Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Herbert Keyserling
Date:
1995
Interviewer:
Rosengarten, Dale, 1948-
Interviewee:
Keyserling, Herbert, 1915-2000
Description:
Herbert Keyserling, born in 1915 to Jennie Hyman and William Keyserling, talks about his father’s immigration to the United States in 1888 from Lithuania, and how William ended up in Beaufort, South Carolina. He describes the extended family members who also emigrated, including William’s brothers, Joseph, Michael, Mark, and Israel; their mother, Bathsheba; and their dead sister’s children, Rose and Harry Segel. William worked for and, ultimately, became full partner in the MacDonald-Wilkins Company. The partners were general merchants with several stores in the Beaufort area and they also managed cotton farms, and ginned and brokered the cotton. Although Herbert’s mother, Jennie Hyman, was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in New York, she was not very religious and didn’t keep kosher in her own home. Nevertheless, she never served pork, and she helped to organize the Sunday school and the Sisterhood at Beth Israel in Beaufort. While William was observant of the Jewish holidays, he did not attend Sabbath services until later in life, which he did “because the congregation was small and to keep up attendance.” Herbert recalls that “when I was growing up, the men and women sat on different sides of the synagogue in Beaufort,” and they prayed in Hebrew. Jewish families who lived in and around Beaufort in the 1920s and 1930s included the Epsteins, Farbsteins, Getzes, Lipsitzes, Levins, Neidichs, Pollitzers, Rabinowitzes, Rubensteins, and Sheins. Herbert discusses his siblings, Leon, Rosalyn, and Beth; his father’s philanthropic activities; the survival of the Peoples Bank in Beaufort during the Great Depression; the creation of a food co-op in the 1920s; and William’s role in building ice plants to keep produce headed to market from spoiling. Herbert is joined in this two-part interview by his wife Harriet Hirschfeld Keyserling. He offers his impression of the Ku Klux Klan in Beaufort while he was growing up, and Harriet describes attending a meeting of the Beaufort Klan with New York Times correspondent Flora Lewis in the mid-20th century. Herbert, a physician, provides a brief overview of his educational background and his service in the navy during World War II. He and Harriet married in 1944 and raised Judy, Billy, Paul, and Beth in Beaufort. For related collections, see the Keyserling family papers, Mss. 1049; the Leon H. Keyserling papers, Mss. 1052, and Tapes and Transcripts from “Land of Promise,” Mss. 1069, in Special Collections, College of Charleston.
