Oral Histories: Sue

A short verse written by Sue about her experiences moving to London: "In my long life, my years in New York City and my years in London have been the happiest, the most comfortable. The times I have felt that I belonged. The times I revel in both my otherness and my membership in the inner city of these metropolises, where everybody and nobody belongs. We are part of a vast diaspora and we form a massive cultural mash up. My social life, my art, and my dress all reflect this. We are all squashed together. We meld. Yet we are individuals celebrating both our differences and similarities. The human family is a remarkable thing."

I've lived in a small farming village in Cambridgeshire. Awful. I lived on Long Island. No. I never fit. You know, I never... and this was in the fifties when I was a teenager. I never had the cashmere twin sets. I didn't want them. And the gold circle thing. And I just. That wasn't in my DNA. And we lived in. Oh, my God. We lived in Atlanta, Georgia, for 18 years because my husband got a very good job as a professorship in Emory University. I have stories I could tell you. It's about being a Jew. It's about being a Yankee. It's about being a person who loves all races. It's about everything. I was. Atlanta wasn't. I have stories. I arrived there in 1968.

Interestingly enough, the year I arrived was the year they were actually facing integration. There had been a big thing all over the news, that little girl, Ruby, who was and she was accompanied by police and so on. That was all for show. She was bused and walked into a white school. They didn't really integrate them. They were just talking about integration. So the year I got there they knew they had to do something. So before they integrated the children, they decided to integrate the faculty. And that year was the year I applied for a job. So actually, in many ways, these were some of the best years of my life. I was put into an all black school in the middle of the projects. It was the first brick building that was ever built for black children, school building, and I was plonked in there. Now, the one thing that was in my favour is that I was not a Southern teacher. I came from I was a Yankee, I came from New York. So all that baggage was not with me. And all the teachers were African-American. They were so kind to me. They didn't have to be they were so kind and so welcoming. And the kids were a mess. It was a poverty stricken area. They were very hard to teach, very, very hard to teach. They didn't care if I was black or white or what the hell I was. They just they were difficult. They were often hungry. And sometimes you could see the mother chasing them through the grounds, pulling a bough off of the tree to beat them with. Oh, my God. It was it was complete culture shock. But the teachers were incredible to me. They were absolutely incredible to me. So that was a real adventure. And in those days, Atlanta has changed. Everything has changed. It hasn't changed enough, but it is changing. So there was a very there were two very famous restaurants. One was called Pittypat's Porch, and the other was Aunt Fanny's Cabin. And both names came from one of the most racist films in the world, Gone with the Wind. And that was revered, that film and that book over here. So I can't remember was Pittypat's Porch or Aunt Fanny's Cabin. We were taken there by some of the faculty for dinner. This is hard to realise that this actually happened. You sit down and you order your drinks and these little black boys would come to your table wearing rags and barefoot with like a yoke around their neck. And their hands in the yoke. And they would have a sign attached to them that had the specials. And there was a.. "Aunt Fanny says today you should order catfish or this or that or the other thing". It was the most shocking thing I have ever seen in my life. This was 1968 and this was the year I was put into a black school and I decided to integrate it. My husband was the first Jew and he was teaching at the medical dental school. They had never seen a Jew. There were no women in the medical dental school, there were no blacks. And there was one Jew, my husband, and they didn't know what to do with him. And the thing about our Judaism is we are completely secular, we are atheists. And I think I don't think they would have had respect for us as Jews, but they at least would have thought we weren't complete heathens if we went to synagogue. Because when we were house hunting, the Dean of the school helped us and he said, "Well, you need to be near the synagogue, don't you?" We said no. We should have said yes, but I didn't want to particularly live in it. No, it was awful. You just feel like a green skinned Martian, you know? You're so different. I was always so weird, and we painted the outside of the house red. What was I thinking? I don't know. What was I thinking? And I always had some of my... I wasn't making art then, but I collected all sorts of weird things and I had some Native American stuff and ethnographic stuff in the window. I thought it looked good. And so, yes... I mean, I didn't see myself as weird, but I didn't dress the way other people dress. And I didn't dress in an embarrassing way. I was just colourful and I collected interesting art and I had a lot of colour in my house. The walls were the same as they are here: yellow and turquoise and red. And that's what I like. I was born with a rainbow in my head. I grew up in a fairly bland house. So a little girl from down the street [says] "My mother says, You are crazy!"

