In this season of one year, we're focusing on 1942, telling stories about the home front during the most tumultuous year in U.S. history.

The best way to understand what it was like in America 80 years ago is to talk to someone

who actually lived through 1942. So we sent our producer Sophie Summergrad to interview a very special guest.

Baba can you tell me your name and how you're related to me?

My name is Mildred my granddaughter, Sophie.

My grandmother, Millie, is 98 years old. I call her Baba.

Her family immigrated to the US from Ukraine in the early 1920s a few years

before she was born and they settled in New York City.

Baba grew up in a relatively new and sort of unique housing development in the Bronx.

Somebody had built something called the Coops, the workers cooperative colony.

It was three separate buildings all connected to each other. Beautiful

buildings with beautiful grounds. The coops were thought of as a kind of

progressive utopia.

They had everything you could imagine, right at your doorstep.

We had a library, we had a daycare center, food shopping right in the building. There was a grocery store and a butcher and a fruit market.

There was also a lot of activity. There was a chorus that people could sing in.

And the most important thing is we had a Jewish Shula.

Shula just me in school in Yiddish. The one at the Coops was cultural, not religious.

It was a place where kids in the neighborhood could go and learn Yiddish on the weekends.

And my grandmother loved it. She can still remember all of her teacher's names.

But Saul Friedman, the way to his son married Lola, my Freidman, to Vira Terrant,

mayor Gelman who happened to be related in some way to us

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