BARUCH COHON ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is February 8th, 2018.  I'm here in Los Angeles with Rabbi Baruch Cohon, and 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?

BARUCH COHON:  Absolutely.

CW:  Great.  So I'd like to ask first a bit about your family history.  What do you know about your grandparents' generation, or even further back than that?

BC:  Well, I have family trees that my mother, ole-hasholem [may she rest in peace], compiled on both sides, her side and my father's side.  And I call it 1:00"West meets East," because my mother's family settled first in California, then in Oregon.  Her parents were already born in this country.  And they were not Yiddish speakers.  My grandfather's mother was Sephardic.  And on the other side, there was one member of the family that had been born in Poland and spoke Yiddish, but the kids never learned it.  You know?  Well --

CW:  So how did they end up in California?

BC:  They came out in the gold rush, and of course, you know, 1849 -- the gold rush didn't last long.  So by the early '50s, they already moved to Oregon, and my mother grew up in Portland.  At the age of eighteen, she graduated from high 2:00school and went to teach in a one-room country schoolhouse in the mountains of Oregon.  Now, the kids up there never saw a city girl before, let alone not a Jewish girl.  But somehow, she got along and she managed to teach them, and then went back and she had a -- the rabbi there in Portland at the Reform congregation was Rabbi Stephen Wise, who later became very well known, but he was a young man then and he encouraged her.  She wanted to be the first female rabbi.  And so she and her brother, a year younger than herself, went to -- got on a train, went down to Los Angeles and transferred to another train, and made their way to Cincinnati to the Hebrew Union College.  And they had to go to the 3:00University of Cincinnati across the street at the same time in order to fulfill the requirements.  And my uncle -- that was Harold Reinhart -- became rabbi later in London.  And he was a rabbi there during the Second World War and during the Holocaust.  One morning, a Kindertransport arrived from Europe bearing Jewish children.  And the young fella, who was sixteen years old, I think, at the time, who was leading that group, told him that -- he told him about a warehouse in Prague where the Germans had stored Torah scrolls that they looted from synagogues all over Europe.  And then my uncle said, "We gotta --"

CW:  Just one sec.  We'll wait for the phone.  Okay.

BC:  My uncle said, "We have to do something about that."  So he managed to collect some support from Jewish people in London, and he and his wife went to Prague, and of course they took out some children, too, while they were there.  But they managed to take out all those Torah scrolls and transport them to London.  And before they got there, he himself built the racks to store them on.  Well, he had a dream that he would make these Torah scrolls available to Jewish communities anywhere that needed them.  But he had to have a soyfer, you know, a scribe to repair them because they were damaged.  The soyfrim refused to work on it for two reasons.  First of all, he said, "If we're doing all this work, our names should be on it."  (Laughs) And my uncle had made a rule, 5:00nobody's name goes on this.  This belongs to the klal-yisroel, belongs to the whole Jewish people.  Well, here they were sitting on the shelf.  Oh, the other reason, by the way, was that the secretary that was gonna work with the committee was a woman, and they wouldn't work with a woman.  So here they sat.  One day, the secretary, whom we met many years later, hears a knock on the door.  She goes there, and here is a khosid [follower of Hasidism] that had just arrived from Israel with the kapote [long coat traditionally worn by observant Jewish men], with the peyelekh [little sidelocks], and he said, "I see this is a synagogue."  She said, "Yes."  He said, "I just came from Israel and I'm looking for work.  I'm a soyfer.  Do you have any Torah scrolls that need work?"  "Do we have Torah scrolls?"  Thirty years he worked there.  And I have a document about his life.  My uncle found him a apartment to live in, and 6:00he stayed there, worked on these, and restored them.  And they became available, called the Holocaust Torah Project.  He made those scrolls available to congregations all over the world.  Some of them are here in this country, too.  And the young man who told him about all this was named Hugo Green.  He became my uncle's successor.  And he first came to Cincinnati and learned with my father, olev-asholem [may he rest in peace], who was a professor there.  And he learned with my uncle, and he became my uncle's successor in the West London Synagogue.  That was really a success story.

CW:  Did you ever hear about the rescue mission?  That must have been amazing to actually -- how they got the scrolls out of Prague.

BC:  Well, I don't know the details of it, but my uncle was involved in it, so I'm sure it was a successful mission.  Anyway, that's part of the story of my mother's family.  And then, of course, I have to tell you about -- that's the West.  Now, I'll tell you about the East.  My father was born and raised in a place they used to call Minske Gubernye [the Minsk region], which is now called Belarus.  But he lived in a village, tiny village called Lahi.  And my grandfather, olev-asholem, was a shoemaker by trade.  A farmer by necessity, because he had a lot of children to raise and needed to feed them, so the shoemaker didn't bring in enough money.  He had -- they lived in a one room 8:00peasant house, and in there all these kids slept.  At one time, fifteen of them.  And they had a -- not a stove, like a -- what am I thinking of?  You know what I'm talki-- in the middle of the room.  It was a -- it was --

CW:  Like a wood stove?

