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Welcome to the PAW Memorials podcast, where we celebrate the lives of alumni. On this episode, PAW Memorials editor Nicholas DeVito sat down with Abby Klionsky ’14 to discuss Joe Schein ’37. Joe was the oldest living alum in Princeton's history at the time of his death. A Princetonian ’till the end, Joe died on the Friday of Reunions Weekend 2024.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello. I’m Nicholas DeVito, Class Notes and Memorials editor of Princeton Alumni Weekly. With this podcast, I’m pleased to launch the new PAW Memorials podcast, where we choose one alum that recently died and discuss them in a bit more detail. This episode we are talking about Joe Schein, from the great Class of 1937, who died May 24, 2024. Joe was the longest-living classmate of ’37 and the oldest undergraduate alum in Princeton’s history at 109. Joe majored in modern languages and went on to medical school at UPenn. He and was a lifelong learner and bibliophile. At Reunions, Joe carried the Class of 1923 Cane as the oldest returning alum of the oldest returning class to Reunions eight times. His love for Princeton never wavered. He appreciated his time here and was thankful for the opportunities it gave him.
Nicholas DeVito: Hello. Today we’re talking about Joe Schein from the great Class of 1937, and we have with us Abby Klionsky from the great Class of 2014. Abby, can you introduce yourself, please?
Yeah, my name is Abby. I was in the Class of 2014, and I met Joe in the process of my research for my senior thesis, and actually before that for my JP in the history department, my junior paper.
ND: OK. Can you tell us a little bit of what your thesis was about?
AK: Yeah. I wrote about the development of Jewish student life at Princeton starting in 1915 and going up through 1972, which is when the University opened the kosher dining hall. And I sort of stumbled into the project when I was, the summer after sophomore year, a friend emailed me and said, “We just found these letters in my great-grandfather’s attic about his experience being a Jewish student at Princeton in the 1910s. Would you be interested in them?” And I was like, “Oh my God.”
ND: Oh wow. Yeah.
AK: “Yes, I absolutely want them.” And it was really a game changer because before then, the sort of story of Jewish life at Princeton is that it got started in the 1940s when Einstein was there. And so these letters helped us push back that history by three-plus decades, and Joe was a part of that story in the midsection.
ND: OK, so tell us how you got in touch with Joe and his story of helping start that.
AK: Yeah. I actually no longer remember where I first saw Joe’s name, unfortunately. And I keep trying to figure out how I saw it. But essentially what I would do is I would go through the yearbooks looking for names that sounded like they might be Jewish. And often religion was listed by requirement, which they stopped doing in the 1950s by requirement of state law. But before then, they would list religion. And so when I would see somebody who looked like they may have been involved, I went to TigerNet, the alumni directory, and ran a search with fingers crossed that maybe they might still be alive and that I could talk to them. And with Joe, I lucked out. He was living in New York City. There was no email address listed. I just called him, cold, on his home phone and explained who I was and what I wanted to do. And he said, “Come to New York, come talk to me.” And so that was the first of many times that we sat down to talk.
ND: That sounds like Joe. That’s great. So what I hear is that Joe started Friday night services. Is that true?
AK: It’s sort of true.
ND: Tell us more.
AK: The story of Jewish life at Princeton is really, it’s very impacted by the fact that an undergraduate experience at Princeton is typically four years. And so institutional memory goes in four year cycles. And in the era before the internet and digital records, every four years, the students thought that they were reinventing because they didn’t know what had been there before. And so really there had been services going back to 1915. We have a record of a rabbi from Trenton coming in occasionally, starting in 1915, to lead Friday evening services. Joe was the person who led those services when he was an undergraduate there in the ’30s. And so there were different iterations of that over time. He didn’t start it and he sort of reignited it. It would die down or somebody would not be interested. And so students would forget that it existed and then it would restart in a year when nobody remembered that it had existed the year before.
And Joe credited, actually, Dean Gauss, Christian Gauss, with sort of lighting the fire and being a catalyst for restarting it when he was there. So until 1964, Princeton had some iteration of a chapel attendance requirement. Princeton’s lasted much longer than most of the other colleges. Yale got rid of theirs in 1935. Princeton held on for much longer. And that meant that you had to go, it sort of diminished over time what the requirement was, but some students had to attend some chapel until 1964. And in the ’30s when Joe was there, it was a much stricter requirement. And he credits Dean Gauss with saying, “You really ought to do something for the Jewish students so that they’re not having to go to this Christian service on Sunday.”
I think to me, the thing that was most surprising about that that Joe shared with me was that non-Jewish students who didn’t want to have to be on campus on Sunday would come to the Jewish service on Friday, which he said was a snappy service. It’s one page of quotes from the Bible, from the Old Testament, with the Shema, sort of a central prayer, the Shema in Hebrew at the bottom. It was a one-page, one and done, over in time to catch the evening train to New York, and then you didn’t have to be back on campus on Sunday in time for services. And that was very surprising to me when he told me that story.
