state of Michigan, but I was not an Ohio licensed teacher.  The principal asked me if I could teach a math class. I said, “Sure, what kind of math, what are you talking about.”  He said, “Well, our math scores at Old Orchard are high in 4^th grade and 6^th grade.  In 5^th grade they drop.  We don’t know why, so we’re thinking that maybe you should teach a gifted class, 5^th grade math kids and keep their scores up so that our scores will look better.”   I said, “Fine, but get me statistics.  Tell me what they’re lacking, what they need to learn.”  While he was doing that, he decided he couldn’t get that, so maybe I should teach science because science was a subject that most of the teachers did not teach.  You taught six or seven subjects.  When it came to science, most of the teachers said, “Well, we’ll put it at the end of the day.  If we get to it, fine.  If we don’t get to it, we’ll do it another day.”  They pretty much did it another day.  He decided that it would be a good idea if somebody came in and taught science to gifted kids so they would have some science background.  He was always looking for kids, for volunteers to teach classes for the gifted.  They now had Special Ed classes, the LD and the DH classes at Old Orchard, but they didn’t have, and they had gifted classes.  They were pulling them out for Great Books reading.  They were pulling them out for a typing class.  They were pulling them out for all kinds of extra things that he thought they would need.  I looked at him and

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I said, “You know, Harry, this is not what you should be doing.  The thing is, what you’re doing is not allowing the teachers to teach a full class.  You keep pulling the kids out, and you’re taking their better ones, and you’re leaving them with the other ones, but you’re not giving them any help or support. So, if you really want me to teach science, I will teach the whole class science, not just the gifted, not the lower end, but the whole class, and let them all benefit from it.  He said, “Let me talk to the teachers.”  Of course, the teachers that he asked all jumped on it because they were getting a break.  They didn’t have to teach science and they were actually getting a class period free where somebody else was going to be teaching, and they didn’t have to be in the classroom if they didn’t want to be, because I was a certified teacher, not necessarily in Ohio, but I was a certified teacher.  I had two or three classes and I taught science the first year.  One of them was my son’s class, and we made a deal.  I told the kids, you know, that Michael would probably call me mom and they’d deal with it, and there would be no special privileges, and they were all fine with it.  We had a great time, and I taught science the first year.  The second year, when they asked me back, I had the whole school, the LD classes.  All the teachers wanted me to do science, so I was teaching five days a week.  I had my own classroom.  The only thing I wasn’t getting was paid.

Interviewer:      You weren’t getting paid at all?

Kamlet:             No, they couldn’t pay me.  It was volunteer.  I was teaching five days a week.  I would take my kids out to lunch, it was costing me money, but I was having a ball.  The kids loved it.  The teachers loved it.  I did this for four years.  I will tell you the funny part about it. One of the science teachers at Yorktown, the school where my kids were transferred to.  After they finished Old Orchard, my kids would go to Yorktown.

Interviewer:      Yorktown was a middle school or junior high?

Kamlet:             It was a middle school.  They came to middle school when my older son was 7^th grade.  They switched from junior high to middle school.  They started taking 6^th graders.  The thing with my kids that was interesting is that the science teacher said to me one day, “I know which kid came from Old Orchard.”  I said, “How do you know?”  She said, “They know science and they love it.  You were a great teacher.

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The kids love science, and they are very interested in what I have to say. Can you give me some suggestions for activities I can do with them?”  I gave her a few, and she did it, and she loved them.  It was a fun thing to do.  I had her take a walnut shell, have them fill it with as many things as they could, you know, one of everything, but they couldn’t use more than three spices because you could only put a little bit of each one in there.  If they put in two drops of salt, two drops of thyme, you can really fill it up with all the spices, but you have to limit to what they can do.  They put in a speck of dust, very ingenious things, a piece of bread.  Some of the kids got 100 things in a little walnut shell, half a walnut shell.  They thought it was fun.

Interviewer:      What happened after that very successful stint as a science teacher?

