Getting Started: Stories

Carol Scharff was one of our first interviewees.

Carol was born in Manhattan and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Carol moved to Larchmont in 1963 and has been an active Larchmont Temple member for many years. Carol says, "Larchmont Temple has been my spiritual second home for nearly fifty years."

Here are a few excerpts from Carol's oral history, taken by Gerry Albarelli during the summer of 2012.

My name is Carol Scharff. I was born in New York City, in December of 1934.   I grew up in Brooklyn.   My earliest memory is: my mother used to have a--we used to have grocers, not supermarkets, and the grocer used to come to the house, and take the order and then leave, fill the order and come back.  You never had to go to the store.  My earliest memory is: my mother was pregnant with a third child and the two of us were sitting around and for some reason my sister, who was probably five or four-and-a-half, decided to run to the door when the grocer came--and she split her head.   And they had to take her to the hospital.  She had to be stitched up…  I remember that very clearly.  

The next memory I have after that is--we lived in a first-floor apartment,  and I looked outside, and it was December--either I was just seven or just six--and my father brought me my first two-wheeler. I remember him bringing it into the house.   

My mother and father were high school sweethearts.  They were actually born on the same day. They got married at the East Midwood Jewish Center, which is the big conservative Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn.  And when they bought a house, they bought a house around the corner--not that they were such practicing Jews but that was a convenient place to live.  So, as a kid I went to the East Midwood Jewish Center --when I felt like it because my mother didn’t care.  My mother was very angry at the Jewish religion because women were not counted.  My grandparents were orthodox. And my mother just tossed it away.  She said, I’m not having any of this.    

My mother’s father  came to escape the Russian draft and pogroms.   My grandmother was a wonderful cook.     She made her own challah.  She made her own fish.  I didn’t learn that from her.   She made her own cheese blintzes.     She didn't teach me to cook.   She did teach me to sew.  And for many years I sewed all of my clothes and my kids’ clothes.