SAUL RUBINEK ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: So, this is Christa Whitney and today is November 29th, 2017. I'm here in Los Angeles with Saul Rubinek. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

SAUL RUBINEK: You do. The Oral History Project?

CW:Yes.

SR:So, here's some oral history for you. I'm gonna speak some Yiddish but it'll sound weird to you. This is how I first spoke. My parents and I came to Canada. My parents are Holocaust survivors, they're Polish Jews, and they survived together and then they went to a refugee camp called Foehrenwald, which was in a province called Wolfratshausen, right outside of Munich. It was a slave-labor 1:00munitions camp that was transformed by the American, the American Zone for refugees, and my father did Yiddish theater there. And I was born in '48, on the opening night of "The Golem." But we came to Canada in 1949 when I was nine months old and through Canada's Ellis Island, which is Pier 21 in Halifax. And then, 'cause my mother had relatives in Montreal where a lot of Jewish immigrants went and there was a large Jewish population there, that's where we ended up. And on the street was French-Canadian working-class people who were training their kids to be anti-Semitic and Jewish immigrants who were training their kids to be anti-Catholic, and there were all these fights. But the way I spoke Yiddish was, "Ikh vel geyn tsu di [Yiddish: I'm going to] magasin-là 2:00[Canadian French: that store]," which was a combination of Joual, which I can still understand -- Joual, J-o-u-a-l -- which is, I would say, a kind of a French-Canadian Ebonics. It's a patois. It's a French-Canadian street language, working-class street language that's very hard for French-speaking people to understand. But it was the language of the street and so I didn't speak much English at all. I could understand Polish 'cause my parents spoke Polish when they didn't want me to understand stuff. But I spoke a Yiddish that was combined with English and French words and I went to a Peretz Shule [Yiddish secular school] to start school, which was partly English and partly Yiddish. And by the time I was six, we moved to Ottawa. My dad got a job and moved to Ottawa, where there were no Yiddish speakers. But I still can speak Yiddish and understand it, 3:00but I learned to read and write Yiddish before I learned English. And it was very odd, because you're either going to meet Hasidic Jews who were my age at the time and who spoke Yiddish and English or you were going to meet old people or, in that time. By the time I was in my thirties, late thirties, and I was back in Montreal shooting -- I was shooting in Montreal quite a lot and the crews were always speaking Joual, which they were surprised I could understand. But I went to university for a couple of years or one year in Montreal when I was nineteen and I lived back in that area where I had grown up and there were a lot of Hasidic Jews there. And I had a Jew-fro and I looked like some kind of weird hippie, I guess. I certainly was jeans and long hair and what -- not 4:00Hasidic-looking. But I got a kick out of walking by the Hasidic boys and just launching into Yiddish with them, 'cause that wasn't supposed to happen for them. That was really kind of shocking to them, that anybody could speak Yiddish who didn't look like them. So, my Yiddish is odd because I haven't had the opportunity to speak it to anyone, really. My parents really wanted -- they spoke it to me but more English than anything else, 'cause they really wanted to learn English. And I may be an actor partly because my father had broken away from the Hasidic tradition. His father was a din-toyre, which means he was a judge. The Jews --

CW:And where did he grow up?

SR:It was in Lodz or, as the Poles say, Łódź, in Poland. Quite a large industrial city, kind of Polish Manchester. But there was a thriving culture there. Certainly, eventually, a famous film school that Polanski went to. But it was also a lot of Yiddish theater. And between the wars -- my father was born in '20 -- by the time my father was seventeen or eighteen, he was part of a whole group of Jewish youth that was all over Eastern Europe whose mecca was no longer Israel. They weren't Zionists, particularly. They were really artists who were interested in going to New York or Paris or -- they were non-ghetto Jews. They cut their peyes [sidelocks] off, they wanted to dance the tango, they wanted to do Sholem Aleichem and Peretz, they wanted to do theater and film. And they were artists. And there was an entire generation like that that really was looking to 6:00get out with no way to get out. And it was my father, having broken away from that, second oldest of a large family, really breaking tradition -- and quite difficult, 'cause he's supposed to set an example for his younger brothers and sisters. And (laughs) when I grew up, I heard all these stories as a lot of children of survivors of any culture, no matter what genocide you're talking about in the world -- the children hear stories far too early to be able to contextualize and to do anything with them. And the stories that I heard about the war and everything about my dad and what he had done -- so, in my mind, by the time I was four or five, there was this very bad man called Hitler who came to power in order, specifically, to stop my father from doing Yiddish theater. Which, as I grew older, I realized was really not that far from the truth, and --

CW:Can you say a little more about what you know about your father's growing up and your grandparents on that side? Do you know much about that?

SR:Yeah, I wrote about a book about my parents called "So Many Miracles," which actually, I'm about to try to get reprinted because there's a whole new edition that I did with my daughter helping me to edit and re-edit and tell some more stories. But I interviewed my parents from 1977 or so, '76 or so to '86. And in 1986, I went back to Poland with them and filmed a documentary that I coproduced with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, also called "So Many Miracles," which is about the reunion my parents had with the Polish farmers who'd hidden them. And in the course of the interviews that I'd made over ten years with them, I learned a fair amount about who both sides of the family -- but the 8:00thing that interested me most may not have to do with Yiddishkayt. It had to do with lies and obfuscation and how people try to hide their background for whatever reason and how that connected to other cultures. And the people that I related to growing up were First Nation Canadians, 'cause I had friends -- Graham Greene and Gary Farmer, two very well-known Canadian First Nation actors -- who I talked to about this and we had a lot in common, not only because of genocide but because of language and because how important the language -- although their tradition was far more oral than ours, which is written. And I think it makes a difference culturally what happens to the kids. But look, my father's father died with his children in the Łódź Ghetto. And my father's 9:00grandfather had died a long time before that. And there was an extended family that my father says goes back to Reb Zishe, who is a Ukrainian maggid [traveling Jewish preacher] and he was a very well-known rabbi. My father says that we can trace our roots back to him. And I was in Ukraine two years ago -- I was doing a film there, first time I was ever there -- and I went to the big synagogue with my daughter, actually. Orthodox synagogue, a synagogue that had been used as stables by the Nazis during the occupation but now had a Yiddish -- had a community, a small one. And I was the only Yiddish speaker in Kiev. In Kiev, at 10:00the major synagogue in Kiev, the person who could speak Yiddish was me. That was a big shock to me, of course, because Kiev was the center of Yiddishkayt and learning and a repository of all literature. And so, you know, it's fascinating, I'm writing now a new play that will be in Yiddish, Polish, and English and French, using all the languages, a multi-generational story which is based on my book, based upon what happened to my father, based upon my investigation of his life and my journey and also my daughter's journey, because as a girl in school, when we first introduced her and decided to introduce her to the subject of the Holocaust, which wasn't until she was thirteen or so -- we made a decision not 11:00to do it that way. My wife's not Jewish. Her whole family's Scottish. But my daughter and my son both identify more with being Jewish than anything else, because although we're not religious, we do keep all these traditions and holidays, including the ones that my wife grew up with and Christmas and Easter and all that stuff. But they're all very non-religious to us and culturally relevant to us. But my daughter's story is also relevant because she grew up in a school where one of her best friend's great-grandfather was a perpetrator during the Holocaust. And in order to show the documentary film and to talk about the book, which is what I wanted to do in school, that all had to come out. I mean, it all had to be brought up by her parents and she had to deal with 12:00that, or not, but they did decide to deal with it. So, in terms of talking about Yiddishkayt, yes, there is Yiddish theater in my life. My father was a Yiddish actor manqué because he couldn't be an actor when he came to Canada. He didn't have English, had a little child, he had to work in a factory, he had to support himself -- although, as you'll see in the documentary, both my parents are in the movie by Barry Levinson called "Avalon." And after my father died, there's another movie, called "Liberty Heights" with Adrien Brody and Ben Foster and Joe Mantegna, and the grandmother in that movie is my mother playing a grandmother in that movie, even though she wasn't an actor. So, it was because of who they were and because, oddly, they were able to portray themselves, in a way.

CW:Can you describe the Yiddish theater scene, as you understand it, that your 13:00father was in?