ND: Yeah, I’ve heard that story too. And I think that’s amazing how Joe, he was keeping true to his faith, but also helping out his friends who were not Jewish.
AK: Yes.
ND: Yeah.
AK: Yes. Yeah.
ND: That’s great. So after you write your thesis, you graduate and then you kept in touch with Joe?
AK: Yeah, we kept in touch pretty frequently. I definitely wrote him twice a year. I would send him a card at Rosh Hashanah in the fall, and I would send a birthday card in February. And in between we would have a few phone calls. And whenever I went to the East Coast, the most important visit was to make sure that I found time to see Joe. I live in Chicago, well, I’ve lived all over. I was in Mississippi and California and Chicago, and then I was actually back in Princeton for a year and a half working for the University. And throughout that time, whenever I was in New York, he was the priority visit. And so I probably saw him once or twice a year after graduation. And we saw each other last in September. And actually I was supposed to see him on the Wednesday before Reunions, and his caregiver said he’s not doing great, and maybe a phone call. And then of course, as we know, he died a couple of days later. Had a really nice visit in September.
ND: That’s good. At PAW, we were like, “This is so fitting that he passed away Reunions weekend.” He was a Princetonian through and through. It’s just amazing. So I started at PAW in 2016. That was the first year Joe got the silver cane. So this was my first year at PAW where I was like, “We don’t know. We’re not sure who the silver cane is at this point,” because we heard about Joe. And so we were reaching out to other classes to try and find out, and it was just like, I was like, “This is huge, because for eight years it’s been Joe. What do we do? What do we do?” And so it was amazing.
Can you tell me one thing you loved about Joe that maybe not many people would know?
AK: Yeah, I was stunned year in and year out by his mental acuity. I mean, how absolutely with it he was well into his hundreds. When I would visit, he would ask about details about my life that he remembered from previous visits. And one time I called and whenever I called, because it had been a few months, I didn’t know where he was at, I would say, “Hi, it’s Abby from Princeton.” And he would say, “You’re not living in Princeton. Did you move back? You’re in Chicago.” And I was like, “You’re right. That was a confusing way to introduce myself.”
But he would ask about — I’m a preschool teacher — he would ask about my students, he would ask about the people I was spending time with. He knew my grandfather had been a pathologist and he had trained as a pathologist. He would ask questions about my grandfather’s training. I mean, he really remembered the details in a way that I have not experienced with other people well into their nineties. Obviously, I don’t know many people well into their hundreds, but I know many people well into their nineties. And it was remarkable how in tune he was and how his drive for learning and new experiences and new information was still present.
When I called him on his 106th birthday, I said, “How are you celebrating?” He said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to learn Russian. This feels like the time.” Who starts learning a new language at 106? I mean, it was remarkable. And did he follow through and become a fluent Russian speaker? No, but he had the drive and the ability to sit and to learn and to think about it and to seek out that passion that was still there for learning. I mean, I think fundamentally, Joe was a curious, intellectual-minded person.
ND: I think that’s kind of what kept him going is his curiosity and always keeping his mind sharp, always learning new things, like they say. As we get older, we don’t do that as much. And to Joe’s credit, I think we all need to keep that up to keep going.
AK: Very much. Yeah.
ND: That’s amazing. Can you tell me, did Joe have interactions with Albert Einstein?
AK: Yeah. He had many interactions with Albert Einstein and also for him, Abraham Flexner was a very prized relationship at the Institute for Advanced Study. And so the stories that I heard about Einstein were in the context of my research. And so he said, “I would go every few weeks. I would go to Einstein’s house to pick him up and bring him to Jewish services on campus. I would walk over to Mercer Street and he would come over in his slippers and we would walk together. And sometimes I would say something at services, and sometimes Albert Einstein would say something at services.” I don’t know the extent to which that relationship continued outside of that context, but certainly relationships with many of the physicists at the institute he maintained for a very long time and considered Abraham Flexner to be one of his most important personal mentors.
ND: Oh, wow. Did he talk to you about Flexner?
AK: Well, every time we visited he would talk about Flexner and then he would say, “But that’s not what you’re interested in.” And I was like, “I’m interested in anything you want to talk.”
ND: In all of it. We want all of the stories.
AK: “I’m here for my research, but I’m here to talk to you. Tell me anything that you want to tell me.” And so yes and no. Those are not the things that I remember because they’re not what we focused on as much, but certainly I could go back and read all my notes and then we could connect another time, and I could talk about that a little bit because he certainly talked about Flexner a lot.
ND: OK. That’s amazing. What a time it must have been to be here with those folks and just with Joe, and Joe was such a character. I can just see him connecting with people so easily and yeah. Wow.
AK: Yeah, I think for me, one of the, this is unrelated to that, but one of the most special experiences that I had with him was at my first reunion. So the year that I graduated. Sorry, not my first reunion. At the first Reunions that I attended as an alum. So I graduated in that year when I was a senior. Joe came, that was 2014. I think he had not been a regular Reunions attendee, but he came that year. And another person who came was Henry Morgenthau III, who was in the Class of 1939, who I also had interviewed for my thesis. And I got to reintroduce to each other two men who had last seen each other 75 years earlier.
