Fred Klein Interviewed by Israel Rubin and Carol Zuckert February 23, 1999 Place of Interview: Fred Klein's Office, Episcopal Community Services Q: Please tell us a little about when and where you were born? A: I was born April 26, 1936 in Chicago, Illinois. In 1967, 1 moved to Tucson, Arizona and have lived here ever since. I became involved in refugee resettlement around 1980. I was Director of Refugee Resettlement for Jewish Family and Children's Service from late July, 1991 until the end of June, 1998. Prior to July, 1991, 1 was on the Board of Directors of Jewish Family and Children's Service and was co?chair of the Refugee Resettlement Committee. Q: How did your career take that turn? A: I went to Graduate School at the University of Illinois with a couple of summer sessions outside of the University of Illinois; one at Harvard and one at University of Arizona. I went to Law School at the University of Arizona. I graduated and entered the Bar in 1972. I practiced law both in criminal and civil fields. I was a law clerk at the University and in the Arizona Supreme Court. I did some work prior to graduation from Law School with the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union and with the U.S. Department of Justice. After Law School and after work at the Arizona Supreme Court, I worked with the Pima County Public Defenders Office, Neighborhood Law Offices which was a legal aid project under the supervision of Southern Arizona Legal Aid. I worked for what used to be Miller, Phipp and Feldman. I worked in partnership with my brother as Klein & Klein. I worked as a sole practitioner. I worked for a time with the association of Harold Hyams. I became involved in refugee resettlement initially as a volunteer. I directed refugee resettlement for about a year at Catholic Community Services. I was head of refugee resettlement for the Tucson Ecumenical Council's refugee project when they had a refugee project. Then I was President of Central Arizona Refugee Ecumenical Service and the Tucson Ecumenical Council Project which merged. I served on the board of directors for Refugees International, a refugee advocacy organization. In my legal career, I handled the first appeal of a juvenile delinquency case in the State of Arizona. I have argued before the United States Supreme Court and delivered very successful briefs to the U. S. Supreme Court in Mincey vs. Arizona, a case involving a man who was accused and convicted in connection with the death of a Tucson police officer. Q: Your organization now is probably very pleased to have you available to head up their refugee services. A: I am pleased to be with them. Q: Then you had taken that very solid avenue into refugee services and away from civil and criminal law. A: Yes. Although, obviously a legal background is helpful in the work that I do now. And I do from time to time, in the course of my work in refugee resettlement, in a sense, practice law. It is important for me to keep that. Q: Yes, yes. Would one need to be a lawyer? A: Most of the people involved in refugee resettlement are not. I would say that the most common career path would be either social work or would having been a refugee themselves. The linguistic skills and experience of being a refugee are obviously helpful. Q: Tell me about your activities aside from the Soviet refugees. A: Among the extracurricular activities that I have done in Tucson, have been on as staff in organizing groups of what used to be "Tucson Meet Yourself" and is now the "Tucson Heritage Experience Festival" and also the Waila Festival. Q: What is Waila? A: Waila is a social folk dance of the Tohono O'Odham. It comes from the O'Odham pronunciation of the Spanish dialect for dance. In the mid 1800s, a lot of immigrants to the United States, and more importantly to Northern Mexico including Texas, were from Central and Eastern Europe. They enjoyed dances like polkas and that became very popular and spread like wildfire, something like rock and roll today. It was picked up by the O'Odham and they continued to dance it for social dances. So you have bands in the old days that could play violin, flute and drum and now they use saxophone and electric guitar. The music is polkas and cha chas. Q: Now for the purpose of just filling out who you are yourself, you as an important contributor to the community. What are some of your other activities? Do have any time for any other activities? A: Well in addition to those things, also worked with the American Civil Liberties Union locally. Q: As a volunteer? A: Yes, as a volunteer. And with some other Jewish organizations like the Jewish Federation and belonging to Temple Ner Tamid. Q: And what is your family background? A: On my father's side, my great?grandfather came from, we think, Bavaria after the revolution of 1848. He was apparently involved in anti?monarchist activities. The legend is that he and his wife escaped across the border in a farmer's wagonload of hay. They landed in New York and peddled their way across the country to Chicago and settled down there. He started a dry goods store and took in a couple of partners. I don't know how familiar you are with Chicago history but the Mandel brothers were his partners. The partnership broke up after the Chicago fire and the Mandel brothers formed their store and he kept his. Q: And they expanded to become a big State Street, downtown store, Mandel Brothers? A: Then eventually, I think, they were taken over, I think ultimately by Carson Pirie Scott. Q: So this goes back to your great, great. Maternal grandparent? A: Grandfather. Q: Did they retain their Judaism? A: Yes. Q: How do you explain that? How do you explain that they retained their Judaism? A: Well, that's hard for me to say. They were leaders in the reform. Jewish community in Chicago. The story that I was told, and I never heard it from my father but I heard it from my other relatives, was that he at one point, as a young man, was involved in a discussion group that included people like Jane Adams of Hull House. They were very involved from a public standpoint in the community. He, my father, entered engineering school at the University of Michigan and did not complete it. He went through a series of career changes. Ultimately he became a credit manager for Spiegels Department Store in Chicago. He died back in 1964. His father died when he was 18 and he died when I was 18. He died about a week before my high school graduation. His father died while he was in the hospital. The story was that his family didn't tell anybody at the time because they didn't want to interfere with my father's recovery. Q: And your mother's side? A: My mother's side is a combination. On my father's side, his mother was, I gather, among the German Jews that settled in the Southern United States. His mother, Isabel Adams, grew up in rural Georgia and went to a Catholic convent school and became a concert pianist. I am not sure how she met Sidney Klein, my grandfather, but they met and settled in Chicago. She was a very early advocate of women's rights. She refused to cook. Q: Was she Jewish? Adams? A: Oh yes. It was anglicized from Adami originally. Q: Oh, I