SR:Well, the Yiddish theater scene -- he was so young, he was seventeen, so it was an amateur theater scene. It was a group of young boys and girls who are teenagers, really, and maybe into their early twenties who would get together and perform mostly Sholem Aleichem, I think, in those days, and he would hide it from his father, who eventually found out about it. But the stories were not so much about how they did it, 'cause he didn't get a chance to become professional there, although he did go to Warsaw to tour 'cause he was a very good dancer, ballroom dancer -- but he was very short, so he couldn't really be a leading man in those days. But he did do some small work in some of those movies that were made then. And I got to know some of those movies because my documentary is with the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University. That's who distributes my documentary and I got to know Sharon Rivo and the people that run that place and got to see some of those movies. So, I don't know that much about 14:00that world of Yiddish theater that was going there because he wasn't old enough to really take part in it. What I know is the stories that I knew, was that he would have to break away from a Shabbos meal and go do a performance on one day without telling his father. And one day, his father -- this is a great family story -- and one day, his father was waiting for him at one in the morning, when he got home after having broken away from Friday night Shabbos meal to go do -- play. And his father was waiting for him and he said to him, "Where have you been?" And as my father tried to make something up, says, "No point in lying because I know that you're a shoyshpiler, that you are an actor because a friend of mine, who I don't think is really a friend of mine because he was very happy to tell me this and his happiness could only be proof that he wasn't a friend of mine, 'cause he was happy at my misery that he was telling me you're a 15:00shoyshpiler and you're breaking away from all tradition. I don't understand how you can go so far away from God. I raised you to be an ethical child. You're one of the oldest in the family of all these brothers and sisters who have to look up to you and I need to understand how it is possible. I mean, I watched you cut off your peyes, but now you're going off to be a shoyshpiler. I don't understand how you could go so far away from God." So, my father said, "Well" -- he was only probably eighteen and he said -- or seventeen and he said, "Well, I don't know how to tell you why except that I'm doing a play, it's by a writer named Sholem Aleichem who writes in Yiddish. And we're doing a play about a husband and wife and his children and how they're dealing with their poverty and how they're trying to make a living and how he's trying to get his daughters married. And the struggle that these characters have onstage is very similar to the struggle that the people in the audience are dealing with. And so, I don't 16:00know how to explain it except that it's a joy to be able to talk to people about their lives in such a way so that they don't feel that they're isolated and don't feel so alone." And according to the story, my father said his father then said, "Well, then, in that case, maybe it's not so far away from God after all." And it's a really great definition of art. And so, those are the stories about Yiddish theater that I remember about our family and they deeply affected me, I think. By the time I was seven years old or eight years old and we had moved to Ottawa and I was very unfamiliar with this culture, 'cause I'd grown up in an immigrant street culture, a working-class immigrant street culture with fighting and battles -- I mean, battles: five-year-olds throwing rocks at each other and 17:00stuff on the streets. And anti-Semitism was overt, as was anti-French from the Jews, too. They were reacting against it and they're all survivors, too. Very tough people, with their own problems. And by the time I came to Ottawa, which was a different culture, I was so isolated and an only child that my parents sent me to theater school, which was very odd because -- not odd that they sent me to theater school, 'cause it was an inexpensive way for my father, anyway, to say, "Well, you should go take acting classes and maybe you'll feel" -- but that wasn't the odd thing. The odd thing was that now, the teachers -- talk about a cultural strangeness. The two teachers, marvelous women, Faith Ward and Barbara 18:00Meiklejohn, were both RADA graduates, Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts graduates. And as far as I remember, both their husbands were in the British High Commission and they found themselves in Ottawa, 'cause their husbands worked for the British government in the colonies, essentially, and they were going to teach the art of the drama to these colonial children. So, I found myself, son of Holocaust survivors and a Yiddish theater actor being taught by a Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (laughs) graduate. I don't think they may have been that far away from Olivier's class at RADA when he took -- probably similar age, maybe a little younger. But that was how I got introduced to the theater, because my father was gregarious and a storyteller, as you can see I am, but also because I needed to belong and I needed to be a part of a community. When I 19:00look back on it now, I would say that if you're asking me about Yiddish theater in Eastern Europe -- and it would be different in Eastern Europe than anywhere else for reasons of the poverty of the Jews, and because of the more or less tacit, if not complicit, acceptance of local governments in pogroms and anti-Semitism and acts of violence against the Jews, so, they were isolated -- is that the most important thing that any artist needs to deal with is their isolation. It's a little easier, maybe, if you're a painter or a writer since you can create in isolation. Actors can't create in isolation. Dancers rarely 20:00can. Musicians, rarely. So, you need a community. And the community of artists is held together by their language, which may be Beethoven or Mozart or jazz or Yiddish or Gaelic or English or whatever it is that holds them together as a community. And without that community, you don't grow easily. You don't grow easily in any case, but certainly it is -- by leaps and bounds, your progress as an artist is affected by the strength and vibrancy and commitment of the community that you're in. I'm sure that's true for what you guys are doing and it's true in any age. And it's certainly true -- it had to be true for Yiddishkayt and it had to be true, in that particular world, whether it was Kiev or whatever, whether it was Warsaw or it was in Budapest or wherever there were 21:00Jews trying to find their like brethren and sisters who were of like mind and had the spirit to get out of an eighteenth century, nineteenth century, eighteenth -- which is really an eighteenth century Hasidic isolation, which was really what gave them strength to survive and also what really hurt them. My father had this very provocative statement. He said, "If it wasn't for anti-Semitism, there'd be no Jews." Why? "Well, if you think about it," he said, 22:00"if there was tolerance for generations and it was easy to live among your neighbors, then what would be the big deal, marrying the neighbor's daughter?" After a few generations, there might be Jews, but there'd be just a small group of them in black hats. And the truth is, I think it's probably true, is that if we really look at it, I would imagine that -- I would love to be able to come back three or four hundred years from now and take a look at the world and see that there's people -- this basically mixed-race world. And maybe we're in a very old-fashioned place where we can actually see races. But that's changing as acceptance grows. So, maybe my father was right in an ironic way. He wasn't advocating anti-Semitism, but certainly he was saying -- certainly, it forced you to be separate. You were forced to be separate, forced to marry within your own group, and you were terrified that you -- if you didn't, you would be turned 23:00on, and you had good reason to believe that, which became a huge issue for me to be with a non-Jewish woman, until my children were born, when it all kind of went by the wayside. But certainly, was why I wrote a book and did a documentary film. It was all because of my parents' terrible inability to deal with breaking away, even though he's the one who told us that story or he would tell stories about how great Alexander the Great was because one great accomplishment was he said all his generals or the governors of the provinces were, by law -- Alexander made a law that you had to intermarry with the local population in order to avoid fomenting revolution. It's certainly a great way to do it. Intermarriage would certainly do that. So, my stories about Yiddishkayt have to 24:00do with my being an actor and a writer and they have to do with my father trying to -- and mother dealing with their own survival after all these things. And also, with how the family's lies about who was who. I have a cousin who didn't know that he was Jewish until his sixties, till I told him that his mother was my mother's sister and that, no, my mother and his mother and the other aunt were not Polish Catholics who married Jews. No, your mother was terrified to tell you that you were Jewish 'cause she didn't want you to grow up different. And those lies that happened or my daughter's best friend who didn't know her great-grandfather was in the SS and didn't know that story. And whenever I would talk about this stuff, as I am now, my underlying feeling is it's not -- certainly Holocaust stuff is not in order to talk about my Holocaust is better 25:00than your Holocaust or my background makes me more special. In fact, the whole purpose of it is in order to relate to other people's cultures and to identify with other people's cultures and to say, Yes, we have all this in common. We're all perpetrators in our background, all victims in our background, all of us, every culture. Nobody's free of guilt or free of being abused, and sometimes within the same generation. Sometimes within the same person. And that is fascinating to me. I'm glad to hear that there's a revival of Yiddish, to a certain extent. It's a kind of nostalgic revival but -- and the New York theater, there's a Yiddish theater in New York now, right? It's kind of cool.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Well, I'd love to go back and ask about your mother's family background. Do you know about that?

SR:Yeah, my mother lived in a small town of about five thousand families, about 26:00fifty percent of them were Jewish. It was a very important town in medieval Poland called Pínczów, P-i-n-c-z-o-w. And my father had -- his grandmother lived there and his aunts lived there and he used to go there to work in summertime. It was a way for him to make some money. My mother's family owned the flour mill in town. They had a shoe store and they lived above the shoe store on the main village square. And she had two sisters. My mother was the oldest and both sisters survived the war with her, in different places and in different ways. Amazing stories about that. And she had three brothers, none of whom survived, for different reasons. So, there were six children. Her mother, 27:00her grandfather, her grandmother, they all were killed in Majdanek, outside of Lublin. But they were more secular a family than my father's family. My mother met my father (laughs) because she was jealous of the other girls who knew how to dance and who had boys who could dance. My father -- how did it work? My mother's brother wanted to learn how to dance. Maybe two of the brothers wanted to learn how to dance. And they saw my father at this wedding dancing and they asked him for lessons. But they needed girls to be able to dance with. So, they asked my mother to come and that's how my mother and father met. And she would naturally fall for him because he represented what she wanted. He was a modern 28:00-- I think they were sixteen, probably sixteen years old and he could dance the tango, he didn't have long hair, he doesn't -- many of the girls who were more modern-looking, they just didn't want to have to get married to some kind of yeshive-bokher [yeshiva student] because they would end up having to cook and bear a lot of children and they basically serviced the men in a religious household who really had to do nothing but study Torah, many of them. And it was considered a mitzvah [good deed]. Many of the girls were trying to break away from that, but didn't know how, because many of them weren't -- originally at the beginning, they were starting to get educated in the 1930s and go to the gymnasium and get high school equivalencies and have a profession. And they didn't have a lot of heroines to look at in Eastern Europe that they could emulate to do that. So, she was lucky enough to meet my dad, who was a modern 29:00thinker, relatively, in those days, whose eyes were not on having a religious life but who could listen to music, who knew jazz and who knew how to dance and who was an actor. In fact, my mother's parents didn't want him in their house because he was an actor, even though they were secular and, in a way, accepted him less than his own father did when he understood what my father was actually doing was not so far away from God. So, there were these internal battles that I'm sure were replicated many times over in many variations of that theme in Jewish families throughout the Yiddish-speaking world, depending on how integrated they were into the society. I doubt if it was quite the same in Germany or France or Western Europe at all, since they really were integrated as 30:00first, citizens, and then Jews second. It was more of a shock to the German Jews, the Holocaust, then it was to the Eastern European Jews.

CW:Now, were either of your parents involved politically before the war?

