I am one-hundred percent Jewish. Both my mother’s parents were Jewish and so were my father’s parents. My grandparents were Jewish too. Their parents were Jewish, and if I searched far into my lineage, I would meet many Jewish ancestors.
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| My mom Edith Kadison, her father Joseph and mother Esther Kadison, My mom’s brother Norman and his new wife Miriam and her family at Norman and Miriam’s wedding |
My mom, Edith Kadison Schneider, was born on May 12, 1922. She was the second child of Joseph Kadison and Esther Becker Kadison. Joseph came to the United States from Poland when he was seventeen years old seeking adventure, but I also believe he came to the United States to seek a better life. Esther, I've been told, was sent to the USA to flee the dangers and the pogroms facing Jewish people in Russia in 1914. She lived in a village similar to the Annatevka shown in Fiddler on the Roof and spoke only Yiddish when she came to America. She was about fourteen or fifteen years old when she immigrated to the United States, and lived with relatives who had settled in the Washington D.C.-Maryland area. I have heard that I still may have some relatives living there with the last name Becker.
My mom was not supposed to be named Edith. “Grandma Esther, I was told, wanted the name "Heeda" on my mom's birth certificate, and "Heeda" was translated to "Edith" by the person who spoke only English,” not Yiddish, who prepared the birth certificates on my mom's date of birth.
I've been told that my mother's family was very poor and that times were hard during the Depression in Washington DC, so eventually, when my mom was about nine years old, Joseph and Esther and my mom and my Uncle Norman put everything their family owned in their beat up and old car and headed to California in hope of a better life. Joseph's brothers owned a Jewish deli somewhere in the Los Angeles area. Out of necessity, Joseph joined his brothers in their business. That’s what families did during the depression years. At first they lived with Joseph’s brother Morris’s family in Boyle Heights, California. My mom’s cousin, Esther, tells me that my mom was a sweet little girl and was always sweet throughout life.
My Uncle Norman was eight years older than Edith. When he first was sent to school, he spoke only Yiddish, and no English. I've heard that the school sent him home and asked Joseph and Esther to teach him some English before he returned to the school. Ironically, Uncle Norman became a college English professor later in life!
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| Joseph Kadison |
Esther was a homemaker who kept a kosher home and cooked everything from scratch. I've been told that her gefilte fish was "to die for." She went to several markets to get the right fish and the process of actually making the gefilte fish took hours and hours (she even ground the fish by hand), but her wonderful delicacies were gobbled up in a few minutes. She also sewed. The clothes she made were not elegant, but saved the Kadison family money since ready-made clothes were a luxury. Esther did what women of the time had to do and worked hard for her family.
The Kadisons settled in Huntington Park, California. That area had a mix of people living there. The name "Kadison" fooled some people, so not everyone at my mom's school knew she was Jewish.
Unfortunately, my mother never told me a lot about her life before she met my dad, but when I look at photos of my mother as a teen, I see a beautiful and sweet girl who was popular and very active in school. I know my mom hated her straight hair and didn't like her wide hips. She was only five feet tall and was always conscious of her weight. I also know that my mom worked to save money after high school in order to attend college and that going to UCLA was a dream come true.
At first she took the streetcar from Huntington Park to Westwood Village and UCLA, but finally was able to live in a dorm-type environment in a house for college women called Stevens House, and because of Stevens House, she indirectly met my dad. Arthur met Edith (who he always called Edie) because of a blind date that was set up through one of my mom's friends at Stevens House.
I always have called my dad, Dr. Arthur Schneider, "Daddy." I began doing that because I was a fan of a 1960s television situation comedy show starring Marlo Thomas called "That Girl." Marlo Thomas was so beautiful and I wanted to be just like her. She called her father "Daddy" in that show, and I copied her. I also copied her hair. Marlo Thomas had perfect dark hair parted down the middle. She had a bubbly personality that I copied too. Her dedication and love for her father was my model.
I love my “Daddy” so much and we have always been very, very close. We may be close since I'm the first born of the three Schneider children, but we may be close since I remind him so much of my mom. I have dark hair and I stand under five feet (I’m only 4 ft, 10 in tall) and I look like my mom.
