YVETTE (CHAVE) MARRIN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is April 11th, 2018. I am here in the Bronx, in New York, with Yvette Marrin, 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?

YVETTE (CHAVE) MARRIN:Absolutely.

CW:Great. So, I wanted to start with a question just to give an introduction. If you were meeting someone who had never heard of your parents and someone said, well, Who were your parents, how would you introduce them? How would you explain who they were?

YM:They were writers. My mother was a romantic poet, wrote many books, expressed 1:00herself poetically all the time. My pa, Aaron Rappaport -- makes me sad to think of him. I miss him a lot. And he came from Europe, many, many years ago, around 1912. He was -- sixth grader when he came, and before he knew it, he finished high school and he was off to the First World War and hardly spoke any English. I was surprised he would even manage to function in that environment where everything was quick and explained so rapidly using the English language. But he was proud that he was a soldier and he was proud that he was a writer and he was proud of being in America. My mother came to America with many heartbreaking 2:00moments that I think of today, but then with hope and love for the opportunity to be herself, to be a writer, to be able to join with other writers and fulfill her destiny, so to speak. She always felt that this was what she was meant to be. It's almost -- in contrasting the two parents, I would say my mother is almost -- we can kind of compare the process to being a Mozart who, at three years old, was able to play music. My mother was always able to write poems. She never knew a time when she couldn't write a poem. They were just born. Every day, when she got up from the bed, her poetry poured out of her. And that's the 3:00way it was for most of her life.

CW:Can you just say her name, for the record?

YM:Yes. My mother was born Malka Leopold and shortened it to a pen name, Lee, Malka Lee. Never wanted to be called Malkele or Molly or any of that. She was Malka. (laughs) And always kept her name the way her mother called.

CW:So, where was she born?

YM:My mother was born in a small town in Poland called Monastyryska. Today it's found in the Ukraine, 'cause it was close to the Austrian border. So, it was always changing its national identity. And her parents came from a khsidishe [Hasidic] background. Looking at my mother in America, she wasn't Orthodox. She 4:00celebrated holidays but she wasn't -- keep kosher. She just was an American in that regard. But in Europe, they were a khsidishe family and, in fact, her parents were introduced by a matchmaker and there's a whole story around that. But the fact was that that's her background. And she always identified with that. She was the eldest of maybe five children. She was always writing, and that became a frustration in her life because her father did not approve of poems, especially women writing them, or even a young girl wasting her time that way. There were better things that she could do. The fact is that, in telling a little bit of that story, because it was pivotal in her life, she --

CW:Sorry, do you know which Hasidic rebbe they followed?