Kamlet:             I got the Mayors Award for volunteerism.  One of my friends nominated me for that.  She thought I did above and beyond.  When my younger son finished elementary school, I have a story about that one too.  My young one finished elementary school and went into junior high.  I decided at that point I should really get paid for what I was doing, so I became a substitute teacher because my kids were older, and I felt I could leave them.  I didn’t have to be in the same building with them, know what they were up to.  If they were sick, I could stay home.  I didn’t have to take a job that day.  So, I taught until they graduated high school.  I was PTA President.  I did other things too, but I was, you know, a volunteer mommy.  What you have to understand is, when I was growing up, most mothers stayed home.  They were stay-at-home mommies.  It was very rare that a parent worked.  My mother worked, but most parents stayed home.  We had a different kind of childhood, an upbringing where mproost of the parents were around.  We’d come home, we’d drop our books off at home, run out and play till it got dark.  Then we’d go home and do homework and everything else.  We had an ideal childhood.  We played a lot of baseball, a lot of sports outside, had a great time.  Our parents, some of them played Maj, but most of them would stay at home.  They didn’t really volunteer.  They were PTA Presidents or PTA things.  That was probably standard, room mothers and that kind of thing.  When my generation came around, we were still stay-at-home moms.  Kids were told, girls were told that there were two professions you go into, nursing or teaching.  Teaching because you

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could be home with the kids.  Nursing because you could arrange your hours so you could work around the kid’s schedule.  Those were the two.  So, most women did not venture into anything like college professor or dentist, doctors, nothing like architecture.  One of my friends wanted to be an architect, and she was discouraged, They said, you know, teach.  Turned out she ended up teaching math at Mt. Holyoke for her career, very well respected mathematician.  She’s very well known.  I went over there one day and found out she was very bright, but I knew that.  She wanted to be an architect, and they told her that it involved art and math.  She was all excited.  She loved math. Turns out that architecture is not math.  It’s plugging numbers into formulas.  When, she found that out, she switched and became a mathematician and never bothered with architecture.  Then she ended up teaching at Mt. Holyoke.  Her husband taught at New Mass Amherst.  She’s the one that introduced me to Art.  Back to my story.

Interviewer:      You were saying women were discouraged from….

Kamlet:             Absolutely.  We were discouraged from any profession other than teaching and nursing, and I didn’t want to empty bedpans.  I said, point blankly, I would not empty bedpans.  They said, “Does that mean you won’t marry a doctor?”  I said I could live with that.  That was the end of that.  I did marry a doctor, but it was a PhD.  So, I got my doctor.  So, they were wrong. (Laughs)  It was funny,.

Interviewer:      Let me ask you about maybe other Jewish institutions that you liked, frequented over the many decades, Martin’s Foods.

Kamlet:             Martins, I kept kosher all the way through until we moved here, to Kensington.  I kept kosher in my house, not out, because my parents, I told you my mother gave up being kosher when she discovered rationing.  I was never raised kosher. I would eat all the wonderful things in life like lobster and shrimp and crab.  I once tried frog legs, which was very interesting.  My cousins were eating frog legs on day, and said, “Here, try some.”  They tasted like chicken, and I actually thought that the frog legs were pieces of chicken shaped like frog legs, and that they called them frog legs because that was the way it looked.  One day my cousin said, “No, they’re real frog legs.”  I said, “Oops,” and I never ate another one again.  I was an adventurous eater, but not really.  My son eats bison and all kinds of wonderful   things like that, but I won’t.  He tried rattlesnake. He’s adventuresome.                         22

My other son is a gourmet.  He spends $500 at a restaurant to try out all these wonderful foods, not for me, $500 is too much to spend on food.

Interviewer:      You returned to keeping kosher as an adult?

Kamlet:             My husband was kosher.  My husband was raised Orthodox.  My in-laws were lovely people and treated me like a daughter, who raised me right, asked me if I wouldn’t mind keeping kosher so they could eat at my house.  I said, “No problem.  I can do that.”  From the time I was 23 till I turned 81 or 80, I kept kosher.  We did all the holidays, did everything by the book.  In fact, it was really hard for me not to give up some of that stuff.  When I came here, you know, it’s not a Jewish facility.  I asked Artie if he wanted to move to Creekside.  He said no, so we moved here.  He liked it here.  I told him that we would not keep kosher here because I couldn’t.  He didn’t have a problem with it.

Interviewer:      You’re here at Kensington which has some Jews, but it’s a mixture of

Christians and Jews.

Kamlet:             It was the way I was brought up.  I haven’t seen any prejudice here towards Jews or anything else.  All the people are lovely, and everybody gets along.

Interviewer:      You mentioned keeping kosher for a few decades now as an adult, so you were over at Martin’s Kosher Foods.

Kamlet:             I was at Martins.  When Irv started, we went to Irv when he had his little kosher store until he passed away.  Then I was at kosher Krogers.  I never ordered food from Cleveland or Cincinnati like some of the other Jewish families did because I felt that, if we didn’t support the ones that were here, it would dry up and then there wouldn’t be one in town.  You need them in emergencies.  I always thought we should have had a kosher butcher.  I’m sorry that they really don’t now.

