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Volume 6, Number 2 - Spring 2008
Funder Honors a Mother's Life and
Literary Legacy
talking with Stephen Milstein
Henrietta Milstein used to read children’s classics to her sons: The Five Chinese Brothers. Curious George. The Little Engine that Could. She told the boys stories of her childhood in Vienna, before her family fled from Hitler’s armies. And when she looked at the elementary school library in Long Beach, New York, where she worked, she glimpsed the future.
Henrietta, who was known as Henny, didn’t want teachers to just drop their students off at the library; she wanted to collaborate with them to teach library lessons that dovetailed with classroom subjects. She brought in study carrels and an open-reel videotape machine; she envisioned the library as a multi-media headquarters where students and faculty could read, discuss, study and learn.
Later, when the Milstein family left New York and bought the Burlington Coat Factory, Henny added children’s books to the inventory of coats and women’s clothing. There was an in-store literacy campaign, posters featuring a mother and child with the slogan, “Never Say No to a Book.” And she routinely brought home three books a week for her grandchildren.
It was that legacy—his mother’s passion for books and reading—that prompted Stephen Milstein to become a People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos funder.
“I’d heard from [board member] Anne Seltzer about this literacy program catering to disadvantaged people. The school where my mother worked was 40 percent low-income. Her goal was to get students interested in reading. She felt they’d have a better shot at educational advancement. She was very progressive in converting the library from a place with books to a multi-media center.
“If a book did not circulate well, she’d read it to find out what the kids didn’t like. She wrote reviews for Library Journal. And she used to practice on [my brother and me] for her classes.”
Milstein remembers walking or biking to the Long Beach library as a child, to bring home books or browse the encyclopedia. “Despite my mother being a librarian, I was not a great reader. I was slow. But now I read a book a week," favoring historical novels such as the Kite Runner. He also loved Waiting for Snow in Havana, the memoir of a Cuban family.
As a young man, he devoured Ayn Rand’s anti-socialist novels, including The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. “She was prophetic, predicting the downfall of Soviet Russia,” he says. And more recently, he read Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust by New York Times reporter Joseph Berger, a story of Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors who came to New York in 1950. His mother’s family, on the other hand, realized right after Kristallnacht that they must leave or face deportation to the death camps.
“My mother told me, ‘As soon as the Nazis came, [her family] said, Let’s run!’ She would point out that my childhood in Long Beach was no different than her childhood in Vienna. She’d say, ‘It can happen again.’”
Henny Milstein died six years ago, but her thirst for books and knowledge survives into the next generation, and the next. Milstein visits the library three times a month, and his teenaged children are both avid readers—his daughter devours a book a week and has participated in the Reading Olympics in Bucks County; his son spends an hour a day perusing Wikipedia and other Internet sources. Surely, their progressive, literary grandmother would have approved.