Bernice Gottlieb with her self-published memoir, “Take My Children: An Adoption Story.” Credit: John Golden
“Give it up, baby. It”™s not going to happen.”
Across the years, Bernice Gottlieb can recall a weary husband”™s advice. “Fred” ”“ the late Dobbs Ferry architect Ferdinand Gottlieb, Bernice”™s spouse for better and for worse for 54 years ”“ had even thought about separating back then. His wife was spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill and in South Korea with her ardent cause. Their three kids too felt her absence.
“I understand those people who sit in front of the White House with a big sign and set themselves on fire,” Bernice Gottlieb says. In the quiet Monday morning hour before Main Street revives outside her office door, she is at her desk at Hudson Shores Realtors in Irvington. Now 80, she was a real estate novice when she started the residential brokerage 17 years ago at her husband”™s urging.
Fred Gottlieb in his distinguished career designed more than 100 houses in Westchester County, and he was grounded here. “He wanted me on terra firma,” says the principal broker. “I started liking it. It”™s a people”™s business.”
She was a novice in the politics of Washington ”“ “with a naïve sense of things, and trusting” ”“ when she went there in the early 1970s, having made the futures of a stigmatized group of Korean kids her business. Some of the bills for which she lobbied survived benign neglect and deaths by congressional committees and subcommittees.
Four years later, the consuming effort brought eight children from Korean families isolated by their society in leper colonies to adoptive American homes. “It”™s so intense that I saw nothing else but the goal of getting those children here,” the broker says of that achievement 35 years ago. “Had I failed, I think I would have set the leprosy cause in Korea back 50 years.”
Hansen”™s disease is the proper, clinical name for that ancient affliction, as Gottlieb reminds readers in the memoir she has self-published at iUniverse. “Take My Children: An Adoption Story” takes its title from the reluctant pleas of Korean parents, sorrowful and sacrificing, to have their children delivered from lives spent in the leper colonies to which families of patients then were confined. Bernice, working with the Korean priest who ran St. Lazarus Village for lepers outside the South Korean capital, pledged to deliver their children to safe homes and secure lives in America.
It is a nonfatal illness, but leprosy is made more terrible in cultures by its ugly deformities of flesh and bone in advanced stages and its ancient and biblical baggage of fear and dread. In Korea, where leprosy resettlement villages remain though children of lepers now may attend public schools and property-owning lepers may sell their products outside their communities, “The social stigma was so pervasive,” Gottlieb recalls. “They believed that patients went out and killed children to get a cure. They”™d eat their livers for a cure.”
In the U.S., bureaucracy, that stone-walled dasher of do-gooder dreams, thwarted her repeatedly. Some adoption and children”™s services officials challenged a project that would uproot children from their native culture and families. A leading private international agency falsely accused the Westchester woman of profiting from the adoptions that she pursued through her program called Outreach.
With two sons at home, the Gottliebs in 1969 had adopted an orphaned Korean girl from Seoul. (Their daughter, Susannah Gottlieb, is a professor of English and comparative literature at Northwestern University.) International adoption was rare at the time, and the Gottliebs”™ Dobbs Ferry home became a Friday-night social center for couples interested in transracial adoptions, an interest inspired in part by the Vietnam War. Working with a private foundation and the Westchester County Social Services Department, Bernice voluntarily placed Korean and Chinese orphans with American families.
“We broke ground,” she says of the national network of pioneers in international adoption with whom she worked. “There were a few of us.” In her travels and lobbying, Gottlieb was supported by grants from the American-Korean Foundation and the American Leprosy Foundation. Her friend, the actress Julie Harris, often paid for Gottlieb”™s trips to Washington. In Congress, officials made small donations for her “kids.”
“It all helped,” she says. “It all went to my cause.” Yet in the end, as she recalls in her memoir, “I knew it was really my own battle.” “I became a thorn in the side of anyone involved with immigration. ”¦ I was unrelenting. I badgered, cajoled, made promises, anything that might move the big bureaucracy into action,” she wrote. “I had no choice,” says the broker, who did not heed her husband”™s advice to give it up. “I started something. I didn”™t think of that ”“ failing. There were at the time 14,000 children in leprosy camps.”
For Korean parents, “This was to be a lesson to them that their children are healthy enough to come into a country that prides itself on checking the health of its immigrants.” “I”™m not a physician. I”™m not a social worker. I was an art major,” Gottlieb says of the woman who went, again and again, to Washington until eight healthy foreign kids with an unfortunately inherited stigma, ranging in age from 3 to 14, in 1976 were admitted onto American soil. ”˜An American citizen without any exposure in Washington or in public can go there and get legislation introduced and badger them until they pass it. They call it lobbying in polite terms. I think that”™s a lesson for Americans,” says the broker.
Seven of the eight adopted children have remained here; one returned to South Korea after his college graduation, says Gottlieb, who keeps in touch. Only the two oldest adoptees still speak Korean. “They”™ve had good lives here ”“ each one of them,” says their godmother in adoption.
The memoir? “I wrote it for them,” she says. “It was their legacy for their children, is how they described it.” One of the two oldest adoptees, “Jennifer was terribly ashamed of her background and would not tell anyone at her school” where she teaches, says the author. “Once the book was written, it was all right.”
