Joyce Rappaport's Oral History

Joyce Rappaport, editor and granddaughter of Malka Lee and Aaron Rappaport, was interviewed by Christa Whitney on October 9th, 2018, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Joyce's paternal grandmother grew up in Galicia in a Hasidic family and began writing at a very young age. Her mother at one point rescued her notebooks which had been thrown into the fire by her father. She also fought for Malka to take the one ticket to America sent by a relative, although her father or brother would have been the more usual choice. Once in New York, Malka travelled in radical and literary Yiddish circles, married writer Aaron Rappaport, and settled in the Sholem Aleichem cooperative houses in the Bronx. She was devastated when it became apparent that nearly everyone left behind in Europe had been murdered. Much of her poetry after that dealt with her loss, guilt, and pain. Joyce remembers her grandmother as a terrible housekeeper and cook who was always sitting at her typewriter working on a poem. She describes the Lee-Ra bungalow colony in upstate New York that her grandparents built. This was during the McCarthy era and Joyce recalls her parents being concerned about Malka and Aaron's political views being discovered. Joyce knows less about her grandfather, whose family farmed land in upstate New York donated to Jewish families by Baron de Hirsch. He became a sewing machine repairman and wrote poems about workers and industry as well as a book entitled "Devorah the Prophet." It was difficult for him to live in the shadow of his dramatic wife, who was much better known in Yiddishist circles. Joyce describes the Sholem Aleichem houses, where her grandparents lived and where she attended shul. Her grandmother favored Joyce, who was named after Malka's beloved mother, but she was a difficult person who could be very hurtful. She recalls Malka's last years in a nursing home when she suffered from dementia. Joyce describes her mother, an anthropologist who worked with Margaret Mead on "Life With People." Her family were active in the Jewish Public Library and the early Jewish day school movement in Montreal. She has fond memories of their lovely apartment and of the cultural scene among the Jews of Montreal. Joyce talks about her experiences in shul and mitlshul (high school) and in Camps Kinderwelt and Boiberik. Her Yiddish is not fluent, but she has worked in many jobs which require some knowledge of the language. Her husband is a Conservative rabbi and they have three children. Joyce mostly works now in the field of editing; she edited every article in the two-volume "YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews of Eastern Europe." She is now the Executive Editor of the "Posen Library" a long-term, ongoing project. Joyce talks about the future of Yiddish; she feels that it will continue to thrive in the academic arena but will never again be the daily language of a significant number of people. Toward the end of the interview, she reads several of her grandmother's poems, including her last poem "Mayn eynikl (My Grandchild)" whose subject is Joyce.