Daddy was born on March 24, 1929. (Yes, he is younger than my mom.) His father, Max Schneider (the Schneider was shortened from Schneiderman when Grandpa Max's family left Zhitomer, Russia at the turn of the century) came from a family of eight children. Grandpa Max’s siblings were Irving, Tom, Rose, Dena, Edith, Anna and David. Their parents, were Esther and Eli Simon, I’ve been told that they were not poor, but rather well off in Zhitomer. Eli Simon Schneiderman owned a silverware factory. He saw the dangers of being Jewish in Russia, and decided to get his family out. They traveled in style on a boat to America in 1903, and first settled in Atlantic City, but the entire family, headed on to Los Angeles and then to Long Beach, California.
My dad told me stories about how close his cousins were. In fact, they were like one big extended family. His sweet Grandma Esther kept a house full of presents. Whenever a grandchild visited, a gift was ready and waiting. His cousins were like his brothers and sisters. Uncle Irving was the head of the family and left his mark on the Jewish community in Long Beach, California. He was one of the founders of Temple Israel and the Long Beach Jewish Community Center. Grandpa Max was a self-made man and was the owner of Maxwell’s Jewelers, a family owned jewelry store located on Pine Avenue in downtown Long Beach. His brothers and his sisters’ husbands were his employees.
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| Young Fannie and Max Schneider |
My dad’s parents, Fannie and Max, were married on January 1, 1928. Grandma Fannie grew up in the lower east side of New York City. Many poor Jewish immigrants settled in that area in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Fannie was one of the youngest of ten children, and her parents came to the United States from Romania somewhere in the late 1800s. Their last name was Reigenstreich.
Grandma and her siblings shortened Reigenstreich to Ragin after they settled in southern California. Grandma Fannie’s family, unlike Grandpa Max’s family, were poor. Grandma saved pennies throughout her life because of the memories she had of being without things as a child. She told me she wished she could have a container of cream cheese that she could have all to herself. She also wondered how anyone could possibly leave any red on a piece of watermelon. Grandma may have known hunger during her childhood.
Young Fannie did not know how to cook when she married Max, but didn’t want to break that news to him until after they were married. Her older sisters had done all the cooking, so she saw no need to learn how to do anything in the kitchen. In those days, young Jewish couples had little to do with one another during the time of courtship, so Max just assumed that his beautiful young wife would know how to cook. When he came home from his first day as a newly married man who had spent the day at his jewelry store, Fannie had his dinner waiting. The young Schneider couple happened to live in an apartment where a Jewish kosher deli was just across the alley from the back door of their kitchen. Fannie brought each delicious course to Max starting with chopped liver and matzah ball soup followed by roasted chicken and a kosher dessert. “Marvelous!” “exclaimed Max. “Not only do I have a beautiful Jewish wife, but a wonderful cook as my bride.” After the meal ended, Fannie confessed to Max that the meal came from the deli across the alley and that she actually had no idea how to cook anything, including boiled water!
I was very close to my Grandma Fannie. A part of me will always be with her, in fact. I had the honor and privilege of living in Grandma’s house in the late 1970s, and not only connected with her, but also with my Jewish heritage at that time. Fannie graduated from Southern California Teachers College before it became UCLA. She and my dad were “best friends” when he was a kid since Grandpa Max worked so much. Daddy tells me that his mother adored him and gave him anything he wanted. She wanted him to be a doctor, which is one of reasons my father did not take over the family business.
Anti-Semitism was part of life when my parents were growing up. My dad told me a story once from his childhood that makes me shudder. He walked into a butcher shop, and when the owner saw him enter, the man brought out a huge knife and chased him and yelled, “Get that Jew out of here!” In first or second grade, my father’s parents decided to enroll him to Long Beach Military Academy, a boarding school that was located on the top of Signal Hill in the Long Beach area. Daddy tells me he was miserable at that school. He pleaded with his father every week to let him go home so that he could attend a day school, but Grandpa Max believed that children needed to be separated from their parents, so my dad had to endure the school for two or three years. What really made military school miserable for my dad was that he revealed to one of the other students that he was Jewish. After he did that, he had no friends at that school.
