Harry Leonard Turtledove

[NOTE: There is no audio to accompany this interview]

Meyer: When were you born?
TURTLEDOVE: June 26, 1921. I am the son of David and Fanny Turtledove. 

Meyer: In the 1920s, were our parents still talking about the First World War, or had they already put that behind them?
TURTLEDOVE: I don’t know what they were doing in the ’20s, but I can assure you that as late as 1932 and 1933 I was very conscious of the First World War, partly because the American Legion had its national convention in Portland in 1932 or 1933, at the height of the Depression, and my dad took me to see several parades during those very depressed times. But even more important, I remember that a topic of conversation was the Veterans’ Bonus, which Congress finally voted to pay in 1933, or ’32. That seemed to be a big event, very important, lots of conversations around that.

Meyer: Had our father, being a First World War veteran, and our mother what they called a War Bride, any personal impact? 
TURTLEDOVE: Yes, as a matter of fact, somewhere along the line I remember thinking to myself, “Why are these old men talking about World War I all the time?” Of course, the truth of the matter is that there were only 21 years between World War I and World War II. This was probably at the midpoint, maybe 10 years after World War I. I couldn’t see why they talked that much about it, while here we are 60 years after World War II, and it still enters in our conversations.

Meyer: Of course you were in that war. But before we get to that, what other topics of conversations do you recall hearing with our parents or their friends in the mid-1930s?
TURTLEDOVE: I’m not sure what my parents and their friends talked about. Certainly what I was aware of as a conversation that went on constantly between our parents — which I wasn’t supposed to hear and which was generally conducted in Yiddish, but I got the drift of it — was money. After all, there was a depression on, and things were tough all around, and my dad had particular problems in supporting family. As for millions of other Americans, money was a consuming topic of discussion.

Meyer: I want to talk more about that social environment, but before we do, I want to move back to where our parents were living when you were born, and the grandparents whom you remember when you were a child, or great-grandparents, as the case may be.
TURTLEDOVE: I was born in Portland, but my parents were living in Vancouver, Washington, at the time. We lived in Vancouver up until 1925, and then we moved to Portland where both of my grandparents resided. My parents lived in Portland continuously for the rest of their lives. There was a great-grandmother who was alive when I was born, but I didn’t know her or remember her. Certainly my great-grandfather was alive, and I do remember him. My daughter, Ann, has all the dates in her head, but I think I was ten or 11 before my great-grandfather died.

Meyer: Do you have any recollection as to how he got here? Our paternal grandfather came from Romania through Canada to San Francisco to Portland. Did his father travel with him or come later, on his own?
TURTLEDOVE: Incidentally, our grandfather’s trek was from Romania to Canada — Winnipeg, Manitoba — to Minneapolis to San Francisco to Portland. But as far as my great-grandfather is concerned, that’s one of the many questions I never asked and should have. My impression is that our paternal grandfather came from Romania to Canada, and then brought his family over in bits and pieces — his fiancé, his parents, and so forth and so on. Unfortunately, I can’t prove it, and there’s no one alive who knows either.

Meyer: That suggests that he also brought his fiancé, Clara Riesman, and they were married in Canada?
TURTLEDOVE: In Winnipeg.

Meyer: Do you remember our great-grandfather in any particular context, in a synagogue or at our parents’ home? Was he ever in our home?
TURTLEDOVE: He lived with his daughter, our father’s aunt, in Ladd’s Addition. My most detailed recollections of him were at Shaarie Torah, best known in those days as the First Street Shul. During the High Holidays, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we would visit our maternal grandparents at Neveh Zedek, the Sixth Street Shul. Then, leaving my mother there with her parents, my father and I would walk down what I thought until recently was Jackson Street, but what I realize now was Hall, from Sixth to First, to Shaarie Torah, within 100 yards of where I now reside. That’s where we would sit with my great-grandfather, sitting in the synagogue with his shoes off. They all had their shoes off. It sometimes got strong on a hot fall day. They also listened to Rabbi Fein, who was also well known as the Royte Rov — for his complexion, not his politics. Those are my recollections of my great-grandfather. As you are aware, there is a picture of me, perhaps three or four years old because we were still living in Vancouver, with both my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather, who looks like something out of the Old Testament. 

Meyer: He had a very long beard!
TURTLEDOVE: He had a long beard and a big Semitic nose and a powerful face. I remember him as kind of a shrunken old man, but at that age even young can be old. 

Meyer: In moving on to your young days, what schools did you attend?
Turtledove:  I went to Fernwood Grade School at 33rd and Hancock, and then to Grant High School, which was still quite new, I think probably the newest school in this area, because once the Depression came along they hadn’t built any schools, and Grant was built in the 20s. It was the largest high school in the state, and that whole area was a growth area and full of young post- World War I families, so Grant was a stimulating place to be.

