Disciplines

Jewish Studies

Abstract

Summarizer: Sophia Maier

Rukhl Schaechter and her family moved from Brooklyn to Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx in 1966 to create a Yiddish-speaking community with two other families. At that time, classes in Yiddish at the Sholem Aleichem Folk Shul 21 supplemented their public school education. During the summers, she also attended Camp Hemshekh, a Yiddish camp founded by Socialist Holocaust survivors. At PS 96, Schaechter began to interact with Jewish and non-Jewish students that came from different background than her, that lived in apartment buildings unlike her private home, for example. She describes her home life as “traditional,” with her parents and siblings together for dinner and afterwards reading Yiddish literature and watching TV. Schaechter’s father, a prolific Yiddish linguist, would take her and other Yiddish-speaking kids in the neighborhood to Van Cortlandt Park for Enge-Benge club, which she equated to Yiddish Boy and Girl Scouts. His insistence on proper grammar influenced Schaechter to become the Yiddish editor of the Forward in her adult life.

Schaechter remembers visiting bakeries, movie theaters, and pizza places in her neighborhood, in addition to the Botanical Gardens as she got older. At Junior High School 80, she and her friends, after facing bullying from a Black gang, decided to form their own gang, the White Whippersnappers, as a joke. At Evander Childs High School, Schaechter explains she may have been in the last class with many white children, as Co-op City was newly built but did not yet have its own school. There, she found smart girls like her, interested in reading and seeking something more than the school offered them. Schaechter was excited to attend Barnard after being in this environment where she felt she did not receive a quality education, or that others cared little for their education.

On Fordham Road, Schaechter would go to Alexander’s with her mom and get books from the library. She shares that her mother, growing up poor in the Bronx during the Great Depression, did not spend money on fashionable clothes for her or her siblings, which made them feel different from their peers. While she remembers some of the improvisation that was done during the teachers’ strikes of 1967-1968, she recalls the announcement that female students could wear pants being much more impactful. Schaechter explains that despite becoming a feminist in college, as a teenager she just wanted a boyfriend.

Schaechter describes how, by the 1970s, the neighborhood was changing, particularly increasing in crime. Her parents were shot during a home robbery, thankfully recovering. By 1991, she and her husband moved from where they had been living in Washington Heights to Riverdale. Though they now live in a house right over the border in Yonkers, she considers her life to be in Riverdale, in the Bronx. Today, Schaechter is Orthodox, having raised her family Shomer Shabbos.

Keywords: Bainbridge Avenue, Yiddish, Sholem Aleichem Folk Shul, PS 95, race, Evander Childs High School, Co-op City, traditional, Shabbos, kosher, Van Cortlandt Park, the Forward, library, intellectual, Barnard, Junior High School 80, gang, racism, Great Depression, fashion, Fordham Road, crime, Riverdale, Teachers’ Strikes 1967-1968, feminism, Camp Hamshekh, Holocaust, Orthodox, Zionism, street games

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