By Samuel Wang
On Juneteenth of 1944, as Allied forces pushed the Axis powers out of France in a fight
for liberation abroad, and as African Americans struggled for liberation at home, Tillie
and Boris Kameras gave birth to Marjorie Moscatiello. She was born Jewish, although
neither she nor her parents practiced the religion. In those days, parts of Montgomery County sported signs that said “No Jews or dogs allowed.”
Marjorie lived with her parents for some time in a bungalow in Glenmont, Maryland.
When her sister was born, the “shack,” as Marjorie affectionately remembers it, was too
small, and they moved to another house in Maryland.
In school, she felt drawn to the humanities and flourished in their light. She loved
English and history, and her father taught her some piano. Later, when she joined the
instrumental music program at her elementary school, she wanted to learn how to play
the flute, but her parents compelled her to learn the violin instead. Though she showed
promise at playing and began receiving lessons from the then conductor of the all-
county orchestra, she resented being forced to practice.
Marjorie attended Walter Johnson High School (which this writer is required to hate as
an enemy of Montgomery Blair High School in sports!). Marjorie’s parents' decision to continue developing her musical talent was a good call, as she was accepted into the MMEA All-State Orchestra as a first violin. She also played as the concertmistress in both her middle and high school orchestras.
Despite her slight bitterness at being forced to study it, she enjoyed the music she
played on her violin, especially pieces by Beethoven. When I asked which pieces
specifically, she laughingly asked me not to embarrass her, saying, “I know it when I
hear it.”
Through the radio in middle school, she also picked up a love for the music of Elvis
Presley which continued on into high school. Though she states that she “loved it, just
loved it,” her parents preferred for her to listen not to Presley, but rather to Beethoven,
and only the latter. When Presley performed on Ed Sullivan in the 1950s, he would sometimes wiggle his hips in "outrageous ways," much to the disapproval of many adults.
When Marjorie began applying to colleges in 1962, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but she knew it needed to be something that helped people. So, having suffered bad grades in math and chemistry, she applied for the pre-nursing program at the University of Tennessee and got in.
There, she came into contact with two entities that would play a great role in shaping
her future: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and her future husband.
Marjorie’s first interaction with the SNCC occurred was when she heard that someone named Marion Barry was going to be a guest speaker at a meeting of the Jewish student organization Hillel. Though she hadn’t heard of him, she thought it might be interesting, so he attended that meeting. There, Barry delivered a fiery speech detailing the suffering of Black people at the hands of discrimination and segregation throughout the South, and encouraged students to fight for local change through sit-ins at local restaurants.
After the speech ended, Marjorie recalls that she was awestruck by the passion shown by Barry and immediately signed up to participate in the sit-ins, which she would do throughout her college life. As a white person, she would usually sit inside the restaurant until the police were inevitably called on the Black demonstrators, at which point she would act as a witness against any possible brutality.
Interestingly, at the time Marjorie didn’t know that Marion Barry was in fact not only a
chemistry major at UT, but also a SNCC representative, and that she was, through her
participation in sit-ins, a member of the SNCC.
When Marjorie was serving as a witness at one restaurant, which she distinctly
remembers to be The Tennessean, she met a student from Israel who was four years
older than her, who wasn’t a demonstrator. Smart and handsome, he told her that he
wanted to understand what the Civil Rights Movement was about and to see “how you
silly Americans behave.” Marjorie began dating him. After two years at the university,
they married, which would eventually lead to a cornerstone case in the Israeli supreme
court.
Their marriage was challenging, and they often had large, intense arguments. At one
point, Marjorie took their car to see a lawyer about getting a divorce, and when she got
back, her husband beat her up. Determined not to live with physical and emotional
abuse, Marjorie walked all the way to the police station and reported him. The next day,
as they were eating lunch, the police showed up and gave a warning to Marjorie’s
husband. After that, conditions in the marriage got somewhat better for her: he never
beat her again.
When their first child, a girl, was six weeks old, Marjorie’s husband moved the family to
Nigeria, where his parents had built a business empire as civil engineers. Marjorie
recalls leading an indolent life there, with servants in their waterfront house doing
everything for them. However, life was very different for others living in Nigeria. As she
walked their baby around in a stroller, she “saw many horrible things.” She specifically
remembers seeing a woman beating a boy, and stopping to ask, “Why are you beating
your child?” The response was that he’d given someone too much change when selling
oranges. This horrified Marjorie and deeply ingrained in her that life was not always fair.
After one year in Nigeria, the Biafran War started, so Marjorie and her husband moved
to Israel, where they had another child. Marjorie mostly stayed at home and took care of
their daughters, the elder of which was one and a half years old. She remembers that,
at the time, only her husband had a car, and she would usually walk to the grocery
store.
