Yvonne Pappenheim

The text below is based on an interview with Yvonne produced in July 2005 by Linda Harrar and Meril Rasmussen
Transcription, notes and introduction by Claudio T. Bornstein, 2010, reviewed 2012.

Yvonne Pappenheim is a far relative of mine. The father of Yvonne’s husband, Fritz Pappenheim, and the father of my grandmother Anna Westheim, born Pappenheim, were brothers. My grandmother used to tell us stories of how Fritz fled from Germany to Spain during Nazism and how my grandfather helped him to reach the US over France. Fritz was an idealist, my grandmother would have said, perhaps not knowing that idealism and materialism are somehow opposed. Yvonne I met much later through the DVD of her interview with Linda and Meril. The DVD was given me in Vienna in 2010. I learned to love Yvonne, hearing what she was saying; nothing special, just great small things… In addition to Yvonne’s thoughts the report below brings also nice little pieces of American history of the XX century.

• Childhood: Yvonne was a very shy child. She found she was not very nice looking and without any special gifts. She grew up in a quite wonderful family. Her mother was very modest, fine and capable, her father was a successful manufacturer who also had a great interest in public affairs. There were lots of people coming at their house and she usually did not feel at home with them. She was a lonely child but she always had friends. When she was born her mother was 30 and her father was 50. Her brother, who she adored, was 9 years older and her sister, who was very nice but quite a boss, especially for a younger sister, was 4 ½ years older than her (see [1]). She was considered the baby of the family and they enjoyed keeping her as a baby, something she did not particularly enjoy. Her childhood was mixed, there were lots of good things, lots of privileges, but she wasn’t really happy. She did not fit in too well.

• Relation to nature: She liked being alone all her life and found it stimulating. It was more like solitude than loneliness. She does not remember New York too well but she went to a school where the kids were much more sophisticated than her; they were very bright and high-powered and she wasn’t very happy. When she went to the country at weekends or in the summer she used to go for long walks by herself. It was safe to go on dirt roads in those days. She would also run down to a field just beyond the side of the house, where nobody could see her and she would watch the light change from afternoon to evening. She was scared of the dark because she was very fearful but she made herself go out in the dark and then gradually learned to enjoy the beauties of a starlit night. She had great conflict whether to stay by the fireside indoors or to go out and enjoy the night.

• Two important aspects of life to keep in mind: First, there is the awareness of the universe that we are part of, even though each of us is just a small atom. Yvonne says that she loves being in nature because one has a chance to think about it all. Second, there is the fact that all men are brothers. Therefore, Yvonne wanted to know all kinds of people and she was eager to get beyond her own elite background. Yvonne reads two of her poems that speak about those two aspects of her thinking:

I carry my aloneness
with me everywhere.
It is my home.
I have no other,
but I need you
to look with me
out of the windows
of our separate homes.

Alone I see magnificence
but stand before it impotent
until I join with you
to make a strength of men
not limited by time or place
to stand up like a mountain
to the sky.
(Yvonne’s Songs, Autumn 2000, page 36)


Who are you?
Who am I?
Are you my brother?
What are we here for?
Is there anything to laugh at?
Anything worth loving?
Magic too?
Where are you going?
Where am I going?
Will the stars come out
even if we don’t get there?
Tell me about yourself.
May be we have something
sure in common.
We come from the same source.
We have the same destination.
Our ways are lonely.
And we both get sore feet.
Let us go our different roads together.
(Yvonne’s Songs, Autumn 2000, page 37)

Because she was privileged and did not have to work, she had time to wonder about why we are here on this earth. . Some of these ideas are expressed in the poems above.

• Influences and Background: Yvonne went to the Ethical Cultural School and there she had a weekly course on ethics (see [2] and [3]). They had assemblies in a beautiful room and there was a sign over the speaker’s platform that said: the place where men meet to seek the Highest is holy ground. She guesses she was an idealist from the start and sort of needed that to steer by. Her father (Sidney Blumenthal) was an active member of the ethical society. He was a republican most of his life; he wrote articles on low cost housing for The Nation (see [4]). Once Sydney and his wife were invited for dinner to the White House by Eleanor Roosevelt because he had some theory about the distribution of surplus food. Yvonne was very interested in poetry and read a lot. She needed that in order to help her to live. All those things shaped her life. Her brother (Andre Blumenthal), who was nine years older, was a wonderful influence too. Her parents tended to protect her too much because she was sickly and they enjoyed having her as the baby. Her brother however was always expecting her to read books over her age, to play tennis really well, to ride horseback and not be scared. He encouraged her to be active and be more courageous. He had a great sense of humor like everybody in her family. Another influence was Aunt Margo. Yvonne’s mother had two friends, both teachers, who spent weekends and a lot of time at their house. The mother was specially close to Aunt Lou but Yvonne was more intimate with Aunt Margo who had run a school and taught Yvonne a lot. She called Yvonne the child of her heart (she was not married and had no children). Aunt Margo saw that Yvonne was not doing too well in her family and helped her to find her way. Things Aunt Margo said could have been taken as critical but Yvonne felt that she was teaching her how to live and that was what she wanted more than anything. Aunt Margo did it all very objectively and she never made Yvonne feel that she was putting her down. She believed in Yvonne and she was telling her about life and that is what she wanted to know. At 92 Yvonne still remembers by heart words that Aunt Margo told her and much has been proven to be true.

• Comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin: Yvonne decided not to go to an elite college. She wanted to know more about life and meet people of different backgrounds. So she decided to go to the University of Wisconsin where she met people from Oshcosh to St. Louis.

• Volunteer jobs in Social Work: Yvonne says that she always was interested in social work, in helping people. In high school she had done community work and in the summertime she had worked in a playschool (kindergarten). She majored in comparative literature and felt she had nothing to offer for a job. She got a volunteer job at the Housing Study Guild which had wonderful people on the board like Lewis Mumford and Albert Mayer (see [5]). They said that in order to have local housing you have to have urban planning and this is only possible in socialism. She did some translating and other minor jobs.

• Trip to the Soviet Union: The year after she graduated from college she went to the Soviet Union. Her father was not too pleased about it. He wanted her to go to England or some more sensible place but once she decided to go he was interested in finding out about it. She went with a group of Americans. By the time they were leaving, they already had made up their mind; half of them thinking that they were going to heaven and the other half thinking of hell. So it was not easy to talk to them. She remembers having a letter of introduction to some famous person which came to visit Yvonne at her hotel. The person took a look at her and asked: “where is your mother?” This was the impression Yvonne gave: a scared child. It was a difficult trip, but interesting.

• School of Journalism at Columbia University: When she came back from the trip to the Soviet Union she went to the School of Journalism at Columbia University. She thought that would please her brother, trying to be a little like he was, more objective and less introvert. She really enjoyed all the interesting work she had to do. Once she had to make a report on a hairdresser banquet; the other time she had to write about an oil man’s affair. But she was not cut out to be a journalist. She was not fast enough and the whole thing wasn’t for her. She really wanted to be in social work. Later, she had a brief affair with a man. It did not go well, she got pneumonia and that also took some effort.

• Medical social work: Then she volunteered for the Henry Street Settlement (see [6]) and she fairly enjoyed talking and helping people. There she met some wonderful woman who encouraged her. She also volunteered for a work at a woman’s hospital. This was during the Second World War. Her brother was at the Navy and she wanted to do something too. So she decided to attend a Red Cross Nurses Aid Course. She had always been sick and on the receiving end and now she was on the other end of the line and even getting the chance to watch operations, hearing the first cries of babies being born. She made friends with the nurses and later got a full time job at the social work department. But Yvonne wanted something more challenging and so she got a work as a medical social worker at Bellevue hospital where the poorest and sickest people of New York would try to find some care.

