Oral history interview with Mordecai (Mortie) Cohen and Dorothy (Dutch) Idalin Gelson Cohen, 1997.

ArchivalResource

Rosengarten, Dale, 1948-. Oral history interview with Mordecai (Mortie) Cohen and Dorothy (Dutch) Idalin Gelson Cohen, 1997.

Oral history interview with Mordecai (Mortie) Cohen and Dorothy (Dutch) Idalin Gelson Cohen, 1997.

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/50388287

Mortie Cohen recalls his childhood and young adulthood in St. Matthews, SC. The middle son of Isaac Cohen of New York City and Raye Needle of Charleston, Cohen describes his Christian friends, the six or seven other Jewish families in town, and his father's general merchandise business and the two farms run by hired help. He and his family were perfectly integrated into the community and never met with any sign of anti-Semitism in St. Matthews or Walterboro, where he later moved in 1940. Only upon moving to Charleston ca. 1953, and later nominating a Jewish friend to the Country Club did he witness it. In St. Matthews, the Jewish families worshipped in the Masonic Temple; there, too, he had slight knowledge of SC novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner Julia Peterkin; it was necessary to cross her farm to get to his father's farm in Fort Motte, SC. He graduated high school in 1935 and attended the University of South Carolina, graduating in 1939, marrying and moving to Walterboro soon after; here he ran a drug store, until "lured" to Charleston to open one in St. Windermere Shopping Center by William Ackerman. He describes his courtship of Dutch Gelson, and she joins the conversation giving details of the death of two children in Walterboro and the marriage of their daughter Carolyn to the attorney and author Alan M. Dershowitz. Both muse on the topic of assimilation and maintaining a Jewish identity in small towns, noting that Jews were accepted, but African Americans were not. They give descriptions of racist attitudes and incidents against African Americans in St. Matthews, Walterboro and Charleston.

Sound recording : 2 sound cassettes : digital.Transcript : 35 p. ; 28 cm.

College of Charleston, Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library