Meyer: Many of our father’s contemporaries lived in South Portland in rather extended, almost familial communities. My recollection is that there were not a lot of Jewish families living in that Fernwood/Grant High axis, but they were friends of mother’s. Do you remember anything about that social dimension of the decision to live where they lived?
TURTLEDOVE: The diaspora from South Portland had certainly begun, and I think that the old German community, those who had money, lived in the West Hills. The exodus for those newly arrived — that is newly arrived with money, not newly arrived in this country — was to Irvington, and it spilled into a Hollywood growth city. So there was already a Laurelhurst. There was a pretty good minority of kids that I knew or my parents knew at Sunday school. The Labbys, the Fishels, the Herzogs, they all went to Grant High School. So we were certainly in the minority. It wasn’t like Lincoln or Roosevelt.

Meyer: Your point is very well taken, I know, from having interviewed Dan Labby recently, who is just seven years older than you are. He grew up and spent his childhood in South Portland, but by the time his two older brothers came along and they needed a bigger house, they moved to Laurelhurst. It is that movement across the river away from the synagogue, as you said, the diaspora, spread around. When the family joined Temple Beth Israel, how old were you? 
TURTLEDOVE: It was about the third or fourth grade, something like that, when I guess my parents decided I needed some Jewish education, and I wasn’t going to go to Hebrew school. Not that I was asked, it wasn’t in the cards; they were liberated to a great degree. 

Meyer: Rabbi Henry J. Berkowitz was on the pulpit at the time. From what I understand from others of your age, and my own recollection, he was a very strong and commanding figure.
TURTLEDOVE: Certainly he had a great influence on me and I think many others. If I look back as I have on previous occasions, I’m not qualified to say whether he was a great theologian or a great rabbi. He was a great teacher, and he had great empathy with kids. In some ways he was an overgrown kid himself. When the Sunday School was up on 13th and Main, every Sunday began with the whole school assembled. I recall the format: it went on for 30 or 40 minutes, and in effect, he was giving a sermon to the kids and he was singing. Of course he had a great singing voice. He had sung professionally to get through rabbinical school. I don’t look back on that, as one would expect, as a period of boredom. It was probably the most exciting part of Sunday school. He was good with kids and adolescents. 

Meyer: According to Dan [Labby], Rabbi Berkowitz’s influence was so strong that Dan even had the idea, perhaps only momentarily, of being a rabbi. Did that occur to you as well?
TURTLEDOVE: Yes, we went through that phase too. For kids, he was a towering figure. Apparently, for the congregation during at least one period, he was a controversial figure because he went through a divorce while he was rabbi here, and I guess that scandalized some of the congregants. I never knew the juicy details, if in fact there were juicy details.

Meyer: Octagonal Club was one of his ideas, named because Temple has eight sides to it?
TURTLEDOVE: Yes, that’s right. He had a lot of ideas. There were 39 kids in our graduating class and 39 books in the Old Testament, so he assigned each one of us a book and wrote the script for each one, and that was the service. 39 sounds like a huge number, but as I look back, some of them were only two or three paragraphs, a summary of that book of the Bible. He intended it to be not just for the kids to show off, but educational to his congregants.

Meyer: 39 is a fairly large number in a graduating class.
TURTLEDOVE: Again, we were the children of the First World War generation, if you want to put it that way. All my classes in grammar school and in high school were among the largest ever because of what happened after World War I.

Meyer: Let me go back a little bit in time to the mid-’30s both geographically and politically: the Japanese had invaded Manchuria, things were happening in Europe. What are your recollections in terms of the Portland Jewish community and your own immediate family community? Was there an awareness of what was happening? My recollection was that you were to clean your plate because children were starving in China. I believe our parents were very well aware of the Manchurian invasion, of which I’m not sure everyone was equally aware.
TURTLEDOVE: I was always interested in foreign affairs. I had an uncle living in New York who helped stimulate me and then, of course, a great teacher at Grant High School, Frances McGill, who encouraged students. She didn’t create my interest in foreign affairs but certainly stimulated it. I remember going with Frances to conferences at Reed College, during the summer before I had gone to Reed probably — 1935 or ’36, ’37 — which were dealing with foreign affairs. There was quite a movement on the Reed College campus against fascism in general. I’m not sure how much of it was aimed at the Japanese in China, but certainly against what was starting to happen in Germany.

My recollections of the Jewish community, not so much concerning China, but concerning what was starting to happen in Germany, this is a big question. I was very much aware that there was a split in the Beth Israel community because the Jewish community was split. As the Nazi influence grew in Germany, even before World War II had begun, the Zionist fervor rose among some Jews, and I think particularly the Russian Jews and the Eastern European Jews such as our maternal grandparents. 