YM:My mother never told me. I wish I knew. In regard to all of that, that was like a lost piece to me because all I knew -- that she came from a khsidishe background. She never explained it. Maybe the family had feelings about certain observances. But she knew all the holidays, she knew the prayers. But yet she didn't talk about them and never sought to be open about expressing herself about that. And I always wondered about that, because later in life, somebody who was doing a PhD thesis on my mother said to me, when she interviewed me and my brother, "What siddur does your mother keep by her bed?" And my brother and I looked at each other and said, Siddur? Why would she have a prayer book by her 6:00bed? And we laughed. And the woman looked at us as if -- "What do you mean?" she said. "Her poetry is so religious -- focused. She's spiritual. She's expressing herself as if she is very deeply religious." And I thought about that later and I said, "She had a religious neshome [soul]." The soul was Yiddish, the soul was religious, the soul -- but what was it observing about? She never talked about that. And for her, the thing she most worried about was her own mother. She didn't take it to a spiritual level in her daily life. But in her poetic life, it was imbued with that to the point where -- but she never went to synagogue 7:00and she never expressed herself in a formal religious way, which to me is kind of strange because I thought, When you are Jewish, you go to shul. Why doesn't she go to shul? (laughs) And my father -- my grandfather was very, very Orthodox and very much imbued with the Torah. And, in fact, he had a Torah in his living room in his house in Ulster County on Rock Hill. And sometimes, I'd look at my zeyde [grandfather] praying and I thought, Now that is what it means to be Jewish. He'd stand by the window with his Torah open, he would read by himself if nobody was around, and the light would be streaming through the window, shining on my grandfather, shining on the Torah, and I thought that was the most 8:00magnificent thing I had ever seen. But nobody would talk to me about it. Nobody told me what was in the Torah, nobody told me what it means to express yourself in a more formal religious environment. Yiddish was being Jewish. Yiddish was going to shul [secular Yiddish school] --- shul, not synagogue. School! (laughs) You go to school and you learn the alef-beys [Hebrew alphabet] and you learn how to read Yiddish and then you sing Yiddish songs and then you go to hekhere korsn [advanced classes] and then you go through the whole stream. I mean, I went through basic shul, regular shul, and hekhere korsn, which is equivalent to college. But at that point, I said to myself, But where is shul? And when I was little and I'd say to my mother, "Ma, aren't you gonna go? It's Rosh Hashanah. 9:00Don't you go to shul?" She said, "No." I said, "Well, I'm going," and I'd walk down the block. Didn't matter I was little. They let me go. And I'd stand -- they didn't know that I didn't belong to somebody in the shul, so I was able to go through the door and I'd watch them pray. But nobody explained the book. Nobody did that! And I felt so sad that my zeyde loved this. Why don't they? And that perturbed me for many years, until I decided I better formally join a shul myself, which I did. (laughs) And I'm still affiliated. But the fact is that, back to my mother in Europe, I don't know.

CW:What do you know about her -- about your grandparents on that side or that family?