Daddy followed Fannie’s encouragement and leading and went to University of California in Los Angeles, and UCLA is where my parents connected. Daddy was a bit of a genius and went away to college at the age of sixteen. He lived in a cooperative dorm near UCLA for college students called The Co-Op. His best friend in college was Jerry Smith, a rather laid back young man from Buffalo, New York who rarely wore shoes. My dad met Jerry in a chemistry class, and the two clicked from the minute they met. Jerry was not Jewish, but my dad tells me that didn’t matter to him then. At Long Beach Wilson High School, he had only had Jewish friends due to the Anti-Semitism Jews faced there, but college was a time to open up to all sorts of people. College students were very open to one another in the late 1940s. Jerry and my dad were also friends with an African American who was popular on the UCLA campus named Bob Rogers.
One of Bob’s many girlfriends, named Tammy, set up a get-together, and that get-together is where my mom, Edith Kadision, met both my dad and his friend Jerry. That night, the small group of college kids went to see an African-American jazz bandleader named Dizzy Gillespie.
On that night, the night my parents met, Edie was attracted to Art for three reasons:
- He was short.
- He wore shoes.
- He was Jewish.
In those days, Jewish young people would never have considered dating someone who was not Jewish. Jews married Jews. The fact that they were both Jewish and had strong Jewish identities made them click that night.
The next day, my mother called my dad and asked him for help. She was stranded near her car with flat tire and asked him to fix it. After he helped repair the flat, from that day on, they saw each other every day. In a sense, they became “one” right away. That wonderful relationship lasted for over sixty years!
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| My parents wedding day at the Kadison home August 20, 1950 |
Edith Kadison and Arthur Schneider fell in love and became engaged quickly, but because my father was only nineteen when they met, Grandpa Max asked him to wait until he was at least twenty-one before they married. On July 15, 1950, they secretly eloped. They did not announce their marriage because Joseph Kadison died suddenly of a heart attack. Esther was devastated at the time, but somehow was strong enough to pull things together for my parents to have small family wedding with a reception in the Kadison home on August 20, 1950. The rabbi from my father’s very reformed synagogue in Long Beach officiated the ceremony. They honeymooned in Catalina Island and began their married life just before my dad began Chicago Medical School.
Chicago Medical School, at the time, was a medical school where the majority of the school’s student body was Jewish. During my dad’s medical school years, my mom worked as a social worker in Chicago. The friends they made during their years at Chicago Medical School became lifelong friends and of course, all of the friends that they made in Chicago were Jewish.
After my dad graduated from medical school, Edie and Art returned to Los Angeles and knew it was time to start a family. I came first. I was born on May 7, 1956 at Cedar's Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Yes, I am the oldest of three children who were all products of the 1950s baby boom. My brother, Billy was born on January 3, 1958 and my sister, Lynnellen was born on February 18, 1959. There’s a Jewish tradition in America where the first letter of a beloved relative’s name is used to name a baby. Those who are no longer living live on in a way through that tradition. I was named after my mother’s father Joseph. I continued that tradition when I named my son, Joel, after my mother’s father.
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| The Three Schneiders - Jo Ann, Billy, and Lynnellen in front of Grandma Fannie and Grandpa Max’s House |
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| Edith Kadison Schneider and Jo Ann Schneider |
During my childhood, our family lived in southern California, but in various places. The first home my parents owned was in Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley. That area is a highly populated Jewish area now, but in those days, we were one of the only Jewish families in the area. When we moved to Bel Air, things were different. It seemed like everyone there was Jewish.
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| This was a combined Kadison-Schneider Thanksgiving in the 1960s Cousing Cheri, Uncle Bobby, Cousin Loren, Grandma Fannie, Grandpa Max, Aunt Miriam, my brother Billy, my sister Lynnellen, my mom, my dad, me, and Grandma Esther |
When I was about six years old, my parents hosted a huge birthday party in my honor. I counted every present I received after the party. One was missing. I was really upset about the missing gift. It turned out that I’d been given a little toy necklace that included a cross. Daddy explained to me that little Jewish girls didn’t wear crosses and hoped I would not notice that the necklace was missing. I count that as being the day that I not only learned I was Jewish, but that I could not consider or even think about Jesus.
My family joined a Reform synagogue when I was in first or second grade so that I could take part in “Sunday school,” Jewish religious school. I remember many things about that religious school and Hebrew school. I remember because as a little girl, I loved being Jewish. I loved the Hebrew prayers. I loved celebrating the Jewish holidays. I loved the history of my people. I loved Jewish bible stories. And…I loved God.
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Excerpt From
Un Sentenced for Life
Jo Ann Schneider Farris
https://books.apple.com/us/book/un-sentenced-for-life/id97524332
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