A consciousness of the fervor for Zionism accelerated, which actually went back to the days of Herzl, but at Beth Israel, which had never been very keen on Zionism, there was a segment that was following a movement which had a name, but I can’t think of the name of the movement [American Council for Judaism]. Its head was Rabbi Elmer Berger. They were the anti-Zionist, the counterpart of the isolationist, and the greater American debate about intervention and isolation in Europe, and this persisted right up to Pearl Harbor. I was aware of that. If you think of the rest of the Jewish community, if you think of how Neveh Zedek was Polish and Shaarie Torah Russian, First Street Shul, I don’t think they had that problem; I think they were pretty much interventionist, pretty much Zionist from the start. Of course, characteristically, one thought of Beth Israel as German although that was not literally true. Its founders and principals were, when they arrived, 19th-century German.

Meyer: In the late 1930s, you went to Reed College and, due to financial constraints, lived at home your freshman year. Did you hear our parents, or your contemporaries, engage in discussions about what became known as the Holocaust? 
TURTLEDOVE: There was lots of discussion, but the word “Holocaust” as we came to know it didn’t exist. Nobody that I knew, or my parents knew, could even guess at the enormity of the Holocaust, but there was a great consciousness that the situation was very, very bad. We were having Jews from Germany enter our community, refugees who got away in time. There was a lot of discussion of that, and there was certainly great attention being paid to [William] Shirer and CBS, when he was reporting from Berlin, and that sort of thing. There was considerable consciousness of the fact that the situation was awful. There was that consciousness of how awful it was. But I don’t think that even struck home until the very end of World War II, until the death camps were exposed. I don’t think my parents, I, any of us had any conception of how awful it was.

Meyer: Nobody had, and those who visited [Germany] and tried to tell the story to FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] or anyone else were not paid attention. My recollection is that David Robinson, because of his particular links with the ADL [Anti-Defamation League], seemed to have insight earlier than others. Because our father was working with him I had the sense, even as a youngster, that before it was generally known, our father and mother were perhaps more aware than others that something was going on, although, as you said, the enormity was not known.
TURTLEDOVE: That is quite possible. You have to bear in mind that during the period that we are talking about, I was away from home a good deal. Essentially from 1940 to 1946, I was only living at home for one year, so you may have a better idea than I do.

Meyer: For the record, let’s go back and retrace your history. You graduated from Grant High School. Where did you go next, what were your adventures and jobs and travels, and where did they take you? 
TURTLEDOVE: I entered Reed College in 1938. I was there for two years and then participated in a somewhat short-lived exchange scholarship program to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan had an exchange program with the University of England, I think in Suffolk. In any case, the war had started, and that was no longer practical. Victor Butterfield, who was the Dean of Admissions at Wesleyan University, had a Carnegie grant to examine ten small, liberal arts colleges in the United States to find out what makes them tick. He was very impressed with Reed and, when he got back to Wesleyan, suggested they exchange with Reed. I was the first and went to Wesleyan as a junior. So I spent a year in Middletown, Connecticut. This was 1940. 

I spent the summer of ’41 working in Foreign Funds Control of the Treasury Department in Washington, DC. I was in effect a “gopher,” but I was making the magnificent sum of $120 a month, which was far more than I was worth. This was a very interesting group because this is when Henry J. Morgenthau was Secretary of the Treasury, and there was a chap named Paley [William S., Secretary of the Treasury under Roosevelt, and later, broadcast mogul] whom I read about later, really his brain man, and incidentally, quite active in subsequently influencing Morgenthau’s thoughts on the Holocaust. 

But Paley headed Foreign Funds Control. The Foreign Funds Control had seized the assets of the governments and diplomats of those countries that had been invaded by the Germans or by the Japanese, on the grounds that we didn’t want that money going to the Germans or the Japanese, so we seized the funds of that country. That also included IG Farben, the great chemical conglomerate. My little section dealt with their withdrawals of money from these various accounts. I guess it was a turning point in my life because I was offered a permanent appointment there, and I think then the magnificent salary would be $150 or $180 a month. 

I subsequently learned that the chap I worked for, Bob Underwood, who was a bright, young all-American tennis player at Stanford, once the war broke out was sent to Honolulu to be on the staff of the governor general there, dealing with financial matters. Last I heard he was a major in the army having a good war. I later found out that the chap who got the job that I would have gotten had I stayed on was sent to Manila. I never heard what happened to him. It really was a turning point in my life.
 
I came back to Reed substantially influenced by several profound letters from our father, who was not telling me what I should do but laying out the alternatives, of course, pointing out that education was something that enabled one to have a better job than one might have if one just took a job. So after that I came back to Reed, finished, graduated in 1942. I knew I was going to go into the service; I tried to get into the Navy, but I wore glasses, and that was enough right there. The Navy program they had at the time allowed you to graduate and then go into the Navy. As it turned out, I had a draft number that allowed me to graduate anyway. I had a number of graduate fellowship offers, a letter from Columbia University urging me to come on because they would help me defer my draft number. But in World War II you didn’t want to be a hero, but you also didn’t want to be left behind. All your friends had gone or were going. As it turned out in retrospect, Columbia probably could have deferred me six months or a year, and that would have been that because when things got tough, everybody was going. 

