Work

So I was right on Hereford when they pretty much stopped us; we didn’t know what was going on. From my perspective it sounded like when you hear a large truck that backfires, that’s kind of what it sounded like to us.  They weren’t telling us anything. We were just literally stopped there for, I would say, I don’t know, time is hard to reflect on at this point, it seemed like twenty minutes.  I told my friend she had to go back, she needed to get out of there, she needed to kind of go back and tell our friends, and we heard that there might be a bombing, there might be suspects on the loose, we were hearing lots of different things.  So then they told us to leave the scene.  As you can imagine, they jammed all the cell service, so no one could really get in contact with each other. We kept trying to call my mom. We walked all the way around, I’m not sure how familiar you are with Boston, but around the Charles River there’s all these paths, so we tried to cut over away from the road along the Charles to then cut back in past the finish line to find my mom because Dana Farber had a meeting spot at the Boston Marriot Hotel. In my delusional mind, I figured we would meet there. Well, obviously we couldn’t get in there. It’s been an hour, I’ve already been running for four hours, limping beyond belief, so injured, so cold in my sweat, they basically told me to route back and walk back to my apartment which was on the Brookline-Boston line, about two miles back.  So we walked back.  It was, it still is, a very surreal thing to talk about, it doesn’t seem like it happened. It was a very, very weird time, and running in the subsequent year was both cathartic and very nerve wracking, but I think that’s something that I needed to do to move past that day.

I have followed two principal ancestral traditions. I have done a pilgrimage in the Huichol tradition. Huichol Indians live in Mexico and I did a proper pilgrimage where you fast and you go someplace and then you walk a long way without food or water and you make prayers to a sacred site. So, I did a pilgrimage but it took me 12 years to do a 6-year pilgrimage in Mexico and that has informed me in one way. And then before that and then after that, I have found teachers in the Lakota tradition and so I study and work with them. So sweat lodges in Temescal and prayer, that sort of connecting to the Earth, looking for how all of us beings on this planet are connected.  I'm no greater than the tree, no more important than that rock, and we all need each other to survive and how do we do this together. But this kind of ties in with me being a librarian because I know that what our species needs to do is to learn how to be together and to share and to be respectful of things even that are other from us. What librarians do is they teach people how to share things like books and lights and chairs and computers and rooms and that sort of thing. And we have stories of the ancestors from many different cultures so we've become more aware of different ways of seeing the world. That’s what our species needs or we won't make it. So that’s my spiritual tradition and it's my work here. 

Romania was an anti-Semitic country. Although its policy now is not. Talking about antisemitism actually, I should mention as I discussed before, that I was born in that province of Bukovina. Romania was an ally of Germany during the Second World War. And on June 22nd when Nazi Germany attacked Russia, the Romanians joined them but went into a different front which was into the Ukraine, and then in October of 1941, the Romanian government deported all of us, all the Jews from that area, from the Bukovina to the Ukraine, it was under Romanian administration, that’s why they named it Transnistria and we stayed there for three years in a bombed out, abandoned place. It was like a ghetto, you couldn’t go anywhere, you couldn’t make a living, you couldn’t–a lot of people died. So, when we came back it took three years until we were able–when the Russians came in and the Germans started to retreat. So my memories of the deportation itself are very scant because I was only two years old, but at the age of four or so I do have memories about that.

For me it's really important to note that as a woman being in a position of leadership twenty, twenty five, thirty years you attract all kinds of attention and not all of it obviously good. So there were a lot of opportunities, but there was also a lot of notice that you got and navigating that is difficult and is still difficult. I have all women who work for me, and it’s still difficult for young women I think to navigate any world where it's dominated by men and especially men at the top. And for me, as I read though some of your questions like, ‘What would you advise women today,’ my take on it even from a young age was, I'm not going to be afraid to be out front, I'm not going to be afraid to fail, and I'm not going be afraid to speak up. And so you know what, I really always wanted to move forward, and the only way to move forward was to be out front sometimes, so I would get on boards, and every board I got on I went through what they call the chairs. So I would become secretary and treasurer then vice chair, then chair, because I wanted to do it and I wanted other women to see a women in that position. And I always show—so that's a picture of me [pointing at photo with Karen and about 15 men, all in suits] and all guys.  That's the state trade association board. And it's me with, now there was another woman but she wasn't in the picture but it's like okay, you know what,  we cannot be afraid to be out from like that. And I always thought of myself as an equal.  Whether anybody else did or not was not really my problem. That’s how I looked at it. I looked at myself as an equal so when I went into that boardroom and sat down with all those guys I spoke up, I said what I thought. And they didn't always treat me as an equal, but that doesn't mean I didn't behave as if I expected them to.