see, but she went to Catholic schools. A: She retained her Judaism and was very active in Sinai Temple on the south side of Chicago. In matter of fact, I think I probably passed confirmation because Louie Mann, the Rabbi there, had been very close to my grandmother. She died when I was fairly young and had been in ill health at the time. You know, he wanted to know if I had known my grandmother and I said, "Yes, alava shalom. " He sat down and said, "Well did you really know her. She was very much of an activist in the community" I gather at that time when he needed supporters, she was quite vocal in his words. Q: You have a brother that lives in this community who is also a lawyer. A: Yes that's right. My younger brother is chief trial attorney for the County Public Defenders Office. That makes him number two in the hierarchy there. Q: I see. Is the same one who was with you as Klein and Klein? A: That's right. Q: Is he your only brother? A: No, I have an older brother Simon, named for my great grandfather. He lives in Massachusetts. I have a sister, Laura, who lives in Las Cruces New Mexico. Simon is self?employed as a computer programmer and desktop publisher. My sister is a physician. She is county medical officer in Las Cruces. Q: What is your family status? A: I have a wife and we have no children. My wife is Patricia Klein. We were married in 1976. She was born in California but her family moved to Tucson, Arizona in the early 1900s. At the time she was born, her father was working in California and was a publicity agent for Twentieth Century Fox or one of the movie studios. Q: What does she do? A: She is District Director for Congressman Kolbe. So she is in charge of his operations and so on. Q: Do you have different political views? A: Well, she was hired by him while she was a registered Democrat and remained a registered Democrat for many years. Then a few years ago when he was involved a bitter primary fight, she changed to a Republican. So now we are of different parties. Q: But not. A: Not philosophically different. You were asking about my mother's side. My mother's father's father was a refugee from the Russian Empire. I don't remember what his original family name was because he took the name of a dead person off the census roles in order to escape the Czarist draft. He was a Rabbi; an Orthodox Rabbi. Q: What town did you say? A: I am not sure. Vaguely my recollection is Minsk which today would be Belarus. But I am not entirely sure of that. A lot of family histories are murky in a lot of cases. In the first place they didn't have much allegiance to their country of origin and considering the times, there wasn't anything that they wanted to talk about a great deal. Often they were covering up ? There wasn't a lot of discussion about it. He settled in Long Island and had a small farm there. My grandfather had a large family, and one of his sons was the first member of the family to go to a University. He graduated from Yale and was a mining engineer. He went out West to work in Butte, Montana. Well, he first worked, I guess, in coal fields in Pennsylvania and decided that was a little bit too dangerous after some mining fires and accidents. He moved out to Montana and went to work in the copper industry in Butte where he met my grandmother. Her family was the Schott family who had also been German Jewish immigrant stock. I gather my, I am not sure, came to the United States probably the 1840s. Kadushen who shortened to Kadin and early on settled around the turn of the century and Schott came in the 1800s, I believe. It was a similar story, they peddled their wares from New York into Michigan and settled in Michigan and Louie Schott moved out west to Montana and developed a real estate business. Q: Not a homesteader? A: He may well have homesteaded but he had few irons in the fire. There's a lot of family lore and part of the lore is on my mother's side. Part of the family were Sephardim and some of the family had settled in Italy. So during the 1930s and 1940s, some of the family members were successful in getting out of Italy. So we have a varied and checkered past. There are other bits and pieces I know that are in my mother's family. There are some pewter pieces that date back to the 1800s and have stamps on the back in French, something like "Et Ainert" which would stand for the name of the pewter maker. So I suspect that some of family were in the Alsace?Lorraine region. Q: Moving on to the time when you were the Director of the Refugee Program for Jewish Family and Children's Services, you did that for how long? A: Seven years. I had a number of years experience in refugee resettlement and had at various times contacted Jewish Family and Children's Services. Actually when I worked at Catholic Community Services as their Resettlement Director they had no refugee resettlement staff and Betty Orman who was then in charge of clinical services at JFCS, through various counseling staff, would assist occasional refugees. They arrived during a brief period of time of the Brezhnev regime when Jewish refugees were allowed out of the Soviet Union. We also resettled some refugees from Iran. During the time I was working with Catholic Community Service, often we would assist refugees because they were very familiar with procedures for resettlement. They didn't have a lot of refugee clients. I made contact a couple times with JFCS but they went through a period when they were having revolving door executive directors and then, of course, in between that time Brezhnev closed the doors to "refusniks. " There was a long period when nobody was getting out. Then Gorbachev began to open the door again. Around the time of "Glasnost" a curious thing happened and that was that one of the members of the Board of Directors of JFCS was designated to set up a committee to investigate the possibility of resettling Jewish refugees in Tucson. Irving Kaplan knew of Felipe Jacome who was then directing refugee resettlements actually here in the Episcopal Community Services. Felipe had formerly worked as a volunteer coordinator for me at Catholic Community Services. So Irving Kaplan was going to Felipe for some technical information and asking him if he would help out. Felipe then said "Why don't you ask Fred Klein? " So Irving contacted me. We went through a period of time, really with a certain amount of resistance from some members of the Jewish community who said, "Why would we think that Jewish refugees would ever settle in Tucson, Arizona. Why shouldn't they go to Israel?" We were trying to drum up some interest. A couple things happened around that time. One of which was that Lou Pozez, who had traveled back to Brest had met some distant relatives and established a channel of communication. Then, later on, some of the people that he had met in Brest were able to get out of the Soviet Union. Since Israel had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union at the time and had no direct flights, their interest was handled by the Dutch Embassy in Moscow. So Jewish refugees would obtain a visa from the Dutch Embassy in Moscow. 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