Many women that I have interviewed are silent in a particular sense; they do not seem able to talk about their lives in the context of history. So many of their narratives are characterized by an aura of isolation, as if they had lived in a cocoon, which to some extent and in a certain sense they did. For century upon century, education was forbidden to women. When they were allowed to learn to study, they were taught the same history that males were, men’s history, and in men’s history women, no matter how cherished, have only a small place. Again, the message: women and important things are oil and water; women can’t; women don’t. Women’s place was and, for the majority of women walking the earth right now, still is the home. They have absorbed the message; they live within a cocoon, a universe adjunct to history. Their narratives have a subtextual assumption: they think that they themselves (or their parents and husband, when they have one) comprise the sum total of forces responsible for their fate.
     The exceptions are Afro-American women and Jewish women, especially European Jewish women, who are awake to the force and impact that governments, laws, religious ideas and social mores have in creating the contexts that we inhabit and to which individuals must adapt if they are to live without social ostracism or more violent punishment from the community.
     There is an old saying that women are locked boxes who carry their stories to the grave. My experience suggests this is another ain’t so. Women love to tell their stories, they always have, but until they were allowed to read and write, a recent privilege, they used the only medium available – the oral tradition. The trouble with verbal transmission is that it is the most fragile of forms, the most vulnerable to being forgotten or altered over time, corrupted by later tellers with a different agenda, or even obliterated.
     The tragic effect of silence on peoples who have suffered injustice and worse has much meaning for women, especially those who are still oppressed. When women keep silent, their female offspring pay the price. The curse of silence is that it condemns each generation to repeat the same mistakes and re-learn the same lessons. Progress requires the accumulation and sharing of knowledge, and building on the experience of those who went before.
     Then there is the matter of the loss of beauty. It is not necessary to become rich or famous to experience beauty in this life. There is such a thing as aesthetic riches, and they are available to those who learn how to look for them. Certainly the world would be a grimmer place without stories about ordinary life that glow like the one Eva Margolinsky tells.

EVA MARGOLINSKY
War and Chocolate - Part 2

In April of 1941, after three years of running from the Nazis, of hiding, of starving, and of being afraid, Werner and I arrived in New York. Those we left behind weren’t so lucky. The Nazis transported my father, my husband’s brother and his mother to a concentration camp. My father was not killed by the Nazis. He starved to death because he refused to eat the food in the concentration camp. He had been so positive the Nazis would honor and respect his service in the army in World War I, but they didn’t care. Werner’s eldest brother, the physician, was killed, and his other brother and sister-in-law perished. My mother-in-law was saved by the Russians when they opened the camps, but she then had to wait in another camp for displaced persons for a year. She was seventy years old when she reached New York.
     Werner and I first lived in a furnished room. The depression was ending and right away we both got jobs, which we needed desperately. A Swiss firm hired me as a secretary. Werner found a job as a waiter and he joined the waiters’ union. Every afternoon he went to the union hall where the big hotels hired waiters to serve at banquets. He also wrote articles for the union newspaper. Later on, we got an apartment near Columbia University, and we rented out some of our rooms, to supplement our wages.
     As newcomers, we liked to travel to learn about our new country. Of course we couldn’t travel very far or for very long because we didn’t have much money. We liked to take weekend trips. One weekend we took a bus trip to see Pennsylvania. This trip was to last from Friday evening to Sunday evening. New York had been very hot, and we were very glad to come out of the city into a little cooler air. We were taken to a nice place to have dinner and then to the hotel where we slept that night. On Saturday we drove to the town of Hershey. As we approached the town we smelled that beautiful aroma which we loved to inhale. We had a tour of the chocolate factory. Small leaflets were given to us which said that Mr. Hershey had learned to make good chocolates in Switzerland. Everybody got a present of a little bag of chocolate in the shape of lentils.
     We then toured the streets which had very funny names like Vanilla Street and Almond Street. The street lamps had finials that resembled Hershey kisses, with little flags flying. We were told that Hershey chocolate had never been advertised, and never needed to be advertised because the candy sold itself.
     Next we travelled to the Amish country and visited a market where pies and pastry were sold. We were told that Amish women were allowed to wear only very simple dresses of dark colors, and that clothes were made without buttons, only snaps. We learned that the Amish were very religious, and didn’t use electricity, and they would not travel in automobiles; they used a horse and wagon. The Amish are different from most people, but in the United States they are accepted and live peacefully. Then on Sunday, we traveled to a beautiful woods, and we came to a museum where there were seven rooms filled with paintings by Renoir, my favorite painter. We looked at these pictures and admired them, and I remember visiting another room with small objects which were made by a famous silversmith.
     We also visited an exhibition of old cars which was very interesting, and then it was time to head home.
     Werner and I made other little trips, but only the one to Hershey is still fresh and vivid in my memory. Perhaps I remember it so clearly because America seemed so different from anything in Europe, especially at that time. All of Europe had become a nightmare of chaos and violence and suffering, but now we were in a new country where we felt safe once again, where we had plenty to eat and life seemed good again. We had a future. People who were different, eccentric even, were tolerated. And there was a town that was pure delight, where streets had names like Vanilla and Almond, and where the air smelled of chocolate.
     Perhaps this town made us feel young again. I think on this trip I started to feel hope again.
     Perhaps, although we didn’t say this at the time, it was our honeymoon.

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