But when I moved into my first apartment in New York City, rent controlled $75 a month. But of course, as a new teacher, I was making $4,000 a year. Money was different then. So, yeah. And I was so proud of that apartment. And I painted the walls. I never saw anybody with a house like that, but I knew what I wanted. Red, yellow, turquoise. I'm so proud of it. And put up all kinds of, you know, prints and tore pages out of art calendars and put them up because I didn't have a whole lot of money. So I invited my mother to lunch. I was so proud. And she looked around here and she looked around there and she said, Yeah, you'll outgrow it. So, hey, mom, 82 years old, it just got worse and even worse! So I didn't set out to be different, but I am very different.

I feel it's everybody else who's crazy. The people who live in beige and grey and colourless houses, the people who are minimalists, the people who...They're the ones I do not understand. And because I'm so lucky here in the East End of London and in London in general, all my friends now are colourful, quirky, interesting artists. And we dress the way we want. We make things the way I want. We decorate our houses the way I want. So I'm not an outsider. I've been an outsider almost all my life. But when I moved to New York City on my own, well, I was with my hubby. There were enough people....Everybody in New York is... There are many people in New York who are weird. And I'm using that word with great affection. And here in the East End, yes, anything goes. And my friends are all amazing. And we meet the third Thursday of every month. And we just glory in our whatever it is we are. It's. It's about colour. It's about being who we are. Not eccentricity. We're not eccentric. We're not putting it on. We just we are the way we are. So I'm not an outsider anymore. And when I walk down onto the Roman Road market and I walk around here and they they call me the - the the ones who don't know my name, they say, "Oh, there's the colourful lady". I love it so much. It keeps me young. It keeps me alive. It keeps me bright. It keeps my brain going. It makes me very, very, very happy. I can't imagine being without it. So I if I had to live in a beige house or a magnolia house or a grey house, I would just I would shrivel up and become a genuine 82 year old lady. But this way, no, I'm not. And people come in here and they well, first of all, they're stunned. I always say, brace yourself, honey, because it's not just about the colour. It's about all the art and all the stuff I make and my friends make. But people, sometimes they get nervous about it depends on who comes in that all the eyes looking at them from the mannequins and the memory jugs and all this sort of thing. They get nervous and I have to kind of talk them into it, told them through it. But most people are delighted. This is essentially the museum of me. And how lucky am I to be able to do that? Anything I want, anything I want I can do. I mean, I don't have a lot of money, so I don't mean that I can spend anything I want and live palatially. I mean that I can put my art and my friend's art and my colour and do strange things. I don't consider them strange.

You know, I go to my flea market every Thursday and I'm around here and I'm around there, and sometimes I'll have somebody who's kind of a nice acquaintance, not actually a friend, but somebody I see all the time. We have a little chat and sometimes somebody will look at me sort of side eye and say very differently, not wanting to hurt my feelings or say the wrong thing "Are you are you Jewish?" And I'll say, "Yeah! Look at my nose, my name. Of course I'm Jewish. What else would I be?" And they it's almost as if they open their arms and they say "Lanzmann Yes!" But they're so afraid to ask. It's just a different... I haven't I have not faced any overt racism in this country ever. But it is that underlying feeling that you are different and maybe you better not say if you're not living in a Jewish neighbourhood, which I don't. This used to be a Jewish neighbourhood before my time. And if you're not ostensibly Jewish, people are a little nervous about saying something about it. It's just very different. It's almost hard to explain. When I say I shun them, I'm not trying to pretend not to be Jewish. It's just okay, I'm going to say this out loud. I hate religion. I hate it. My religion is being nonreligious.

