Interviewer: We are here today with Gitel, the main character in Gitel’s Freedom by Iris Mitlin Lav. Gitel has graciously agreed to come back briefly from the afterlife to allow me to interview her.
Hello Gitel. Thank you for granting me this interview. If you were still alive today, how old would you be.
Gitel: Let me see. I was born in February, 1907, so I would be around 118 years old now.
I: You seemed unhappy a lot of the time you were growing up. What made you so unhappy?
G: I felt stuck between being an old-world girl and being an American girl, although I wanted to be the latter. I was five years old when we came to the United States, to South Bend, Indiana. My mother Rayzel never adjusted to life in the U.S. She never even learned to speak English. She tried to impose on me all the restrictions that would have applied if I had been raised as an Orthodox Jewish girl back in Belorussia. I couldn’t go to the houses of my school friends, I couldn’t play sports, I couldn’t wear pants, I couldn’t go away to college, and lots of other restraints. I defied her to the extent I could by playing on a non-Jewish softball team, for example, but that was not until I was in high school.
I: How did you meet Shmuel? What made you want to marry him?
G: I was already 25 years old and working at Studebaker. My mother was pushing me hard to get married, but I had no use for any of the local men the matchmaker or my mother proposed. They were so provincial and boring. I had just about decided that I didn’t want to marry at all. But when I heard Shmuel speak at a Workmen’s Circle meeting in Chicago, he seemed so different from any men I knew. He was concerned about the welfare of people who didn’t have the money to afford their necessities. And he also had good ideas about what politicians and the government could do to help workers and those without jobs. I fell in love with him and his ideas.
I: What is your conception of happiness and freedom?
G: When Shmuel died, after having been an invalid for much of the preceding 11 years, I was 60 years old and exhausted from taking care of him, being the breadwinner, and holding the family together. But I soon shook off my exhaustion and realized that for the first time since our first daughter was born a year after we married, I was free from responsibilities and could be my own person. Both daughters were married and on their own. I set about finding a job and a small studio apartment in the city, which my bookkeeping skills allowed me to readily find and afford. And with no other responsibilities, I could visit with friends or relatives or do volunteer work in my free time. It was wonderful. I worked at that job until I was 72, and then I retired.
I: Why does so little make you feel happy and free?
G: My life had been so difficult. Shmuel and I had just been married a couple of years when we lost our business in the Great Depression, when our bank that hcld our working capital and personal funds closed and didn’t reopen. Then Shmuel kept getting sick or injured. Most of the time we didn’t have enough money to live; we were always pinching pennies. And Shmuel insisted that I didn’t work outside the house to supplement his meager income. I never was able to realize my dream of becoming a teacher. After all that, a job with a decent salary, a nice place to live, and free time that I could spend as I pleased seemed to me like a huge reward or recompence for all that I had suffered.
I: If you could go back and change anything in your life, what would you change?
G: There is so much I would want to change. To start with, there were warning signs before we were married that Shmuel’s health might be problematic. But I was too much in love to pay attention to those signs. And above all, I wish I had insisted that Shmuel pay more attention to the warning signs of what might happen during the Depression, rather than my going along with his optimism. We could have waited a few years before opening our drug store, rather than do so in 1932 when the economy was crashing. And I wanted to take our working capital out of the bank. I should have insisted rather than let Shmuel’s reluctance prevail.
I: Thank you so much for your willingness to be interviewed and for your honest answers. One more question. Is there really life after death? What is it like?
G: Ah. We are forbidden to talk about that.
Iris Mitlin Lav grew up in the liberal Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. She went on to earn an MBA from George Washington University and an AB from the University of Chicago, and to enjoy a long career of public policy analysis and management, with an emphasis on improving policies for low- and moderate-income families. She also taught public finance at Johns Hopkins University and George Mason University, and in 1999 received the Steven D. Gold award for contributions to state and local fiscal policy. Her first novel, “A Wife in Bangkok,” was published in 2020 by She Writes Press. “Gitel’s Freedom” is her second novel. Learn more at: www.irismitlinlav.com
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