SR:Yeah, no, my father had learned -- if you read my book, maybe some of this is in the documentary film -- but he had a huge mistrust of politics. And certainly, one of the great political themes for Jews was communism and its appeal. But he didn't trust it. He had a fellow worker 'cause he did summertime work, working in sweater machines and knitting machines and other kinds of work. And he knew that the owner was this man who could barely get by and was trying to do what he could. And one of his fellow workers unionized, was a communist, 31:00and he said, "But you're going to drive him out of business. It's understandable in maybe other factories, but just to do it on principle makes no sense." So, his attitude about communism was, They want to share what you've got but not what they have. And so, he also was not political. The reason we ended up in Canada -- this is an example of my father's mistrust of politics. We were in a refugee camp. I don't know if you know much about how these refugee camps operated, but the American soldiers were particularly anti-Semitic. They would have much preferred and did much prefer to deal with a docile and polite German population outside the camp than these complaining Holocaust-surviving Jews who were constantly needy. There's a man called Henry Cohen, who at twenty-four years old was a captain in the US Army, who was a Jew from one of the boroughs 32:00in New York -- maybe Brooklyn, I don't remember -- that I've now read about as an unsung hero who actually took over Foehrenwald at twenty-four years old and transformed it into a place that was livable. But it was a very difficult place. And my father was doing theater in the camp. He and another man started a theater troupe. There was an orchestra, symphony orchestra. There was a daily newspaper. There were all kinds of things. In fact, the birthrate was higher per capita in the refugee camps than it was in all of Europe, 'cause they'd just survived. In many ways, they were able to forget about the war more quickly right after the war than they would many years later. They were just interested in the process of survival and where they were gonna end up, which is what my story is about. So, my father got all these benefits from being an actor, whether it was chocolate, silk stockings, food. And he got a Mercedes former SS car to drive around in. He bought it. He got it. And so, he was a somebody in 33:00the camp at twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. And by the time he was twenty-eight, he had a child. Me. And he was, "Where am I gonna go?" So, the shlikhim [emissaries] from Israel who came over to convince the immigrants to go -- whether to go in a kibbutz or to make aliyah or to become Israelis, it was the easiest place to go to. So, naturally, that seemed like the place to go. So, they said, Well, you're not gonna do Yiddish theater. It's the language of the ghetto and you're not going to do it in Tel Aviv or in Haifa or in Jerusalem. What are you going to do? My father said, "Well, I wasn't thinking of doing theater. I mean, I'm not crazy. I'm going to drive a cab. I have a car." You're going by boat. You're not gonna have a car. My father took out the plans that he 34:00had drawn up of how the car was gonna be dismantled, about the size of boxes that he would need, and how he was gonna put it back together. And you know what they said? Maybe you can guess. Well, in that case, we'll take fifty-one percent of your salary. We're socialists. And he said, "You can take your socialism and stuff it up your ass. I'm going to Canada without the car." 'Cause my father's attitude to politics was very jaundiced. Or politics was jaundiced and he looked at it with a clear eye. But the politics of the day, he saw many Bundists who really wanted a social -- Bundists were the ones who wanted a socialist world but within their own community, whether Eastern Europe, or the Zionists who thought that the natural homeland was Israel, which my father wasn't sure about. He wasn't anti-Zionist but he wasn't particularly in favor of it, or we would 35:00have ended up there. His attitude was more one of an artist's, which he couldn't really practice, except he did it as a hobby and he did it --- he told stories and he did amateur theater and he did -- and in Montreal, he worked with -- what's his name? I'm terrible with names. You would know who the Montreal -- Ben -- there was a famous Yiddish troupe that did Yiddish plays and musicals and skits that operated in Montreal. And I've just forgotten. His name was Ben something-or-other. And actually, one of the actresses who worked there ended up working with my mom and dad again when they did the movie "Avalon" in 19-- whenever it was, '88 or '90 or whenever it was that they did "Avalon," 'cause Berry Levinson hired a lot of Yiddish speakers for that movie and some of them were from Montreal. So, yeah, that's --

CW:Yeah.

SR:-- so, those are the stories that I remember about --

CW:And you mentioned about, obviously, the theater in the DP camp. Can you say what you know about that?

SR:Well, I got a book about -- recently, I was just reading about it. There is a book and I'll have to tell you what the title is, about the camps and about the different theaters and about the politics. And there were a number of them. There was one called -- I think my father ended up with one called "Bar Kokhba" or "Bamidbar [Hebrew: In the desert]" or "Negev." I forgot what the name of the theater troupes were. Some of them amalgamated -- my father was acting and directing with a partner of his called Jacob Sandler. And he did "Tevye der milkhiker [Tevye the dairyman]," he did "The Golem." In fact, he played the golem and I was born on opening night of "The Golem," which they toured. I mean, 37:00I would really be fascinated to know how they did that within the German population, 'cause as you know, the German population was gonna understand Yiddish much better than the Americans would, 'cause Yiddish is German. It's, again, a Ebonics, plus a thousand years, right? I mean, it really is a form of German patois with the integration of whatever local language Yiddish had. The funny thing is like, people believe that shmate [rag] is a -- the shmate business, which they think is a Yiddish word -- it's not. Shmate is the Polish word for rag and not a Yiddish word, but it is a Yiddish word. So, anything can be a Yiddish word, I guess. But yeah.

CW:So, where are your first memories from?

SR:Montreal, yeah.

CW:And where in the city did you grow up?

SR:On Clark Street, near Villeneuve, which was very Yiddish. It still is a 38:00Hasidic French -- although now it's gentrified. And the irony, of course, is that (laughs) -- the French-Canadian working-class people who were there were upset as wave after wave of immigrants came in, whether it was the Jews in the '30s and the '40s or the Vietnamese or the Jamaicans or whoever came in, they were all terrified that's going to destroy their neighborhood. Ironically, the people that got rid of them were their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The French-Canadian yuppies who gentrified it and now made it unaffordable for them, that's the irony of who really got them out, was their own kin, not the immigrants. The immigrants were all looking for ways to get out of there once they were there. The people that went there and drove the prices up were their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

CW:And what kind of house was it?

SR:It wasn't a house. It was an apartment building. My mother and father -- you 39:00needed to have a sponsor, so I guess my Canadian citizenship might be revocable because they lied about who their sponsor was. It couldn't be an uncle. They said it was my mother's brother, but it wasn't my mother's brother. It was an uncle of hers who was there and his wife and children and they lived in the same building. And that's how we ended up in Montreal, under sponsorship, we all got naturalized as Canadians. But it was an apartment building. I don't remember -- I mean, it's still there. I visited it a couple of times. I took my children there at one point to show it to them and the street that I grew up in, all of which has changed because now it's a very trendy area. But it was certainly the immigrant area. But that's happened in many cities, is that the lower-class 40:00areas became -- look, I just finished living in New York, in SoHo, which was just factories. Probably one of the trendiest areas in America. It happens in every neighborhood.

CW:So, can you describe the apartment itself?

SR:It was a one-bedroom apartment where we slept on the floor. They had no money for furniture and my father had to be a presser, which was considered -- which he made more money at but it was a very -- profession that was really looked down on by the immigrants, because you'd sweat. And so, it was a low-class (laughs) -- he didn't care and she didn't care. And she had to sew to make extra money so that they could buy a bed and buy some furniture. And I listened to Yiddish records, many of which I have still. I'll have to go find them, but I have -- so, I listened to Yiddish songs and Yiddish music and klezmer music --

CW:Like what?

SR:-- is what I grew up with. Oh, my God. "Rumenye, Rumenye, Rumenye, Rumenye! Rumenye, Rumenye [Romania, Romania, Romania, Romania! Romania, Romania]," that song I remember. I remember some great Yiddish singers. Haven't thought about it in a long time. But I used to listen to the cantors singing. The record broke and I said, "Di reboyne sheloylem iz gebrokhn." I said that, "God is broken." "Di reboyne sheloylem iz gebrokhn." There was a family story of -- little saying that the record was broken. But instead of saying the record was broken, I'd say, "Di reboyne sheloylem" is broken because that was the name of the song on the record. And my father loved to tell stories, so he would read to me in -- Yiddish stories. And, (singing) "Oyfn pripetshik, brent a fayerl,/un in shtib iz 42:00heys,/un der rebe lernt kleyne kinderlekh,/dem alef-beys [By the hearth, a fire burns,/and in the house it is warm,/and the rabbi is teaching little children,/the alphabet]." (Singing) "Rozhinkes mit mandlen./Dos vet zayn dayn baruf,/rozhinkes mit mandlen,/shlof mayn kindele, shlof. [Raisins and almonds./This will be your calling,/raisins and almonds,/sleep, my child, sleep]." "Raisins and almonds is all you'll be able to sell when you grow up," these songs about how twisted your fate's gonna become. "Rozhinkes mit mandlen" is a great, beautiful song about -- that's all you're going to be able to do. "Dos vet zayn dayn baruf -- That'll be your calling," "Rozhinkes mit mandlen," songs like that. Those are the two songs I remember most. And when I was a young 43:00actor, I got to do a production of "The Dybbuk," playing not a big role. But that was a real thrill for me, and learning the nigns [melodies], the melodies that were Hasidic melodies, some of which were real -- I mean, original, and some of which were written by great songwriter, musician, composer for the production. It was directed by a great director called John Hirsch who himself was a Hungarian Jew who was a survivor, as a child, in the Holocaust and responsible -- was one of the founders of the Manitoba Theatre Centre, which is where we did "The Dybbuk." He was a great director and also responsible, ironically, for my first jobs in CBC television because after I worked with him in 1973, by a year later, he was the head of drama for all of Canadian television and he opened up the doors for all of us that were doing small, 44:00indigenous theater. And this is the way I suppose I connect to this, which is that there is an argument to be made that American theater was really born and the American voice of the playwright was born with Eugene O'Neill and Ben Hecht and "The Front Page" and the plays of Eugene O'Neill in the teens and the '20s, that the voice of the American playwright began then and the Group Theatre began then. In Canada, that didn't happen till I was a young man. That didn't happen till the late '60s because all our theater was American and British. I'm not talking about French-Canadian theater that had its own identity and its own, much faster and much more vibrant birth. But the Canadian theater birth -- there were Canadian playwrights, but very few and far between, writing with original Canadian voices. My generation coming into their early twenties were unable to 45:00get jobs, really. There was the odd play -- I was a member of the Stratford Company when I was twenty. Also, John Hirsch was there, as well. That's how he knew me later on, 'cause I was -- 1969 when I was there. And they did the odd Canadian play. Very odd and very rarely. But those of us that couldn't get jobs in the theater or in television created our own theaters. It happened in Toronto, it happened in Winnipeg, it happened in Vancouver, it happened in Halifax. It happened in every major Canadian English-speaking city. It was already, as I say, going on in Montreal. But it certainly just started then. One of the reasons it started was because of another Trudeau, Justin's dad, because Pierre Trudeau was elected in '67 or '68 and he -- that government created an opportunities for youth program and it created a number of programs for the arts and gave the funding for all these art centers to be built, including the 46:00National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The Americans that had been draft dodgers in Canada -- what this has to do with Yiddishkayt, I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but it has to do with community and it has to do with language. The Americans who were draft dodgers and deserters had a much better understanding of political action than Canadians did. The Canadian attitude towards politics and citizenship was one of cooperation, compromise, and being good citizens. The American attitude, and certainly by the ones who were draft dodgers and deserters, were political activism and individual rights. It was the Americans who taught us how to politicize our needs, gather together a voice, and tell the Canadian government that they should never build any art center in this country 47:00without also commissioning original Canadian playwrights' work, Canadian authors' work, Canadian composers' work, Canadian choreographers' work. That happened because of, to a large extent -- 'cause of American draft dodgers' and draft deserters' activism. We got -- maybe an untold story. There is a huge effect of the Vietnam War -- was the birth of Canadian theater. And it was because we were getting the cream of the crop. We were getting all these very socially conscious activists who were helping be responsible for free clinics and for many, many aspects of left-wing Canadian rights that were -- left-wing Canadian activities that were going on that we were fighting for politically. And one of the offshoots of that were the theaters that I helped found, that I became a part of or a founding member of, whether -- and these theaters, one of 48:00the main things that they did was, for a first time ever, new Canadian plays. So, in many ways, what was going on in my father's generation in the 1920s and teens and by the time it was the 1930s for him, when already Yiddish theater was already starting to have a voice before the Holocaust destroyed all that or tried to -- in many ways, that's what happened to me, accidentally. I don't think I was influenced by my dad having done it. Where you find the common denominator is not because I saw my father do it. It's the search for community. It's a search for belonging, it's a search for having a voice. It's the search for being able to tell your audience in their own language. It's a very interesting thing that happened to me. I directed a film that was produced by Dustin Hoffman's company, a movie called "Club Land" I directed for Showtime and Paramount in the year 2000 or so. And one of the people that was in Dustin's 49:00company was a great American playwright called Murray Schisgal, who was his dramaturg who was responsible for helping to develop the scripts and make them better and all that. And I got to meet Murray, who is a hero of mine. And I said, "You know, Murray" -- there's a great story, actually, about the subject. I said, "One of your plays actually changed my life." He said, "One of my plays changed your life?" I said, "Yeah, when I was fourteen." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "You wrote a play called 'Luv.'" L-u-v. it starred Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach and Alan Arkin and I saw it on Broadway with my parents, who had relatives in New York and they took me to see this play. It was a big hit. This is a play about middle-class Jews in Long Island. How could a fourteen-year-old 50:00be affected by it? I said, "Well, I have to admit, it wasn't the play that really changed my life. It was the intermission." He said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, it was a revelation to me." I had already been in theater for six, seven years by that point, did a lot of different plays. Children's theater, "Peter Pan," and American plays or playing a young king in Shaw's "Cleopatra" or whatever the hell I was doing as a child actor onstage. But I, in the intermission -- he said, "Yeah?" "All the people in the lobby getting drinks spoke exactly the same as the people onstage." "Yeah?" I said, "Well, I had never seen that." Never were the people onstage speaking the same language as the people in the lobby. It changed my life and I realized that that was possible, which is why Sholem Aleichem exists.