BC:  Stove and space heater.  I mean, it was all in one structure.  And in the wintertime, somebody would sleep on top of it to keep warm.  You know?  But then they had -- they slept on benches all around the room, and one corner, he had his last -- shoemaker's last.  Well, that was a part of his living, and the other part he was, like I said, a farmer by necessity, planted potatoes.  And my uncle used to talk about how he and my father picked potatoes together.  9:00Says, (speaks with Yiddish accent) "We picked potatoes and I picked on him."  (Laughs) Since he was the older son.  There were -- of those fifteen kids, there were three who died in infancy, 'cause of course there was no medical help in the village, one was killed in a pogrom, and the other eleven grew up and came to this country.  Four boys and seven sisters.  The first of the brothers to come here was my Uncle Nathan, olev-asholem, and he was already twenty years old.  He was of draft age so he had no passport, he had to sneak the border.  10:00He managed to get to a ship in Hamburg, I think, and made his way to New York.  Got off at Ellis Island and they asked him for his name.  He didn't want to give the Russian name, the Russian name was Kazhdan.  But he knew that his father who raised him -- stepfather, actually -- his brothers were cohanim [Cohens, of the lineage of Hebrew priests].  So he gave the Hebrew name, and some clerk wrote it down with two o's.  And that's why we still misspell our name.  (Laughs) Okay?  Anyway -- all the others got the same spelling as they arrived.  So anyway, my father showed some intellectual ability as a young kid, and my grandfather managed to put a few kopeks together and send him to a yeshiva, first in Berezina, which was the local, bigger local town, and 11:00eventually to Minsk.  And he went to yeshiva in Minsk until he was sixteen years old, and then his relatives -- some of them were already in the United States -- they sent him a ticket, and he came to New York.  He arrived in New York and he told his older siblings that he was gonna go to school.  And they said, School?  School, you could get in the old country.  America, you come to make money.  But he didn't listen to them, he went to school anyway.  Went to a public high school in New York and he learned English.  Learned it very well, because later on he wrote books in English about Judaism.  And he met a rabbi in Newark who recommended him to HUC in Cincinnati.  And so eventually he did 12:00go there.  He did not graduate from high school because, of course, he had support himself while he was going to school.  And either he would give Hebrew lessons or he would work for some peddler on the Lower East Side carrying stoves.  He carried wood stoves on his back to the third- and fourth-floor tenement houses, and somehow he survived, made a living.  But he had to drop out of high school last half year so he could work.  So he got to Cincinnati.  He didn't have a high school diploma, so in order to enter University of Cincinnati, he had to take an entrance exam.  And he passed.  Not only that, but he entered HUC.  He had more traditional information from the yeshiva in Minsk than some of the faculty members at HUC.  They had a different 13:00background.  So they put him to work while he was a student there tutoring other students.  And one of the students he had to tutor was this girl from Portland.  And she soon found out that they would admit her to classes, but they were not about to ordain her.  So instead of becoming a rabbi, she became a rebbetzin.  They had a marvelous relationship.  He graduated, he got his diploma and his ordination in, I guess, June of 1912.  And later that month they went to Portland and they were married there.  So that's how West met East. 

CW:  So where were you born?

BC:  I was born in Chicago.  My father was a rabbi there at one time, and 14:00then, from Chicago, he had already moved to his position in Cincinnati.  And what happened was, they had been married for several years and had no children yet, but the doctor who had been president of his congregation in Chicago came to Cincinnati and he was at their house for dinner one night, and my mother was pregnant, and she fainted.  And he said, "We have to help you.  You come to Chicago and we'll take care of you."  And so that's how I happened to be born in his hospital in Chicago.  But that's my birthplace, and within a few weeks I moved with them to Cincinnati.  And that's where I grew up.  So my first really acquaintance with Yiddish was from my father, 'cause it was his native 15:00language.  And he used to take me out for walks after dinner, and I'd ask him, you know, "Speak Yiddish to me," because the other Jewish boys in the neighborhood knew more Yiddish than I did.  So I had to catch up, you know?  So, he would tell you, "Dertseyl mir epes."  You know?  "Tell me something."  You know?  And I would try to tell it to him in Yiddish, and he'd correct me, and that's how I began to learn the language.

CW:  Can you describe the home you grew up in?