YM:What I know was my mother described her mother as a very loving person who 10:00took care of her. But she was the oldest kid. So, when the next one came -- and she describes this in her autobiography, "Durkh kindershe oygn [Through a child's eyes]" -- she was kind of jealous. And so, it was a difficult time of adjustment for her to be able to accept other siblings. Each one in turn took a little other piece of her mama away from her. She was very, very connected to this mother, very dependent on her for one reason or another. Her father seemed a lot more distant. He was very official, he did his work as -- but you know what? To this day, I do not know what he actually did from an economic perspective. Mama, zeyde, whatever -- ma knew. What is it? My mother hardly talked about it. If she could not speak through her books, it was not really 11:00said. However, the story of her mother coming to her rescue when she most needed her as a young adult always remained as a peripheral -- not a peripheral, but a pivotal point in her life. It was a very life-changing event. She had gone into the area where they ate and they were wanting to put some pot on the stove, it was a wood-burning stove, and it wasn't catching fire. So, her mother opened up the door and noticed that there were many papers inside this stove, this wood-burning stove. And my mother realized what had happened: her notebooks where she wrote her poems were in that oven burning. And my grandmother said to her -- and my mother, this story she always told. This was a story that was important to her. She turned to her father and, "Chaim, what are you doing? How 12:00did this get in here?" "Girls, women do not write. I am throwing these away. They have to be burned." And she admonished him over and over again, this mother of hers, and said, "Malshele darf shraybn [Little Malka needs to write]. Don't burn her books, her notebooks." So, she pulled them out as rapidly as she could, the mother, and rescued as much as she could, considering they had started to burn. (laughs) And my mother was weeping, and she thanked her mother. And she said later her father was embarrassed that he had done that, because he saw how much pain he caused not only his daughter but his wife. And she said to him, "Malshele darf shraybn. Zi iz a shraybern. [Little Malka needs to write. She is 13:00a writer.]" You couldn't take that away from her. Could you take away the harpsichord from Mozart? You couldn't take away the books, her notebooks. And in fact, it was kind of interesting because when she was on the boat going to America -- oh, I skipped over this story, I have to tell you that part. A ticket arrived in the mail, and it was a very important ticket because tante Dvoshe in America had sent it for Chaim. He would come and then later he could bring the rest of the family. And this is a time of immigration for Jews. That was very critical because things were heating up in Poland. It was a difficult life. It was impossible to do all the things that they had a right to do, the shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish commmunity] life. Well, they were -- Monastyryska was a town more than a shtetl. But nevertheless, their relatives were in shtetls, and they felt the constriction of life the government in Poland 14:00was placing on people. And it was getting hard to make a living if you were Jewish, so many Jews came to America as a result of that whole cycle. And one of the things that I never understand is, did they ask tante Dvoshe for this ticket or was it arriving because tante Dvoshe thought that's a way out for them? And all I know is the conversation that I was told was that there was this big debate that was going on behind my mother. My mother didn't ask for it; it was just going on. And the debate was, should Chaim really have the ticket? "Because," said her mother, "Malkhe needs to have the ability to write. She 15:00needs to have the ability to be able to express herself as a young woman. She's a flower, she's growing, she needs to have the freedom to be herself." And I'm imagining the scene, the mother and the daughter, talking about this. And knowing my mother, she probably turned red and almost was holding her breath as she was sitting there, literally with bated breath, not believing what she was hearing, that the mother would deny the father the ticket so she could go to America and write. There was great joy in her heart when she realized that mama was serious and that mama really cared about her, her sweet oldest child. She was letting her go so she could be herself. My mother never forgot that 16:00experience. It was a very important experience in her life, as was even the ride across the Atlantic, which she describes in "Durkh kindershe oygn." And she was on a boat that -- they were all in steerage and there's many stories. But the story that applies to her writing was she often used to go on the top deck and sit against the railing of the boat and she'd pull out her notebook and what else was she doing? She was writing poems. And she was sitting there writing and listening to the conversations