About This Item

  • Call NumberBJHP_0355
  • Summary(00:55) Tobia Lemelman and Gusta Scheichter, parents of Martin ,were holocaust survivors who arrived in the United States in 1947 -- (05:15) They settled in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The family lived in the back of their candy store, Teddy's. Martin, born in 1950, recalls the story of the candy store -- (09:45) Martin and his older brother Bernard went to a yeshiva school (studying both biblical and secular subjects). The family was not very religious. They kept kosher, spoke Yiddish at home, but the store was open on Saturday (shabbat) -- (14:30) Martin did not feel poor growing up but not as well off as others -- (16:50) Shopping at Prospect Park Market, you could get anything from the pushcarts and peddlers, some of them had tattooed numbers on their arms from concentration camps -- (19:00) People spoke Yiddish, even non-Jews knew a few words. The store closed in 1968. Martin and his brother stayed in Brooklyn. Martin met his wife at Brooklyn College.
  • Date2021-05-16
  • Physical Description1 audio file (30 minutes) : digital, MP3
  • CreatorLemelman, Martin
  • CollectionBrooklyn Jewish History Project
  • Cite AsBrooklyn Jewish History Project, Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History
  • Formatsound recording-nonmusical
  • Genreinterviews
  • NoteTitle supplied by cataloger. Audio interview conducted on 2021 May 16 by Ariane Loeb. Collected through the Brooklyn Collection Jewish History Project of Brooklyn Public Library. This project is funded by the David Berg Foundation.
  • SubjectJews--Identity ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
  • PlaceBrownsville (New York, N.Y.)
  • RightsThis work is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Users are free to share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes as long as appropriate credit is given to the source and new material created with this work is shared under the same conditions.
  • TitleThe Lemelman family collection. Oral history interview with Martin Lemelman conducted on May 17, 2021.
  • Biographical NoteMartin's parents, Tobia ("Teddy") Lemelman and Gusta ("Goldie") Scheichter, originally from Poland, were Holocaust survivors. They met and married in a displaced persons camp in Germany. In 1947, they came to America where their first son, Bernard was born. They lived on the Lower East Side, then moved to a farm in upstate NY, and finally settled in Browsville, Brooklyn, where the family took over a candy store and named it Teddy's. The bulk of the interview concerns Martin's childhood in the 1950s and 1960s and the candy store.