What they have said
about the book:
"New
Life for Biography",
By Sandee Brawarsky,
The Jewish Week, Nov. 29, 2005
...“Always
Up Front: The Memoir of Helen Fried Kirshblum Goldstein,” as
told to Myrna Katz Frommer (Gefen) is autobiography. Hers is the story
— not often told — of the vigorous volunteer whose hard
work propelled her to the heights of lay leadership in the Jewish
community. Although she was the wife of three distinguished men, two
of them rabbis, Fried Kirshblum Goldstein was known not for their
accomplishments but rather for her own. She was very involved in Women’s
League for Conservative Judaism, as a leader in Brooklyn, a teacher,
speaker, leadership trainer, student of Judaism and eventually as
national president.
As
a young child, Fried Kirshblum Goldstein chose to sit in the front
of the class, and that was where she took her seat throughout her
life, as the title implies. She began teaching Sunday school at a
young age, in the Conservative synagogue where her grandfather was
the longtime president. From the start, she felt like she was on stage
while teaching — and loved it. She worked in various jobs after
high school, attended college at night, married, had two children
and began her life of communal activism. After her first husband’s
death, she began teaching college. Five years later, she married again,
and took on the role of rebbetzin, in addition to her other activities.
She befriended many faculty members and leaders at the Jewish Theological
Seminary as part of her leadership work there. When she was widowed
again, she married another Conservative rabbi.
Fried
Kirshblum Goldstein was ever the forward-looking optimist. In the
book, she speaks with surprising candor about sexuality, intermarriage,
abortion, marriage and family. Before her death in 2004, at the age
of 92, she endowed a chair in practical rabbinics at JTS; this book
adds to that legacy.
Katz,
who with her husband Harvey Frommer, has written several oral histories
including “It Happened in Brooklyn” and “It Happened
in the Catskills,” first got to know her subject when they were
both teaching at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. She succeeds
in intimately capturing her subject’s seeming unlimited energy
and dedication.