of the first-class people. And nobody chased her out; they let her sit up there. And she began to realize that there was a lot of concern that when you get to the American shore, if you have something about you that could be denied, maybe you were sick or there was another matter that was 17:00subversive, they would send you back. So, she began to shred her notebook because she was afraid that these poems would be blocked and she would have to go home. And a man on the boat, an older gentleman, was watching her do this and came over to her and said, "What are you doing? Are you feeding your poems to the fish?" (laughs) And he talked her out of doing that. He said, "No, they're not gonna lock you out. You will be able to go into New York. They will accept you there. Whatever poems you have, they're not subversive. They're poems!" But, of course, a woman was writing, so maybe that was subversive. That was sufficient. (laughs) But not to this guy! And my mother believed him because she desperately wanted to believe that. And she continued writing until they reached 18:00New York and she arrived with at least most of her notebooks intact. (laughter) It was a very special time for her. And when she got off the boat, one of her cousins, her cousin Chana, greeted her -- among some others -- and she was going to stay at an aunt's house. And gradually, her cousin Chana came and said, "I want you to meet some writers. And I'm going to take you to a very special club in New York City, Second Avenue club. That's a place where all the writers come together." And so, she went and she was a big hit 'cause she was cute -- she was seventeen. (laughs) Seventeen-year-old young lady from Europe who actually was pretty good-looking and, to top that, she wrote poems. I don't know -- I'm not 19:00entirely clear how much of them were German and how much of them were Yiddish. That is to be debated, I think. But certainly enough that they understood what she was doing, and they loved her poems. And, importantly, there was a group of guys who kind of checked her out (laughs) and said, Hey, this is a young lady we'd like to know better for more than one reason. (laughs) Among those people was my father. And he was quiet. He was a quiet type. And my pa spoke Yiddish and he spoke Russian. He didn't speak German. So, my mother got her Yiddish better, I guess, talking. And there's some interesting stories that they tell 20:00together about it. But I was mostly not aware of those except through her autobiography, which was very interesting to me -- that she could talk through her poems, but interacting directly with her family about that inner life that was so active and so vivid was not shared. She'd get up in the morning -- and I'll go back to the other story in a minute but I'm following this trail -- she said as she's getting up, "Ikh hob a lid [I have a poem]!" (laughs) I'm laughing because that's what she did. And what did that mean? Mama had to go to her desk and write it down. Then we could get breakfast. (laughs) And I think to myself, Mame hot a lid? Vos far a lid iz dos? [Mom has a poem? What kind of poem is it?] (laughs) What's a poem? I didn't know. And she never really explained it -- 21:00except showed it. And it's funny 'cause I was looking at one of her books the other day and the book was published in 1945. I was only -- I was eight years old at the time. And I don't know if the ondenk [dedication], the book's flyleaf has a little note from her to me saying things. And I'm saying, Did she give it to me then or did she give it to me later? There was no date. But it was the kind of thing where she said on there -- and she'd say, "Khavelen," so, I'm figuring I was younger because when I was older, I was Chave to her. But younger, Chavele, that's me. In fact, my family still calls me Chavy. But that's kind of the adaptation. (laughs) So, she said to me in this flyleaf, she said, "Khavelen, these poems are something that I want you to -- I hope when you are 22:00older, you will follow in my footsteps," essentially, she said. "I hope," she added, "Ikh hof." (laughs) And then she said, "And when you read the poems, you will remember me." And she just signed it, "Di mame [Your mother]." So, I'm thinking I was younger, otherwise it would have been formal, Malka Lee, which she did when we were older. We got a formal dedication, Malka Lee. But not this one. This was from di mame. The mama said, "If you read about me, you'll remember." I mean, "Read the poems." Not just "about me," but "read the poems; you'll remember." And I stopped short at that because you know what? At this age in my life, I'm eighty-one years old, I've said to myself, How come I just read 23:00it today? (laughs) Why did she read the dedication? So, at least I would understand some of the meaning behind it when I was smaller? But I remember getting gifts of books from other writers. On my tenth birthday, did I need a book of essays from somebody? (laughs) But those are the kinds of presents they gave to children. They thought this was the way -- children could understand whatever they were saying. Sure. (laughs)

