Islanders
Helen Roht: 31 Years on the Island, Living Long,
Going Strong
by Cassandra Langer

Helen Roht is about as big as a minute and a sensational 90 years old. Actually she defies age and stage. In her bright-red jacket, embroidered in black, she looks twenty years younger and has the energy of a 21-year-old – an energy suggested by her wild silver hair.

Her Roosevelt Island connection goes back to its earliest days as a residential community – 1975 – when she got an Island House apartment despite the building being fully rented. Somebody changed his mind, and that paved the way for her family’s move from Flushing, Queens. At that point, she was not quite 60. In short order, she became one of the Island’s advocates and activists.

But the arc of her life story parallels the rise of modernism and the new woman. Born and raised in the Bronx, she is a member of that rare breed known as a native New Yorker. For her lower-middle class immigrant family, moving to the Grand Concourse meant they had arrived. Her father came from Lithuania, where he was considered a very learned man because he was able to read Pushkin. She remembers him as hard and bitter with a streak of vindictiveness. "I never knew what to expect. He once gave me the silent treatment for a whole year."

Her mother came from the Ukraine and loved people and food. Growing up, Helen recalls the sounds of Russian and Yiddish resounding throughout her home. Unfortunately, her father didn’t have a head for business and he was unable to make a go of the various ventures he attempted. Finally, her mother’s brother (Bella Abzug’s father) Manny helped Helen’s parents to set up a butter-and-egg stand in front of his butcher shop. Helen was both rebellious and brilliant, but she had a strong sense of family obligation, so she and her brother helped to sell produce when they weren’t in school.

"I was a fat little girl who loved her mother, but I was ashamed of her because she seemed so subservient to my father. It took me years to appreciate her real strengths. I loved to write and at an early age I became obsessed with France. I thought all things French were beautiful and good, and I dreamed of living in France one day. I read everything that was French oriented." But Helen faced a lot of obstacles before she could make her dream come true because her love of all things French and European did not sit well with her parents who had fled from pogroms, racial laws, and anti-Semitism, and never wanted to go back to Europe.

Winning a Regents scholarship to Hunter College, Helen saw herself on the first step to realizing a long-held dream. When she graduated from Hunter at age 15, she took a job as a French translator, earning the enormous sum of $40 per week, all of which went toward supporting her family.

But Helen’s striking out on her own created a gigantic gulf between her mother’s generation and her own. They now lived in two different worlds. She found that having a conversation with her mother was as if she was speaking a foreign language. Her mother was appalled at her taste in boys and even threw two of her French boyfriends out of the apartment. She wanted Helen to vacation in the Catskills where she could meet nice Jewish boys. She even forced a fur coat on her rebellious daughter. "I took revenge on her by going dancing at the Savoy Ballroom and purposely leaving my fur coat on my chair so that it would be stolen." She recalls going into the cold night in triumph, though shivering.

Helen was unconventional for her time. She took a job working in the subscriptions department of a French-American theater company and, eventually, was given small walk-on parts in dramas by Molière and Jean Anouilh. This fueled her hopes for travel to France, but that dream was destined to be put on hold. In 1940, the company’s second season, the French players were called home for the mobilization for war. She was confronted with a dilemma – to go to France or to stay in New York and fulfill her family obligations? Torn by her overwhelming sense of duty to her family, she stayed home.

She took the teachers examination and began a job at the Wadleigh School on 145th St. In its heyday, Wadleigh had been a girls finishing school but now, it catered to a population of African-American girls who, Helen knew, would end up on the mean streets of Harlem without any chance of realizing their dreams. During the year and a half she spent there, Helen tried to change all that by inventing games, a drama club and other activities to keep her students from being exploited by the unsavory types who hung around the school. As a result of her caring and nurturing efforts, several of the girls went on to fulfill their dreams: one became the head of a choral group and another had a successful career on the stage.

By this time, December 1941, America was in World War II. Helen got a job at The Voice of America and off she went to embattled Britain. She set sail for England in a convoy of 88 ships. After 28 days at sea, battling raging storms, being followed by U boats, having one of the ships split apart, and finally being driven so far off-course that they ended up in Scotland, the company traveled down the coast until they found themselves in a blacked-out Edinburgh. Days later, they arrived in blacked-out, blitz-scarred London.

Laughing, Helen says, "I did not see London in the light until 1944." But her job broadcasting to her beloved France, now Nazi-occupied, helped her feel that she was doing her part to fight fascism.