• University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work: Then she decided to go to a School of Social Work and fortunately was turned down (refused) by the New York School of Social Work. So she landed at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work in Philadelphia. The school was run by two wonderful women Virginia Robinson and Jessie Taft (see [7]). She loved it because again this was a school of life and Yvonne wanted to know a lot about life. When she graduated she worked in a Child Identification Clinic (see [8]).

• Fritz: While she was in the Clinic, Fritz, her later-to-be husband, called her. She had met Fritz on a vacation in Alabama. During the thirties, before she did medical social work, she had worked at the National Refugee’s Service. It was time of exodus of Jews from Germany. Yvonne was invited to a party when she was 24. There she met Erna May with whom she used to go hiking. Erna’s sister Lore May did not have a place to live and Yvonne’s parents said that she could invite her to live with her. Through Lore, Yvonne met Fritz Pappenheim (see [9]). Fritz was ten years older than Yvonne. He used to say good things come in small packages. He was a scholar and an excellent teacher because he was not arrogant and listened to the students. He was very sweet and had a good sense of humor. He was a socialist from the time he was a teenager and had to leave Nazi Germany, Franco Spain and an internment camp in France. He was not given tenure in America after seven years at a college, where he was a very popular teacher, because they did not like his getting the students to think too freely. He was more radical and encouraged Yvonne to leave social work which, he thought, was sort of going along with the status quo, instead of trying to change the society so that people would not suffer and have to go to social work (see also [10]). Yvonne left social work after she married and they moved to Cambridge. The people of the social work agency where she was working at the time did not understand why she left because she was good at the work and they liked her. Yvonne did not know what to do with herself. It was difficult to give up the only thing she knew. She volunteered in a Freedom School (see [11]). Fritz was a refugee scholar who taught at a black college in Alabama and Yvonne met him through common friends. Fritz felt that Yvonne needed to break away from her family. She felt he could give her a larger view and regrets that she never had his courage to take the stands he did but on the other hand she did stand with him. According to Yvonne there are two problems with social work. First, most of the people who go to social work are middle class. Second, it leaves untouched the basic problems and the values of society. There is a wonderful song and the barriers between classes make it difficult to be heard all over the world. Some kind of class struggle may be necessary to wipe out these barriers so that the sound/song may be heard everywhere.

• Political thoughts: Yvonne tells that although she has been in several demonstrations for civil rights, marches, etc., she never felt she was an activist. She felt better at writing letters, taking a stand here or there and supporting causes for a change in the world. In 1983 she organized a group of around ten people which met weekly, writing letters to congressmen and others. They wrote a letter to Harvard Law School asking why they didn’t hire a black professor and eventually they did. Another result of these meetings was that they educated each other and had a good time. Although several died they stayed together, at least until the time the interview was made. There often were disagreements, it was not always accepted that Yvonne was a socialist, often different letters were written by different people on different things. However, people listened to each other. They were not close friends but the group was like an organism, everybody was included in it, there were no splits. They were fond and respected each other and there was a personal relationship between them, like if somebody was sick or celebrating a birthday, having a meal together, although, often in between times they were not much in touch.

• Civil rights movement: Yvonne tells that one of the wonderful things about the civil rights movement was that people knew what they were doing; they had a vision of freeing people. Songs were very much a part of it, it was exciting. The trouble nowadays is that people don’t have any vision, there are often protests against the many injustices but there is no clear idea about the kind of society they want. Yvonne sees the present society as dehumanized, money comes before all and success is important. What we need is a human society. It is nothing very new, it is in the bible. We should treat people decently because we are all in the same boat trying to live and we should live together. However, there is very little discussion of any about and when they examine experiments in the Soviet Union or in Cuba or Venezuela, Americans do the best to knock it down, call it names, worry about the safety and call them terrorists. Yvonne really wonders often about how Americans are going to get to something more decent that way.

• Joy and outrage: It takes a lot of courage to use the outrage in a constructive way and one has to be ready to risk more than Yvonne thinks she ever was willing to do. She says she had some letters to the editor published but that is something anybody can do. It does not take much courage or anything else. What people are, is more important than what they write about or say. We help sustain each other by who we are. Over the years, she worked for many social agencies; some of them just stick to their work, each person trying to save the world according to his view. One thing Yvonne likes in Community Change, a small organization devoted to fighting racism, is that there is a kind of graciousness and feelings for the other people. There is friendship and this strengthens. It is very important to be happy. One does not improve the world by not being happy. One may have joy with very simple things like friendship, watching the light change. Little things may mean a lot.

• Loneliness and being alone: Sometimes people are very lonely and fill their time with many activities in order not to feel it. When you are by yourself, you have all sorts of richness you can relate to, the thoughts and so much is there to live with. We spend a lot of time brushing our teeth, figuring out what to have for supper and sometimes in solitude one does not have to think on those little things and we may get a broader vision of what goes on.

• What does it mean to be human: It is so simple. We all want to be happy and we all want to be recognized by others. Understanding means standing under and looking up to respect people. We all want to be seen and respected. There is a Zulu greeting which says I see you (sawubona) and the answer is supposed to be I am here. A person is not a person unless he/she is seen by others. But nowadays people feel that in order to be seen they have to be number one, or a great success. They can’t just be themselves.

• Capitalism: Even not being a scholar or an economist, Yvonne’s view is that in capitalism money comes first, the economic life dominates the living life of people. She is a socialist because she believes that there can be an economy where people live a happy life together. That is not what capitalism does. We have constant wars, we are trying to put people down and there is great injustice and inequality. Capitalism has released many productive forces and probably helped the human race along, to a certain extend, but its usefulness is over and it is leading in the USA towards a kind of fascism which may be has to happen before something new comes. Yvonne believes there is a kind of dialectics of life, one has night and day, if you have great sorrow you are more capable of great joy and in order to be awake you have to sleep.

• Phil and Phylis Morrison: Yvonne reports on her work with the Morrisons (see [12]). They generously took her into their life and she enjoyed them so much that she decided to continue to work with them although the job was not very rewarding. They had much sense of humor, Phil never put her down although she sometimes asked some stupid questions. He was full of curiosity about life and knew about everything. Phylis shared everything with him. She was an artist and she helped Yvonne with the computer. They had lots of outings together that were fun. Phylis was very creative and like Yvonne loved colors. She was very appreciative and she put together a little book with poems of Yvonne and helped her to make clothes for friends (see also [13] and [14]).

• The Rasmussens: Yvonne met Lore and Erna May when they were refugees from Germany and they became and stayed friends for all the life (see [15]). Yvonne became part of the Rasmussen’s family. She tells that Nova Scotia is probably one of the most beautiful places she ever has been (see [16]). The mountains come down to the sea, the weather is exhilarating and people are very friendly. The Rasmussens were very much respected in the community and were very welcoming to everybody.

• Anne and Carl Braden (see [17]): Yvonne worked with the Bradens shortly after Fritz died. She went for a vacation with Fritz’s sister, Marta, at World Fellowship in 1967. She heard Anne talk and became friends with her. Yvonne asked if she would come to Cambridge some time and Anne said she would but Yvonne would have to organize a Fund Raising party for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) (see [18]). Yvonne worked for them and started a Massachusetts Friends of the SCEF. When SCEF had speakers who would come and visit Cambridge, Yvonne would find places for them to speak. Carl died but Yvonne is still friends with Anne. Anne grew up as a southern lady in Alabama, went into journalism and was not at all interested in the races subject. However she somehow became aware of it, left her background and just threw herself into the civil rights movement. It was not the easiest thing to do. She and her husband sold a house in a white neighborhood to a black family and she later wrote a book with the title The Wall Between reporting on their experience. The house was dynamited and then they blamed it on the Bradens. Carl was sent to jail for a year. Finally it all got overturned but Yvonne admires their courage and dedication.