CW:I want to just go back a little bit and clarify -- I mean, I know some of it's in her autobiography, but I'm wondering -- you said there's a story about the shidekh [arranged marriage] between your grandparents on that side? Can you tell that story?

YM:It's such a moving story. It truly is. My mother used to talk about that a bit as well. The day that she was going to meet the khosn [bridegroom], she was 24:00taken by her parents to this household and she was asked to wait and maybe they were gonna peek at each other and say hello and so forth. And then, she looked at him, but when she got back home, she didn't remember what he looked like. She was very, very overwhelmed, I guess, by this encounter. This was going to be her husband. This is her khosn. And yet, what did he look like? And she began to weep. And her mother tried to console her, but I guess zeyde Chaim was the boss of the household generally, except when mama gave her push that this is not gonna be so. Most of the time, she let him. He was in charge. And he came in and 25:00she said to him, "Look, she's very upset. What's happening?" And he sat down and he tried to be as gentle as he could with her because this was an important encounter and she was a young woman. They were married pretty early in those days. And my mother never told me exactly the age, but very early. And she explained to him, "Ikh hob fargesn di punim far mayn khosn -- I don't remember my khosn's face! How can I marry somebody I don't know?" So, they made up a thing where the sister of the khosn would (laughs) invite her so she'd be -- come to the household as a guest of the household. And somehow, she would then get a better look at him, which she did. And she decided, Okay, this is all right. I'll accept that. But interestingly enough, I have to say, in remembrances about grandparents -- in this case, great-grandparents -- it was an 26:00accepted tradition so you didn't question much. She does include pictures of her grandparents in her autobiography. But I don't know anything about them. One was named Moishe and another one -- I don't even rem-- somehow, they're not part of my consciousness because they were there as part of history, whatever that means. For my mother, however, the interaction between her parents was something that she always felt important to recognize. But when she came to America, I only had very brief glimpses of this bobe-zeyde [grandparents], not too much 27:00beyond what my mother explained. And what do I mean by brief blintzes -- (laughter) not blintzes, glances, glimpses. I say this 'cause it is -- it's all fartshadet, it's all a mix-up in your brain. Where does one parent connect to the next generation back and how does it all fit together? And all I could get out of my mother -- she'd point to the wall and there was this -- my grandmother, as many women in Poland, were very good at handcrafts. They were good at crocheting, they were good at -- she didn't do embroidery, but she did also -- what do you call it? The thing with the yarn? Weaving. Well, anyway, you make pillows and stuff like that. And when my mother married my father, my grandmother sent to America this round piece of tapestry, I guess, that was 28:00woven by her, of a couple, a man and a wife she had dedicated it to. And my mother called it "Dos iz di libe [This is love]." (laughs) "Vos iz dos, a libe [What is this, love]?" "Yes." And I said, "Okay. That came from bobe [grandmother]?" "Yes. bobe sent it for me when pa and she got married." I mean, she's talking now. "And is there anything else, ma? What else did bobe send? What else did she send you with?" She says, Well, when she came to America, she sewed for her a sailor outfit. I mean, she's going sailing, right, (UNCLEAR). (laughs) So, that's how she traveled, her fancy -- and her mother made it for her. And when she got to America, to the tante's [aunt] house, the tante looked at it and ripped it and said, "Vos iz dos yuropeyen kleyder [What is this European clothing]? You are in America now! You don't wear this kind of stuff!" 