BC:  Well, the first home I remember was an apartment in Clifton, and then when things, back in -- what was it, 1929, I guess, '28 or '29 -- things were pretty 16:00good and my parents thought that their prosperity would last and they bought a house in Avondale, which became the Jewish neighborhood.  It's now a Black neighborhood, but at that time it was all -- we were on a corner, and on one street was all Jewish, and on the other street was all gentile.  (Laughs) But it was -- so I had two different groups of friends.  Anyway, it was a two-story Middle Western house, brick house, and I don't have a picture of it handy, but it was a comfortable place.

CW:  And who was in the house when you were growing up?

BC:  My parents and I.  And once in a while a relative, an aunt or an uncle, 17:00would come and stay.  We had -- my mother's brother and his family lived close by, and sometimes, if they were in between apartments, they might stay with us for a while.  We had room for guests and we were happy to have them.  And then of course, the Depression hit and people had to stay there because they had nowhere else to go.  You know?  (Laughs)

CW:  So what do you remember from the Depression?  If anything.

BC:  (Pauses) What do I remember from the Depression?  Well, one thing I think definitely grew out of the Depression was a change in the political attitude of 18:00the Jewish population.  Before that, the older immigrants, the people had been here for a longer time, were mostly of a German background and fairly prosperous, and they tended to be, you know, they tended to be conservative in their political attitude.  The newer immigrants came during World War I and thereafter, and including my father's generation came in early 1900s.  But they were poor, and so they came from countries where socialism was considered a 19:00goal, you know, to make people equal and everything.  Anyway, they were attracted to the New Deal.  The Roosevelt -- and that's where the shift in political interest came.  So from there on, and into more recent times, the Democratic Party kind of relied on the Jewish vote.  Maybe it's changing now, but anyway, that's what the Depression brought on.  And then of course, then came, of course, the -- (sighs) you know, so, like I say, I was getting into a 20:00little bit of Yiddish culture.  And --

CW:  Can I ask what --

BC:  -- mostly I learned Yiddish songs.  The first Yiddish theater play I ever saw was "The Brothers Ashkenazi," "Di brider ashkenazi," in New York when I was twelve years old.  (laughs)

CW:  Do you still remember it?  What do you remember?

BC:  Well, I really didn't understand most of the dialogue.  But it was a spectacular production.  You know?  That's what impressed me.  It was really impressive production.  And then, like I say, I had these sessions with my father, and I was into music.  Mostly into, particular into Jewish music, both 21:00cantorial and folk.  And as I grew older, I sang a lot of Yiddish songs, not only for fun but to make a few bucks.  I'd sing for the Workmen's Circle, sing for the Pioneer Women, and got acquainted with the Yiddish secular organizations.  But --

CW:  Would you hear Yiddish in your home?

BC:  Well, a little bit.  You know, they would quote Yiddish sayings, Yiddish vernacular.  But actually speaking to each other in Yiddish they didn't, because it was not my mother's language.  And I didn't have any brothers or sisters to (laughs) share it with, so that's what happened.

CW:  But you said that other kids on the street knew more -- were speaking Yiddish?

BC:  They understood it.  What happened in my generation really was that the parents would speak to the kids in Yiddish, and the kids would answer in English.  And they'd really didn't pursue that.  They didn't pursue the language.

CW:  Now, when you were --

BC:  My --

CW:  Go ahead.

BC:  My wife, on the other hand, was sent to Yiddish school, and she learned a little more than most of, you know.

CW:  Now, thinking back to when you were a kid, what was your association with Yiddish?  What did you think of it?

BC:  It was a Jewish language from the Old Country.  That's basically all I thought about it.

CW:  And what would be some of the songs, let's say the folk songs, that you knew as a kid?  Or started performing, even.

BC:  Oh, well, there were a lot of them.  But one sticks in my mind right 23:00now.  (Sings) "Vos mir zaynen, zaynen mir.  Ober yidn zaynen mir.  Vos mir tuen, tuen mir.  Ober davenen, davenen mir. [We are who we are.  We are Jews.  We do what we do.  We pray, we pray.]"  You know?  That kind of a song.  And there's a sort of philosophy to it.  You know?  Whatever we do, we're still Jewish.  And you know, say some people place a -- like, politically incorrect?  There's such a thing as religiously incorrect.  You know?  And criticize each other because you don't do this or you do something else.  And that's not what Judaism is all about.  You're Jewish whether you make mistakes or not.  Whether you fulfill all the mitzvahs [commandments] or you don't.  24:00You're still Jewish.  It's an identity.  And like I said, we don't have to agree with each other all the time, but we have to work together.

CW:  Now, going back to the home you grew up in, what was Friday night like?

BC:  Oh, we always had erev-shabes [Friday night] dinner, we sang the bentshn [blessings], and my father made kiddush.  Oh yeah.  It was traditional erev-shabes.

