In the one-woman play Eleanor : Her Secret Journey, written by novelist Rhoda Lerman, there is a soliloquy about the Jewish financier Bernard Baruch, who despite his exalted status as an adviser to presidents, was considered by some of the Roosevelts to be 'NOKD' -- "Not Our Kind, Darling."

Actress Jean Stapleton--who was one of a kind herself as Edith Bunker in the former television series "All in the Family"--will portray Eleanor during ten performances at the Spreckels Theatre Jan. 25 through Feb. 4, with 8 p.m. curtain times Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. matinees on Saturdays and Sundays.

The work is fiction, as was the novel by Lerman upon which it is based. But, in a telephone interview from her home in Port Crane, N.Y., Lerman told HERITAGE that her research about Eleanor was as exhaustive as that done by any biographer. Although conversations and characters alluded to in the play by Eleanor were fictional, the content of those conversations are based in well-documented fact.

The Jewish community for many years has had a love-hate relationship with the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Yes, he appointed numerous Jews to important offices--including Justice Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court-- but he turned a nearly deaf ear to the plight of Jews trapped in Europe in the Holocaust. Insights such as Lerman's as to the Roosevelt's true attitudes toward Jews are valuable. Here is how she scripted Eleanor:

Mr. Baruch , of course, was a Hebrew. In public our friends referred to Hebrews as Orientals. In private the references were worse. Livy and Franklin had often warned me about Hebrews. "If you turn them away at the front door they'll sneak in the back door. Not our kind, darling. NOKD.' 

There was nothing exotic or foreign about Mr. Baruch. He was very much MY kind, if not Franklin's. He had wonderful manners, was extremely generous, always on the right side of things, sensitive and had, as everyone knew, one of the finest minds of the century, which was of course why he was in Paris...to advise Mr. Wilson.

Lerman said her own grandfather, an architect who designed buildings for capitalists of the early 20th century, was referred to as an "oriental" by the Rockefellers -- who were members of the same patrician class as the Roosevelts.

Eleanor, like Franklin, grew up a snob. Jews and African-Americans definitely were not social equals. They were causes perhaps, subjects for noblesse oblige, but NOKD. 

After relating an encounter (fictional) with Baruch in which they discussed how the United States and other victors at the Versailles Conference should treat Germany in the aftermath of World War I, Eleanor confided: He was so noble, so brilliant, so kind to me but all I could think was what a pity he's a Hebrew. I was so stupid then, arrogant, so ignorant. How much pain I must have given others.

Over the years, Eleanor's attitude changed, Lerman told me. She met leaders in the labor movement. She became quite fond of men and women who loved ideas. Drawn to these Jews, she sought to integrate them into her world. Whereas Eleanor may have had a metamorphosis, Franklin changed only slightly. Jews became useful to him, and for that they deserved a certain gratitude, but still they were NOKD.

Was Roosevelt an anti-Semite or just a snob? I asked Lerman. She grappled with the question. "He was a snob," she replied. But his snobbery dismissed whole classes of people, including Jews and African Americans.

Lerman had met one of Roosevelt's grandsons at a retreat at which participants explored their spirituality. He asked her if she would be interested in doing a book about Eleanor. As a writer whose The Girl That He Marries had helped to give voice to the feminist movement, Lerman was intrigued, then angered, as she delved into her subject matter. 

She was offended by the notion, then and perhaps still current, that Eleanor had become such a world force simply as a reaction to the miserable way she had been treated by FDR. Not so, Lerman said, Eleanor was a force majeure in her own right, whose intellectual passions would have overcome FDR whether or not he had taken such lovers as Lucy Mercer.

Stapleton was not just some celebrity hired to play a role. She and Lerman actually were collaborators. While Lerman was in the archives at Hyde Park, pulling the real Eleanor out of letters and other documents, Stapleton was there to study film footage of Eleanor in connection with another stage production based on her life.

The two were attracted to the proposal to have Val-Kill, the home in which Eleanor had lived behind Hyde Park, made into a national historic site. Local officials were against having the property taken off the tax rolls. Stapleton asked Lerman to write a speech for her. Norman Lear, creator of "All in the Family," also became involved in the successful effort.

In that sense, the Lerman-Stapleton collaboration now has two decades behind it. Although the production directed by John Tillinger has received favorable reviews in most places it has appeared, Eleanor: The Secret Journey still is a work in progress. Lerman said there are a few changes which may be needed in the play. "But you won't see them," she said. If implemented at all, they will come after San Diego.

The author/ playwright said she has been urged to write other biographical novels, most notably one about Picasso. But she said she is unwilling to commit several years of her life to such a project. Instead, she has been lured to the Amazon, which she senses is a spiritual center of the world. She can't tell you the plot of her next novel, but you can bet its setting will be the Amazon.