During this period she lived in a modern apartment, one of the first high rise condos to be built in London. The Luftwaffe hit this building directly and left it a hollowed-out shell. As a result Helen and a friend were left homeless amidst the rubble. The two young women were forced to sleep in the famous Bond Street Station immortalized in graphic works by the great British artist, Henry Moore. She recalls having lunch with a young man at Lyons Chop House and naively asking him what he did. "I carry out the dead," he replied.

Ever rebellious, the 25-year-old Helen tried to get dropped behind the lines in France, but they wouldn’t send a woman. At war’s end, she finally got to Paris, the city of her dreams. She plunged right into the swift stream of French culture. She fell in love with a young poet who was a disciple of the Surrealist poet, Louis Aragon. Then, on a hunch, she called her former director from the French theater company, delighted to discover that he was now heading up a major Paris theater. He greeted her by saying, "High time you got here!"

Once the war ended, Helen was out of work. The State Department offered her a job in Berlin but, having seen prisoners returning from Prussia, she declined it. Now she had to make one of the hardest decisions of her life – to stay in France with her lover, Bernard, or return home. Realizing that he was just too French to live in the United States, she reluctantly told him she was going home to New York.

Then, with $400 she still had from her Regents scholarship fund, she took off for Mexico on a third-class bus. She shared space with 30 Mexicans, four chickens, and a young couple with two infants. The bus broke down three times on the way to Mexico City. On the way, she used her French as a basis to learn Spanish and, between two young people who had some grade-school English and her elementary knowledge of Spanish, she managed to communicate. During this time she fell in love with the people and children of Mexico. She worked for one of the first UNESCO programs, teaching literacy to the population using Dick and Jane primers. She ended up staying a year and a half until her money ran out.

Romance always seemed to find Helen. She met Carlos, who worked for a conservative newspaper, and they had a hot affair. She became chummy with a group of intellectuals, writers and artists. She even met Diego Rivera and Frieda Khalo. "Rivera was the ugliest man I ever met and she was a nervous wreck." Helen’s money was running out when she received a cable asking her if she would be interested in working with the United Nations at Lake Success. The job was in the language division covering meetings and doing summaries of the proceedings. She jumped on it. "This is what I was born for!"

Helen married late, at age 38. She met her husband, George, whom she calls "a force to be reckoned with," at Tanglewood. It was a hot day and several attractive young men had taken off their shirts. They were all lying on the grass together and listening to Tchaikovsky. Helen ended up tapping out the music on the chest of one muscular young man. She didn’t want to be tied down by a marriage, but George paid no attention to her agenda.

It was a whirlwind courtship. They had a titanic fight and she refused his phone calls. Finally, she relented and invited him over to her apartment where she proceeded to throw pillows at him and act out every drama she could think of. George just sat in a chair and watched the scene. This stopped her cold. Seeing it was having no effect, she asked, "What do you think?" He arched an eyebrow and replied, "Why do you have to know?" They were on again.

Commenting on her husband, Helen smiles and says, "He was the only one who cared enough to get behind my mask." Whenever she made a scene he would react by saying, "Curtain. Act two."

After five miscarriages Helen gave birth to a girl. For them, Naomi was a miracle. Having a family and raising a child did not prevent Helen from working. She stayed with the United Nations for 29 years and then took early retirement. But she enrolled at Columbia and took a full course in gerontology. She was the oldest person in the program and soon had a following of younger admirers. Despite having officially retired, Helen still worked as a consultant to the United Nations for the next twenty-eight years.

Once on Roosevelt Island, Helen immediately began organizing the Island’s elders. She formed a consulting committee on aging for United Nation’s retirees. The association consisted of U.N. retirees from all over the world living in New York. Over the past ten years, she has brought in 25 speakers from around the world to talk to the association, most recently just last month. In addition to all this, Helen has written three plays and numerous Ogden Nash style poems, mainly to her neighbors and their children.

No "ol’ rocking chair" for Helen. Her latest career consists of writing 20-minute one-act plays. One is a whodunnit that features a wheelchair-bound individual who outwits two thugs. Another is a classic Molière adaptation that features a hypochondriac. "It is written in a Neil Simon vein; the maid’s the hero," she says, laughing warmly.

The plays are for performance by actors over 70 – not about old people, but to show the younger set what elders can do.

Her motto? "Living long, going strong."