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The Window Shop: Safe Harbor for Refugees
A new history of the Window Shop will be available in December 2006. The Window Shop: Safe Harbor for Refugees, tells the story of this unique organization in the words of the refugees and the board members who made it successful. Through oral histories and other documents in Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, remarkable women describe their remarkable partnership built on mutual respect, hard work and entrepreneurship that became the Window Shop’s foundation and its legacy. Until now, its full story has not been told.
Chapters in the Window Shop’s history include its beginnings as a thrift shop in a tiny room in Harvard Square, the Gift and Dress Shop, the Bakery/Restaurant, Social Services, the Customers, Friendship House, the Scholarship Fund, and its demise in 1972. Biographies of 21 influential refugees and board members will help illuminate these extraordinary individuals, and the book includes several recipes that made the Window Shop famous. Archival photographs illustrate a bygone era.
The book was written by Ellen Miller, a former administrator at Harvard Law School whose cousin was a Window Shop employee; Ilse Heyman, a Holocaust survivor who was assistant manager of the Gift and Dress Shop for 25 years; and Dorothy Dahl, a long-time Window Shop board member and two-term president.
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Photos by permission of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.