Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh was the first American home of Kitty Oppenheimer’s immigrant family, the landscape of her affluent upbringing, and the setting of a meeting that redirected her life. The city links her family’s arrival and social standing to her own movement between education, Europe, and political commitment.

The Puening family’s arrival and home

Kitty’s parents, Franz and Kaethe Puening, immigrated from Germany to Pittsburgh in 1912, when she was two. Franz, a trained metallurgical engineer, found work with a steel company. The family settled in Aspinwall, a wealthy Pittsburgh suburb, where Kitty grew up as an only child in comfortable circumstances.

Her family history carried a different kind of distinction. Kitty later told friends that her father was a prince from Westphalia and that her mother was related to Queen Victoria; her maternal ancestors had ties to European noble houses. Her father, however, had made her promise not to speak of this blue-blooded ancestry. Pittsburgh was thus both the setting of her American childhood and the place where family claims of European rank were kept in tension with the ordinary life of German immigrants.

An unsettled education

Kitty enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, but left within a year for Europe. She studied at the University of Munich, the Sorbonne, and the University of Grenoble, though she later recalled spending little time on schoolwork. After an impulsive marriage in Paris and its subsequent annulment, she returned to the United States and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin to study biology. Her path did not follow a steady course from Pittsburgh outward; it was marked by abrupt departures and decisions that repeatedly changed its direction.

The New Year’s Eve meeting

Ten days after the Wisconsin court granted her annulment on December 20, 1933, a friend invited Kitty to a New Year’s Eve party in Pittsburgh. The friend had met a Communist and asked whether Kitty wanted to meet him. There, Kitty met Joe Dallet, a political radical from a wealthy Long Island family. She later recalled falling in love with him at the party and never ceasing to love him. Less than six weeks later, she left Wisconsin to marry Dallet and join him in Youngstown, Ohio.

Pittsburgh’s importance in Kitty’s story is concentrated in these crossings: an immigrant household became the base for a privileged childhood, a university became a point of departure, and a return for a holiday party led to a marriage and a new life elsewhere. The city is not simply a backdrop to her later identity; it marks the moment when her restless personal history became entwined with Dallet’s political world.