CW:  And can you describe a little bit more about the Jewish neighborhood in that area?

BC:  Okay.  We had half a dozen shuls within a few blocks' radius.  When I 25:00was getting ready for bar mitzvah, I went to a synagogue called Avondale Synagogue, which was on Reading Road.  I don't know if you're familiar with Cincinnati at all, but Reading Road is the main drag in Avondale.  I'd go there and went there every morning and I learned how to lay tfillin and -- you know.

CW:  What kind of a shul was it?  What did it look like?

BC:  It was a big building.  The weekday services were downstairs in the little beys-medresh [prayer house].  In the main synagogue, men and women sat separately, but they didn't have a mekhitse [partition].  It was the middle aisle was like the mekhitse.  You know?  So that's how they did that.  But 26:00then there were others that were stricter.  There was a khsidishe [Hasidic] shul right up the street from us.  There was the Washington Avenue Synagogue, which was the home base for Rabbi Eliezer Silver, olev-asholem, was the chief rabbi of Cinci-- he called himself the chief rabbi of the United States and Canada.  (laughs) I think that was a little exaggerated.  But anyway, he came to our house.  He and my father knew each other well.  And that was his synagogue.  I just came across some old notes of my mother's, some old memoirs of hers, and she wrote down one story about, one Shabbos morning, I asked her to walk me to Washington Synagogue.  So she did, and she asked me afterwards, "Why did you wanna go here and not to the Reform services, which are closer?"  I 27:00said, "I don't know.  I think it's the congregation.  Here, they all sing the prayers."  And they didn't in the other.  You know?  So that always attracted me.  And she took me to New York, and there I studied with a very fine khazn [synagogue cantor] by the name of Jacob Beimel.  Taught me all the nusakh [melodies], the nusakh-tfile [melodies to the prayers], and became a -- you know.

CW:  Had there been good khazns in Cincinnati when you were growing up?

BC:  Oh, yes.  Yes.  We had a khazns by the name of Emil Rosen.  I still sing some of the melodies I heard from him.

CW:  Can you give an example?

BC:  (Sings) "El adon al kol hama'asim./Boruch um'voroch befi kol 28:00neshama./Godlo ve'tuvo moleh oylom,/da'as u'svuno sovevim oso. [Ashkenazi Hebrew: God is the Lord of all creation./Blessed and praised by every soul./His greatness and goodness fill the universe,/knowledge and wisdom surround Him.]"  And there's the same melody for each verse.  Used to hear that every Shabbos whenever I went there.  So that was a part of it, and --

CW:  When did you decide you wanted -- or realize you liked singing?

BC:  Oh, I was a little boy.  You know, I was three.  Always liked to sing.  I don't have the voice anymore, but I used to have a fairly good voice.  And so I had my first cantorial job at the age of seventeen.  I conducted high holiday services in Pontiac, Michigan.  And I always remember, it was a small 29:00congregation.  The rabbi had been a student of my father's, and he knew me and he offered the job.  So I went there and I davened at Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur there.  And I always remember being out in the hall when the people were coming out, and this little boy sees me and he says, "There's that singing man.  Hey, singing man!"  And at seventeen, to be called a singing man -- it  felt good.  You know?  But of course, a month -- that was what, September?  Yeah, September of 1943.  And World War II was already going on.  A month later, I was in the Navy.

CW:  What was it like to be Jewish in the Navy?

BC:  Well, there was discrimination to a certain extent.  One story sticks in 30:00my mind.  I was overseas in the Aleutian Islands, and I was on a minesweeper.  And we used to -- couldn't bring any liquor on the ship, so we had to go over on the island.  So on the island, they had this big Quonset hut where they had some three-two beer -- terrible stuff -- they imported from Seattle.  Anyway, I was the only enlisted man on the ship, and there were four commissioned officers there, one of whom happened to be Jewish.  His name was Lefkowitz and he was an engineering officer.  Well, you realize, Mr. Lefkowitz came from Brooklyn, he 31:00probably had a degree from some business college in Brooklyn.  And in World War II, the Navy gave a commission to any inductee that had a commission -- that had a college degree.  And with typical Navy efficiency, they made him engineering officer on the minesweeper.  He knew about engines like I know about space travel.  But the guys that were under him in the engine room knew all about engines.  So they had very little respect for him.  Anyway, this one night, I'm over on the island drinking beer with some of the guys -- they were called the Black Gang.  They were -- of course, they were not Black.  They were white.  There was only one Black man on the ship, and he was like a servant to the officers.  But these guys were all -- they were electricians, they were motor macks.  And as we sat there drinking in the Quonset hut there, they began 32:00discussing their officer, began running him down.  And sure enough, pretty soon, you get from him to the rest of the Jews.  Well, across from me is sitting a French kid from Maine.  And on my left is sitting a Mexican from Los Angeles.  And as the conversation goes further and further, sure enough the Mexican guy says something I didn't like, and by this time, I'm nineteen years old and full of beer.  I stand up and haul off, and he said, "What's the matter?  You a Jew or something?"  I said, "You're damn right I'm Jewish."  Up jumps Frenchie the peacemaker.  And he said, "Oh, Cohon, Cohon, everybody knows that.  We have Cohons back in Maine.  They have the biggest junkyard in town."  (Laughs) And so the Mexican guy says, "That's what I mean, is you see a Jewish guy, he got a junkyard, he got a pawn shop.  He's always doing good.  33:00But you," he said, "you're just as dumb as the rest of us.  You're too dumb to be a Jew."  (Laughs) I couldn't hit him after that.  I was laughing too hard.  But it was typical, you know.  It was that kind of attitude.  I remember a boatswain's mate calling roll on one base that I was on.  He came to one name that he couldn't pronounce, and he said, "What are you?  Are you a Jew or something?"  And he says, "No, I'm a wop."  And so, you know, well -- then he comes to a name.  "John Barnes.  Oh, there's a good American name."  You know?  That was the attitude.

