The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

August Maymudes's Oral History

August Maymudes, Yiddishist and political activist, was interviewed by Christa Whitney on January 16, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. His grandfather's surname came from an ultra-Orthodox sect that he belonged to in Ostrawa, Poland; August shows us the one photograph taken of this ancestor. His father emigrated to the United States at age eighteen, by which time he was no longer religiously observant. He became a latnik (patchmaker) who was estranged from his family after his frum (religiously observant) father caught him writing on Shabbos. August tells the painful story of finally meeting his grandfather many years later. He grew up in a secular home in and around Los Angeles. His parents spoke mostly Yiddish at home, but August never became fluent. He describes the political atmosphere and the cultural influences of the home he grew up in and the various Jewish organizations of the time and of the present day. His father trained as a Yiddish teacher at the Workers (then Workmen's) Circle and eventually became a shule (secular Yiddish school) teacher and the leader of the Yiddish branch of the International Workers Order (IWO) in Los Angeles. After spending a year in New York in a leadership position at the IWO, he returned to California and became a chicken farmer and later the west coast editor of the "Morgen Freiheit." August recalls his own political affiliations and experiences during the McCarthy era. His children went to school to learn Yiddish, but the language is not important to them now. He and his wife feel very little connection to Israel; much of the Jewish fund-raising in Los Angeles relates to Israel and not to preserving a Jewish cultural identity in this country. He ends the interview with a joke whose humor hinges on the fact that Yiddish remains an international language that brings people together.

This interview was conducted in English.

August Maymudes was born in New York, New York in 1930.

Artifacts related to this oral history