So I entered the Army in the fall of ’42 and took my basic training at Camp Callen in California, just north of San Diego, the country club of the Army. I then went to Camp Davis, North Carolina, to Officer Candidate School. My military career is incredibly undistinguished, but I was a Second Lieutenant in the Coast Artillery, anti-aircraft, and served at Camp Fannin in Texas. When we realized, two or three years later, that we really didn’t need 90mm guns to shoot down Japanese and German bombers, because they hadn’t had any for several years, I was transferred to the infantry and took a refresher course at Fort Benning, Georgia. I spent the next couple of years in various portions of Texas and at Fort Rucker, Alabama, and eventually, late June of 1945 when the war had already ended in Europe, I was sent to India and spent the better part of the year there. 

I came back to the States in 1946. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but thought I was interested in journalism. I walked into the Oregon Journal one day and presented myself. Don Sterling Sr. hired me on the spot for $55 a week, which was considerably more than I would have settled for. I spent the next several years, until 1949, doing various jobs in the Sports Department and elsewhere at the Journal. 

I realized that the only way to change one’s status at the Journal was to be fired, which would probably require insulting the publisher’s wife at a Christmas party, nothing less. Otherwise, one would still be there 38 years later. So I used the GI Bill of Rights and went off to London on the Queen Mary, steerage class, for $160, sharing a cabin with a stranger. 

At London University I took a fascinating graduate course. It was supposed to be Modern English Literature; it really was much more. In retrospect, they were experimenting in how to get American participation and money into the English educational system. By now, of course, it’s a refined science, but at that time they didn’t know quite what to offer us, so they really threw things at us. There were ten to 12 of us. We had guest lecturers come in, some of whom were just fascinating. I remember Harold Nicholson was with us, and the Prima Ballerina of the Moscow Ballet, a great lady. Karsavina, I think, was her name. 

It was a ball except for fried tomatoes for breakfast every day. The weather was terrible. The headlines I remember. It was a drought in England; it hadn’t rained for two weeks in August, and the temperature had reached the 80s. Antiperspirants apparently had not been invented, or if they had, they had not gotten to England. 

From there I went over to France. Still having my extensive savings, which probably were in the low four figures, I lived in a hotel. Most of its residents, I think, were Romanians, probably on the shady side of the law. In recent years, I’ve looked at that hotel. It’s on the Left Bank, and now, of course, it’s a condo. It was the kind of hotel where the police would knock on your door at 4:00 AM in the morning and look at your papers. But it was fun. About four dollars a night, a monthly rate. It was a residential hotel. 

I had some friends from the old newspaper days whom I’d known in the [Newspaper] Guild, who were working for the Marshall Plan. They hired me to do a couple of freelance pieces for them and then suggested I come to work for them, which was a suggestion I welcomed. I spent the next couple of years working for them in Paris and then in London, for a lesser period, in the Marshall Plan Information Services, which became part of USIS [United States Information Services]. 

About that time, early 1953, John Foster Dulles had come in as Secretary of State for [President] Eisenhower; they were firing most of the people who had worked for the Marshall Plan, a lot of the Information people, people whom they subsequently rehired, by the way. When you move people from Europe and back with all their household goods, it’s a pretty good bill for the taxpayers, but that’s neither here nor there. The atmosphere around USIS had become poisonous due to the “investigations” conducted by Roy Cohn and his boyfriend, David Shine. I never met them because, my boss said, the day they came to inspect the USIS library in London he wanted me out of the way; he said I was going to get him in trouble. 

Meyer: Cohn and Shine were the investigators for McCarthy?
TURTLEDOVE: Yes. So I came back to the United States. I had had some contacts, letters, telegrams from others that I should come be the Executive Director of the Democratic Party of Oregon, which just shows you how desperate the Democrats were, even in those days. I came back, and somewhere along the line, in 1952, I had been contacted by the CIA, and I knew I was interested in joining them. I had also obligated myself to manage, or in retrospect mismanage, the Joe Carson campaign for governor. The ’52 election was a very critical election.

That’s the one Dick Neuberger won that turned the Senate Democratic. It’s the one that Edith Green won and established Congressional District Number Three from that day forward as a Democratic seat. And while Joe lost  — he had been the Mayor of Portland and had gone off to Washington for a few years and come back — he really didn’t stand much of a chance. But he did get more votes than any Democratic candidate had gotten. We didn’t pull the rest of the ticket down that much.

Somewhere along the line after that, I got married in Tucson. We came back to Portland for a few months, and then I went to New York and joined the CIA. Actually, I didn’t join them in New York. I had already joined them in Washington, DC. We spent a few weeks in New York, and then we went to France. We were there until early 1958.