CW:  Do you remember any holidays during your service, you know, that you --

BC:  Oh, yeah.  Yeah, it was one Yom Kippur I was on board, and we went out to 34:00sea, and there was no way I could go to any services because I was at sea.  But I didn't eat that day, and I went out on deck and I said a prayer, and that was all I could do.

CW:  Did you have a favorite yontev [holiday] growing up?

BC:  Oh, yeah.  Purim.  (Laughs) Got it coming up again, don't we?

CW:  Yeah.  Why'd you like that?

BC:  Well, I would chant the Megillah [The Book of Esther] -- as a matter of fact, the students from HUC used to come to our house erev [eve of] Purim, and we'd read the Megillah, and as I was learning how to do that they let me read a 35:00chapter.  Yeah, I really enjoyed that.  We had, of course, hamantaschen and all the good stuff for Purim.

CW:  And then how did you -- how would you have learned the Yiddish folk songs that you knew?

BC:  Well, I had -- I had some exposure to it on records.  And I learned music -- I took piano lessons, I took violin lessons.  And so I could learn it from printed music, too.  But the style, of course, you learn from the records.  We didn't have much in the way of Yiddish performances in those days, but I could listen to, you know, Yosele Rosenblatt and records like that.  Really good -- and learned the different dialects, you know, they were singing.  It would be 36:00litvak [Lithuanian Yiddish], would be galitsyaner [Galician Yiddish].  And of course, in my family, galitsyaner was (makes thumbs down) like this.  (Laughs) But like I say, "Vos mir zaynen, zaynen mir, ober yidn zaynen mir."  They're all, all part of the same tradition.

CW:  And did a Yiddish theater ever come to Cincinnati when you were growing up?

BC:  I don't remember any.  That doesn't mean it wasn't there, but I frankly don't remember any Yiddish theater there.

CW:  And now what -- you mentioned before you would do performances for different Jewish organizations.  What were the organizations your family was involved in, and what were the other ones that you would perform for?

BC:  Hm. 

CW:  Like, were you in a youth group or anything like that?

BC:  Pardon?

CW:  Were you in a youth group, or anything like that?

BC:  No.  Trying to remember if there were any organizations that involved in my family.  I think not.  A lot of the performing like that, that I did for Yiddish secular organizations were later, and some of them were out here.  I learned my Yiddish songs as a kid, but -- and I added to them as time went on.  (clears throat) Excuse me.  My -- I'll tell you, my proficiency in the language 38:00improved a lot after I got married.  My wife came, as I told you, from a Yiddish-speaking family.  She went to yidishe shule [secular Yiddish school] when she was a little girl, and maybe she doesn't remember a whole lot of it now but she had that background.  And her parents remained active.  Her mother was some kind of an officer in one of the -- Pioneer Women.  Things like that.  And so I would go and do a little, few songs for one of their meetings.  Because they always had, besides food, they'd have a little entertainment at every meeting.  And so that's what -- did a lot of it there.  I'll tell you 39:00something.  What I was going to say the -- oh, in terms of Yiddish theater, the Yiddish theater star that I knew best was Leo Fuchs.  And I met him on the set of a picture called -- Gene Wilder --

CW:  "The Frisco Kid"?