Interviewer:      You started out on what was Columbus’s far east side, but you’ve been here now three, four decades.  You’ve seen the Jewish community which used to be just on the east side, Bexley, Berwick, Eastmoor.  You’ve seen it scatter now.

Kamlet:             There was a group that was up north from the very beginning.  There was a whole bunch of university professors up there.  They were up in Upper Arlington and Worthington, and some, a few, in Westerville.

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In fact, there was an organization called the, it was a Jewish west side Worthington Jewish couples’ group that met once a month.  They celebrated all the Jewish holidays together.  We lived on the east side, but we were allowed to join the group.  We hung around with some of the college professors up there and socialized with them.  They were a lovely group, and we celebrated the Jewish holidays together.  There was a group of young Jewish people up there.  The Jewish Center did move up to the New Albany area because there were Jews there.  They’ve got to go where the Jews are.  The Columbus Day School is up there.  It has spread out, but there’s always been a small faction of Reform Jews up around the university area because they are more liberal than the rest of us and not as religious, but they still believe in practicing the Jewish holidays.  We always got together, and we celebrated.  It was another group. When you don’t have family in Columbus, and we didn’t, my kids didn’t.  We

moved away, so you don’t have family.  You form your own little group with the people that you find, and you make your family.  This year, for the first time, we moved in three years ago, they never really celebrated any of the Jewish holidays as a group because of Covid and all this other stuff that interfered.  This year I sponsored Break the Fast for all the Jewish residents at Kensington.  About 30 people were invited.  Some were going to family, so they didn’t come.  Everybody who didn’t have family came. We actually celebrated Break the Fast, and it was nice.  They have Services for us.  They have all kinds of activities.  The Rabbi comes once a month and talks to us about some topic of Judaism.  He comes every month, and he entertains as well.  He plays the guitar and sings, secular songs, of course.  I always thought that Cantors were frustrated singers.  We would go for Passover to the Nevele every year when the Catskills were still around.  A lot of the Cantors entertained during that week.

They would come to the various hotels and perform.  They would sing secular songs, opera, and show tunes.  They were all frustrated Broadway actors.  A lot of them couldn’t make it on Broadway, so they became Cantors.  It was a lot of fun.  It was a nice time.  We wore nice evening gowns every night.  My kids grew up with most of their Passovers, until they were 18, were spent in various hotels in the Catskills.  They’re all gone now.  You see pictures of them in books.

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Most of them became hotels, it’s a shame.  Our honeymoon was at the Concord.  It was a happy time.

Interviewer:      Looking at the Columbus Jewish community, are you pretty optimistic about its future?

Kamlet:             I think it’s going to be different.  When we were growing up, families joined congregations so the kids could be Bar and Bat Mitzvahed.  As soon as the Bar and Bat Mitzvah happened, and the families were not that religious, memberships dropped, and the families disappeared. A lot of the families stayed.  We’re one of the few families that joined the congregation before kids.  My husband was very strongly Jewish, and we were religious enough because we kept kosher, that we felt that we needed to belong to some place.  Our kids went to school.  It was a different time.  As I said, when I was growing up, we were supposed to stay home.  It was a rare woman that worked, and she worked only if she needed to because her husband died, or there was some reason why.  We were stay-at-home moms.  My mother’s generation played Maj, cards, and things like that.  Our generation volunteered, and we formed a lot of activities.  This was when the Hadassah groups rose, and the B’nai B’rith groups were active.  There were all these groups and things to join.  ORT was very prominent, National Council of Jewish Women.  I was a member of all of them, life member of two or three of them.  You joined them, and you were active, and you volunteered.  You actually went out and you did some work for them.  You had fund raisers.  You did activities overboard.  I volunteered for Hadassah.  My mother-in-law was very involved in Hadassah.  We are a four generation Hadassah group, life members.  My mother-in-law, God love her, was a Founder twice over.  She donated lots of money to Hadassah.  That was her thing.  Their names are on the wall in the hospital in Jerusalem for being Founders.  I was very proud of her for that.  That was one of my goals, someday to become a Founder.  I may or may not do it. It depends on if the kids want the money or not.  It was a different time.  We were volunteers.  It was second nature for us to volunteer.

Interviewer:    You do not see that today?  Are you worried that it’s not happening?