29:00And she was very insulted by that, but she tried a little bit. But she always had this exotic look about her when she was young because she had long hair and she'd weave it around in different ways and she was kind of flirty, I have to admit. (laughs) She knew how to attract people to come and talk to her. She had a very outgoing personality and was very much liked because she was such a welcoming person. And so, here, I'm looking at this libe, I'm looking at my father, and I'm looking at my mother, and my father's a rather quiet, stern type. He was. Didn't really express himself much emotionally, though every once in a while, he'd lean over and pat my head, "Mayn tekhterl [My little daughter]," that kind of stuff. And I knew he and I had a connection. But he didn't have too much of a connection to people at large, except when he was 30:00describing his essays. So, here's this libe thing that comes from Europe at some point, obviously, prior to me. I was born later, after the Depression. But this was 19-- my mother and father got married 1921, '22. Maybe '22, 'cause my brother was born '24. So, around 1922. My mother never even talked -- they didn't celebrate anniversaries. Vos iz dos [What do you mean]? You have a picture -- a libe -- and you don't celebrate anniversaries. But she knew her date. They were married on June fourth. "Okay, that's great, mama. (laughs) I'm glad to know that." I didn't even believe that her birthday was July fourth, but that's the date she always used to use. Somehow, I think, that July fourth was a special date and that's the one she picked for her birthday. I do not know what her real birthday was and will never know, because who had birth certificates? 31:00But so, there was this thing, the libe. So, what came next from bobe? I opened her drawer one day because my mother had very messy drawers. She was very disorganized as a housekeeper. She was busy writing, and who has time? So, my job was clean the closets and fix her drawers and make sure she's organized. She always remembered to do the wash 'cause she was very clean. But she didn't have time for ordinary, worldly things. That was not where her order was and I couldn't stand it, so -- especially in the kitchen. My God, what a mess. So, (laughs) anyway, we figured it out. It was good for a week, then it started up again. So, I open up a drawer and I'm looking underneath it and I see all the way shoved in the back -- why shoved in the back is an interesting thing to me. 32:00I pulled out the two things that I have from my grandmother. I have them framed in my bedroom because I have something, one thing -- that's all I have from my grandmother. And she had woven these -- crocheted it for my baby carriage. It was like a pillow cover and a cover for over the blanket. So, it was a beautiful, decorated carriage. And I looked at it and there were little bells and maybe stylized things that Polish ladies like to put in their crochet work. But this was for me. And why was it in the drawer, shoved away underneath everything else that you have in that drawer? "Hey, ma, what is this? Where is this? Why didn't you ever show this to me?" I was maybe a teenager when I found them, 'cause I never used to go all the way in the back of the drawers. But 33:00then, it got really messy so I had to clean, and there it was. And I looked at it and I said, "Mama, what is this?" I think at that point, I started calling my mother "ima [Hebrew: mother]" 'cause I was taking Hebrew in high school. And I decided ima was a better way to call her than ma, 'cause everybody else, Ma this and ma that. And she was too much -- ma. She was -- very strong personality. "Ikh hob ir gezogt [I told you]," this and this. But ima couldn't boss me around as much. (laughs) And she didn't. She kind of backed off, because for better or for worse, I inherited a strong personality from you-know-who. (laughs) So, we kind of had to come to a meeting of the minds of what I needed to do versus what she wanted me to do. And since I was a pretty good kid anyway and I cleaned her house a lot, she left me alone. The exchange was okay. (laughs) But the fact 34:00was, especially after we heard they were killed, this became especially important because I was one of -- well, I wasn't the only one around the block who had bobe and zeyde in Europe, because many Jews -- the kids came and their parents were still back home when Hitler struck. But the fact was that this was the only familial connection that I had. But my mother reminded me, when she became engaged -- my grandmother, that is, became engaged to her -- I'm sorry, I -- (laughs)