Despite now having two children, tensions between Marjorie and her husband remained
high, and after being married for five years, they divorced. Marjorie moved back to the
United States, and her husband remained in Israel. Having been granted custody of their two daughters, Marjorie sent them on regular visitation trips to their father every summer.
Meanwhile, her ex-husband married a second wife shortly after the divorce, and they
moved back to Nigeria. However, the second wife was soon diagnosed with cancer and
could not have children. So, one day, having sent her children, now five and seven
years old, on a visitation trip, Marjorie received a telegram from her ex-husband: “Have
decided to keep girls with me -(stop)- Hope you understand.”
Though Marjorie desperately wanted her daughters back, there was no way to fight a
legal battle against her ex-husband in Nigeria. His family had too much influence, with
wealth and ties from their civil engineering. However, when the second wife died after a
year or so, Marjorie’s ex-husband brought her body back to Israel, along with Marjorie’s
daughters. Marjorie now had a chance to fight for her daughters back.
Marjorie was able to find a Knesset lawyer, the Knesset being the Israeli parliament, to
help her. Though the lower court ruled in Marjorie’s favor, her ex-husband appealed,
and the case went before the Supreme Court of Israel.
At the time, Marjorie had been dating a Christian man in the U.S. Her ex-husband’s main
argument was thus that if Marjorie was able to keep their daughters, then they would
grow up Christian, since Marjorie was an “unfit Jewish mother,” and if she married her
Christian boyfriend, he would insist that their children be Christian, and that that would
be undesirable. In a supportive gesture, after hearing this, Marjorie’s boyfriend, who had been providing financial support to Marjorie along with her parents during the legal
battle, also offered to try to convert to Judaism to invalidate the argument.
On the other hand, Marjorie argued legal custody of her children couldn’t be taken away
from her simply because there was a chance she would marry a Christian man.
Eventually, the Court ruled that the children would be in Marjorie’s custody. Marjorie
recalls that the decision was a landmark case, setting the precedent not only that
custody could not be decided based on religion, but that interfaith marriage was to be
recognized by the State.
After she won the case, Marjorie went back to the U.S. and got a job with the
Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services as a caseworker,
where she interviewed people to see if they qualified for Medicaid, Medicare, and Food
Stamps (now known as SNAP), which at the time were literal stamps that allowed
people to receive cheap or free food.
During this time, having not finished her undergraduate education, Marjorie took two
years of night classes on English and sociology at the University of Maryland, those
subjects having interested her her whole life. When she was in her 50s, she obtained a
master’s degree in social work from the Catholic University of America, with financial
support from her parents. Marjorie continued working as a caseworker as she took her
classes, and with her master’s degree, she became a social worker instead, which was
“basically the same work, but with better pay.” Eventually, she retired.
However, when the AIDS epidemic began in 1981, Marjorie felt that she needed to help.
She came out of retirement to work in a clinic for the MC Department of Health and
Human Services. She would help connect AIDS patients find resources such as housing
opportunities and encourage them to use the medication AZT, which was the only drug
available for AIDS at the time.
Later, after new medications were developed, such as HAART, and the severity of the
AIDS epidemic decreased, Marjorie left the clinic and worked for a year in the
Montgomery County Child Welfare Services program, then went back into retirement.
Some years ago, when Marjorie was 52, she put an ad in The Washington Post saying
that she was interested in meeting a man who enjoyed watching the Redskins play and
was liberal (the former was added apparently to make men more interested in the ad).
She received several phone calls, including seven from a man living in Arlington who
had a daughter and a son, and whose wife had died three years earlier from a heart attack. They eventually met in person, and after dating for three years, when he was emotionally ready, they married.
Now that they were both retired, Marjorie told her husband, who was a first-generation
Italian American who’d never been outside the U.S., “We have got to travel while we’re
still healthy.” They traveled to several countries, including Italy, where they met his relatives.
After 16 years of a "wonderful" marriage, he developed Alzheimer’s and later died of a
stroke. Marjorie eventually moved into Montgomery County’s Leisure World, where she
would live for eight years. She loved singing, and during that time she participated in the
choral group, which would practice every week for several hours, and would perform at
schools and other assisted-living facilities.
However, as Marjorie noted to me during the interview, as she got older, the relationship
between her and her children changed, and they assumed the role of her caretakers.
So, when Marjorie’s daughters decided she was isolated and not receiving enough
nutrition at Leisure World, they “helped” her decide to move to the Brookdale Senior
Living facility which, Marjorie mentioned ruefully, didn’t have a choral group.
Presently, Marjorie still intently follows politics, though she no longer does much social
work or activism. She raised her children to be politically aware, with one being politically active, and has thereby helped pass the baton of social progress onto the next generation.
Thanks to volunteer editor Shaun Wang who assisted with this story.