Kamlet:            Today is a different kettle of fish.  Today, a lot of mothers are working, some from necessity, some from just because fulfillment.  They feel that they have a higher purpose.  They want to work.  They

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want to be a productive part of society.  Some mothers, the mothers that do stay home, the mothers that don’t work, usually are involved in activities around their children.  They become mother-centric.  The kids at soccer, the soccer moms are in the school meetings.  They become active in the school program.  My grandson was in the marching band in high school.  My daughter-in-law became a marching band booster.  She’s still raising money for them.  My son got involved in my grandson’s scouting troop.  My grandson is an Eagle Scout.  He’s now 23, but he still goes back and volunteers for scouting.  He’s very active in scouting.  My son is active in scouting.  My son never was involved with scouting as a young kid.  I put my foot down because the parents all wanted me to be the Den Mother and take care of all the kids in the neighborhood.  I said, “Wait a minute, I’ve done this.  It’s everybody’s turn, we should rotate it.  I’ll help, but you need to rotate it.”  None of them stepped forward and volunteered, so we never had a scouting troop.  My son was deprived.  Now he’s very active.  He’s in Pico Rivera.  He’s 54 years old, and he’s running the scouts in his area of California.

Interviewer:     Are you saying you’re worried that there is not enough volunteering?

Kamlet:            No, I’m saying volunteering is changing.  They’re volunteering where their kids are.  They’re volunteering for their family, and they’re not, because they’re working, a lot of them don’t have the time to be running the organizations.  A perfect point is our auxiliary at Heritage House.  We had the auxiliary there for many, many years.  I was President of it for two or three.  The last three years of the organization’s intention I was President.  I had to close it down because we couldn’t find anyone to be President.  We could find people that would take a job here or there.  I’ll do this project, but I’m not going to be President of the whole thing.  Actually being President was the easiest job because you just delegated everything.  They didn’t feel that way.  They felt that they were the person that was holding it all together, and they couldn’t do it.  They didn’t want the responsibility.

Interviewer:     So that organization doesn’t exist anymore?

Kamlet:            The auxiliary does not exist as an auxiliary.  That does not mean that people don’t volunteer at Heritage House.  We raised a lot of money, and we put the money in Federation.  Federation is now giving

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them money that we raised, in increments because we set it up so that, when we would close down the organization, whatever money is left, they’re getting it piecemeal to pay for some programs that we wanted.

Until the money went down, they’re getting that money.  The auxiliary is gone.  There was an auxiliary here for the Jewish War Veterans.  That’s gone, they closed that one went down too.  I closed it down as President, as President of the Department of the State of Ohio for Jewish War Veterans.  Nobody wanted it.  I ran that from about 2008 till 2017, 2018 when I closed it down because nobody wanted to be President.  I was driving to Cleveland four times a year because the Cleveland group had 200 members.  They had an organization.  We had 11 in Columbus that actually stayed with the Jew War Veterans Auxiliary.  That organization is dying out.  A lot of the wives didn’t want to join.  In Cleveland they had this huge, active, group, 200 people.  They couldn’t get a person to be President of the state.

Interviewer:    The state group.

Kamlet:             I was President of the state group.  They had the Vice-President.  All                    the groups and the Treasurer, Secretary, and everybody were all up in

Cleveland.  They did all the work, but I had the title, President.

Interviewer:     So you put your finger on a real dilemma that maybe other people           haven’t spotted.

Kamlet:             It’s an interesting dilemma.  They closed down the Hadassah chapter                     here because Emily Hinden was the one that was running most of it.

She was the one that really would take the presidency until Barry ? went down and said “Enough, you’ve done it so many years, you need to spend time with us.” They had this organization that, and every group has had this problem, they had this organization, but they had nobody that wanted to be President.  They had people that will do little jobs but nobody wanted to be President.  You pay your dues, and there’s a lot of life members that are out there that pay their dues and continue paying their dues forever, but they don’t want to be involved.  They’ll give you money, but they won’t be involved.  What they do now in volunteerism is very interesting.  I think it’s what is going to save us.  What they’re doing is they’re offering you opportunities to volunteer on a one-time basis.  They’ll put a call out to the community and say we need ten volunteers to pack goods for the servicemen overseas.  They’ll get the ten volunteers.  They may even get twenty

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volunteers.  There will be people that will sign up.  They’ll do a one-time deal, and they’ll bring their children to show them that being a volunteer is important, but they’ll only do it once, and then they’ll do something else.  They may volunteer twice a year, three times a year doing something because they think it’s important, and they think that they need to be involved, but they don’t want to commit their life to going to meetings because meetings can be very boring and very time consuming.  You don’t really accomplish anything.  In my day, when we had meetings, you went out to lunch afterwards, you socialized, it was part of your existence.  It was what gave your life meaning.  You didn’t have jobs.  You didn’t have other things that you were involved in.