CW:That's okay.

YM:-- collect my thoughts on this, because looking for the lineal connection via the generations and where does it get lost and where does it get cut or where is 35:00it broken? And zeyde and bobe, when they became engaged, my grandmother -- I don't know who gave her the money for it because she didn't work -- as part of the dowry, she presented my grandfather with a watch fob. And it was gold. And when my mother left to go to America, my grandmother gave her that watch fob as di goldene keyt, the golden link to the generations past. And she turned it into a bracelet and she used to wear it on her wrist with a little gold heart that she had added. Remember love and heart and all of that. And she wore it and she told me, "One day, I will give it to you." And when I got married, she did. But, I have to confess, I never could wear it because (pauses) -- as a poet, she was 36:00open-hearted and loving and greeted the world with great affection. And it was almost like watching a movie of who your mother is. And you can't relate to a movie; you can only react to it. And that's a lot of what happened to me growing up, because her brain was so involved with this creative force that I think kind of overwhelmed her. I didn't hold it against her, but I felt sad that I couldn't have that direct connection. And years later, when I read more of her poems in her book -- there were whole sections of one book that were all about -- poems 37:00about Chavele. And I had never read them and I never knew they were there. In that case, the keyt was somewhat damaged, wasn't it? And I don't know why and I really think a lot about it and I think -- when I think about my mother, I think about how hard it was for her to be in America with the ticket that could have saved her family. And she got freedom and they were lost. I was born at the end of the Great Depression and my mother used to refer to me as the "krizis meydl," the crisis child. With me arriving, the crisis would be over, and I would be 38:00there as a new dawn, which is --- the way one of her poems about her pregnancy with me expresses itself. I was this dawn child -- vald meydele [girl of the forest]. She almost had to pull it back almost to Genesis to free herself from something that got in her way because of that rupture of the line of her leaving her family, who she didn't realize until later -- how dependent she was on them and how -- what a loss it was for her. And somehow, I understood that because otherwise, I probably would have been angry. I'm not angry; I'm just very sad about this. It's a very sad thing to know that a disruption in the world was 39:00also a disruption in my personal life in a way that I would never have imagined or understood if I hadn't later studied the Holocaust and all that that had done. And, in fact -- and I'll go back to that in a minute, but to me, one of the most moving stories I ever read, following this continuum, was a story by Chaim Grade called "The Homecoming." I don't know if people are familiar with that, whether it was his alter ego sitting in the basement in the Warsaw Ghetto -- is part of that, but he anonymously presents this character which we kind of know is Chaim Grade. And he goes into the ghetto and as he's walking to a familiar location where he had been before the war, he heard hammering. And in 40:00the sound of the hammer, he followed it, and he goes down the steps into an underground area. It was like -- former cellar. And there is a shoemaker sitting, hammering, repairing shoes. And the shoes, they get in -- have an encounter and they're talking back and forth, and he realizes it's someone he knew before the war. And as he communicates with him, the person doesn't want to recognize him. But after a while, he does. And there, in the middle of the rooms of the Warsaw Ghetto, is somebody fixing. Fixing shoes. And why was that such a 41:00profound example for me, to see the restoration or the renewal image that that particular story engaged me with? I was so moved with it, I just read it a few years ago, but it was, like, Oh my God, yes. And then, I thought of my nieces. My nieces used to laugh, 'cause when my mother would read a poem, sometimes her voice would go way up where she was very emotional. She didn't realize she was getting shrill -- I mean, usually she read okay. (laughs) And they would laugh. And I said, "What are you laughing at?" I mean, they were little kids. (exclaiming in a high-pitched voice) "Shikhelekh, shikhelekh [Little shoes, little shoes]!" I said, "Wait a minute, what's bobe reading?" And I went to look and, of course, she had written a poem called "Shikhelekh" where she remembered this was what was left of the people who were murdered. Stacks of them. And if 42:00you go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, you see shikhelekh. So, when I was in Israel a few years ago, I went to Yad Vashem and I go into one room and here's a whole pile of burnt shoes and on the other side another pile of burnt shoes and a prayer on the wall. And you still smell it. The smell has not left, of the burning. And I stood there and I think of the homecoming. Someone's repairing shoes. They're not burning them. My mother was very much affected by the Holocaust. My father, too, but quieter. He didn't express it. Since my mother was always producing poems, she could express it in her usual stream that 43:00emerged out of her. It was always flowing. Always flowing. When I was three years old -- well, maybe I was four, 'cause it was 1941 when she heard that her parents were shot. I must have come back from nursery school. Maybe I was four. I mean, that's where the thread picks up, where I walk beside her for many years, reacting to this mother. And understanding from this mother what pain is. True pain. Probably why the rest of my life, I became a caregiver. Foundations to help people become more productive in their lives, not wasted. I mean, how 44:00could you not after this impact of this kind of experience? I came home, maybe it was from nursery school, and my brother, who was thirteen years older than I, was home. And my mother was on her bed with a cold shmate [cloth] on her head. And I said to my brother, "What's the matter with ma?" I mean, I'm thinking that's what I would say. Or I'd be looking. I did a lot of looking in that house without talking. I had to be quiet mostly 'cause that's the way it was. And I think my brother told me, "Hitler shot bobe and zeyde." I don't know exactly how he said it, but I know he must have used the word Hitler because that was -- I 45:00was terrified. I thought Hitler was coming to our house next. I truly believed he was coming. If he got my bobe and zeyde over there, he's coming here and we'll be next. And around that time -- let's see, how old would my brother be? No, so, a year later he was drafted. He would have been eighteen a year later. So, oh, that was terrible because I thought Hitler was gonna shoot him, too. And my brother was my rescue person in that house. He's the one who played with me. So anyway, so my mother was lying in this bed and she wouldn't come out. And I asked my brother again -- well, I guess he explained that my mother was very upset because this is what happened to bobe-zeyde, but also my uncles and aunts. 46:00There were lots of kids in that household. My mother used to sing a lot at home. She used to hum melodies. She stopped singing. And she would cry a lot, my mame. And then, I came into the story. Mamele [Little mother]. I had to comfort my mother. I wanted comforting but I had to comfort my mother. That was tough, ladies and gentlemen! (laughs) And I remember I used to sit on the floor. I even feel it. It's funny how memory doesn't escape you when it's traumatic. I sat on the floor with bare legs, almost keeping guard at her door, and she was lying 47:00there. And I'd watch her for hours because -- was she gonna go away, too, kind of thing? When you're four, you have all kinds of imaginative thoughts. And my mother was very attached to me. She really loved being a mother! (laughs) But especially when you're really little did she love -- it's harder when they're older. But she was a very enveloping mother. And all of a sudden, I was "mamele." I wasn't that before. I was "Chavele" before. Why am I "mamele"? And that's the way it was for a long time. That was 1941. And so, the years of terror for everyone in the whole world, it wasn't just for our household, were 48:00very deep and very powerful because there were so many people -- and my mother started writing many poems about the loss, her shtetele [little town] Monastyryska.