Meyer: Would you give just a sense of your lifestyle as a CIA agent while you lived near Paris with your wife, Patricia Lavan Turtledove, and where Ann Michelle [nee Turtledove] Jaffe was born?
TURTLEDOVE: It was in retrospect a good life. We lived in Rueil Malmaison, which was then a village of its own. Josephine’s Chateau was and still is there. Today, of course, it’s like Beaverton or Gresham, a bedroom community very much attached to Paris. We lived in what had been the servant’s quarters of the Chateau. It was owned by Pere Joseph, whose name is well known to the French for having been the confessor to Cardinal Richelieu, so there’s quite a bit of history there. 

Meyer: It was the elegant remains of what had been a stately home.
TURTLEDOVE: Yes, even the servants’ quarters. Central heating sometimes, or if the temperature outside was very warm, the central heating got it up to 60 degrees. We by then had a daughter who was born in July, 1955. My duties involved half a dozen trips a month into Paris and writing notes on what had transpired. It wasn’t a hard life, certainly. In retrospect, we were living on the fat of the land; we had what I thought was a decent living. The check was deposited into an anonymous account in New York every month. But we never went out to the fancy restaurants except when our parents would send us a $25 anniversary check. That would get us out for a big dinner. We had a refrigerator. That was pretty high living. Other than that we had a little two-burner stove and a little oven that wasn’t big enough to put anything in. It was nice living. 

Meyer: Having visited you there, I can attest to that, and I can also attest that I did not know you were working for the CIA. But what I can recollect is that from time to time, as you say, several times a month, you got on the train to Paris, and you met with somebody with whom you either had a conversation or exchanged written material, and that you were writing under a pseudonym. Or were you writing under your own name?
TURTLEDOVE: I never did much writing; I thought I was going to do some writing. I wrote a few pieces for the Newspaper Guild and for a Jewish publication, the name of which I can’t recall to this day.

Meyer: As a private citizen or as a CIA agent?
TURTLEDOVE: No, as a private citizen. I was what was known as a “deep cover agent.” Other activities to lead a normal life were actually encouraged and preserved a regular source of income. I wrote one piece for Harper’s, which was a very prestigious publication. It paid $250, which wasn’t much money for the amount of work, even then. But we decided we both had aging parents — my wife had a mother who was older than our parents and perhaps needed some attention — so we decided, rightly or wrongly, I think rightly, that if you stayed away long enough you never really could acclimate yourself to coming back to the States, and you became somewhat rootless, particularly with a young child.

So in 1958 we turned in our chips and came back, and that brings us back to Justin Rinehart, who said one day, “I have a client I think could use your help.” Earl Heims had an advertising agency and, in Justin’s opinion, needed a partner. I did a little freelance work for Earl, and we got along well. In 1960 we established a small advertising agency, Heims and Turtledove. I knew nothing about advertising, still don’t. Earl did. It was a small agency, and hardly through careful planning, we managed to keep it very small. And that morphed into Turtledove Clemens after Earl retired, and died a few years later,  and I had hired Jay Clemens, who became a junior partner. That’s when the name changed. I got out of all that in 1986, and here I am today.

Meyer: I want to go back over a couple of things. When you graduated from Reed, you graduated with high honors. The summer between graduating and going into the army, waiting for your number to be called, you worked in the Oregon Shipyards? 
TURTLEDOVE: Swan Island. I was a timekeeper. I felt oppressed. I was making 75 cents an hour, which was more money than I’d ever seen before, but as a timekeeper we had to walk all through the shipyard and note the number of men working and code what they were working on and so forth. That all went into IBM punch cards that the government figured out what contract it applied to, and so forth and so on. But the laborers who belonged to the Boilermakers Union, which during that World War II period became an incredibly powerful, rich organization in Portland, were already making something like $1.45 an hour, which was obscenely — I had to note the pay of each person we accounted for.

Meyer: Why the discrepancy?
TURTLEDOVE: They were unionized, and the Boilermakers Union, which was at least mildly corrupt, had a closed shop. They ended up with a headquarters in Portland that was called the Marble Palace. I think it went down with the urban renewal.

Meyer: The union dues paid for a fancy building?
TURTLEDOVE: And a lot more. This is old history that a lot of people aren’t even aware of. We decided to unionize some of the people, mainly ourselves, who weren’t unionized in the shipyard. So we went to see George Brown, who was then the lonely official Oregon representative of the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] and later became a city commissioner. But there wasn’t anything he could do for us. 

Some months later, when I was in basic training in the Army, I remember being called out one day because attorneys from the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] wanted to interview me, which they did. They got a sworn statement. We had gone to the CIO because the Boilermakers and the other AFL unions in that shipyard at Swan Island, and all the shipyards around here, weren’t interested in us. I found out from the idealistic young NLRB lawyers that to keep peace in the family, to keep the war effort going, the administration had made a secret deal that the East Coast shipyards should be CIO and the West Coast shipyards should be AFL [American Federation of Labor]. The lawyers thought that was illegal, but I am sure they were eventually put in their place. Our little fling was immaterial because nothing was going to happen; the CIO was not going to be allowed to get into a West Coast shipyard. But at the time we didn’t know that.  