• Horace Seldon (see [19]): Eventually after working in many other organizations Yvonne went to Community Change (see [20]). She had had the experience at the Book Review Office of Scientific American Magazine and she used her experience to get free books from publishers for the Library on Racism. She was also on the Board of Community Change. Horace was the founder of this organization so they gradually became friends. He started out as a minister and he had a degree from the Andover Newton Theological School. Later he went to the anti-racism work. At the time of the interview he taught a course on History of the Development of Racism at the Boston College and at 81 he worked for the Park Department as a Guide on the Black Heritage Trail. He was fascinated by the history of people like Garrison (William Lloyd Garrison).

• Langston Hughes (see [21]): He was doing rounds on black colleges in the south. When he came to Talladega the girls from the sorority asked Yvonne if she could drive them to the station. Yvonne met him there and brought him home for a huge breakfast because he could not eat in the dining car on the train Yvonne heard him talk and she also had several books inscribed by him. He was a lovely person.

• Fritz’ European experience: Yvonne says that Fritz did not talk much about his European experience with the Nazis and Franco Spain in conversations with young black people. He was a professor, he taught sociology, he got the student to think about those things but he did not directly talk about his past experiences.

• David and Tamara Rasmussen: Lore was eight years younger than Yvonne and came to live with her when Yvonne was around 24 years old. They became part of each others family. Lore had three sons and David was close to Fritz. They loved each other very much. David went to Harvard School of Education and there he met Tamara and of all three sons of Lore, Yvonne has been especially close to him and now with Meril (David and Tamara’s son), the next generation. Yvonne says that she always had friends of all ages. When she was young she had old people for friends. Aunt Margo was deep in the seventies when Yvonne was in her twenties. She always had young people in her life.

• What Yvonne really would like to talk about: What Yvonne would like to leave as a legacy is her concern about the human condition, the dehumanization of man. Fritz wrote a book on the alienation of men, which is another way of saying what she has in mind. It seems so utterly unnecessary that people don’t care about each other and enjoy life. And Yvonne recites a part of Robert Browning’s (see [22] and [23]) poem Saul: How good is man’s life, the mere living! How fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy. She believes strongly in the song of the world and nobody has kind or interest in seeing it. We are so busy getting ahead or making a living that we lose sight of the greatness of the universe and the possible solidarity of human being so that they can travel with each other with joy and concern from life, from birth through death. How we are going to get from our present materialistic, money-oriented society to a society where people feel for each other? It sounds simple enough, we all want it, but the people in power come to persecute those who try to change, so it will be a bitter struggle until the change comes.

• Philosophy of life: What enabled the civil rights movement to happen, how can we recreate it (there is such a need) and, on the other hand, what means life and death? These questions occupy Yvonne’s mind and heart. How do they relate to each other? Life should be a joy. There is a song deep in the world that Yvonne always has wanted to be in touch with and that is the reason she likes poetry and solitude (she always needed to sense something extra). Yvonne also believes that one has to reach out to help other people and that there is great fulfillment in doing so. Yvonne has always sought people out of different backgrounds and ages. She always had old people and children in her life, people at the corner grocery, the mailman or whoever. That is what she believes one has to do because one has to reach out to each other. When a comment is made about her present popularity, she laughs and says that it is because she is going to die and they know it is their last chance. It is wonderful to remember playing a part in so many lives over the years. It is very fulfilling! One never thinks about at the time, but it is very nice of people to stay in touch. It is rather an art to get ready to die and keep on living at the same time. The two are related. Yvonne says that she is not scared about dying. It is part of life but she wants to keep on living as long as she can. As long as she is alive she wants to live. She watched her parents, her husband and her sister-in-law die; she had not been out of contact with death. It just means you don’t do it anymore; you make a way for some of these wonderful babies, for small children and for other young people. We would have tremendous overpopulation if everybody would live forever.

• Questioning some of the things Yvonne has believed in: Yvonne says that she continues believing the same things she did as a child. She was not a happy child and spent a lot of time alone and in nature. The awareness of the wonders of the world has stayed with her as well as the belief in the possibilities of people. She wished only she had had more courage. Fritz took unpopular stands at great risk and suffered. She never was quite ready to take those risks and she always felt that if she had cared more she would have taken those risks. This is a thing she somehow regrets but it hasn’t been in her to do so.

• Moments of courage to be proud of: Yvonne worked for the Bail Fund (see [24]). The office was in the basement of the old Cambridge Baptist church. Yvonne was alone in the cellar and then a big Afro-American man came in and said that he needed some bail money. He wanted a couple of thousand dollars and the Bail Fund only gave three hundred at a time. Yvonne told him what she could offer. This was just after a white nurse had been molested or perhaps even killed by an Afro-American man. So he expected Yvonne to be scared. He started talking Yvonne but she knew that at that moment she was not just herself; she was representing the Bail Fund. So she kept cool even though, when there was a chance, she looked to see if there was a door going somewhere so that she could get out or trying to figure out what to do in case of need. Anyhow when the man saw that Yvonne was not scared he was quite delightful and she remembers at the end of the conversation telling him to come back. She was always proud of that.

• Great small things: “It is a very small thing” says the interviewer at the end of the conversation above. Small things reveal bigger things, answers Yvonne. The conflicts of our time are often only visible in conflicts between two people. They reveal values of society. Beautiful things like a flower, a shadow or a cloud are small things and yet they are wonderful!

• Staying in the background: “Fritz was a great man, much greater than me”, says Yvonne. Everybody wants to be special and wonderful! Yvonne always felt that Fritz was a way ahead of her. That wasn’t always easy. She also admired Anne Braden, a leader in the civil rights movement. It was not an average relationship. Yvonne did not see her often but Anne always counted on Yvonne as a friend. Anne did not have much time to make friends because she was so dedicated to her work. It takes a certain modesty and readiness to be in the background, to be a friend or a lover of a great person. Yvonne’s mother was that way. Her father was a very successful businessman, very socially minded and quite remarkable. Her mother, who was very intelligent and capable, just took a very background role. Yvonne always questioned this attitude; she did not want to be exactly like her mother. In spite of Fritz’s aura of greatness, Yvonne formed her way with the help of friends and different kinds of volunteer work. Even though she lived alone she felt in touch with people. She had solitude but she was not alone. She had all the richness in her head still in an old age.

• Favorite Writers: Yvonne mentions Katherine Mansfield (see [25]) who wrote wonderful short stories and had a delicacy about what she wrote. The other is Andersen Nexø, a Scandinavian writer, who wrote Ditte, Child of Man and Pelle the Conqueror (see [26]). She found his books very moving because he was so human and made you feel more human. Ditte is a book about an illegitimate child. When she grew up and was buried at the end someone asks: “Did she soften any heart?” (See [27]).

• Have you softened any heart? Perhaps, is the answer Yvonne gives to this question. She would not be surprised. You never know what you do. You do what you have to do. Yvonne continues speaking, telling that first she was a social worker because she liked people and wanted to help. Later, Fritz helped her to work on some of the problems that send people to social work. Yvonne never enjoyed the activists, who are real bare activists, full to heart, even though they may be necessary, so maybe she was soft hearted that way.