Oh, my God. Yeah, I am an Eastender, I'm an adopted Eastender. And so many people from around here are adopted one way or the other. We come from everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. And it's Steve and I. My husband and I came to visit London in 1967. My father, my mother had just died in unfortunate circumstances. And he was very, very, very guilty. And he gave me $1,000, which in those days was a huge amount of money, and we were able to come have a trip and we decided we come to London and we were going to spend a week in London and then a week going to Bath and other places... Fell so deeply in love with London, but we rented it as an old battered Vespa and we drove all over the place and we ended up in the East End, which was not on any guidebook in those days. The East End was kind of a mess back then. There was a lot of bomb damage and they were just starting to build places like these, you know, these new housing developments, people that were just starting and it was very, very, very Jewish. I mean, really, really Jewish. And it just fascinated me and it was filthy. And I remember I have pictures from those days. There was a butcher shop, I think probably a long Whitechapel. And there was a dead rat lying in the street. Why did I fall so deeply in love with it? I do not know. I just felt like I had been here before. You know? Maybe there was another life before. I don't really think so. But you never. You never know. So we had such a good time. We took so many pictures. We went and we decided not even to go to the rest of bath and all that. We just two weeks in London and we were all over the East End. And I said to Steve "Maybe one day we'll live here!", laughing. No, no way we're gonna live here. And look what happened. So I was looking for a place that I could afford and kept coming further and further east and got off the train at the station on Whitechapel and walked up Burdett Road across the road onto the Roman Road. There's a big I think it's a Catholic church there. And I turned on to the Roman road and I had the strangest feeling that I had come home. I can't even explain it. I just felt immediately, this is where I belong. Of course, it turned out that back then it was really affordable. So there was a junk shop. This is another really good story. There was a junk shop on the Roman, not very far from here, right on the Roman. And the woman who owned the junk shop had a little like a little house to rent behind. You had to go a little courtyard behind the junk shop. And there was this little house, two floors. It used to be her junk shop, a Jewish bakery. They baked bagels. And I'm talking probably back in the forties, in the fifties. Bagels and rye bread and all that sort of thing. And in the back was actually the bakehouse. There was this huge oven, and then she kind of cobbled together a living. It was very dangerous. It was a death-trap, I swear to God. But I said, I'll take it. I rented it while I was looking and I stayed there for almost a year. This I'm not this kind of person who I'm not this kind of person, but sometimes it wanted... I felt so protected there. It was a really weird little place. People loved to visit me there and sometimes in the middle of the night...I could smell bread baking. I think it might have been a little haunted, and I think they were taking care of me. I don't actually believe this, but I swear I could smell bread baking.

This area where I am on the Roman road used to be very, very Jewish. All before my time. Now it's very mixed. It is very Muslim, but it's very everything else too. I don't think there are that many Jews around unless they were young, secular Jews like like me! But right across the street was the dry cleaner I used ever since I've been here. It was run by a Muslim family. The old grandpa would be in the front, the son would do the hard work. And so and they were the nicest, most welcoming people in the world. And when I would come into oh, very special lady, we love it when you come in. They were so nice, very, very Muslim, but really, really nice. And the sign which said Royal Dry Cleaners was all flaking and they needed a new sign. So they pulled it down beside me. And they were three or four days before that new sign went up and there was an even older sign underneath, and that older sign was up for three or four days until the new sign was put up. And the oldest sign said Goldstein's Smoked Fish. The layers of history around here absolutely amazing. And of course, you know about Brick Lane, the big Muslim, the big mosque on Brick, right along Brick Lane. That was a synagogue for a long time. And before that, it was a Huguenot Church. This is what I love. Layers and layers and layers. And it's there for you to see. Just in Shoreditch, on a side street, they're luxury flats, but you can still see incised in the stone: Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor. So I'm sure when they go to bed at night, they will smell soup cooking because those ghosts and I don't really believe in ghosts, but I do believe in atmosphere. And that atmosphere is there. I love that so much. So I know that somewhere my people are around here, the Huguenots are here, the Muslims are here. Now we have Polish and Russian and we have we have Africans, plenty of African people, not like African-Americans. I mean, actual Africans who come directly from Africa. And also we have Caribbean. That's what life should be all about. Living in a place where everybody is the same is some kind of punishment. You know, there's no texture to life when you do that. What's the point? We are a human family. Let's let's enjoy that to the hilt.