Book Preface
Preface from The Window Shop: Safe Harbor for Refugees
From its beginning in 1939, the Window Shop of Cambridge, Massachusetts, provided a safe harbor for hundreds of German and Austrian refugees who fled from Hitler to America. It was founded by concerned Cambridge residents who were guided only by their desire to help the refugees, and over time it evolved into a non-profit enterprise that was unparalleled in its success and influence.
That year, with pooled resources of $65, four wives of Harvard professors founded a small consignment shop in Harvard Square where refugee women could sell hand-made crafts and Viennese pastries. They called it the Window Shop, because the one small room had a large window. After a two-year struggle to survive and a move to larger space, its Gift and Dress Shop was selling hand-crafted goods made mostly by refugees, and its Restaurant/Bakery was serving Viennese pastries never before seen in Harvard Square. In 1941 the Window Shop incorporated; members of its board of directors were Christian and Jewish, and most were women. The staff were Jewish women, most of whom were refugees from Nazism. The women on the board were generous, compassionate, and energetic; they worked hand-in-hand with the refugees to build a dynamic, progressive workplace that was also a haven for the dispirited and displaced. While the women of the Window Shop predated the movement known as Feminism, they embodied the strength, courage, energy and vision of true feminists. Their remarkable partnership built on mutual respect, hard work and entrepreneurship became the Window Shop’s foundation and its legacy.
Window Shop Bakery
and Tea Room staff, 1940
Eventually, the organization not only sold elegant European products and served delicious continental meals; it also provided employment for German and Austrian women who had never worked outside the home and offered counseling to help them cope with their new lives. Their husbands had to retrain before they could find work, leaving the women to support the family (most refugee families arrived in the U.S. almost penniless). In addition to finding jobs, the women had to learn English, adjust to a different culture, cope with husbands who were uncomfortable with working wives, and care for their children. Window Shop volunteers helped them get a start in their new country, and a powerful bond was soon forged among the disparate members of the small community. “We were like a family,” said a former employee from Germany, now 93 years old. “We really had a sense of togetherness.”
The Window Shop’s profits, which increased slowly, were earmarked for the Assistance Fund, established in 1943 to help employees and their families with childcare, summer camp, tuition and emergency relief. This later became a Scholarship Fund that assisted students in the wider Cambridge community.
From 1939 to 1972 the Window Shop occupied a special place in the often turbulent lives of the immigrants it served. Because of the Shop, many achieved success in their new world. Generations of Cambridge residents and Harvard and MIT faculty and students shopped there, worked there, volunteered there, and met there for coffee and pastries. Eleanor Roosevelt came for lunch on several occasions, bought gifts for family members at the Gift Shop and wrote about it in her newspaper column.
But the glory days ended in 1972, partly because of sweeping changes in the commercial culture of Harvard Square, which sent sales in both the Gift Shop and the Restaurant plummeting. The Window Shop closed, but until 1987 its Scholarship Fund continued to help a new generation of immigrants, mostly students at Boston-area colleges who came from many different countries.
It was fortuitous that in the mid-eighties, Board President Dorothy Dahl recognized the value of documenting the Window Shop story to allow future historians to study not only its response to an historic catastrophe but also how it adapted to changing circumstances, keeping the aim of the institution squarely on helping deserving people. Under Mrs. Dahl’s leadership, many employees, customers and board members were interviewed and also asked to rummage in their files and attics for minutes of meetings, letters, notes, photographs, recipes and anecdotes. The recipes in particular proved difficult to document since the amounts of the ingredients were gargantuan, suitable for baking upwards of eight cakes at a time, and all knowledgeable cooks and bakers asked for time to experiment to reduce the recipes to a more acceptable number, like six or eight portions.
Finding a home for this material was easy – the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, then part of Harvard University’s Radcliffe College, was a close neighbor of the Window Shop. More important, it was then and remains today the foremost library of women’s history in the country. Mrs. Dahl worked with Katherine Kraft, Schlesinger Library archivist, to catalogue the Shop’s files. A contribution from the disbanded Scholarship Fund to the Schlesinger Library defrayed the cost of processing and maintaining the collection, which is available to the public. A summary of the Window Shop records at the Schlesinger Library, prepared by archivist Eva Moseley, appears in the Appendix.
Utilizing this valuable collection, The Window Shop tells the complete history of the organization. The themes developed in this work are multi-faceted. The heart of the book reveals a unique vision and a partnership between a small group of Harvard wives and a growing number of Jewish refugee women. The collaboration and mutual respect that grew between two such disparate communities provide valuable research material in cross-cultural studies, the historic upheavals of the 1930s and ’40s, and the entrepreneurial spirit. Furthermore, research into the refugee women’s lives reveals the divisive sociological dilemmas they faced in suddenly having become their family’s sole support when their husbands could not find work in their professions. For the wife of a German or Austrian doctor or lawyer, the social stigma of being a waitress or a bus girl in the Window Shop restaurant was, at first, difficult to overcome. “If someone would have told me in Germany I would be selling pastries or waiting on tables,” said an employee, “I would have said, ‘You are nuts!’ But we needed the money, and it didn’t bother me.”
In all cases, Window Shop board members tried to help by finding jobs for the newcomers within the organization, in addition to providing counseling, referrals, English lessons, and financial assistance for childcare and tuition. Co-workers, who were also refugees, offered friendship, support and shared experiences.
The Window Shop story is told by the women who were responsible for its surprising success—the refugees, the Harvard wives, the customers, the board members. Their own words have been preserved in oral histories, speeches, letters, documents and other records at the Schlesinger Library. A small number of Window Shop employees and board members are still living; their oral histories were recently recorded for this book, and several family members also contributed their reminiscences. We have attempted to present the history of the Window Shop as accurately and completely as possible, with the aim of capturing the spirit and essence of this remarkable place.
The book is organized chronologically as well as by subject matter. Each chapter begins with a brief overview of the period, followed by the “voices” of those who participated in it. A biographical section called “Portraits” is also included.
The reader may notice that we refer to some members of the Window Shop by their first names, and others by their surnames; this practice reflects the times and various cultures of the Window Shop.