CW:I'd love to get a bit more of a sense of the world you grew up in. What were your parents like as parents?

SR:Why?

CW:Well, just to understand where you came from, where all of your work has come from and growing up the child of survivors.

SR:I was very fortunate. My parents were very much in love. I never heard them fight. They would bicker, but I never heard them fight. Nobody raised a voice and there was never a fight about money. My mother and father were not acquisitive or materialistic and they loved each other. And they survived 52:00together and they were married when they were twenty-one in the middle of the German occupation and they lived together and survived together even though they lost their first child. They managed to have a life, and a good one. And so, I was very fortunate. The other thing that was fortunate about -- in terms of them being survivors was that they weren't in a camp. The friends that I had who were children of survivors who had parents who were in a concentration camp had a much more difficult time, for the most part, because who knows what they had to do to survive? And they were much more reticent to talk about than my parents, who were fine to talk about it. In fact, my parents considered themselves fortunate, comparatively. And so, since they survived together and they had been in love together and they actually both lived and they actually got to have a child and come to a free country that they adored, they found a way to live, even though my father lost nine brothers and sisters and his parents and 53:00grandparents, everybody else was murdered, they found a way to survive without survivor's guilt and without -- or the crippling survivor's guilt. And so, I grew up in a household like that. Now, you add to that that they were immigrants and they had to learn English, my mother much quicker than my father about this 'cause she made female friends right away who spoke English and who -- she read the newspapers and when she would go to the neighbor's house who could afford a television and watch the television till we got one eventually -- I don't think we got one until we were in Ottawa, by the time I was seven or eight, maybe nine. But it was a world of stories and it was a world of survivors telling stories. So, the house was always filled with people and they would talk about -- and cry and laugh and cry. It was a very emotional house that had to do with this. Now, as I got older and I saw other cultures deal with this, whether they're people from South Africa or whether -- friends who are African American 54:00who talked about their grandparents who were sharecroppers or whether or not they were dealing -- whatever culture I've ever seen where there's kind of hardship, you look for people to share stories with, songs with, plays with, whatever you do in order to find a way to communicate your upbringing and your survival and your hope for the future. And you're looking for support, positive reinforcement to be able to go on with your life, which is perhaps the most important part of it. I would say the other important part of it is the language, so that they reinforced each other's memories by the speaking of Yiddish or whatever language, whatever culture is dealing with. In this case, it was Yiddish and I grew up with that music in my ears and with Polish in my ears, with the French Canadian in my ears, so that I'm very good at accents. So, that affected my life because I have all these accents and all these tones and sounds 55:00that I grew up with, so -- in fact, I just finished a Coen brothers movie (speaks with French accent) where I am playing a very French -- not French-Canadian, which is a much more different accent and a much, much harsher accent, but a French-Canadian accent, especially if it's working-class is like that, but a much more sophisticated French accent in the nineteenth century of the -- of a character who is playing a French person. And so, the accents come very naturally to me and the melody of the accent comes naturally to me. I don't have a problem with that. Or if I'm talking --- I had a very interesting problem when I was doing a movie called "The Quarrel" because "The Quarrel" is based on a short story called "Mayn krig mit hershl raseyner [My argument with Hershel Rasseyner]," which is by a great Yiddish writer that I'm sure you know called Chaim Grade. Now, Chaim Grade was a friend of my father's in Montreal before he actually decided to go back to Poland, where he was more revered and just a 56:00nobody in Montreal in the '50s. And he kind of became my godfather for a while. But, by ironic chance, his story was adapted into a movie called "The Quarrel" and I read -- it's about these two characters who knew each other in yeshiva before the war, one of whom, his father ran the yeshiva and the other of whom was his best friend who read forbidden books, whether it was Shakespeare or Chekhov or whatever he did and got kicked out, but was a much more brilliant student. But he left. And they each got married, they each had children, they all -- children and their wives were murdered in the Holocaust and by chance they meet -- in the story, I think it's in Paris. But here, in this case, it was Montreal and they meet in Montreal by accident. How? The artist is, I think, writing for the daily Jewish "Forward" and he has gone to Montreal on a lecture and he got laid the night before and he wants to return a necklace to the woman 57:00he slept with and they're gonna meet in the park. He happens to go to the park on Yom Kippur and he sees tashlich, which is when you take crumbs out of your pocket and put it into a moving, living stream. He sees a Hasidic Jew with his congregation of young men doing this and he recognizes that man with the beard as his old friend from before the war. And they embrace and they reminisce, but then the quarrel starts again. And the quarrel, essentially, in that situation is, my character, who has closed himself off from the world and created a yeshiva because the only way the modern Jew -- in that case, modern being 1948 or whenever that took place, the only way they can survive is to separate themselves from the murderous non-Jews, whereas the artist feels that the only answer to the Holocaust is inclusion. So, inclusion and exclusion, which is a postmodern Jewish problem usually embodied in the same person; in this case, it's two people. All right. (laughs) The director was Israeli, Eli Cohen, a 58:00really nice man but no ear for accents. And he's hired a dialect coach from Brooklyn, from New York. Now, I wanted -- I said, "I'm not gonna accept this role." It's a really interesting story about "The Quarrel." I said, "I'm not gonna accept the" -- I've never told this story publicly, but I don't mind anymore. I said, "I'm not gonna accept the role unless I know who's playing the other character." First of all, I wanted to play the artist. I didn't relate at all to the Hasidic -- obviously, I wanted to play the artist. But Eli, who's brilliant, said, "No, no, no. Going against it would be very good for you. Very, very good for you, the conflict." He was really right about that. But I wasn't sure. I had to talk to my father about it and there's a whole mase about that, a whole story about that. Okay, but first of all, I said, "Okay, but I'm not accepting the role until I know who is playing the other role." And they said, That's understandable. So, everybody they came to me with, I approved. They came to me with a bunch of actors and I thought they were great. They didn't approve 59:00them. Finally, I had other work and I said, "Listen, there's a very good friend of mine. He's not Jewish. His name is Robert Thompson, R.H. Thompson, who's -- I've grown up with in the theater. He's a brilliant actor. And you'll have a shorthand 'cause we've been friends for many years and you don't need a Jew to play this role. He's an artist, he's red-haired. It doesn't matter but he's got a very Scottish Jewish face and he could be a red-haired Jew and he's brilliant." And they said, Well, you can't have approval of -- I said, "I don't have approval. Go cast two other people. You haven't hired me." And they said, But you can't have approval. I said, "You're not hearing me. I haven't been hired. You don't owe me any money. This is who I'm gonna do this with. The time is running short." Well, I can't be blackmailed. I said, "You're not being blackmailed. Cast somebody else in both roles." I had power, but no financial power. They had to cast him or they weren't gonna -- he was brilliant and they 60:00were very lucky to have him. He was great. And so, R.H. and I ended up doing this. So, they hired a dialect coach for him. He wanted one. I said, "Okay, but this guy is going to teach you an accent that's kind of New York Jewish and not really European Jewish." "These -- so, what's European Jewish." I said, "You don't want me to speak like my father. You want the feeling that they're talking Yiddish." He said, "Yes." I said, "Well, in order to do that, (speaks with Yiddish accent) I'm gonna do it for you now. And the way you would do it is with a slight melody and a slight over-pronunciation of the way you're speaking. This is now me as if I was speaking Yiddish and you would hear it slightly in the melody but I'm not doing any kind of particular accent that you can really -- like, Borscht Belt accent, but you have a feeling and a flavor of the accent. And I know how to do this really well. I grew up with it and I'm fluent in Yiddish as a first language." And what did Eli Cohen say? "I don't hear you doing an accent." I says, "'Cause you're an Israeli." So, he had the dialect coach with earphones on and I said, "Not around me." I have nothing against him 61:00and, look, R.H. -- so, I remember having done this thing where I had this huge monologue about the death of my father that I did in a single take. And I watched him talk to the dialect coach, who had earphones on. He came over to me, said, "You have to do more accent." And I said, (laughs) "Here's what you're allowed to do. You're allowed to direct me as an actor but you're not allowed to talk to me about accents 'cause you have no ear for it and neither does he. He can work with R.H. but not with me. And this character is from New York anyway, even though we grew up together in Europe. It makes sense. Let him have a bit of an American Jewish accent and let him teach him that 'cause it'll -- he would have a flavor of it maybe 'cause he's lived in New York all these years, so it works for him. But for you to -- for me to do a six-minute take about the death of my father and for you to come over to me because you've spoken to him 'cause you can't hear it and he says, 'I don't hear an accent' and then you come over 62:00and direct me? That's not going to be allowed. We have fifteen days of shooting. You can't do that." Said, "You can't stop me from directing you." I said, "Watch me! I'm not allowing it. Fire me, but that's not gonna happen." He never directed me again after the first day. Never talked to me. I met him many years later and he says he teaches classes in Israel as an example of how wrong he was about how he did this and he paid me this compliment. I said, "There was nothing I could do." My director became my friend R.H. I would ask him about every take and he directed me. He never directed me for a second. He was too -- he had too big of an ego. But the problem was, in talking about accents and how I grew up and how it affected my work, there's a perfect example of how it affected my work. I wasn't going to allow something that I knew growing up in my blood, in my veins and my skin, in every fiber of my body, I knew how to do that flavor 63:00that I just did for you, effortlessly, because I grew up with it. I grew up with those tones. (speaks in thick Yiddish accent) I know not to do a Jewish accent from the Borscht Belt if I'm playing this, which is what they wanted me to do, which I wasn't going to do with that movie. It would've just been a farce. Instead, I did a slight flavor of accent so you could just hear a little bit of it and it sort of goes away and you would just accept it after a while, but I wasn't gonna do a comedy routine, which is where they were pushing me to go so they could hear it so they could be satisfied that they'd done their jobs. It was going to kill the movie. The movie was too important to me. I knew the story. It meant a lot to me, the story. It was my father's best friend, Chaim Grade's a great writer. Who knows how long this story will last? I wasn't gonna destroy it for the sake of their egos. And I refused. And I was a really easy actor to get along with except for then. So, yes, my work has been affected. Of course, I grew up with my parents, growing up with a gregarious storytelling household. My parents probably survived because they were so likable. They had a 64:00little grocery -- a little store after they got married in Pińczów, where you had to wear -- where there were curfews against the Jews. And in that store, when they were twenty-one and twenty-two years old, they would tell stories. If they didn't have something, they would have to go get it wholesale and bring it to the store, had to keep the customer there, my father would just tell stories and make them laugh, all the Polish farmers, while my mother got out and got the stuff. And eventually, when the round-ups happened and my mother was pregnant with my sister and she was going to go to a concentration camp, there was no way around it that that's where they were going, they heard that a farmer's wife was looking for them and wanted to save their lives. Why? Because they had once given her credit, unheard of during wartime, because she didn't have money and they gave her something. And also, she figured maybe this girl is from the richest family in town, maybe they could survive, but they had no money. The money got to them eventually through my mother's sister, but that's another story. But yes, they were gregarious, they were very likable. They always made 65:00friends wherever they went, much more than I did. I was a very sullen, odd, single child who was an actor and my community was my community of actors and I was a very odd kid. But really, they found their community and friends wherever they went. A very likable, in love couple till the very end. And I grew up with that. That's why it was such a shock to me when I thought that they would accept my non-Jewish girlfriend. Not the woman I married, but my first girlfriend, whose family was Irish Catholic and the first woman I lived with. And I figured they would accept her. (laughs) That didn't happen. And in fact, the only way I 66:00could get back together with my parents was to lie to them that I was actually asked to write a book by a publisher about their experiences, 'cause they were -- very, very difficult for them to refuse me anything that had to do with my career. But that was a lie and there was no book. There was no publisher. Instead, it was a way to get back together with them and interview them. And it's a lie I -- basically, I told my friends and my girlfriend that I was writing a book and I just lied about my parents not accepting her and everything. I said, "No, they're fine with it. Everything's fine." I just lied about everything in order to just get by. And it's the new introduction to my book, the story that I'm telling you now, about how the book got to be written, because eventually a publisher did want -- eventually, my friends said, Can we read some of it? And that's where the revelation happened, when I realized the stuff that I had -- there were no computers then. This is in the early '80s and I was typing everything out from transcripts and realized that there was a 67:00beauty in their language and their syntax and everything else and that these stories, once put on paper, actually were kind of interesting. And eventually, that did become a book and it was published by the people I lied about saying were interested, Penguin, publisher. So, the lie became the truth and that's how it was passed down to my children. And that's how there became a documentary film and that's how that story got told, all because my parents refused to accept my non-Jewish girlfriend, which I had to turn into lemonade somehow. And took me years to do it but it really affected our -- my children and their lives and people who see the film, as you'll see.