Meyer: Going back to your being stationed in India, my recollection is that American troops were poised in India for an invasion of Japan, perhaps by infantry, but of course, this was precluded by dropping the atomic bombs?
TURTLEDOVE: Correct. I went to India with troops composed of what they call “branch immaterial.” In other words, we weren’t a unit; there wasn’t a division or battalion or even a platoon. They gathered people from various parts of the world. You were put on alert any number of times with your stuff packed up, and you couldn’t leave the camp in the jungle outside of Calcutta where we were for 24 hours, or whatever it was. 

I later learned that the plan was that this group that I had been attached to were transportation people who had run the Port of Bombay. Most of them had been in the shipping business in civilian life, and they had run the port successfully. It had been the only port open to supplying the Burma Road all the way across India, six days by freight train to get anything delivered. General Stilwell, who had then gone to Guam, was going to make a landing and seize a Chinese port, and we were going to fly in. This group that I had got attached to when I was infantry was going to run the port. Exactly what I was going to do I had no idea. I don’t think anybody had figured that out, they needed so many people. This was going to be a stepping-stone for the invasion of Japan. 

Of course, in the interim, I remember reading about it in the paper. I had gone to a theatre in Calcutta to see Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V, and I came out of that cinema heading toward where there were trucks back to our camp. I picked up an Indian newspaper and read about this thing called an atom bomb, and I was certain, as I had been on subsequent occasions, that the Indian press has a great capacity to exaggerate. Who ever heard of an atom bomb, and what could this be? Who had dreamed this up? That was what kept us from being sent to China and certainly invading China. But that didn’t happen. I spent most of my career in India or in Calcutta, after the war was over, giving property back to the Indian Army and then running a Karachi port-cab for troops going home. So I got home in June or July of 1946. 

Meyer: This is before India was divided?
TURTLEDOVE: That’s correct. Karachi was still India, but the trouble had already started.

Meyer: Did you see signs of the trouble, of the partition?
TURTLEDOVE: Yes, when we were in Calcutta — Kanchrapara outside of Calcutta, 20 or 30 miles away — there was a protest against the British, and a mob moved up to Chowringhee Circus, which was like the Times Square of Calcutta. The Bengalis, the people who live in Bengal, are very small, or at least undernourished, typically under 80 or 90 pounds. They were not one of the Marshall races; the British had only allowed the Marshall races into the Indian Army. They tended to be the ones from western India or the north. Individually they weren’t very fearsome, but as a mob they could be. They had stormed up to Chowringhee Circus, and they had never gotten up that far, breaking windows and that sort of thing. 

That was the writing on the wall, in a sense. The American authorities had to make a decision very quickly, and the decision was that we would not be armed. The mob had killed one American, ironically a black ambulance driver. They grabbed an ambulance, surrounded it, and pulled the driver out and killed him. The decision was we would not be armed and would emphasize that our vehicles had the white star on them, and that we were not the British. The British, of course, were taking different actions; we were kind of riding out on our allies. 

A day after this happened, a couple of us who were in a jeep driving into Chowringhee Circus somehow got ourselves surrounded by a shouting mob of coolies. They were no longer breaking windows, but they were chanting and so forth. That was the only time I was really frightened in India. We got out of there alive. But yes, I was aware of it. 

When I first got to Karachi, we were housed with a British outfit in what was a three- or four-story building, the finest apartment building in Karachi, overlooking the cricket field. Actually, the building was nothing at all; I can’t imagine that it even exists today. But one of my roommates was an American Communist, I knew that. He didn’t know that I knew it, but the telltale signs were there.

Meyer: Was he a military man?
TURTLEDOVE: Yes, from New York. He arranged through his connections for me to meet a wanted dissident. It took place at a cinema one night. After the lights went down, this stranger suddenly appeared sitting next to us, and while the movie was playing we had a political conversation, and before the lights went up at the end of the film, he was gone. I never saw his face. I remember my question to him was — he was obviously someone who had political importance, that the police were after — my question was, “Okay, it’s inevitable that you’re going to get your freedom, but what are you going to do afterwards?” And that would take care of it. Of course, it didn’t take care of itself because partition resulted in hundreds of thousands — millions of people, I guess, were killed. So yes, I was very conscious of it, but a lot of Americans weren’t. 