BC:  The picture was called "The Frisco Kid."  Gene Wilder was the star.  And my job was as a technical advisor.  My job was to teach Gene all the davening that he had to do in that picture.  And I soon found out that he, of course, he was Jewish.  But he probably didn't enter a shul since his own bar mitzvah, so he didn't remember anything.  So I had to supplement what he didn't remember.  40:00And he -- later on, about maybe thirty years later, he was quoted in a book called "The Stars of David."  I don't know if you ever saw it.  Interviews with all the Jewish film stars.  And he mentioned the technical advisors that he had on that picture, including which two rabbis that I worked with at the temple where the producer was a member, and the cantor, which was me.  He said, "The cantor was the best one because he gave me tapes."  And I did that, and he used them very well.  He was a good study, and one time he was in a scene where he was supposed to be -- still in the Old Country -- he was supposed to be skating on a frozen pond.  And the script called for him to sing something, you know, some folk song or something.  And so the director, who was not Jewish, 41:00said, "Well" -- turns to me -- he said, "Maybe you could give him something."  Gene said, "Wait a minute.  I remember a tune."  Says, "I don't remember the words, but -- (singing) "Da dee da da da da da da dun, da dee da da de dun."  I said, "Gene, you know what you're singing?"  He said no.  I said, that's your haftorah."  And that's when he got tears in his eyes.  It was important to him.  You know?  So the director asked me to write him a tune.  And so you know, it was really a fascinating experience to work on that picture, because not only did I get acquainted with Gene and appreciate his personality, he was -- you know, he made people roar with laughter in his performances, but in 42:00person he was really a quiet guy.  He was shy.  And he'd get visits on the set from his best friend, Mel Brooks, who was just the opposite.  Right?  There was a sketch, watching these two.  You know?  But anyway, the --

CW:  And Leo Fuchs was also on that picture?

BC:  He was -- Leo Fuchs was cast as the rosh-yeshive [head of yeshiva] of the school in Poland where this -- Avram, the part that Gene played -- was at the bottom of the class in the rabbinical program.  And that's why they selected him to go to this distant place.  San Francisco, they didn't know where that was.  (Laughs) Anyway, I got acquainted with Leo, and --

CW:  What was he like?

BC:  Hm?

CW:  What was he like, personally?

BC:  He was great.  He settled in Los Angeles at that time, and we became 43:00friends for the next eight years.  Used to see each other every once in a while.  He was really a mensch.  And he did a fine performance in the picture, and he was always cordial and constructive in his approach to other people and to life in general.  I had the honor of officiating his funeral.  But --

CW:  And you had invited him to your shul, I think, to do something?  A chicken --

BC:  Oh --

CW:  -- number.

BC:  -- I invited Gene Wilder.

CW:  Oh, Gene Wilder?

BC:  Yeah.

CW:  Oh, okay.

BC:  Yeah.

CW:  Can you tell me about that?

BC:  Oh, well, what did he do there?  Hm.  I didn't write that down, did I?  No.

CW:  That's okay.

BC:  Forgive my failing memory, but --

CW:  Oh, you're doing great.  Don't worry.

BC:  No, he did something at our shul.  I was at Temple Emanuel Beverly Hills then and had him come in.  And -- I'm sorry, I can't --

CW:  That's okay.

BC:  -- can't remember the details on that.

CW:  There's another person that you knew, Jack Bernardi.

BC:  Oh, yes.  Of course.

CW:  So who's that?

BC:  Yes.

CW:  Can I grab those papers?  Just 'cause we're hearing them a little bit.

BC:  I'm sorry.

CW:  No.  No worries.

BC:  Yeah.  Yes.  Well, of course, Herschel Bernardi was the well-known one in the family.  And Jack was his brother who was always kind of played second 45:00fiddle.  And he was a fine fellow.  You know, he didn't become a great star of any kind, but yeah, we had a few good spots together.

CW:  And their father was also an actor, right?

BC:  Mhm.

CW:  Berel?

BC:  Berel Bernardi.  Right.  Yeah, I didn't know him.

CW:  Yeah.  Yeah.  But was he in the Yiddish theater?

BC:  Yeah.

CW:  Yeah.  Great. 

BC:  What I noted down there, too, is that both my wife and I worked here at the Westside Jewish Community Center for several years, and a lot of Yiddish speakers there, including this man [Shmukler?].  I don't remember his first name, but he was a Yiddish actor and he used to direct plays in Yiddish at Westside Center.  And then he had a daughter whose name we don't recall at all, 46:00but she was a --- she became a star of Yiddish theater.  Can't give you her name.  But so these were people that we knew years and years ago.  Also, there was a couple that we knew there who had a Yiddish radio program here in town for a long time.  And also a famous guy, Maurice Schwartz, came to LA and he put together a -- he assembled a cast for a Yiddish production at Westside Center.  My wife tried out for it, and then she was offered a part but on condition that she had to lose weight, and she already had four children and a full-time job and she turned it down.  But Schwartz was active here in those days.