CW:I want to talk about that a little bit, but can you tell me about Grade and what --

SR:No, because I never met him. I can't tell you anything about Chaim Grade. I wish my father was here. He'd tell you a lot of stories about Chaim Grade. But I was too young to know him or remember him. And I just know that my father really 68:00liked it. I read the story in Yiddish, I remember, first. Then, it was dramatized really well. And Eli Cohen directed it well, even though he didn't direct me. I have to credit the director who was, for me, was my friend R.H. Thompson. But Eli knows that. And I really wanted it to be good because --

CW:Had you --

SR:-- he's a great writer. I wish he was more recognized. But he's less secular than Singer and he writes more about the religious life than Singer. Singer is a far more accessible writer to be translated into English than Chaim Grade would be, I think.

CW:Had you read Yiddish literature in school, in your education at all?

SR:No, because my only introduction, my only -- later in life, as I became 69:00interested in "The Golem," which I'm very interested in and all the different -- in fact, there's a really interesting book by Elie Wiesel about -- called "The Golem," reading now for the first time. I'm interested in the play, in Yiddish. I can read it in Yiddish, but with help because I haven't read Yiddish in a long time, although it's my first language. I can read it, but there are a lot of words that I just go -- they're just too hard.

CW:Who taught you to read in Yiddish?

SR:My dad taught me the alphabet, how to read, when I was very little.

CW:So, I know it's in your documentary and in other places, but could you talk about going back to Europe with your parents?

SR:Going back to --

CW:Europe with your parents. How did that come about?

