For fun, the judges kept asking me harder and harder questions, which I kept answering correctly-one of the proudest moments of my life! Since I had just taken such a course, I was able to answer all the questions.
I had to pass an exam in American history and government in front of three judges. When I turned twenty-one in October 1947, I was finally able to obtain my American citizenship. My grandparents had been shot by the Nazis, and my cousin Rivatchka was taken on a ship, raped by German soldiers, and thrown into the ocean. In May 1946, I was shaken to my core and out of my self-indulgence by a call from my mother who had just received a letter from her uncle Venia. When I recently found my diary, I discovered that at 17 all I wrote about was boys. My memories of college and myself at that time are that I was a very studious girl who loved books, my professors, and college life in general. I was surprised, but it turned out to be Paris, Texas (not France). When I told him I was born in Paris, he told me he had flown over it everyday during training. I remember dancing with one of the soldiers. It was wartime, so we were often bused to USO dances. There was a curfew: 10 o’clock on weekdays and midnight on weekends. It is part of a large database somewhere in my brain-stored in those college years between 19. So often when someone mentions an early scientific discovery or the name of an author long gone or a historical event, it feels familiar to me. There is little that I come across today that doesn’t trigger a memory of something I learned back then. I still have the oil painting I did in art class of one of the Scripps gardens. (I chose to major in philosophy, and psychology was my minor). This included world history and literature, science and art, and diverse religions and philosophies.
It covered most of what happened on our planet from antiquity to the present time. In the 1940s, Scripps required a four-year humanities program with only one elective per semester. By the time I could go home on weekends, I had become a newly, independent woman. To assure our integration into college life, we were not allowed to go home the first semester. I was the tentative 17-year old with red braids and a French accent living in Browning Hall. There were only three foreign students at the time, and each of us was assigned to a different dorm. We were two hundred girls divided into four dorms.
#SCRIPPS COLLEGE COLORS MOVIE#
It was a lovely enclave of learning in a small village with one movie house and mostly bicycle traffic. In September of that year my mother and I drove to my new dorm at Scripps College, an all-women’s college in Claremont, California. In the summer of 1944, I gave the graduation speech at Beverly Hills High School about coming to America as a refugee four years earlier, not speaking a word of English. LA JOLLA, California - After a long interlude, I am resuming where I left off regarding my life story…
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