CW:  So have there -- I did want to ask you one thing about actually khazones [Jewish liturgical music].  Is there a khazn that for you is kind of like a model, your favorite khazn?

BC:  Good question.  Most of the top khazonim, the most famous khazonim that we have had were tenors.  And being a baritone, I couldn't compete.  (Laughs) You know?  But I think, of course, Yosele Rosenblatt is a -- everybody recognizes him as one of the top.  Mordechai Hershman.  These are all, you know, from the old days.  We do have some khazonim still active who I think can 48:00compare in quality.  Abe Mizrahi is one.  And you have some really good talent in the field.  And it's a field that is not disappearing, it's growing.  'Course, now it's changed because now they have female khazonot, which is a different style altogether.  It has to be.  But in Schenectady, my son-in-law just put on a concert with a student cantor, a young man who is also a tenor but very accomplished, apparently.  I didn't hear him, but apparently it was a very successful concert.  And so talent is growing.

CW:  And can you explain, for people who aren't familiar with khazones, what 49:00makes a good khazn?

BC:  That depends whose -- who are you asking?  You know?  It's interesting.  Anywhere -- now they have cantorial schools.  You know?  Takes five years, then you get a degree and -- I had no such experience.  I learned from khazonim as a kid, and then anyplace I ever went for a job, nobody asked me if I graduated from kindergarten.  You know, said, Get up there and daven.  Either you can do it, or you can't.  Right?  But those people, the members who were passing on hiring a khazn, they knew what to expect.  They knew if he was pronouncing the Hebrew properly, they knew the nusach, you know, the musical tradition, how each section of the service should sound, and was he doing it 50:00right.  They don't have those people today.  We just don't have them.  So the idea of a school that can give you a recommendation.  You know, This man knows what he's doing.  Or, This girl knows what she's doing.  But didn't need that in those days.  Now, it is necessary because you don't have the educated public that was prevalent then. 

CW:  And who did you study with?

BC:  I studied with really the father of all Jewish musicology, Abraham Zvi Idelsohn.  My father, olev-asholem, got acquainted with him in -- I don't know 51:00if it was Chicago or maybe in New York.  But he assembled a collection.  He went out to collect Jewish music from all over the world.  And an interesting biography on Idelsohn is that -- and I wrote him up for the Cantors Assembly one time -- as a young boy in Riga, he was a meshoyrer [choirboy in a synagogue].  You know, he singing with the local khazn.  And one day, his mother sent him to the market to buy a fish for Shabbos.  So he goes to the market and he buys the fish, and the fishmonger wraps it up in some kind of paper that has printing on it.  Never saw that kind of printing before.  And he asked people, "What is this?"  Until somebody told him, "That's music writing."  Oh boy.  "Music can be written down!"  He decided to study music.  So he went to a -- well, got 52:00himself to a conservatory in Germany and studied music there.  He went to Austria, and that's where he met his wife, in Vienna.  And then he got to South Africa, where some relatives were, and he officiated as a khazn there.  And then he got this dream to collect Jewish traditional music from different parts of the world.  He went to Jerusalem, which was really a perfect place for him because there were little congregations from all different places.  From Europe, from Asia, from Africa.  You know, all over the world.  And he put out -- eventually, he was able to put out a ten-volume thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental melodies.  And he eventually found his way to the United States as his 53:00thesaurus was getting finished, first in German and then translated to English.  I have the whole setup there with English copy.  And here you have a volume from Yemenites, a volume from Hasidim, a volume from Persia, from -- all different areas.  And so anyway, my father was impressed with this man.  He has a fine cantorial voice and good -- certainly nobody knows more about Jewish music than this guy.  So he brought him to Cincinnati to teach at HUC, teach 54:00Jewish music and liturgy.  And of course, they remained good friends.  And here's this man who was very possessive, very jealous of his time.  But he was willing to teach his friend's five-year-old son.  And that's where I started to learn.  He was the first teacher of music of any kind.  I learned how to read notes, I learned how to read trop [system of musical accents used in chanting the Torah].  And so he was my first teacher, and he eventually -- he went with his family, he got many strokes.  He was very -- he died young, I think.  Fifty-eight years old.  But he went to -- I think he went back to South 55:00Africa.  That was the end of his life.  But after him, I told you about Jacob Beimel, the khazn I studied with in New York.  Those two were my main teachers of khazones.

CW:  And where -- what do you think is the place of, you know, traditional khazones now?

BC:  It's shrinking.  Like I said, there is a growing supply of cantorial talent, but there's not a growing market for it, as far as I can see.  I'm just finishing a book, kind of an autobiography called, "Making Sense of My Century."  And maybe you'll see it.  My son-in-law is putting it out for me.  56:00And this is one of the appendices that I put in about cantorial work.

