Talk:Violet Oaklander

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Violet Oaklander’s life has been marked by both warm family support and by a series of personal tragedies, all of which helped shape the psychotherapeutic work that she developed and is known for. She was born on April 18, 1927, in Lowell, MA. Her father and mother, Joseph and Molly Solomon, both immigrated as teenagers from western Russia about 1911 as part of an exodus of Russian Jews, and met at a garment factory in Lowell. Violet was the youngest of three children, her older brothers Sidney and Arthur Solomon were born in 1918 and 1920, respectively. The Solomons moved to Cambridge, MA when Violet was still a toddler, and she lived in Cambridge until she was 17 years old. She grew up during the Great Depression, and her father, a tailor, and mother, a seamstress, ran a series of small tailor shops and frequently moved to more humble apartments as they struggled to support their family during hard times. Violet was very devoted to her parents and to her older brothers, and when asked in later life who her “spiritual teacher” was, she found herself answering “my mother.”

When she was five years old, Violet was very badly burned when a family friend accidently spilled a pot of boiling water on her at a dinner party. She was in the hospital for several months, and remembers being very cold all the time because the burn made it impossible for blankets to be directly on her body. She also remembered hearing her father arguing with the doctors who wanted to amputate her leg, and although her mother came to the hospital daily, remembers feeling alone and scared and that it seemed that no one spoke to her or comforted her—except her grandma who came to the hospital and fed her cherries (still her favorite food). This experience profoundly influenced her future work with children. She did recover, but two years later suffered a serious mastoid bone infection that, in the days before antibiotics, began a hearing impairment that led her to begin wearing hearing aids by the time she was in her 30s.

Shortly after the United States entered World War II, both of Violet’s older brothers enlisted in the U.S. Army—Sidney spent the war in the Pacific, and Arthur was sent to the European theater. During the war, beginning at the age of 15, Violet began working in the summers as a camp counselor, and quickly gravitated to using arts and crafts and music to engage the younger children. Prior to her senior year in high school, Violet’s family moved to Miami, FL, and in January 1945, just months before the war’s end, while Violet’s parents were enjoying a rare night out together at the movies, word came that Arthur, to whom Violet was especially close, had been killed in action in Germany. Overwhelmed with grief, she ran through the streets of the city looking for her parents.

Immediately after the war, Violet moved to New York City to attend college at New York University. Following in the footsteps of her parents, who were idealistic supporters of humanist values and the American Communist party, and her older brothers as well, she became involved in the youthful progressive activist community. At many of the gatherings she attended there was music, and Violet learned to play the guitar and developed a lifelong love of folk music. A friend introduced her to a young sailor, Harold Oaklander, and the two 18-year-old began a brief and mostly long-distance romance (Harold was on duty at sea and they exchanged letters daily). Violet was still grief-stricken over Arthur’s death and Harold was a great listener. In August 1946, a few months after Violet’s 19th birthday and five days after Harold’s 19th, they were married in a small civil ceremony attended only by Harold’s parents. Violet dropped out of school after just one year and took a secretarial job with the relief organization CARE, so that Harold could pursue his studies at Hunter College. They lived for several years on Manhattan’s lower East side, and Violet continued to work while Harold finished his degree and worked on a master's degree in social work at Columbia University.

On New Year’s Day 1951, Violet gave birth to the first of three children, naming the boy after her brother Arthur. Less than two years later Harold was offered a job as an Assistant Director at a Jewish Community Center in a suburb of Denver, and they moved to Colorado, where their second son Michael was born in December 1954. In Colorado Violet assisted at a pre-school, going from class to class and singing songs with the children. In the summers they both worked as camp counselors, with Violet further developing her “arts-and-crafts” expertise.

In 1955 Harold took another Jewish Community Center job, in Albany NY, and they lived there until 1960. Their third child, Sara, was born there in 1958. Violet earned extra money playing and singing with children at birthday parties. In the Spring of 1960 Harold took still another Jewish Center job, this time in Long Beach, CA. It was in Long Beach that Violet, with her three children all in school, went back to school herself, first at Long Beach City College, and then at Long Beach State College (now California University at Long Beach), and received her bachelor's degree in Education in 1964. She took a job as a teacher in the Long Beach public schools, first in kindergarten and then 4th grade.

Her second book, Hidden Treasures, was published in 2007 and has been translated into Spanish and Lithuanian. Dr. Oaklander is now semi-retired, and a group of her colleagues and students have founded a non-profit foundation, the Violet Solomon Oaklander Foundation, to promote and disseminate the "Violet Oaklander method" of working with children and adolescents.