SR:After I'd written the book and realized that it could be published, and I got a publisher for it, and after they'd already accepted my (laughs) non-Jewish girlfriend, who I was about to break up with anyway, ironically -- but my parents got a letter from Zofia Banya, who is now in her eighties, I guess, who is the farmer's wife that had hidden them during the war, for two-and-a-half years. Her husband was dead, her son was now probably around fifty. It was now 1986 and it had been forty years since they had been in Poland and had gotten 71:00out and made their way to the American zone to escape the Russians and tried to get away from all that. That's a whole other adventure. But they managed to get away and then they were at the camp and my mother pregnant and we left to Canada, okay. So, now they were getting a letter from her saying, "I want to see you before I die." My mother said, "Well, I'm not bringing her here because they'll think we're billionaires or something." And we lived in a sixteen-thousand-dollar bungalow in the suburbs of Ottawa. My father made less than ten thousand dollars a year. But for Polish farmers, my mother was worried, true or not, whether or not it was gonna happen that they weren't giving them enough money. And they sent them money. My father arrived to Canada with ten dollars, he sent them five. They always got money. In fact, they were the best-off farmers in that area because of the money my parents, who were lower-middle-class income, sent them for the last forty years. Clothes, parcels, 72:00gifts, money, if they could, but whatever they could. But her parents had a clothing store, so they would send clothes for all the children, the grandchildren, for the wives, for everybody. They used the money to buy a new house, build a new house in that village of Wrocław, right outside of Pińczów. "I'm not bringing them here," she said, "and I don't want to go there. Everybody's dead. I'm not going back there. All the memories will come flooding back. I don't know what to do." I happened to be working at the time with a great cinematographer called Vic Sarin, who's originally from Kashmir. And I had worked with him a few times. He's now a director. But at that time, he was a cinematographer for Canadian television. He did documentaries, he did all kinds of things. Drama. All kinds of really cool things. It was --- he became a friend. I told him this, what I'm telling you now, and he said, "Why don't we do 73:00a documentary? Why don't we go back to Poland?" There's a series on Canada -- he said, "You know, the series 'Man Alive.'" "Man Alive" was a half-hour series on spiritual values, hosted by a really extraordinary guy called Roy Bonisteel. And it was part of the CBC documentary series, all about all kinds of cultural, spiritual matters. By that time, by 1986, I was a very well-known Canadian actor on television and onstage and in films, too. And I remember going with Vic to CBC to see the producer -- I forgot -- who was running "Man Alive," a woman, I've forgotten her name, sorry. And it was this pitch: "Saul and I want to go back with his parents to Poland to have a reunion with the people that saved his life." Sold. That's how long it took. And I said, "I'm gonna -- how much will it 74:00cost?" They said, Twenty grand to bring a producer, a cinematographer, you, your parents for a week or so, and a sound man. One sound guy and somebody who will help with the camera and sound. So, I said, "I'll put up half of it and I want the rights after CBC to do what I want, 'cause you may make half an hour, I want to make maybe an hour," which is more of what that is. So, that's what happened. So, I put up half the money, I coproduced it. And since I was a part of the subject of the documentary, it was difficult. But I had to stay out of some of the filming so it could happen. And so, the directing credits went to Kathy Smalley and Vic Sarin. It was my choice to make them, as producers, to give them both directing credits, which I didn't want to take. So, I just took a writing 75:00credit and producing credit, 'cause it's based, really, on my book in many ways and the stories that were told. And my parents got to tell some of the big stories in the thing that was a cut down version told on "Man Alive" and the version that was done in Poland. So, the book really describes it in great detail. This is the only part of the book -- the documentary is all of that. It's all of it. But in the book, it's the only part of the book that's in my voice except for the introduction and the epilogue. I talk about how the book came to happen, the story about the lies and about my daughter's experiences and how we told our children about genocide when my wife and I decided, much different from many Jewish families who tell their kids much too early about the stuff, how we decided to do it, how we decided to introduce the book and the documentary into their school lives and how we did that, that's the epilogue. That's in my voice, and the section about the documentary. I kept a journal and 76:00I used the journal in the book. As you can imagine, it was a pretty -- I heard stories that I'd never heard before, which are really moving, and some very funny stuff that I'd never heard before because memories come back with location and smell and things that they recalled when they were young teenagers together and lovers for the first time. I saw them as young lovers for the first time, my parents who were actually younger than I am now when we brought them over because it's thirty -- it's, what is it? It's thirty-one years ago, but --

CW:So, doing the documentary convinced them?

SR:Well, that's what happened, is that -- sorry, when I went to my parents and 77:00said, "CBC has agreed to do this as a documentary film," that made the difference. They now had a community. They knew Vic Sarin and now they felt that it would be contained and also, they had a reason to go aside from just seeing Zofia, there was gonna be something they could tell other people. And, in fact, the documentary film became a very important part of their lives, something they could show their friends. It was very important for me in -- I didn't know I was gonna have kids yet. So, at that point, it was just a very important thing to put on at the Toronto Film Festival. It was a big hit at the Toronto Film Festival, and many screenings of it. It got a lot of press about it. They got a lot of press about it because they're really -- you'll see, they're really (laughs) lovable and easy to like and very funny as a couple together and very 78:00touching. And it's a very -- maybe it's a kind of an old-fashioned documentary in many ways, but I'm proud of it because Kathy and Vic did a great job and my parents were really open-hearted. And there were accidents that happened that we didn't expect to happen, of course, in a documentary film. An old friend of my mother's, photographs that happened, amazing things that happened. A Polish guy saying, "You want photographs of the period?" I said, "Yeah." "Well, you're lucky, 'cause it's summer." Said, "Why are we lucky?" "'Cause the guy who has the photographs is drunk six months a year. He's drunk from, basically, from somewhere around October for six months and then he's sober for six months. Right now, he's sober and he has his own photographic collection, including all the shots of the" -- there are shots of the actual round-up of the Jews that he took from hiding -- I mean, a Polish guy, not a Jewish guy -- that he took of all of the town in flames, of the square in flames, of the Jews being rounded up 79:00on their way, being marched towards the gas cham-- towards the camps that would kill them. He had all these shots that I was able to get and use for my book. Photographs of my mother in school when she was little, because, by accident, somebody approached us and said, "I used to go to school with her. I thought she was dead. I'm Polish Catholic but I'm your mother's -- I was in school with her from first grade to eighth, sixth grade or eighth grade, and I have all the photographs." And so, we put them together without my mother knowing who it was. And my mother meets this woman on the street and this woman starts to cry and my mother has no idea who it is. And she's trying to be nice to this woman who seems to be crying 'cause she thought that my mother was a ghost walking down the street. And they were like, best friends. And then, my mother recognized her. And then, they go and they look at these pictures of a teacher who they loved, Polish Catholic teacher -- is alive. And so, they went to her -- we filmed them at her apartment and it was really cool. And, of course, the 80:00reunion, which was really emotional and really interesting, in many ways. And it was interesting for the stories that we don't tell, as well. There were harsh things that, because the Banya family, Banya being the last name of them -- he was a real son-of-a-bitch who -- my father had to stay alive every single day by -- he really wanted to sell them out and get a couple bags of salt or flour in return for their lives. And it was his wife who convinced them not to. And also, my father raised the boy, because it wasn't his son. He was a bastard son of -- because she was raped by the former landowner where she worked, gave birth to this child on a field. He took her in and never treated the son as his own. My father was twenty-two years old; there was an eight-year-old boy there. My father's the one who taught him his catechism, taught him how to write his name, taught him -- became, really, his first father and his first son. So, when they met, when my father was sixty-six and this boy was fifty or forty-nine, I 81:00watched my father meeting his first child, in a way. But his attitude in the documentary is that his father -- he calls him his father -- was a hero. That's how he saw his father, because they saved their lives and all of that. But my recollection of it was it was good he was gone because it was a real battle, my father trying to train him how to be a decent human being for six years and educating him how to be a decent human being for the two-and-a-half years that they were there and after the war, as well, and sending them money. And the truth is that I never felt a particular animosity towards him. Being anti-Semitic and a Polish farmer was like living in Los Angeles and being a Dodgers fan. It was mother's milk. There was nothing more natural. The church 82:00taught it to you from the time you were a baby that they were Christ killers and you were taught it every Easter and you were taught it every Christmas and you were just (UNCLEAR) worshipping a Jew. They are taught that that's your enemy. And so, being raised with -- especially if you're uneducated -- and a farmer, it wasn't a big deal. "Besides," my father says, "if it was switched around and you told me that if I hid Poles, that they were after them, and if they found the Poles at my house, first they would burn my house down, then they would kill my children and my wife in front of me, and then they would kill me, and that's what the Nazis would do. If you're asking me would I hide the Poles, I don't know. I can't ever blame him. He didn't ever turn us in. He wanted to, but how do I blame him for that? That's how he grew up, that's who he was, but he didn't." And he used to beat his wife on this issue, violently, none of which you could tell -- well, she says it in the documentary, actually. She says, "He 83:00beat me over this issue." It's not a black and white story and it isn't for anyone, whether it's Rwanda or Yugoslavia or South Africa or wherever the hell it's going on somewhere on Earth, every second of every day in human history. It's the same story.

CW:What was the impact of doing this project on you?

SR:You can see the impact and you hear it in my stories and you hear it in my life and the life of my children and what they care about, what they write about, what they're interested in, how they identify. There are a lot of stories about Scottish history that are kind of awesome. But this is much more recent. And, in fact, we had our honeymoon in Scotland and my son's first play was done at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a couple years ago. And we have relatives there. My wife has relatives there. Wonderful people. But they identify with 84:00being Jews because you identify with being the underdog and it's a natural thing. And I think the Passover ceremony has more meaning to them spiritually than the Christmas ceremony, which is a real family event in our place, or Hanu-mas or whatever we do. And they're fluent in French, both my kids. And German. They studied German and French. (pauses) It's affected every part of my life and it's what I write about, one way or another, whether it's not specifically about that, you know? I mean, even a play that -- I did a play called "Terrible Advice" that I wrote. Was on in London a few years ago. And that play is a result of improvisation with actors that I knew from my early 85:00Canadian theater days. So, you can trace a line, even though the play has nothing to do with -- "Terrible Advice" is about middle-aged friendship and sexuality. It has nothing to do with Jews or the Holocaust, particularly. However, it has to do with -- it could never have been written without those friends that I grew up with in those early days of theater and that would never have happened if I didn't need to express my own culture and my own language. And that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't in Canada and that wouldn't have happened if my parents' journey hadn't been what it is. There isn't a fiber of my being that isn't affected by my father's having broken away from the Hasidic world and become an actor. It's one of the reasons he survived. For one thing, my father had no doubts about the fact that there were gonna be -- that there were killing camps, whereas many people doubted it. He was already part of a 86:00movement of people that were looking outside the ghetto walls, even if the walls were metaphoric. Before the Nazis came, he could look outside. He had no problem believing it, looking at history and looking at the writing that he was dealing with. He's the one who made sure that they had a bunker to hide in so that when the round-ups happened, that family had a place to go to, whereas nobody else did, or very few people did. I wouldn't have children if my father had not broken away from a Hasidic tradition and entered a more modern world in Yiddishkayt and Yiddish literature and art because of what he was a part of and the community he was a part of. That had a lot to do with why he survived. Another person sitting beside me here, I can imagine, would tell you the same stories why the family died. There isn't any virtue in it. It just happened that way for my family. Another family could say, Yes, they were part of the artistic 87:00community and they all gathered them up, everybody else lived but all of them died. That would be their story. There isn't any lesson to be gained there.

CW:Would you mind saying about how you taught your children about the Holocaust and how you decided to do that the way you did?

