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Memories of Work
P A G E 2
“So I went to work at a fur store as a bookkeeper... But I loved the selling... And after a while I was on the floor all the time... [We had customers,] “sporting women” and it was so interesting. One had a diamond here, and one had a diamond there... in their teeth! That was the style.”
Belle Woolpy Rauch, oral history, 1986. Rauch, who went to work in about 1905, was too gregarious to find bookkeeping interesting. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.
“It was a tremendous transition for mother. She was a very fine seamstress and had worked in Bialystock making shirts for the army... Here she
was out in the bleak North Dakota prairie, living in a shack, no running water, no inside bathroom, cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and what they were doing was pulling the stones away so they could plow the land.”
Laura Rapaport Borsten, oral history, 1994. Borsten’s parents homesteaded near Ashley, North Dakota, in the 1910s. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.
“I wanted to attend a specific business machine school... I was received by this lovely looking Nordic, I’m being polite, and she had my name on there, asked me to sit down, and started asking questions about experience and grades in school and what I hoped to do. Then she said... “Are you Jewish?” And I said, “Yes.” And after a pause she said to me, “We don't have any Jewish students.”... My money was returned to me, pushed back across the desk and I was asked to leave the office.”
Fannie Schwartz Schanfield, oral history, 1992. Schanfield recalled how she was affected by anti-Semitism in Minneapolis during the 1930s. Interview, Minnesota Public Radio broadcast, 1992.
top photo: Hannah Marcus (center), her daughters Rachel Marcus Shapiro and Eda Marcus Schlessinger and their children. All three women homesteaded. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.
inset photo: Many Jewish men and women found work making straw hats in this St. Paul downtown factory, about 1920. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.
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