ND: That’s amazing.
AK: One of the photos I have framed on display in my apartment is this photo of the three of us in our Reunions jackets. And it just felt so special to be able to bring together these people who, at the time that they were at Princeton, were among a handful of the Jewish students there and had this deeply shared experience and then hadn’t been able to talk about it with each other in more than seven decades.
ND: Wow. That’s amazing. Because I know Henry talked about how hard it was to join an eating club, and I don’t believe he was in one. Did Joe have that same?
AK: No. So it’s interesting. One of the most surprising things from my research was that most of the people I spoke to said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was antisemitism at Princeton. We all know that.” And I said, “Can you talk about that and how you interfaced with that?” And they said, “Oh, but it didn’t affect me. It wasn’t my experience.” And that for me was really important to hear people say, “This is the story, and this is what it was really feeling like. It wasn’t feeling like that.” And so the dominant narrative really has been, Princeton was this very waspy, East Coast elite place that was not comfortable for Jews. And in many ways, Jews were excluded from the University itself and from social aspects. And personally, people didn’t feel like it impacted them.
And so when I think about my own experience, I was friends with a lot of Jewish students. People could look at me and be like, “Oh, you didn’t join an eating club?” I joined a co-op. “Why didn’t you? Were you excluded? Your friends were...” And I wanted to be where my friends were and the friends that I had were doing this particular activity. And so Joe, actually, he did. He was in Gateway Club, which did have a lot of Jewish students. It was actually a very sweet lineage story where Gateway Club became Prospect Club, which was sort of more a co-op style eating club and had lots of Jewish members. And then that physical location is where the Center for Jewish Life is now. And so that exact spot of land has kind of been this unofficial and now official home for Jewish students on campus for many, many decades.
ND: That’s a great story. That’s great.
AK: Yeah.
ND: Is there anything else about Joe you would like to share?
AK: Let me think. I mean, there’s lots of funny stories that are not necessarily about Princeton.
ND: That’s OK. Give us a funny Joe story.
AK: OK. Well, so the first question that I always asked the folks who I was interviewing for my thesis was tell me a little bit about growing up. Tell me about your Jewish background. Were your parents immigrants? What was your involvement like in the Jewish community? And Joe told me this story about as an 11-year-old, approximately, before bar mitzvah, so before 13, he was a pretty serious fencer, and actually he ended up going to Princeton as a fencer and was anticipating competing in the Olympics as a fencer, and then got appendicitis and took time off and did not end up competing. But he was a very serious fencer.
And as an 11-year-old or whatever, he’s outside his Hebrew school class practicing his fencing, and the rabbi comes over to reprimand him. And this is in the mid-20s, so prohibition is still in effect. And he turns to the rabbi, he says, “You bootlegger,” which is just about the worst thing you could have called someone, right? You’re accusing this rabbi, and he was kicked out of Hebrew school and never went back. He was like, “That was the extent of my formal Jewish education.” I mean, it cracked me up, one, of just like, we’re not that far removed from something like prohibition. It was not that long ago.
There was this man who I was sitting with who lived through it, who remembers it, and just that for him as a preschool teacher who has worked with many ages, just thinking about the kid brain behind that of maybe not even meaning that maliciously, but, “I see you serve wine on Friday nights as part of the Shabbat service and I know that that’s called bootlegging.” So just not thinking about the implications because you’re an 11-year-old child. So that one continues to crack me up when I think about it.
ND: I love that. Any other fun Joe stories?
AK: No, just very sweetly, his family included me for many years in the Old Guard Luncheon at Reunions, and it was really lovely to be included in that way and to get to see him in that context and to get to know the family a little bit and getting to walk with him in the P-rade. That makes you a celebrity. When I walked with Joe—
ND: So tell us about that. What year was that?
AK: So I guess, he carried the cane starting in 2016, so for three years, ’16, ’17, ’18. And then I moved to California and that was too far to come back. So those three years that we walked together, there was another woman, Catherine Ettman, who was a year or two above me, and she was close with his grandchildren from Miami. So she would walk with us also, and his granddaughters would walk, and it was kind of a big hullabaloo, and everybody waves at you and everybody looks, and everybody’s cheering for him, and it’s loud and it’s exciting, and you can tell he’s just absorbing the energy and people are so stunned and impressed that he’s walking the whole way. That was the comment every year, “I can’t believe he walked a mile.” And just to see the energy and the pride that people felt towards him was really beautiful just to see him getting some recognition in a way that I imagine as a student was not his full experience.
ND: Right. That’s great. Well, Abby, I think we’re going to leave it there. This was wonderful. I appreciate you taking the time to talk about your old friend Joe.
AK: Yeah, thank you.
ND: Thank you.
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