Meyer: Let me move back in time again. Growing up in Portland as you did, did you have any sense of anti-Semitism, any sense that you were being treated differently than others around you as you were going through Fernwood, Grant, and Reed in getting on with the rest of your life?
TURTLEDOVE: Yes and no. You have to keep in mind a couple of things. I did not come from an Orthodox family, so the idea that you couldn’t join friends on Friday night because you had to be in shul or that sort of thing, none of that affected me. Also, I did not have a Jewish name. Most people who start speculating about our name ask, “Is it English or is it Indian?” Thirdly, how do I put this delicately, I did not have what passes as a “Jewish face.” Yes, I was aware that the Multnomah Club did not admit Jews. Our father was approached during the Depression to join the Multnomah Club. I forget what the dues were, $10 or $15 a month, something like that, which he didn’t have. But he told the person who solicited him that he would join if the Multnomah Club would get a letter to him that they did not discriminate against Jews. This was during the Depression, about 1933 or 1934, and the Multnomah Club was flat on its back like everything else.

Meyer: And did they deliver the letter?
TURTLEDOVE: Of course not. In fact, the Multnomah Club had been founded by Jews. I was aware that one of the reasons you had to supply a photograph when you applied to a university was, of course, that they could detect a Jewish face or connect it with a Jewish name. There were quota systems. I think I was pretty lucky; if there were people who shunned me because I was Jewish, I wasn’t aware of it. I wasn’t aware, or maybe I’ve forgotten some things I was aware of, but I certainly didn’t suffer if there were shortfalls in society that all Jews had to face. 

One of the amazing things about Reed was that its articles of incorporation specify that there be no discrimination in race or creed, which was certainly way before its time, so I didn’t get it in college. Did anti-Semitism exist? One took it for granted, and one knew that the Tualatin Country Club was a Jewish country club, if you wanted to play golf. That’s an incomplete answer. Certainly I was very aware of what was going on in Germany, having no notion that the Holocaust was going to happen because it hadn’t started. We knew concentration camps; we knew the Jews were being persecuted.

Meyer: You knew that by the mid-1930s?
TURTLEDOVE: Yes.

Meyer: Was that common conversation at home? Outside the home?
TURTLEDOVE: I’m not sure outside the home. Certainly by the time I got to Reed. I was impressed that a bunch of Reed kids had gotten arrested on the docks, I think because steel was being shipped to Japan, but it could have been also because of something going on in Germany. There were demonstrations by Reed kids. I’d say 1936-37. 

Meyer: When you were at Grant High School, did you feel any animosity or anti-Semitism during those years?
TURTLEDOVE: Not that I can recall. 

Meyer: Let me go back and ask you about our paternal grandfather, Abraham Turtledove, who was a signator on the precursor of the Robison Home when it started as the Jewish Old People’s Home [in 1920, founded by the Old Men’s Hebrew Fraternal Association]. Do you recall our grandfather’s role in the Jewish community? Or did he just happen to be someplace where they said, “We need ten men to sign”?
TURTLEDOVE: Our grandfather was a complicated man, at least in his later years. He was an auto-didactic man, self-taught. The claim was he had read Schopenhauer. His English was excellent. I don’t know how many languages he knew, but at least in his youth, he must have been very resourceful because when he came to Canada, he worked on the Canadian Pacific Railroad that was still in construction, I think about 1883-84, and then he acquired a sled — or a sleigh — and went trading with the Indians. 

He was apparently active in a number of Jewish organizations, but characteristically, if they didn’t do it his way, it was his way or the highway. I don’t know if he burned his bridges as he went or others burned them. He was what you’d call a secular Jew, even though his father, who lived with our grandfather’s sister, was very Orthodox. Our grandfather hardly was. 

When he left South Portland and went out to 17th & Powell, beyond the pale, they bid him good-bye and good luck; the kids weren’t going to go to Failing and Lincoln School. Our dad went to Brooklyn School, which was in an Italian neighborhood. His younger brother, for whom I was named, went to Franklin High School. Franklin High School, what the hell was a Jewish kid doing at Franklin High School? So 17th & Powell, that was his declaration of independence right there from the Jewish community, and I don’t think he looked back. He had a lot of Jewish friends, and I think his social contacts, such as they were in subsequent years, were always with Jewish people, but I think he broke with Jewish organizations because I don’t think he got along with them too well. He was a very domineering person, a very large man. 

Meyer: He worked in Canada, then he went to Minnesota, then San Francisco where our father was born, and we’re in the 1890s now. At what point did he bring his family to Portland? Would that be about 1904?
TURTLEDOVE: I would have thought about 1900.

Meyer: Then he settled in South Portland like a lot of other Jewish families.
TURTLEDOVE: Southwest, although it wasn’t Southwest then, First Avenue where I now live.

Meyer: First near Harrison. You’re suggesting that he took himself off to SE 17th & Powell because he took umbrage at the Jewish community?
TURTLEDOVE: I don’t think he did it because he took umbrage, but I think, when he went, it was an indication to the Jewish community that he didn’t need the kosher butcher shop next door and he didn’t need that stuff. He didn’t need to be near the shul. At that time, that was going out a long way. There was no Ross Island Bridge then; it was out there.  

