Connie Karesh Franzblau was born in Brooklyn, New York, where her father, Leroy Karesh, ran a shooting gallery in Coney Island until he was drafted at the outbreak of World War II. His wife, Frances Frankel, and their four children moved to Eutwaville, South Carolina, where Leroy’s parents, Abram and Katie Cohen Karesh, and a number of Katie’s relatives lived. Leroy was excused from military duty when Frances became ill, and the family moved to Charleston where he took a job at the shipyard. Although they lived only briefly in Eutawville, Connie recalls fond memories of the town where she spent her summers and extended family gathered for holidays. Connie’s family was Orthodox and kept kosher, but the Orthodoxy was “southern style.” “You do what you can, and then after a while you do what’s easy, and then after a while you do what you can get away with . . . .” When they moved to Charleston, they attended the Conservative synagogue, Emanu-El, because it was in their neighborhood and, therefore, convenient. Connie discusses her family history, how she met Arnold, and Camp Baker when it was located in Isle of Palms. Arnold, the son of Nathan and Nettie Franzblau, was born and spent his early childhood in New York City. When he was seven years old, the family moved to Aiken, South Carolina, where they hoped Nathan, who had a lung condition, would enjoy better health. The Franzblaus joined a small, close-knit community of immigrant Jewish families who, generally, did not socialize with the town’s gentiles. Arnold recalls attending Sunday school and holiday parties at the synagogue, Adath Yeshurun, and identifies some of the Jewish families in town. He moved to Charleston to attend The Citadel and the Medical College of South Carolina. He met Connie while working as a urology resident at Roper Hospital and the two married in 1953. They lived in a number of locations across the United States, and raised their two children in New Mexico. Arnold describes his family background and the antisemitism he encountered in Aiken and among medical school fraternities. Both interviewees discuss intermarriage and assimilation, and recall the discrimination blacks faced in the South before the civil rights era.
Louis Decimus Rubin, Jr., was born in 1923 in Charleston, South Carolina, the eldest of three children of Jeanette Weinstein and Louis D. Rubin, Sr. Jeanette grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and met Louis Sr. while visiting her sister in Charleston. In this interview, Louis talks about his father and his father's brothers. Uncle Harry worked with Marion Hornik at M. Hornik & Company in Charleston. Uncle Dan took a job at a Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper, and later became a Broadway playwright. He also wrote Hollywood screenplays for Paramount Studios in the 1930s. Uncle Manning, who wrote advertising for M. Marks & Sons Department Store in Charleston, worked for decades, beginning in 1914, for Charleston's Evening Post as a reporter and editor. Louis Sr. was a self-taught electrician and opened Louis Rubin Electrical Company at 333 King Street. Jeanette and Louis Sr. moved the family to Richmond in 1942 to be near her brothers; Louis Sr. had been sickly and Jeanette was struggling to take care of her family. In Richmond, Louis Sr. earned local fame for his weather predictions based on the clouds and became known as the Weather Wizard of Wythe Avenue. Louis Jr. oversaw the revision of his father's book, The Weather Wizard's Cloud Book, published in 1989 by Algonquin Books, which the younger Rubin had founded in 1983. The Rubins were members of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, Charleston's Reform congregation, which, the interviewee recalls, was very small when he was growing up. Boys at the temple were confirmed, but did not have bar mitzvahs. Louis Jr. had only one Jewish friend as a boy; the rest were not Jewish. "Growing up as I did, being a Jew wasn't very important. I didn't define myself as being a Jew." As an adult, Louis thinks of himself primarily as a southerner and considers himself Jewish culturally but not religiously. He compares himself to his brother, Manning, who has embraced his Jewish identity and religion. Louis mentions Charleston natives Sidney Rittenberg, Sr.; Octavus Roy Cohen, Jr., Earl Mazo, and the Mazo families. He describes the differences between what locals at one time referred to as Uptown Jews and Downtown Jews. "We were raised to be snobs." His mother was among those with the attitude that "Orthodox Jews were somehow peasants." He considers the impact of the Holocaust on American Jews, in particular, its role in breaking down the barriers between Charleston's Uptown Jews and Downtown Jews. He adds that economic and social parity played just as much a role in eliminating bias. Louis discusses the assimilation of Jews in America: where once many may have abandoned religious practices that set them apart, he now sees a return to traditional customs. Louis married Eva Redfield, an Episcopalian, in 1951, and they raised two sons, Robert and William, in a secular home. The interviewer references a few of Rubin's many published works, tracing the parallels between his fiction and real life.