SR:Well, when we came to Los Angeles and my daughter was a year old, we had friends whose son was in the Rudolf Steiner, Waldorf school education system by the time my daughter was two-and-a-half, and we'd explored the school and found out it wasn't a cult. And it was a great way to educate kids. We really were fascinated by it. Our daughter became a Waldorf student. Waldorf students are taught differently. People say, Oh, it's a little like Montessori. Said, 88:00Actually, it's kind of the opposite of Montessori in the sense that kindergarten is not a prep school for first grade. They are not taught to read, really, until they're maybe seven. They're kept younger and floating a lot longer. Media is really discouraged. Television, radio, all that stuff is discouraged till they are seven or eight. People use it as a babysitter and they don't have police about it. But there's a reason for the kind of eye contact that the Waldorf kids have and the lack of social media at a young age that they have and the way that they relate to people differently. There's no textbooks. They write their own textbooks. It's a lecture system, starting in first grade. They write their own textbooks from first grade through high school and they create their own textbooks. And it's a developmentally fascinating, interesting pedagogy because it has -- what you're being taught has to do with the inward development of the child in the sense that by the time my son was six or seven years old, he's 89:00knitting. Why is he knitting? Dexterity. Art. He's creating a case for his recorder. And math. And they're dancing, which teaches them a lot about geometry and movement and coordination. They're learning about world revolution when they're thirteen and fourteen, when they're rebelling against everything, when it's already in their souls. It's a very simplistic example of the kind of developmental school it is. There's no marks or grading. They don't compete the students against each other until eighth grade or ninth grade, when they can handle it. As a result of that and my wife eventually being board president of the school in the Northridge school, the Waldorf school here called Highland Hall -- and it has, like any restaurant, you don't want to see too much in the kitchen, but -- you might not want to eat the food -- there are problems with the Waldorf school system, of course. Has to do with any -- where there are 90:00people. But it has a great idealism and one we really liked, including its problems. But we liked its developmental stuff, we liked its lack of competition, and we liked it wasn't a fear-based education in the sense that most education that we had experienced is about the fear of the parents, their children not doing well. So, everything is predicated on fear: how the child is educated, how the testing happens is all to allay the fears of the parents that their children aren't gonna go to the right school, they're not gonna get the right job, they're not gonna have the right partner, life partner, they're not gonna meet the right woman or man, they're not gonna succeed in life, they're gonna fail, whatever it is. It's all fear based. Mostly fear based. This is not a fear-based education. It is a developmentally really fascinating and well-thought-out pedagogy. So, we were influenced by this and we began to talk, Elinor and I, about when are we gonna introduce Hannah -- since Sam was four 91:00years younger -- when are we gonna introduce Hannah to the subject, 'cause the children are kept young longer? It would be difficult if they were in a regular school, 'cause when my daughter was a kid, she would have known who the Spice Girls were. But she didn't. It would have been socially awful for us to keep it from her if she were in a regular school. But in her school, she wasn't any different from the rest of the kids. None of them know, or most of them didn't know. So, she wasn't socially ostracized because of her lack of knowing what pop culture was. So, how are we gonna deal with this? So, we talked to the school about it. And together with the school, we said, Well, thirteen seems to be about the right age. What they're learning in school by that point and according to the Steiner philosophy, it's when they can start to contextualize, when cause and effect starts to make sense. For me, it was, I didn't want to raise a kid 92:00like I was. Here's the kid I was at six on the schoolyard, or at seven, in Ottawa: "Do you have a grandmother?" "Yeah." "I don't. Mine was murdered." I didn't want to raise a kid that had that as a badge 'cause they didn't understand what they were talking about, 'cause they were given the death and murder of their relatives as a -- without any context. And how could they have a context? Hitler came to power to stop my father from doing Yiddish theater. So, that really was a subject that Elinor and I talked about. I said, I didn't want to do that. I also don't want to -- I had a really interesting experience that also really deeply affected me. When I wrote the book and made the documentary film -- they all came out at the same time in Canada -- there was a book tour. 93:00And luckily, on part of the book tour, I could show the documentary. It was a really cool thing, right? The worst place was Second Generation. The worst. Second Generation is an organization of Jewish children of survivors. They were the worst. Why? Well, I went to these places and, "How can you do a documentary about how Poles saved Jewish lives? Poles were murderers." "Well, I'm not doing a documentary about how Poles saved Jewish lives. I'm talking about the Banya family, who were a mixed group, with different motives, and how they took my parents in, how they saved each other's lives is my personal history story. I am not extrap"-- they wouldn't listen to this. And it wasn't until this old woman put up her hand at the back and showed her tattoo from Auschwitz and said, "Shut 94:00the fuck up. Let him tell the story. Who the hell do you think you are?" Because what these second-generation kids -- and I'm second-generation -- what this Second Generation organization was about, I have no problem saying this publicly, is that they were about, for the most part, a reinforcement of their victimhood status and their separation from the rest of the world and their knighthood, their individual self-knighthood as being representatives of the most victimized people on the face of the Earth, which is, first of all, an extraordinarily dark and exclusionary place to be as a human being and untrue, on top of it. So, I was deeply affected. I refused after a while to go to any second-generation groups. I wasn't gonna talk to them about my book or documentary. There was no way I was gonna talk to them anymore after a few of these places. I remember being on a radio show. Think his name was Andy Barrie, 95:00if I remember. Canadian -- I think that was his name. He had a talk show, it's a very popular talk show, where he would talk about things of the day. So, if there was a taxi driver -- there's a rash of taxi drivers that were getting killed or robbed in Toronto at the time, in the middle '80s, and he had taxi drivers on, talking about -- he would do that. So, for me, he wanted -- was doing a book tour, so I had interviews. And he said, "So, what I'd like is -- it's a call-in show, so people will call in and talk to you, will ask all -- children of survivors, big Jewish community here to -- or survivors to call in." And I said, "I'm not doing it." And he said, "Why not?" And I said, "Don't ask me now. Ask me on the air why I'm -- doing it." Said, "Great." So, he's a very great guy. Terrific guy. And I said, "The reason I'm not doing it is because 96:00this is what happened to me with Second Generation," the story I just told you. "And I didn't write this book in order to be exclusionary or to say my Holocaust is better than your Holocaust or for me to have a badge. I didn't have children then. Hadn't even met Elinor yet. That was a year away at that point. We've been together for twenty-seven years but at that point, we hadn't met." I said, "No, I want anybody who's a child of a parent to call. I think there might be a few children of parents out there." He said, "Why?" I said, "Because this is what this is about. It isn't about the Holocaust. That happens to be where my parents were. But the truth is that if you were a child of a parent who grew up in the London bombings or any kind of issue, any kind of thing, you're gonna deal with your -- one thing that might deal with is that you invalidate your own pain and 97:00suffering because it can't compare to your parents' war stories, wherever you're from or whatever they went through. And, in fact, it might not be that. It might be a whole different thing. And I really have written a book and done a documentary talking about my relationship with them in the best way I knew how to tell the truth about this so that people can relate to it, not so that people can be excluded from it. And by asking children -- survivors -- or survivors to call, it's a way of putting a lie to why I did this in the first place." So, we got that. That's what we were talking about. That influenced me and Elinor a lot. Those experiences influenced me and she was really sympathetic to it and much more articulate about it. And being board president of the school, she was able to talk to the teachers and was able to put it in context. And we decided, Okay, what we're gonna do is we're gonna show my daughter first the book, not 98:00the documentary, 'cause the documentary is very emotional. We want her to read -- she's a big reader and we'll let her read the book and then we'll ask her permission, because what we planned to do is to introduce it to the school as a way to do a short course in personal history. So, the purpose of introducing it to the school was so that -- which I eventually did for my son's Waldorf school in New York, as well, which is, together with the history teacher, to then do a course to encourage the children in the class to do their own investigation. And the way that it would usually start was very provocatively. I'd show the documentary in the class -- about the book, of course, the documentary. And after the documentary was shown, I would say, "Well, who here thinks that my life was more dramatic than their life?" And twenty-eight hands would go up and I'd say, "It's not true. And the reason that you think my life is more dramatic is 'cause you haven't asked the right people the right questions. Because I guarantee you that within your own family, there is a Tolstoy novel. There is 99:00murder, suicide, great, miraculous heroism, victimhood, perpetrating, perpetrators. There are evil people. There are sometimes angels. Sometimes that's in the same person. There are amazing stories within your own background. You just have to find the right people to ask questions to or write a song about or a poem about or make your own documentary film or write a play about or however you want to communicate this to the rest of the kids in the class, which is the point of this. How do you find a way to, first, find out who your family is and where you came from. Why are you in LA? How did your parents meet? Why did they meet? Why did their parents come to this country? You'll find that there's great movements of history that they're a part of and that they were either affected by it or were able to fight against or however it was, there are 100:00great movements that your -- the reason you're here in this class. You're a part of a great story. And maybe there's a way for you to find out what matters to you about the story. And if there is a way for you to find out what matters to you, maybe you'll find a way to communicate that to the rest of the class." So, we find out things about the class, of course, and about their backgrounds that you would never find out about, you'd never know about, right? The South African white kid who was ostracized by the left-wing community as soon as they came from South Africa 'cause the community immediately believed that they must have been part of the pro-apartheid movement, which they weren't, and how the family was isolated and how that affected -- stories that were -- of course, amazing stories and very, very healthy for them to share. And, of course, it bonds the kids instantly. So, that's how we did it. That's how we decided to do it. We did it together with the school's philosophy of the development of the child and where they were emotionally, and thirteen, fourteen seemed to be the right age, 101:00and how to do it was through the book and the documentary. And the other most important part of it was to do it in a non-exclusionary fashion in a way for them to relate to other kids, which was very difficult in the case of my daughter's friend whose parents had to be convinced to allow her daughter to be in the classroom, which I wouldn't show the film in that classroom with that girl present unless she knew the truth about her family or she would have to be removed and not be a part of the classroom. And her mother agreed to tell the story about her own grandfather and how she was raised and who he was. And he happened to be murdering people in the very area. He could have been personally responsible for the death of our own relatives, some of them. How coincidence happens. Much harder for her, of course, than for my daughter to deal with all that. That's how it happened.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Well, I just wanted to ask about Yiddish today, where you see the place of 102:00Yiddish in the world today.