Meyer: The other day we were talking about a particular family in Portland, and you spoke of a meeting our father, as a youngster, had gone to with his own father in about 1905 or ’06. Can you repeat that story?
TURTLEDOVE: Dad told me about an unprecedented citywide meeting of the Jewish community that was called after the pogroms in Russia, as I recall. It was about 1905. It was held at the old Beth Israel that was later burned down by arsonists. I can imagine how unprecedented that was because in much later years my maternal grandparents, who belonged to Neveh Zedek, entered Beth Israel with some trepidation and only because I was participating from the bima during graduation. 

The speaker or the chairman, who was pre-eminent in the Jewish community, stood up and — this may be a paraphrase but dad had an incredible memory for details, so it couldn’t have been very far from the mark. The gist of it was, “We Jews have called you Jews together this evening to talk about those Jews in Russia.” In other words, “We German Jews have called you Polish Jews to talk about those Russian Jews over there.” The Polish community at that point was probably larger than the Russian community because the Russian community flooded in after the Russian Revolution. 

Meyer: I do want to ask you again about Temple Beth Israel. What was the ambiance of Temple Beth Israel and the Reform Movement as you recall it from the days that you were going to religious school?
TURTLEDOVE: As I look back, we recited Hebrew. Nobody studied Hebrew. We went to Temple Beth Israel, and of course, it’s a beautiful building. It’s the Hagia Sophia on a smaller scale. There was hardly anything today that you would recognize as distinctively Jewish when you walked in except, I suppose, for the eternal light and . . .

[Recording pauses and resumes]

Meyer: We had to change the tape, and you were talking about the fact that you could walk into Temple Beth Israel and other than the ark and the windows, you might think you were . . .
TURTLEDOVE: In my opinion, in a Presbyterian Church perhaps. It was very white bread. There was a Saturday morning service, but even so, you certainly never saw a tallis, you never saw a yarmulke. It was surprising to me when I first came back into Beth Israel and saw people wearing a tallis or yarmulkes.

Meyer: You’re talking about the 1950s at this point.
TURTLEDOVE: Yes, the late 1950s. So that was a change. Interestingly enough, I remembered arguments from Berkowitz’s sermons, and I thought he was so right. One was, “My country, may it ever be right, but right or wrong, my country.” My paraphrasing. And Berkowitz told us that was wrong, that he was almost prescient in terms of the Nuremberg arguments, only following orders or, even to some to degree, some of what has gone on in Iraq on the US side. The other one somewhat reflected the arguments over Zionism and what was going on in Europe, but even went further than that, and that was his argument of who speaks for the Jews. And of course, the rabbis do, and this is still the case. I’m not sure whether the argument is being articulated these days, but it’s certainly relevant — who does? I think the answer is that a lot of people are trying and nobody is recognized. But he saw that one pretty clearly. 

Meyer: So when Rabbi Berkowitz said the rabbis speak for the Jews, who else was attempting to be a spokesperson for the Jews at that time?
TURTLEDOVE: You had any number of central organizations, whether it was B’nai B’rith or ADL, you name it.

Meyer: American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee . . .
TURTLEDOVE: The answer, I suspect, is nobody does, but it doesn’t mean that a lot don’t try, and when you think about it, the rabbis don’t speak with one voice, so how can you have anybody who’s speaking for the Jews?

Meyer: Who were the students with whom you went through religious school and enjoyed? Will you name a few of your contemporaries?
TURTLEDOVE: Stewart Durkheimer, Jerry Shank, Ossie Georges, Howard Fischel, Bernice Weiner, who married Ralph Schlesinger, and Leah Kinspel, who married Stewart. 

Meyer: Tell me a little more about Rabbi Berkowitz because he was such an influential person.
TURTLEDOVE: I don’t know how much of a scholar he was. I don’t know how deep, how profound, but he certainly had a great deal of influence. I don’t recall his being involved in what we now refer to as community affairs that much. I don’t recall him making any political pronouncements. He was a people person. He connected with people so much that there was a spirit, an enthusiasm. 

Meyer: Which is why I always get our family to sing “Now It Is the Springtime of the Year” as he used to do, marching back and forth at the building at 13th and Main. He went into the service as a Navy chaplain. His place was taken by Rabbi Irving Hausman, who subsequently went to San Francisco and who, on the pulpit, was an adamant, articulate, emotional Zionist who offended probably 50 percent of the congregation. My question to you is, before Rabbi Berkowitz left in the late ’30s and early ’40s, before you yourself went into the service, do you have any recollection of any stance he took on Zionism?
TURTLEDOVE: I don’t think he was with the [Rabbi] Berger crowd, but I don’t recall. I wouldn’t say he was an ardent Zionist. I’m just guessing. His congregation had been influenced or dominated by the elite — you can say that’s always true — at least the older families who had been here a long time. Not like today where there’s quite a mixture. It was the German community. Their point of view was once different at that time from the more recently arrived. I don’t think there’s any question about it.