YouSaid · the spoken record

Sara Paretsky

lines on the record: 64
first: 2023-12-14
most recent: 2023-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I never have understood this. She gave a different reason every time the question came up, but she was accepted at the U of I medical school. She grew up in downstate Illinois with a full ride, which was just unheard of for women in the late 30s, early 40s. And then the day she was supposed to show up on campus, she didn't. She had a different unbelievable story for each time she told it. But then a year later, she entered graduate school at Iowa State in Ames. And Iowa State at that point was just an extraordinary place because one of the members of the cell biology, the big chemical, biochemistry and so on, faculty, was very close to a lot of the Jewish scientists who were at risk in Germany in the 30s. And so it was kind of like a holding depot for a decade.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, or he thought that I shouldn't do. He had women graduate students. I've never really understood this, but I have four brothers and it was made very clear that if I wanted a college education that I needed to pay for it because funds were limited and the future lies with boys. money for education was to go to the boys.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was, I want to say confused and complicated person, but he wasn't a good respecter of boundaries, and he was a very needy person, and if you didn't agree with him, he would become just Enraged and not physically violent, but sort of terrifyingly angry.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, today you'd call it cell biology, I guess. When he did it, it was bacteriology. He worked on an organism in World War II. Typhoid was typhus, I guess, was the second biggest killer on the Eastern Front next to the war itself. And it was an organism that was thought to be useful and potentially useful in biological warfare. So the Russians were trying to develop it as a bioweapon. And I guess my dad was working on it similarly in Kansas as what you could do to protect a population against it, I guess.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So I often thought, what would they have done if the building had burned down? You know, they just would have celebrated another auto de fay, I guess. But yeah, that was a strange experience.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my God, yes, I had forgotten that. So, the Supreme Court decision banning prayer in school had been handed down. And we had this every year, the Thursday before Easter, there was a mandatory attendance at a religious revival in the school auditorium. So this year, that in 63, I protested this having to attend this. and a guy whose parents were progressive whatevers and three Catholic girls were locked in the principal's office for the duration of the revival”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. But for some reason, when I was 15 and 16, I was the designated person to go speak to local Christian churches on. What Judaism was all about. I don't know why they picked me. Just like I don't know why you picked me. But anyway, I would talk what I would know about Jewish history and practice, which wasn't a lot. And then the first question was always, but why do Jews control all the world's money? And I'm like, that was the first time I had heard that we did. So I was kind of at a loss for an answer. All this is so much on my mind just because of all the events. The recent two months, but anyway.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Lawrence Jewish community was very small. I was usually, or my brothers and I were often the only Jewish kids in any given classroom. My parents were not observant in a Strict way. I mean, they were atheists, but it was important to them to have Jewish identity.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was where my parents could buy a house when they wanted to. They were looking to buy a real house. The realtor actually told them because they didn't seem very Jewish, she would be glad to show them property outside the zone, so to speak, the mud flats along the Kansas River, which even in the 1950s didn't have indoor plumbing. And my mother was just furious, so they bought this old farmhouse in the country. And in those days, you know, now two-room country school, you wouldn't get a equitable education, but gosh, my brothers and I were these chubby unethic kids, but in this school, you had to, everyone had to play sports so that they could have a team. And, you know, I loved playing baseball. I was a terrible athlete, but I loved it. And there were 11 kids in the seventh and eighth grades. And so all 11 of us had to play. And so it was a great experience for us just having to.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or any spontaneous rebuttals. Yeah, it was, we were very much like giraffes in the town. I don't know that there was blatant anti-Semitism, although there were real estate covenants which excluded Jews, people of color. And it's a much larger indigenous population in Lawrence than there is African American, although that's a complicated story too.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I don't understand it to tell you the truth. I just don't understand, well, I understand this, that it's convenient to have one group of people that is marginal with minimal power, that you can blame for everything that's wrong in the world. And that if you belong to a different marginal group, it's easier to attack. These less powerful people than it is to go up against the real power structure. I thought about that with Minister Farrakhan, for example, that he was denied his chance to perform as a violinist. I think it was going into prep school. And that was very much a waspy prep school that shut the doors on him. But it's easier to blame the Jews than it is to try to really take on a massive kind of power structure that may have some Jews in it, but it's mostly non-Jewish.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just under the air. Well, everyone else in the family was massacred in the Shoah down to the smallest infant. And so it just feels kind of. Horrible to me right now thinking about this, the only reason I exist is because my great-grandfather was murdered and they sent my grandmother to New York to get her out of harm's way.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My grandmother was a Polish count. This count was so important that even when the communists took power, they left him alone and let him keep his title and his lands. But he had a hunting modge outside Vilna and my great-grandfather managed the hunting modge. He thought my grandmother, who was the oldest child, was a smart little girl, and he had her enrolled in the local girls school, which would have been Catholic. So my great-grandfather was murdered and my grandmother was just kind of out there in the public eye. She feared for her safety. So my grandmother was 13. They got her on a boat to New York to keep her out of harm's way. And it's one of those things two of her sisters joined her before the 1924 immigration law.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My great-grandfather, my grandmother's father, was murdered in a pogrom. They broke into the house and shot him in bed in front of his wife. In Lithuania, right, near Vilna.”
2023-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 561 — Sara Paretsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source