• Activists Yvonne enjoyed: Yvonne mentions Horace Seldon. He started out as a minister. Instead of giving sermons about how to live he decided to live the way he taught and he started Community Change which was a small organization against racism. Yvonne volunteered there and for many years she was on the board. She enjoyed it because people were so warm. Horace set the tone of an organization where people were considered of each other, shared interest and enjoyed having ice-cream together so that one felt very much included. This is the kind of world Yvonne would like to have seen created. Horace was always very aware of his own attitude, of any racism he might feel, any attitude towards women or towards old people and she admires that in him a lot. He was very different from Anne Braden who was very high powered. Horace was a good listener and when he taught a course on history of racism at Boston College he stayed in close touch with the students because he listened to them. He had a great sense of humor and Yvonne enjoyed that very much.

• Balance of humor and courage (in the struggle): Humor and song are part of the joy of life. Yvonne says that she was lucky because both her parents had a good sense of humor and they laughed a lot about silly things or even bad things that happened. Humor means having a sense of proportion, means that you don’t let things get out of hand. It has to be fun! What is the use of brushing the teeth and doing all those little things you are supposed to do if you don’t have joy in life? And other people need each of us to have joy, they feel it, and that is a wonderful thing to share in the sense that life is worth living and that there are possibilities. Of course, for many people this is not true right now because of the injustices in the world. That is why Yvonne finds it so important to fight injustice.

• Sorrow and joy (dialectics): Yvonne tells that she was not a happy child. After Fritz died she had trouble finding her way. “I feel that I grew through having pain.” she says. Pain is part of life, just as death is and it enlarges one. When she was young she memorized a French poem (her mother was French) that said (see [28] and [29]):
Quel que soit le soucis que ta jeunesse endure,
Laisse-la s'élargir, cette sainte blessure
Que se forme au fond du coeur.
Or in English:
Whatever difficulties you have as a child.
Let it grow,
Because it is at the basis of good living.
Yvonne always remembers these words. Just like there is night and day, cold and hot, grief and joy, life and death. Always dialectical ideas go together.

• Going (now?): Yvonne doesn’t know. She couldn’t say. Sometimes she is so preoccupied by just having enough energy to do what she wants to do that she really doesn’t think much about those things. She feels privileged to feel fulfilled and still have friends and feel part of it all. You don’t have to be more than an atom to feel that somehow you have a place in it all.

• The wonders of the world and the awareness of the wonder-world: joining hands. The wonders of the world, the complications of the human body, of a flower and how all works together. It is fascinating! We loose sight and all tends to be very earthbound. In order to have the possibility of being aware of the greatness of the universe we need to join hands and go between life and death together. If we succeed in doing so we will have a much better time, we will get rid of some of the injustices, we will share and have the joy of living which is very important and is part of what we may call the song of the world. The Song of the World by Jean Giono (see [30]) means a great deal for Yvonne. Fritz said that in order to release the song of the world you have to have class struggle so as to get rid of the inequalities.




Notes

[1] Yvonne’s brother was Andre Blumenthal. He died in 1989 of cancer at the age of 85 at his home in Norwalk, Conn. Surviving him at the time were his wife, Mildred; two sons, William, of Norwalk and Thomas, of Southington, Conn.; one daughter, Elizabeth, of Arlington, Mass.; two sisters, Doris Stein of New York City and Yvonne Pappenheim of Cambridge, Mass., and eight grandchildren. He was a retired executive and civic leader. Mr. Blumenthal joined his father's textile-making firm, Sidney Blumenthal & Company, in 1925 after graduating from Yale University. He retired as chairman in 1958 when the firm was sold to Burlington Industries. Then he founded Norwalk Powdered Metals Inc., which compacted and powdered metal to produce parts. He retired in 1982. Mr. Blumenthal was born in Manhattan. He was a Navy commander in World War II and a former president of the Textile Research Institute. Additionally he occupied important positions in the health system as a member of the Connecticut State Board of Mental Health from 1958 to 1964, a former president of the Connecticut Hospital Association and a former chairman of the advisory board of the Connecticut Mental Health Center. He was also a former president and board member of the Norwalk Hospital, a former president of the Connecticut Hospital Planning Commission and a founder of the Greater Norwalk Community Council. (Published in The New York Times, obituaries, September 24, 1989)

[2] Yvonne’s background and the influences from home reflect the progressive north against the conservative south, which almost 60 years earlier led to the American Civil War 1861-1865 and another 60 years before to the French Revolution 1789-1799; rationalism was one of the characteristics of the bourgeoisie in a time when this class played a progressive role; Yvonne reflects a little bit the tail of this movement; it should not be forgotten that there were links between the most conservative tendencies in the USA and anti-Semitism, particularly segregation in schools and universities. The Ethical Culture Fieldston School which pursued social justice, racial equality and intellectual freedom and was havens for secular Jews who rejected the mysticism and rituals of Judaism but accepted its ethical teaching”, was founded by Felix Adler, a Jewish rationalist, in 1878. He was a main influence in Humanistic Judaism. It should be remembered that the institutionalized anti-Semitism of the times, established rigid quota systems against Jews in private schools (see “Ethical Cultural Fieldston School” at Wikipedia for more details; retrieved September, 28, 2012).

[3] During the 1920's, racial tensions in American society reached the boiling point. New non-protestant immigrants like Jews and Catholics had arrived from south-east Europe since the beginning of the century. Together with Orientals, Mexicans and the Black population these minorities suffered the most at the hands of those concerned with preserving the long established White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (W.A.S.P.) values that were an integral part of American life. Prejudice and racism reared its ugly head in many areas of society, with people showing a tolerance for racist views in the media, literature and towards organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Also the language, living and working conditions and Government legislation that ethnic minorities were subjected to is further evidence that the twenties was an openly discriminatory decade. The Immigration Restriction League was a group which claimed to have 'scientific' evidence that the new immigrants from Southeast Europe were racially inferior and therefore posed to threaten the supremacy of the USA. They believed strongly in WASP values and certainly did not wish to see them become polluted by other religions from minorities like Catholics and Jews. The principals of important American universities like Harvard, Stanford and Chicago were numbered among the Leagues supporters. Another similar organization looking to conserve the American way of life was the American Protective Association. (Copied Aug 21, 2010, "Racial Discrimination in America During the 1920's" 123HelpMe.com.)

[4] The Nation is a weekly United States periodical devoted to politics and culture, self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, it is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the U.S. It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City (Retrieved October, 9, 2010 from Wikipedia).

[5] See also Regional Planning Association of America; there are connections with the Ethical Culture Society.

[6] A not-for-profit multi-faceted social service agency in New York City that provides social services, arts programs and health care services to New Yorkers of all ages. It was founded on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1893 by progressive reformer Lillian Wald.

[7] Julia Jessie Taft (1882 –1960) was an early American authority on child placement and therapeutic adoption. Educated at the University of Chicago, she spent the bulk of her professional life at the University of Pennsylvania. She is best remembered for her work as the translator and biographer of Otto Rank, an outcast disciple of Sigmund Freud. She and her lifelong companion, Virginia Robinson, adopted and raised two children. She also worked at Hull House, the social settlement of Jane Addams. Taft completed her doctoral thesis “The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness” in 1913. It was published in book form in 1916. Taft was finally able to begin an academic career in 1929 at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1934 she became the director of the new school of social work. (retrieved August 23, 2010 from Wikipedia).

[8] A Child Identification Clinic helps with the location of lost children.