In   Interviewer:        Liz, we are talking to you the day after there’s been horrible news in                      Israel.  War has broken out between the Palestinians.  Hundreds of                      people on both sides have died.  Hostages have been taken.  Do you                    have any thoughts at all about Israel and your identity as a Jew and                 that whole arena?

Kamlet:             We’ve been to Israel twice. We took our kids.  My granddaughter went on Birthright Israel.  I have family in Israel.  I haven’t been in touch with them for years.  I’m sure some of them have passed away. I still identify, and I imagine my family still identifies with Israel and the importance of the Jewish state.  We send money.  That just isn’t the same.  The Rabbi’s son is over there.  He’s living there, Rabbi Berman’s son.  Jack Chomsky has moved to Israel.  I’ve been following him on Face Book to see what’s going on, you know, from his perspective. It’s a very scary time.  I think it’s very important that Israel survive.  I think it’s important that we support Israel as we can.  I think that, before it’s over, unfortunately, there will be more deaths and more destruction, but I sincerely hope that Israel survives all this.  There are a lot of countries that are paying lip service, but how much actual help we get, I don’t know.  Israel is strong and they’re resilient.  One of my cousins worked for the Irgun when Israel was first forming.  She was on a kibbutz, and they made the ammunition for the fighters.  They now make Melnor sprinklers to show you how far they’ve come.  The kibbutz is beautiful.  They make lots of money.  They make millions of dollars a year selling the sprinklers.  They’re a resilient group and they will find a way of

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surviving.  I’m just hoping that there isn’t much more bloodshed.  This morning I read that there were 500 killed and over 4,000 wounded.  How much can you take, I don’t know.  Somehow or other, they will manage to survive.   Hopefully God is on our side.

Interviewer:      Liz, as we wrap up our interview with you, is there anything that you                   haven’t been able to say that you think is important for people to                             know about your own life, your Jewish identity, or the Columbus                           Jewish Community as a whole?

Kamlet:             I think there’s hope for the Jewish community.  I think it’s going to     be different.  I think that it’ll come full cycle.  Right now, there’s a lot       of interest in being Jewish, and there’s still the desire for your kids   to have an education and to know their identity.  The Jewish

Birthright Israel is a fantastic trip for the kids because it really reaffirms their Judaism, and there’s hope for them.  The parents still send their kids to the Jewish Day Camp.  Ramah gets filled.  My kids went to Ramah.  I think as long as people identify as being Jewish, and still feel that there’s some benefit to being Jewish, you know, just carrying on the traditions.  Kids are learning, they’re getting the traditions from school.  It may be a different look in the community than what we’ve had.  That doesn’t mean that there isn’t the interest or the desire to be Jewish.  I think people tend to get complacent and something like this terrible tragedy in Israel will pull them together for a little bit anyway.  They’ll be working towards a common cause.  It will eventually die down again, and then there will be a lull.  My grandson is at Perdue, and what got me very thrilled was the fact that, his first few weeks at Perdue, he spent a lot of time at Hillel.  He got involved in the group at Hillel.  He was going to Services every Friday night.  He was going to the dinners.  He felt that, if you were going to dinners, you should go to Services as well.  He was one of the few that went to Services and dinner.  He joined a Jewish fraternity.  He joined ZBT.  He’s very impressed with the fact that two of their goals are scholarship and volunteerism of any kind.  He likes that spirit, and he may be a volunteer doing something somewhere.  He says he’s still active in Hillel and he goes to Services, and a lot of his friends go to Services.  He’s living his Jewish life.  I just hope that the kids are doing that.  As long as there are organizations like Hillel

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and groups that I know are very active on campus, going after the

kids.  That’s the important thing that kids have a feeling about Judaism, and they don’t get it from their parents, they might get it from college with their other friends.  There’s hope.  People have not turned away from Judaism.  They turned away from the organizations.

They don’t feel the need to be affiliated, but they feel they’re Jewish, and they still have some feeling.  There’s hope.

Interviewer:      With those words, we’ll end our interview with Liz Kamlet, here at Kensington, on October 8, 2023.  I’m Bill Cohen with the Columbus Jewish Historical Society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Scripps Howard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scripps Howard