SR:I'm really hardly the person to ask. I don't have a -- that sounds like it's a very academic question. I don't think you want an academic answer, but the place of Yiddish, I mean, as somebody who knows way more than I do -- I don't even know how extensive it is in different countries and I don't even know how many -- no idea how many schools are teaching it in the English-speaking world or French world or how many European countries are doing it, especially with the wave of anti-Semitism that's happening in Eastern Europe and in Western Europe. You would know really well, I'm sure, what schools are teaching it, what the courses are, how many kids are taking it compared to ten years ago. You would know all that. I don't.

CW:Where do you see it?

SR:I don't. For me, all it is right now is a useful thing for my play that I'm writing of three generations of people and in the original language -- one of 103:00the characters is the Polish translator who was a spy for the communist government, local communist government who was this young woman who was put on as a translator, but really unabashedly was reporting back to the government about our activities. But it was really easy for her because the year before, Claude Lanzmann had been there to do "Shoah," which excoriated the Polish people, and I was doing a documentary about how these Polish people saved my parents. Well, every door was open to us. So, there wasn't anything much for her to do except that -- this is interesting -- we were given a gift by the governor of the province or the mayor or somebody at the end of our little documentary. And the gift that we were given was my father and mother were given this gift of this book of the history of Pińczów done by the University of Krakow and their doctorate thesis or whatever. So, a history of Pińczów. And my father, the night before, read, "This is unbelievable." I said, "What?" Said, "For maybe six 104:00hundred years, this town has been fifty percent Jews. For six hundred years, until October or September of 1942, until Rosh Hashanah, until the first night of Rosh Hashanah, for five, six hundred years." "Yeah?" "There are three pages on the Jews here, on the history of Pińczów, three pages. And they were these onion-smelling money lenders. Who knows what happened to them? They disappeared." I said, "I'm not going to let this stand." I said, "Really? Do you want to really cause a stink at this point?" And he said, "Absolutely. This is not going to be allowed." And he went to the governor and he said, "Have you read this fucking book?" "No." "Well, this -- look!" That got pulled. As far as I know, my father's responsible for that book not being allowed to be published anymore or had to be rewritten or whatever, 'cause he wouldn't accept it as a 105:00gift. But, boy, did they make a mistake about that book. But that's what's going on. And that was thirty years ago. And now there's a whole new wave of nationalism, right-wing nationalism all over the world. And so, where does Yiddishkayt sit there? In Israel, I think it's pretty much -- it has been for many, many, many years considered a ghetto language and it's looked down on compared to Hebrew, although modern Hebrew is, what, seventy years old? Sixty, seventy years old? It's not Babylonian Hebrew. It's not the Hebrew of the Torah. It's not the Hebrew of the Talmud, which is really the great literature in Hebrew. It's not the Aramaic, it's not Babylonian, it doesn't have the metaphors. Modern Hebrew's very young. Yiddish is a thousand years old and is a 106:00much deeper language than Hebrew because it's got nine hundred and some-odd-more years of being practiced. But, as my father said, because anti-Semitism is looked down on, has to be hidden under words like anti-Zionism or nationalism, because anti-Semitism is not the norm, publicly accepted by the governments, but it -- then you don't have to hide and push yourself away and speak your own language. Then Yiddish, which was a language of the Diaspora, Yiddish, which is a language of separation and then dispersal and a way for communities to communicate and keep their cultural, spiritual life together so that they could have hope, so that they could tell their stories, so that they could sing their 107:00songs and share their joys and suffering because they were despised, hated, pushed apart, generation after generation, robbed and despised and spit on, like many other cultures in the world that are now experiencing it -- the differences between many other cultures in the world? The Jews wrote. The language of writing and theater was crucial to the culture. And that's what separates their particular -- enforced separation by their population from other cultures, although there are similarities to some. But many other cultures, the writing wasn't as important, the written language. Certainly orally, yes, but the 108:00written culture, the theater part of it, the plays, the novels, the books, how the secular and the religious writing connected to them is unique, which is why maybe the language and Yiddish is so important to a despised and separated people. The less you're despised, the more you're integrated into your society, of course the language starts to disappear except nostalgically. And I would suspect that the plays that are being done are old and of that period and there aren't playwrights with the need to write, in Yiddish, a new play because they don't need to communicate to their community in that language in order to share 109:00their troubles and their joy. And when there isn't the need for the artists to write in that language, when there isn't a need for the newspapers to write in that language except the part of the community, which is getting less and less and older and older, that needs to read it, and when that community is specifically a right-wing Hasidic community that's going to deeply affect the kind of writing that they're even going to want to read, the language loses its soul and its reason to be. That's what I think.

CW:And what does it mean to you personally?

SR:I didn't grow up -- I grew up in English theater, not in Yiddish theater, and I don't have a nostalgia for its reemergence. I use it in my life and in my 110:00work. I don't have a personal feeling of great sorrow that the language may be -- certainly is disappearing, for the reasons I just talked about, because part of the reason it's disappearing is because things are better. Even as we see anti-Semitism in the world, it's not the same kind and it's not government-sponsored pogroms and ghettoization. That's happening to Muslim communities, where, for them, their Koran and their language is gonna be extensive-- really important to hold them together. But there's a billion of them compared to a much smaller percentage of local populations and they're fighting with each other, where there wasn't that kind of violence between Hasidic and non-Hasidic or Conservative and Orthodox Jews as there is between Sunni Muslims and Sufis and whatever kind of religious apostasy they're 111:00struggling with. I'm not bemoaning the fate of the Yiddish language because that would be saying like, I really look back on the ghetto life. On the other hand, I don't think there's anything wrong with speaking it or doing plays and remembering what that's like and getting a spirit of that. And certainly, there's extrapolations of it. Look, the great mashing together of hip-hop in American history that happens in "Hamilton" is a result of a Ebonics and a specific language that came from an enslaved people to talk about the enslavers and to talk about the history of America in such a way as to communicate to an entire generation of people in a way that was extraordinary. And that didn't 112:00happen because a particular will of Miranda to make that language culturally acceptable. It happened because those were his influences and that's what he loved and he was influenced by a wide range of things, including "West Wing," and he was influenced by a lot of, lot of things that really affected him and he told his story in such a way so effectively that it affects a lot of people. That could happen with Yiddish as well, but only if it's extrapolated by artists who need to do it to a community at large and not to a specific community that's nostalgic to hear those melodies and voices again. It's really an academic thing otherwise. And I think that language has to have a vibrant cultural and 113:00spiritual reason to be or it naturally disappears.

CW:Well, is there anything else that you wanted to be sure to include for the Yiddish Book Center?

SR:No, but you might have some questions if you see the documentary. I'd be happy to talk to you or I can self-tape something and send it to you --

CW:Okay.

SR:-- if you have other things. But take a look at that and there's also extras of my parents talking about stuff and --

CW:I look forward to seeing it, yeah.

SR:Yeah, and there's excerpts from "Avalon" and from "Liberty Heights," my mom and dad, and some great stories in there. My dad tells a great story. This is a great parable when you're talking about -- this is a great parable, when I said, 114:00"I'm just trying to identify with you. What was it like when you were being hunted? I'm just trying to understand what it was like." "I'll tell you a parable to get you to understand. There was once a farmer, plain Jewish farmer, with his wife. A poor man. And one day, the king of the country comes knocking on the door. Says, 'Hide me! You have to hide me! The revolutionaries are after me, they want to kill me. You have to hide me!' 'I don't know where to hide you.' 'I assure you, they're going to kill me!' And so, they put him -- in the olden days, they used to have, instead of a mattress, they had straw and they covered the straw with a sheet. And they put him inside the straw. Didn't take long, the revolutionaries came with their swords, with their bayonets, and they 115:00looked everywhere. 'Are you hiding the king?' 'No.' And they looked everywhere and they stuck their swords and their bayonets into the straw. But, by luck, they didn't -- they missed him. Took a little while, the revolution was crushed and the king was king again. And he said to that farmer, 'You saved my life. And whatever you want, you can have.' 'I don't know. I don't want anything. I'm glad you're alive. Maybe you should go.' He was scared. 'Well, here's my card. (laughs) Here's my card. If you ever need anything, you come to the castle, whatever you want, if it's in my power, I'll give it to you.' And his wife was bothering him about they were poor, they need money. 'Again with that?' But he couldn't sleep. He just couldn't sleep and it was bothering him for a whole year. He couldn't sleep. And so, he made his way to the castle and he said, 'I 116:00have to see the king.' Who are you? You can't see the king! Says, 'I have his card!' Okay. So, they showed the card to the king. Said, 'Oh, this is my savior! Let him in!' So, he goes in, this little farmer, and the big castle with all the dignitaries sitting on their chairs in a big room and the king is sitting on his chair. He says, 'Your Majesty, do you know me?' Said, 'Of course I know you! You saved my life! Whatever you want, you can have if it's in my power to give.' 'I don't want anything. But it has been bothering me. I can't sleep. How did it feel? How did it feel that you were hunted and then the revolutionaries came in with their swords and you were hiding in the straw? I have to know.' The king got red in the face. He stood up. He said, 'You could have had anything you 117:00wanted. Anything. And instead, you choose to embarrass me in front of all my courtiers here and the people, my people, my dignitaries? I sentence you to death.' He said, 'Your majesty!' 'Nothing will help, for to embarrass a king in a public place is the worst crime. Take him away.' He cried, he pleaded, nothing helped. He was in the jail, they are building a scaffold, and they said to the king, It's ready. He said, 'Good. Take out the farmer. My pleasure will be I'll hang him myself.' And they took the farmer out and he's begging, he's crying, and the king put the rope around his neck and he leaned in to him and he said, 'Like this I felt,' and he let him go." It was my father's way, of course, of saying, "I can't tell you how I felt." You can end with that.

CW:Perfect. Well, a sheynem dank [thank you very much].

[END OF INTERVIEW]