[9] See report My Story, 2001 by Yvonne Pappenheim.

[10] "From Swastika to Jim Crow," a chronicle of German Jewish scholars who were ousted from their universities by the Nazi regime and wound up teaching at black colleges in the American South is a 2000 documentary that explores the similarities between Nazism in Germany (the Swastika) and racism in the American south (Jim Crow). In 1939 the Nazi government expelled Jewish scholars from German universities. Many of them found teaching positions in Southern U.S. universities, where they sympathized with the plight of their African-American colleagues and students. The film was directed by Lori Cheatle and Martin D. Toub and produced by Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher. It is based on a book written by Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb. Jews and African-Americans have argued bitterly about whether the term Holocaust belongs uniquely to the Nazi extermination or applies as well to the slave trade. Of the 1,200 Jewish professors driven from German universities in the mid-1930's, the most prominent, including Albert Einstein, were welcomed in the elite reaches of American academe. But about 50 of the uprooted, facing a Depression economy and discrimination in hiring at Ivy League schools, landed in such far-flung black colleges as Tugaloo in Mississippi and Talladega in Alabama. There they lived what Ms. Edgcomb calls in the film "double exile," sundered both from Germany and from the refugee community and regarded in the South, by whites and blacks alike, as not quite Caucasian. In the film Calvin Hernton, a professor emeritus from Oberlin, recounts how Fritz Pappenheim, his professor at Talladega, arranged for him to meet Langston Hughes. In their classrooms and the surrounding towns, the refugee professors attacked segregation at some peril to their tenuous place in the South. Mr. Pappenheim, a socialist, had to testify before a Congressional committee investigating supposed Communist subversion in the civil rights movement. Two faculty members at Talladega, Lore and Donald Rasmussen, were charged with inciting to riot for eating in a "colored only" restaurant. At the same time, the black college campuses offered the only genuine community the refugees knew in America. Local whites considered the Jews everything from Marxist agitators to Nazi spies, while blacks tended to view them as kindred souls, even racially. (Material copied partially from Wikipedia and from “Swastika to Jim Crow: Finding Their Refuge in the Segregated South”, by Samuel G. Freedman, January 28, 2001, retrieved September 11, 2010 from www.racematters.org/refugesouth.htm).

[11] Freedom Schools were temporary, alternative free schools for African Americans mostly in the South. They were originally part of a nationwide effort during the Civil Rights Movement to organize African Americans to achieve social, political and economic equality in the United States. The most prominent example of Freedom Schools was in Mississippi in August 1964 (retrieved August 23, 2010 from Wikipedia).

[12] After leaving Talladega, Alabama where Fritz had his tenure denied due to McCarthy times, they settled in Cambridge, Mass. where they met the Morrisons. Fritz died suddenly of emphysema and heart trouble on July 31, 1964 (see report My Story). Yvonne had a part time job in the Book Review Office of Scientific American from 1966 to 1998. Phil Morrison was a reviewer of books on science for the journal starting in 1965 and Yvonne worked for him (see also Wikipedia / Philip Morrison). She was his next door neighbor and perennial assistant and she passed over to Phil her stack of the past day’s arrivals. Almost hourly deliveries brought science books of every kind to Phil’s doorstep: from treatises dense with mathematical notation to children’s picture books, from ground-breaking research studies to popularizations about energy and aliens. Skimming each on the spot, Phil made a first cut of those to be read more closely for possible review (copied October, 25, 2010 from www.memoriesofmorrison.org/Storiesandtales.html).

[13] MIT Institute Professor Emeritus Philip Morrison, a distinguished theoretical astrophysicist and interpreter of science and technology for the general public, died April 22, 2005 at his home. He was 89. A member of the Manhattan Project who went on to become a vocal critic of the nuclear arms race, Morrison was widely known for his research and professional contributions in quantum electrodynamics, nuclear theory, radiology, isotope geology and, since the 1950s, in cosmic-ray origins and propagation, gamma-ray astronomy and other topics in high-energy astrophysics and in cosmology. For more than 50 years, since his involvement in the development of the first atomic bomb, Philip Morrison has been a leading participant in the efforts to control and eliminate nuclear weapons. In addition, he was deeply committed to education, both at the undergraduate level and for younger students. A member of the MIT faculty since 1964, Morrison has held the rank of Institute Professor, the highest honor awarded by the MIT faculty and administration, since 1973. He was among the first scientists (in 1959) to call upon the professional community to begin a coordinated search for interstellar communications using a microwave search. His many publications and speeches, beyond research and astronomy, center on two large issues: nuclear and conventional war and American policy; and the teaching and public understanding of physics and science in general. He has authored or co-authored many books on these subjects, including "The Price of Defense," which he co-authored with five students of the arms issue. The book, published in 1979, was the first to propose a detailed alternative defense posture for the United States. A regular reviewer of books on science for Scientific American since 1965, Morrison had also narrated and helped script films on science for Charles and Ray Eames. He appeared widely on radio and on British, Canadian and American television in a number of science programs and series, most visibly as author-presenter (with his wife, Phylis Morrison) of a six-part national Public Broadcasting System series, "The Ring of Truth," which first aired in 1987. He and his wife co-authored a book, "The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry Into How We Know What We Know" (Random House, 1987) as a companion to the series. Morrison was spectacular at explaining physics to the public. “He was not only a scientist who did other things, but he defined his role as a scientist by being involved in other things” (sentence freely adapted from a speech of Charles Weiner MIT Professor Emeritus of History of Science). Philip Morrison was born in Somerville, N.J., in 1915. He attended Pittsburgh public schools and received the B.S. degree from the Carnegie Institute for Technology in 1936. In 1940 he received the Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley, under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer. A resident of Cambridge, he was survived by his stepson, Bert Singer, and by Singer's wife, Angela Kimberk. (Partially retrieved Aug, 28, 2010 from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/morrison.html, MIT News, Elisabeth Thomson, News Office, April 25, 2005. A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 27, 2005. See also www.memoriesofmorrison.org).

[14] Phylis Morrison was born Phylis Hagen in 1927. She married and had one son, Bert Singer, but the marriage did not last. Self taught as an artist and weaver, she became convinced that art and science were the same. She was a teacher of art and science but her true gift was teaching other teachers how to teach. In 1960, she published a book on crystals with Alan Holden for the Science Study series. In 1965 she met the distinguished physicist and peace activist Philip Morrison at an education program connected with MIT. The two married and became an inseparable couple. The two Morrisons were collaborators for over thirty-five years, having served together on the Commission on College Physics, work which has had a profound effect on the teaching of physics ever since. They subsequently co-authored many books, worked closely on education reform initiatives, narrated and scripted films, and appeared widely on science programs for the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting and American television’s NOVA series on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The Morrisons became widely recognized for their presentation of a six-part PBS series, "The Ring of Truth," aired in 1987. They also coauthored and collaborated on a book and its film adaptation, "Powers of Ten", which presents compelling visual images of the world around us, from the most minute objects to the unimaginably vast. When Phil began to serve Scientific American as book editor, Phylis joined him in reviewing children’s science books for thirty-five years. In May of 2000, Phylis Morrison was honored, along with her husband, with the National Science Board's Public Service Award. Of the Morrisons, NSB awards chair Michael Ambrosino said: "their ability is to see things whole, not from a single perspective. They focus on teaching freshmen courses that empower students to learn through experimentation. Their reviews of children’s' science books and their giveaways of these books to children each year are all indicative of how special they are," The Morrisons, he added, maintained a vast interest in international education, especially in India and Africa. Throughout her life, Phylis Morrison maintained a childlike sense of wonder at the universe around her. She proudly wore a massive, angular magnetite ring, hewn out of a meteorite fragment that she and her husband found on one of their trips. "Passive learning, where a child sits still, with little activity except that of the ear and the eye and perhaps the hand marking the paper, is not wrong," Phylis Morrison said in a presentation to the National Academy of Sciences in the late 1980s. "Video, video tape, video games, computers-all are easily operated and produce interesting results with a modest amount of activity. But how much better if children learn how to make them behave. How much better if they learn that in order to find something out about a system, they must inquire of it, and that the best kind of evidence comes from scientific experiments and their confirmation." Phylis received the Wheeler prize with her husband from the Boston Museum of Science. She died of cancer in 2002. (retrieved from www2.cambridgema.gov/historic/cwhp/bios_m.html and www.setileague.org/admin/phylis.htm Sept. 19, 2012)

