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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

Depression, and I became very interested in every little thing about it, but I personally don't recall it as a horrible period. It wasn't.

Q:

To summarizeit, what strikes me most are two things. One, that you had such a diverse range of interests, and it seemed like all of you did. I mean, this is not getting into when you got involved in music, but music, and reading, you know, cheap novels, and sports, and all these kinds of things, and that you --

Foner:

But everybody did that. I don't think that was very unusual. Maybe the music was.

Q:

I don't mean unusual for you. I mean the whole milieu was like that, people did everything.

Foner:

Yes, people did everything. They sort of tasted everything at that time. It was a small town in a big city. It was very tight, the people were all close together. I remember the backyards. In the backyards there was always somebody, always singing in the yards, and people were throwing down pennies. A lot of crazy things happened there that I gather is fairly typical of what was happening all over the place. Like, for example, we were up in the Adirondacks, we'd run into somebody, a couple there, he lived in Williamsburg, much older thanI, in a different section of Williamsburg. His experiences are fairly similar to mine, even though he's considerably older, he's about eighty.

Q:

One thing that also has struck me is that it seems to me, based on what I've heard from my grandfather, who was twenty-five years older than you, you know, that the Lower East Side experience was somehow different from the Williamsburg experience, that in the Lower East Side --

Foner:

They're poorer.

Q:

They're poorer and politics seem inescapable in the Lower East Side.

Foner:

There had to have been socialist around during this period, on the street corners.

Q:

In Williamsburg.

Foner:

In Williamsburg. And they don't stand out in my mind. They may in other people who were there. For example, my brothers, I'll bet you, would remember them. I don't really, because my interests were not in that direction. There had to have been, but the East Side





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