Biography

I was born in 1945, in the small eastern European country called Romania. My mother’s parents were from Czechoslovakia and my father’s family was from Hungary. In the house we spoke Hungarian but when my parents did not want my older brother and me to understand they conversed in German or Rumanian.
In 1949, when I was four years old, we escaped from Romania in the middle of the night, walking through three feet of snow over the border to Hungary. My parents did not want to live under the Communist regime, who came as liberators and stayed as conquerors, this after Hitler disseminated the country and all of us who were Jewish! From Hungary we went to Austria where we became Christians in order to immigrate to Argentina—Argentina was not friendly to Jews—but that is where my parents chose to go. That was where my father’s brother lived. The first year we moved a few times and I attended different schools. We finally settled in Buenos Aires.
In High School, after failing frequently in my classes I decided to quit school and turn my “Part Time” job into a “Full Time” work, promising my parents that I would finish school. By the way, diagnosed with ADD, under doctor’s care and medication, I finally fulfilled my promise to my parents and got my GED in the United States when I was 50 years old.
At the tender age of 18, knowing a little of “British” English, my work life started in the United States as a “Counter Girl” in a fast food chain. How I managed to survive, I often wonder! That this country, this people, so different, was a culture shock! To these you must add all my shame, my shame of my scholastic failure, and the shame brought on a feeling of no self-worth!
How I managed to “Step-up-the-ladder”, from a “Counter Girl’ to a lowly position in a Bank, was a stroke of good fortune! A New York Unemployment counselor sent me on an interview to a Bank. But because of prejudice, I wasn’t hired! I was considered as a Puerto Rican (below the salt). This was America?
Finally, a position (higher only to a cleaning man), was mine. I filed cancelled checks – from this, through more, but better menial jobs, rote jobs, some self taught English and working for lower than scale wages; I climbed the ladder (going nowhere). I was still scared, scared that I would be found out that I had lied about my High School Diploma (nonexistent), scared that I could not compete, scared most of all that I was not accepted because I was thought of as a “Puerto Rican” There were other jobs, other disappointments … I was Jewish … I was a foreigner … I was … I was unacceptable as bright as I have been told I was … this did not help how I felt about myself. It was only when I became involved with the Girl Scouts that I began to feel “good” about myself. They did not think of me as a “second class citizen”. They liked me for me. I was not all those awful things I had been told that kept me apart. I was blossoming.
But… and this is what has brought me to today… Chase Bank, where I worked in the accounting department, had an “on site” program with Cornell University, for women employees (…the result of a discriminatory lawsuit against Chase, many years earlier) gave me my first taste of Academia! For me, and the others in the program, it was like a parched person with a long awaited drink of water! I was starting a new beginning!
Hoorah for the chance to learn – me, in the eyes of the world, a lowly uneducated foreigner with a Spanish accent, me, Veronica with ADD, with no self esteem was learning! And this wasn’t for my parents. It was for me, for my self-worth.
Today, as a result of being mislabeled, misjudged and mistreated, today, my self-fulfillment is in teaching, empathizing with those children and adults whose background cultures, languages and religions do not fall into “The Norm” (whatever the “Norm” is)
I was not the “norm” – How I was unaccepted in society has made me more and more cognizant of how teaching must deal with the ever increasing problem of multiculturalism. Today there is only one world – A world of many diverse cultures and backgrounds which, for peace, must be recognized and respected!