[15] Erna (already mentioned earlier in this report) and Lore May were sisters. Lore was a pioneer in mathematics education who taught at The Miquon School, an independent, parent-owned, elementary school located in Conshohocken (suburban Philadelphia), Pennsylvania. Central to the school's philosophy is that children learn best through inquiry and discovery. Mrs. Rasmussen taught at Miquon where her husband, Donald, was the school’s principal – from 1956 to 1968, developing programs that revolutionized mathematics education around the world. Her discovery-based Miquon Math Lab Materials remain in use to this day and are popular among families who home-school their children. Born in Germany, Mrs. Rasmussen escaped from the country during the Holocaust and came to New York City in 1938. Lacking a high school diploma and speaking only limited English, she was admitted to New College, the experimental division of Columbia University Teachers College. The following year she transferred to the University of Illinois on a scholarship and graduated after only two years of study. She married her professor, Donald Rasmussen, the day after her final examination. The couple moved in 1942 to Talladega, Ala., where Mrs. Rasmussen raised her children and taught elementary education at Talladega College, a historically black school. Within two months of arriving in Alabama, Mrs. Rasmussen, her husband and a black friend spent a night in the Birmingham jail for eating together in a black-owned restaurant. Her experiences in Alabama were recounted in a documentary, “From Swastika to Jim Crow,” which aired on PBS in 2001. After leaving Miquon, Mrs. Rasmussen devoted herself to improving education in Philadelphia’s inner city schools. She established the Learning Center Project and opened the first teacher center in the United States. In 1976, she received the John B. Patterson Award for Excellence in Education for her work on behalf of public education in Philadelphia. The Rasmussens have lived in Berkeley since 1986. Lore Rasmussen died Jan. 23, 2009 at her home in Berkeley, Calif. She had three sons Peter, David and Steven. (Partially retrieved September, 06, 2010 from http://chestnuthilllocal.com/issues/2009.02.05/obituaries.html).

[16] Nova Scotia is a Canadian province located on Canada's southeastern coast. Its capital, Halifax, is the major economic centre of the region. Nova Scotia is the second-smallest province in Canada with a population of 940,397 as of 2009. David Rasmussen, one of the sons of Lore and Donald Rasmussen lived and perhaps is still living in Bay St. Lawrence, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. (Retrieved September 06, 2010 from Wikipedia; see also http://stthomassource.com/content/commentary/open-forum/2005/09/22/another-response-magbies-letter, retrieved Sept. 7, 2010).

[17] Anne McCarty Braden (July 28, 1924 to March 6, 2006) was an American advocate of racial equality. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in rigidly segregated Anniston, Alabama, Braden grew up in a white middle-class family that accepted southern racial morals wholeheartedly. A devout Episcopalian, Braden was bothered by racial segregation, but never questioned it until her college years at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia. After working on newspapers in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, she returned to Kentucky as a young adult to write for the Louisville Times. There, she met and in 1948 married fellow newspaperman Carl Braden, a left-wing trade unionist. She became a supporter of the civil rights movement at a time when it was unpopular among southern whites. In 1948, Anne and Carl Braden immersed themselves in Henry Wallace's run on the Progressive Party for the presidency. Soon after Wallace’s defeat, they left mainstream journalism to apply their writing talents to the interracial left wing of the labor movement. She endured her first arrest in 1951 when she led a delegation of southern white women organized by the Civil Rights Congress to Mississippi to protest the execution of Willie McGee, an African American man convicted of the rape of a white woman. In 1954, the Wades, an African American family who knew the Bradens through association, approached them with a proposal that would drastically alter all lives involved. Like so many other Americans after World War II, Andrew Wade wanted to buy a house in a suburban neighborhood. Because of Jim Crow housing practices, the Wades had been unsuccessful for months in their quest to purchase a home on their own. The Bradens, who never wavered in their support for African American civil rights, agreed to purchase the home for the Wades. On May 15, 1954 Andrew Wade and his wife Charlotte spent their first night in their new home in the Louisville suburb of Shively, Kentucky. Upon discovering that blacks had moved in, white neighbors burned a cross in front of the house, shot out windows, and condemned the Bradens for buying it on the Wades’ behalf. Their fears may have been stoked in part by the timing of the move which came only two days before the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark condemnation of school segregation. Six weeks later, amid constant community tensions, the Wades’ new house was dynamited one evening while they were out. While Vernon Bown (an associate of the Wades and the Bradens) was indicted for the bombing, the actual bombers were never sought nor brought to trial. McCarthyism affected the ordeal. The investigation turned from segregationist violence to the alleged Communist Party affiliations of some of those who had supported the Wades in their housing quest. Segregationists charged that these Communists had engineered the bombing to provide a cause célèbre and fund-raising opportunity, but this was never proven. Nonetheless, on October 1954, Anne and Carl Braden and five other whites were charged with sedition. After a sensationalized trial, Carl Braden—the perceived ringleader—was convicted of sedition and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. As Anne and the other defendants awaited a similar fate, Carl served eight months, but out on $40,000 bond when a U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidated state sedition laws because of their capricious use. All charges were dropped and the Wades moved back to Louisville. Blacklisted from local employment, the Bradens took jobs as field organizers for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), a small, New Orleans-based civil rights organization whose mission was to solicit white southern support for the beleaguered southern civil rights movement. In the years before southern civil rights violations made national news, the Bradens developed their own media: SCEF’s monthly newspaper, The Southern Patriot, and through numerous pamphlets and press releases publicizing major civil rights campaigns. In 1958 Anne wrote The Wall Between, a memoir of their sedition case. One of the few books of its time to unpack the psychology of white southern racism from within, it was praised by human rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt, and became a runner-up for the National Book Award. Although their radical politics marginalized them among many of their own generation, the Bradens were reclaimed by young student activists of the 1960s. They were among the civil rights movement’s most dedicated white allies. The Bradens also had three children: James, born in 1951, a 1972 Rhodes Scholar, and a 1980 graduate of Harvard Law School (where he preceded Barack Obama as editor of the Harvard Law Review), has lived and practiced law for over 25 years in San Francisco, California. Elizabeth, born in 1960, has worked as a teacher in many countries around the world, serving as of 2006 in that capacity in rural Ethiopia. Anita, born in 1953, died of a pulmonary disorder at age 11. After Carl’s death in 1975, Anne Braden remained among the nation’s most outspoken white anti-racist activists. She instigated the formation of a new regional multi-racial organization, the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC), which initiated battles against environmental racism. She became an instrumental voice in the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition of the 1980s and in the two Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns, as well as organizing across racial divides in the new environmental, women’s, and anti-nuclear movements that sprang up in that decade. From the 1980s into the 2000s she wrote for Southern Exposure, Southern Changes, and the National Guardian and Fellowship. No longer a pariah, Anne received the American Civil Liberties Union’s first Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty in 1990 for her contributions to civil liberties. As she aged, her activism focused more on Louisville, where she remained a leader in anti-racist drives and taught social justice history classes at local universities. Anne Braden died on March 6, 2006. Over her nearly six decades of activism, her life touched almost every modern U.S. social movement, and her message to them all was the centrality of racism and the responsibility of whites to combat it. (Retrieved September 9, 2010 from Wikipedia).