CW:  So you said the demand is shrinking.  Why do you think that is, for traditional khazones?

BC:  I think we have two problems.  One is ignorance, and one is apathy.  Right?  And a story goes that one rabbi asked a member of his congregation, says, "What do you think we should do about ignorance and apathy?"  The guy says, "I don't know and I don't care."  (laughs) Whether that's true or not, it could be.

CW:  So what do you mean when you say ignorance and apathy?

BC:  Well, like I mentioned before, in the old days, they would audition a 57:00khazn, let him daven one service.  If he says the Hebrew correctly, and if he has the right nusach, and he sounds good, fine.  And they had the knowledge to judge that.  People don't have that kind of knowledge today.  And of course, we have talented composers, but they don't necessarily have the background of a Jewish sound.  And it comes out -- it was true a long time ago, also, but only certain synagogues would use that kind of music.  You know, Lewandowski was a very talented composer, but his "Hallelujah," sounds like it's a military 58:00march.  (Laughs) Anyway --

CW:  And what about the apathy part?

BC:  The apathy part is that you have a synagogue set up, and people usually go to it rarely.  A lot of the membership of liberal congregations, no matter what movement they describe, they go to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and very little else.  And when you enter an Orthodox synagogue, like I go here to Chabad most of the time because I enjoy it there, everybody's very active, it's a very welcoming congregation.  But they don't employ a professional khazn except for 59:00the high holidays.  The rest of the time, the members daven and they don't know what they're doing. 

CW:  Well, I want to give you back this notes, make sure we get all the stories --

BC:  Sure.

CW:  -- you wanted to tell in.

BC:  All right.  I mentioned Maurice Schwartz and his tryouts.  My wife knew Leyb Kadison pretty well because he was at a resort that the Workmen's Circle-owned, and my in-laws were guests there.  They were -- and my wife, as a kid, was a guest.  So she -- it was in the Bear Mountains, she said.  [BREAK IN RECORDING] Oh yeah, she acted in a Yiddish show that Leyb Kadison put on.  60:00And so that was our other connection with Yiddish theater.  Yeah.  By the way, you might wanna see this.

CW:  Oh, yeah.

BC:  (Holds up photograph) This was on the set of "The Frisco Kid."  My son, Jonathan, shot the picture. (laughs) 1979.

CW:  And can you just explain, for the young people, who those people are in the photo?

BC:  Okay.  This, of course, is Gene Wilder, and this is myself.  And we were going over davening, the prayers that he had to say in the script.  Yeah, he was very professional, you know.  He knew what he was doing and he did it very well.

CW:  And I want to ask you a similar question that I did about khazones about Yiddish.  What do you -- from your perspective, what is the place of Yiddish nowadays?

BC:  Oh.  I think it's different than it was in my childhood.  You know, in the old days, a lot of young people looked down on Yiddish.  That was from the Lower East Side, don't to take that up to Uptown.  But it's a different attitude today, and the Yiddish Book Center has a lot to do with that change of attitude and making it a legitimate field of study.  And now the fact that there is such an organization and that people are interested in it, both Jewish and not Jewish, it becomes a language that is on a par with other world 62:00languages.  It has a literature and it has theater, it has all the attributes of a legitimate field of expression.  So I think it's changed, attitude, for the better.

CW:  And do you have a favorite Yiddish song?

BC:  (Laughs) I like them all.  (Laughs)

CW:  Is there any one that you might wanna share with us?

BC:  Christa, I appreciate the invitation, but my voice isn't up to it.

CW:  Okay, that's fine.  (Laughs) Well, is there anything else that you wanted to include, either about stories from your life or from your work as a khazn or 63:00with Yiddish theater that you want to get into this interview?

BC:  I think we covered everything, just about everything I can come up with in that connection.

CW:  Okay.

BC:  You know, khazones is a lifelong occupation of mine, and you know, it's -- I'll call you tonight, about two o'clock in the morning.  (laughs)

CW:  Okay, sounds great.  And is this something that you wanted to read, or just for reminder.

BC:  You can take that with you --

CW:  Okay.

BC:  -- if you'd like.

CW:  Okay.  Great.  And this --

BC: Yeah, this --

CW:  -- what is this?

BC:  Yeah, this was published in the "Jewish News," Phil Blazer's paper, after Gene passed away.  And if you wanna use it, you're welcome to.

CW:  Great.  Okay.  Well, a hartsikn dank -- thank you very much.

BC:  My pleasure.  Thank you for coming.  Consider it an honor.

CW:  Yeah.  An honor for me.  Great.

[END OF INTERVIEW]