In response to the interviewer's questions, Abel Banov gives very detailed and articulate answers to his family's history and his memories of growing up in Charleston, South Carolina. His father's family was originally named Banor. Around 1792, in a partition of Poland, the family took the family named Banovitz and moved to the Russian sector. Samuel Lazar Banov, b. 1870, the interviewee's father, was smuggled out of Russia before he was twelve to avoid military conscription; he went to an uncle in Manchester, UK. Then he went to another uncle, surnamed Gorse, in Fall River, Mass; before coming to Charleston, SC, to work in the clothing store of his first cousin Wolfe Banov. The store, Banov and Volaski, employed and helped launched other clothing merchants such as Jack Krawcheck and Sam Berlin. By 1888 or so, Sam Banov had his own shop near King and Spring Street; he would later own several stores, including a pawn shop, and the Lincoln Theatre, a totally black movie house and vaudeville state on the site. In 1901 Sam Banov married Rachel Karesh, b. 1880, the daughter of an itinerant peddler, in Greeleyville, SC. Their children were Carrie, Katie, Isadore Lee, Milton and Abel. Abel Banov grew up first above the store on King Street, but then his family moved to Moultrie Street. Banov recounts the history of the Hebrew school in Charleston, calling it the great leveler, and gives testimonials to the Hebrew teacher, [Jacob] Glas[s]er and music teacher G. Theodore Wichman, both of whom had great effects on many Charlestonians. He speaks of "downtown" and "uptown" Jews and the differing social hierarchies, with much information on the Mazo, Barshay and other families and also refers to Karl Karesh and Gus Pearlman. He founded the first newspaper at the College of Charleston, and then began his journalism career in Puerto Rico, creating the North American Newspaper Alliance, in which he could act as a "stringer" for many newspapers. He moved to Spain just before World War II, where he covered top secret stories, some considered too volatile to publish. He returned to Puerto Rico and helped start a new newspaper there. He returned to Charleston and met and married Joan Heineman, who with her parents, fled Germany just before the outbreak of World War II. Banov speaks of his father's first cousin, Leon Banov, Charleston's public health officer, briefly mentioning the anti-Semitism he faced. He recalls key figures in the Kalushiner Society, death and mourning customs, bar mitzvah customs of the day, the "symbiotic" relation between Jews and African Americans, and other subjects.