[18] The Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) was established in 1946 as the educational arm of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). SCEF became a completely separate organization the following year and based most of its activities out of its New Orleans, Louisiana, office. James Anderson Dombrowski directed the group and edited its monthly newspaper, the Southern Patriot. Dombrowski and Aubrey Williams became the most visible figures in SCEF during the 1950s, and they helped establish the organization as a leading proponent of integration and civil rights in the South. Veteran journalists and civil rights activists Anne and Carl Braden directed SCEF from the mid 1960s into the 1970s. They forged close ties with regional and local southern civil rights groups, kept civil rights issues in the national media and strengthened SCEF fundraising activities. SCEF worked closely with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from the early 1960s on. Anti-communists in Congress and state government frequently attacked SCEF as a communist front. In 1963, police raided the New Orleans offices and arrested several officials for violating Louisiana's anti-communist laws. The United States Supreme Court overturned the laws in 1965, after SCEF challenged the arrests in court. The Bradens moved SCEF's offices from New Orleans to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1966. The organization continued to work toward the goal of a southern interracial future. In July of 1973, a group of Black Panthers kidnapped, at gunpoint, two SCEF officials, Helen Greever and Earl Scott. The two eventually escaped, but the incident caused deep divisions within SCEF that were evidenced over the following few months. At a SCEF board meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, in October of 1973, board member Walter Collins denounced several Communist Party members, including Greever, arguing that they had placed the policies of the party over the best interests of SCEF. Collins argued that the Communists had caused the disputes with the Panthers. He and other board members voted to oust the Communists over the opposition of the Bradens. Eventually, SCEF moved to Atlanta, Georgia where internal disputes and financial problems plagued the organization. By 1981 financial problems caused the group to consider moving to Dallas, merging with other organizations, or disbanding altogether (retrieved September 9, 2010 from www.library.gsu.edu, Georgia state university library).

[19] An epiphany on the Massachusetts Turnpike 40 years ago, days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, inspired Horace Seldon to create Community Change Inc. Seldon, a former protestant minister, had just quit his job at the United Church of Christ and was driving home after performing a sunrise Mass in western Massachusetts. At the Chicopee marker on the turnpike, Seldon had an emotional revelation. "It just became clear to me that I must live my life working against white racism," Seldon, who is white, says of the bigotry whites direct toward blacks, "and I said, 'Yes,' sang hymns, and wept alternately on the Pike as I came home." Since he founded the organization, which is celebrating its 40th year of educating the public about institutional racism, the 85-year-old Wakefield resident has experienced lows (Seldon says many thought his anti-racist goals were "crazy") and highs (the election last month of Barack Obama). The New York Times marked Obama's election online with a headline that read "Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout," and CNN and USA Today published polls in which the majorities of Americans said they believed that racial relations would improve because of the election of Obama. Seldon says the eagerness to use President-elect Obama as a sign of a post-racial society reflects people's misunderstanding about the causes of racism. "Most white people still think of racism in terms of individual feelings and acts of prejudice and discrimination," Seldon says. "It's a much broader, institutional problem than that. That kind of problem doesn't go away quickly." For 26 years Seldon taught a class at Boston College on the history of racism, which was taken over by Paul Marcus, who also holds Seldon's former job as director of Community Change. Now Seldon fights his anti-racism battle from a historic angle. For the past 10 years, Seldon has enlightened people about the history of blacks in Boston as a park ranger at the Boston African American National Historic Site. He also has two websites devoted to the work of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. (Edited version based on a report by Vanessa E. Jones © Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company, retrieved Sept. 8, 2010 from www.boston.com).

[20] Community Change Inc. (CCI) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote racial justice and equity by challenging systemic racism and acting as a catalyst for anti-racist learning and action. CCI makes visible and challenges the historical and ongoing role racism plays in the institutions that shape all of our lives. They focus particularly on involving white people in understanding and confronting systemic racism and white privilege. They understand racism as a system that impacts every area of life in the United States from education to law, from housing to transportation, from employment to media, from religion to artistic expression. It is a system that privileges white people and oppresses people of color. This gives white people disproportionate power to make and enforce decisions, access resources, set the standards for behavior which are imposed on everyone and name the view of “reality” everyone must agree with. To transform this system requires that a critical mass of white people come to recognize the injustice of the system and participate collectively in dismantling the privilege they receive from the system at the cost of people of color. (Retrieved Sept. 8, 2010 from www.communitychangeinc.org )

[21] James Mercer Langston Hughes, (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best-known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and her husband James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934). He grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. Both his paternal and maternal great-grandmothers were African American, and both his paternal and maternal great-grandfathers were white: one of Scottish and one of Jewish descent (retrieved Sept. 11, 2010 from Wikipedia)

[22] Robert Browning (7 May 1812–12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Browning was born in Camberwell, a suburb of London, England, the first son of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. Browning’s paternal grandfather was a wealthy slave owner in St Kitts, West Indies, but Browning’s father was an abolitionist. Browning's father had been sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation. Revolted by the slavery there, he returned to England. Browning’s mother, to whom he was very close, was a devout nonconformist as well as a talented musician. (Retrieved September 15, 2010 from Wikipedia; see also “Porphyria’s Lover” in www.sparknotes.com/poetry/browning/section1.html).

[23] Browning, to use an expression in his Fra Lippo Lippi, fully recognizes "the value and significance of flesh." A healthy and well-toned spiritual life is with him the furthest removed from asceticism. To the passage from his Rabbi Ben Ezra, "all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul", should be added what David sings to Saul, in the poem entitled Saul. Was the full physical life ever more beautifully sung?
"Oh! our manhood's prime vigour! no spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced.
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!"
Though this is said in the person of the beautiful shepherd-boy, David, whoever has lived any time with Browning, through his poetry, must be assured that it is also an expression of the poet's own experience of the glory of flesh.
(Retrieved Sept. 15, 2010 from http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/hcorson/bl-hcorson-intro-2.htm).

[24] Bail is money deposited with the court to obtain the temporary release of an arrested person on the assurance that the person will obey the court’s orders, as by appearing for trial (Webster’s New World Dictionary). Apparently the idea was to organize a fund to help to release people from jail during the Civil Rights Movement.

[25] Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf with whom she became close friends. Her stories often focus on moments of disruption and frequently open rather abruptly. Among her most well known stories are "The Garden Party," "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," and "The Fly." During the First World War Mansfield contracted extra pulmonary tuberculosis which rendered any return or visit to New Zealand impossible and led to her death at the age of 34 (retrieved 25/09/2010 from Wikipedia).

[26] Martin Andersen Nexø (26 June 1869 - 1 June 1954) was a Danish writer. He was the first significant Danish author to depict the working class in his writings, and the first great Danish socialist, later communist, writer. He was born to a large family (the fourth of eleven children) in an impoverished district of Copenhagen. In 1877, his family moved to Nexø, and he adopted the name of this town as his last name. Having been an industrial worker before, Nexø attended a folk high school and later worked as a journalist. Pelle Erobreren (English: Pelle the Conqueror), published in four volumes 1906-1910, is his best-known work and the one most translated. Ditte Menneskebarn (English: Ditte, Child of Man), written from 1917 to 1921, praises the working woman for her self-sacrifice. Danish police arrested Nexø in 1941 during Denmark's occupation by the Nazis, for his communist affiliation. Upon his release, he traveled to neutral Sweden and then to the Soviet Union, where he made broadcasts to Nazi-occupied Denmark and Norway. After World War II, Nexø moved to Dresden in East Germany, where he was made an honorary citizen. His international reputation as one of the greatest European social writers grew, especially, but not exclusively, in socialist countries. Nexø died in Dresden in 1954. (Retrieved from Wikipedia, September 24, 2012).

[27] Ditte, Child of Man, (Danish: Ditte Menneskebarn), is a 1946 socio-realistic Danish film directed by Bjarne Jensen-Henning based on the novel by Martin Andersen Nexø. It tells the tragic story of an impoverished young girl who becomes the victim of harsh social conditions. It has been noted as the first example of the more realistic and serious Danish film in the post-World War II era. Ditte, Child of Man is one of the ten films listed in Denmark's cultural canon by the Danish Ministry of Culture. Ditte born illegitimately is deserted as a young girl by her alcoholic mother Sørine. She moves in with her grandparents Maren and Søren Mand. But after Søren dies, it is Ditte who becomes the old woman's only support. It is the small girl's deepest sorrow that she has no father, so she is pleased when she hears that Lars Peter will marry her mother and they will all live together. However, it is Ditte who becomes like a mother to Lars Peter's three small children. Their poverty is so oppressive, it drives Ditte's mother to kill Maren, and Sørine is sent away to prison. Ditte, despite her young age, must assume all of the household's responsibilities. As time passes, a warm relationship develops between Ditte and Lars Peter. One day, Lars Peter's brother Johannes appears. Johannes is a poor knife and scissors sharpener who informs them of his big business schemes, however, his schemes bring nothing but disappointment. Lars moves away and Ditte must find herself a job. Ditte takes a job as a servant on a rural farm. The farm owner's weak-willed son Karl, who is completely controlled by his mother, falls in love with Ditte and they develop a happy romance. However, when Ditte becomes pregnant, Karl does nothing while his mother forces Ditte to leave the farm. Deeply distraught, Ditte searches after Lars Peter, the only parental figure who ever showed her kindness and understanding. Ditte discovers her mother has been paroled from prison and Ditte begins a new life—forgiving and caring for her mother—at the same time that she becomes the mother of her own illegitimate child. (Retrieved from Wikipedia, September, 24, 2012; full text of Ditte: Girls Alive! can be found at www.gutenberg.org).

[28] Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) is considered one of the leading figures of the French Romantic movement. Musset produced numerous distinguished works of lyric poetry and several esteemed plays, including his outstanding historical tragedy Lorenzaccio (1834). Musset's verse cycle Les nuits (1835-37; The Nights), inspired by his love affair with French writer George Sand, is typically regarded among his preeminent poetic compositions. Comprised of four separate poems—La nuit de mai, La nuit de décembre, La nuit d'août, and La nuit d'octobre—Musset's Les nuits cycle chronicles the poet's gradual recovery from the intense suffering and bitterness caused by the end of a love affair, capturing this process over four disparate nights. All but “La nuit de décembre” take the form of a conversation between the poet and his Muse. In that work, an evocation of winter that depicts loneliness and desperation, a black-clad figure of death appears. Through the poems of Les nuits, Musset affirmed his belief in the importance of love and its relationship to art. In the last of the series, La nuit d'octobre, the poet rests after reconciling with his past. (Retrieved October, 6, 2010 from http://www.enotes.com/nineteenth-century-criticism/musset-alfred-de).

[29] The excerpt from Musset’s poem La nuit de mai quoted by Yvonne is:
Quel que soit le soucis que ta jeunesse endure,
Laisse-la s'élargir, cette sainte blessure
Que les noirs séraphins t'ont faite au fond du coeur :
Rien ne nous rend si grands qu'une grande douleur.

[30] Giono, Jean (1895-1970) is a French novelist. Son of a shoemaker of Italian descent he enjoyed a happy childhood and attended the local school, which he left at 16 to work in the town bank. He served in the infantry in World War I, married in 1920, and returned to the bank until the success of his first books enabled him to become a full-time writer. Le Chant du monde (1934) brings battle on to a human scale. Telling of a feud between families, conducted like a European Western, it is one of Giono's finest fictions, in which he succeeds in giving an insistent voice and life to natural phenomena alongside his human protagonists. The most poetical of French novelists, Giono expends cornucopian imagery to celebrate the joys of instinctual living. He once described his aim as being to batter the sensibilities of his readers. His people are all of a piece, and not mutilated by the demands of life in mass-society. (Retrieved September 29, 2010 from www.answers.com/topic/jean-giono by Walter Redfern ; see also W. D. Redfern, The Private World of Jean Giono, 1967).


Some additional information on Yvonne Pappenheim

Yvonne (Blumenthal) Pappenheim, a social activist, was born in 1913 in NYC and died Sept. 8, 2005, in Cambridge, MA. She was raised in a wealthy Manhattan family. She went to the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1934. Soon after, she returned to New York and attended the School of Journalism at Columbia University. She started to volunteer at the Henry Street Settlement House and the National Refugee Service. During World War II, she trained as a nurse’s aide and worked at Bellevue Hospital. After the war, she earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania and was a professional social worker for the next fifteen years. In the early 1950s she married Fritz Pappenheim, a German refugee, who was a political activist and professor of economics. The couple moved to Alabama when Fritz accepted a position at a black school, Talladega College; he taught there from 1944 to 1952. At the college, Yvonne became keenly aware of racial discrimination, as she reported in a PBS documentary, From Swastika to Jim Crow, that recounted the experiences of Jewish refugees teaching at black colleges in the South. The couple was soon caught up in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s. They moved to Cambridge in 1952, where Fritz Pappenheim wrote a groundbreaking study, The Alienation of Modern Man (1959), and continued to teach and lecture. After her husband’s death in 1964, Yvonne threw herself into working for social justice. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, she ran the Massachusetts Friends of the Southern Conference Education Fund and served as a member of the human rights coordinating committee at the American Friends Service Committee. For many years, she worked with Community Change, a Boston organization founded to fight racism, and in 1992 was awarded their Drylongso award, which honors ordinary people doing extraordinary work in the struggle to dismantle racism. The library of the organization was subsequently named in her honor. Other awards included the “Fighting for Women’s Voices Award” from the Coalition for Basic Human Needs in 1994 and the Cambridge Peace Commission’s “Peace and Justice Award” in 1995. For twenty years before her death, she was a member of “Writers in Action”, a group that met weekly at her home to send letters to public officials and news outlets on various social and economic issues. Her last letter to the Boston Globe was sent only two weeks before her death. Over many years she was assistant to her neighbor, Philip Morrison, an atomic physicist and a peace activist, in his role as book editor of the Scientific American. Her personal maxim was: “If you don’t live what you think, soon you’ll think as you live”. She died in Cambridge at the age of 92. (See Boston Globe 7-19-05; Monthly Review, December 1995 and Monthly Review, Vol. 57, No 7, December 2005).

Acknowledgments: I thank Linda Harrar and Meril Rasmussen for the kind permission to use the interview they produced in 2005 and Ruth Pappenheim for handing me the DVD with the interview in Vienna and sending me Yvonne’s poems by e-mail in 2010.