CW:Do you have a sense of what that place was like? Do you have sort of a mental image of it?

YM:A little bit. Not enough, but a little bit because, remember, we didn't have conversations. Every once in a while, there'd be a little bit of talk. Or I'd spend a lot of time listening to other conversations, 'cause that's how I got a lot of my knowledge. A lot of people used to come in and visit. In those days, nobody locked their doors. They used to come in and out and I'd just sit in the corner watching them have conversations. And I was rarely involved but nobody 49:00chased me, so that's kind of what happened. And so, what do I know about something that nobody really talked about? (laughs) I would say I know more about the family, the individual people, rather than the environment in which they were in. Though my mother, in her autobiography, painted such a beautiful picture of the town. She had the marketplace; she had the roads that were around to the adjoining villages. She describes the buggy that her mother went on, 'cause she had heard the stories, to visit her khosn, to visit other people. Did 50:00you hear much or a conversation from her about the economics of the environment? One would wonder, how were they supporting themselves? Was it by dreams? Was it through poems? Was it through the waves of the air that people somehow made it through? I knew that they were not poor, but I knew that others had more money. They were probably equivalent to a middle-class family in that environment. Everybody had a space. And she was mostly worried about her displacement. She was the oldest kid and every time there was a new child, her mother was a little bit more of a distance from her. So, it was -- remember, she left Europe, she was seventeen.

CW:And they had been in Vienna during the war, World War I, is that right?

YM:She had gone to a German Gymnasia, which was right across the border. They 51:00were on the Austrian border. But it wasn't Germany, it was Vienna, Austria. She probably went to visit. What she did there, who knows? (laughs) She was young enough that all of it would be wonderful and exciting. And I think it's probably there that she got her first glimpse of what it means to be an intelligent person and it's not just knowledge of the village and of the town but of the writers that she encountered when she went briefly to this Gymnasia. 'Cause even when she came to America, she went for a little while to Hunter College to study and she loved the poets and she always admired Whitman and people like that. Those poets she could identify with. And, in fact, we found, upon her death, 52:00when we looked -- actually upon my brother's death, amongst the books in his house were some books that my mother had actually presented my father on their anniversary with one of these poetry books in English, which I'm sure she understood and appreciated. But my father's English was far, far less developed than my mother. My mother actually spoke English properly. Always with an accent, but she spoke English and she could communicate well, whereas my father's English was extremely broken. And he wouldn't care if we spoke English to him, but his English was azoy tsedreyt [so mixed up]. He used to speak Yiddish and then was delighted if somebody knew Russian, 'cause he'd speak to them in Russian. Those two were always intact. He knew Hebrew as well. But English was a fremde [foreign] kind of thing. He worked in the sewing trades. He 53:00repaired commercial sewing machines, and everybody spoke Yiddish in those places, so he didn't have to learn English, really. But sometimes, it got him into trouble when he said certain combinations of words. He had no idea that he was mixing up the language in a way that was actually funny. But we had to be as kind as we could. Sometimes it was difficult to repress our reaction when he said certain phrases. But the fact is that my mother's intelligence was expressed through her curiosity of the larger environment, including starting off when she was a young person and her mother actually let her go to a Gymnasia, which I think is remarkable in those days, 'cause most people didn't 54:00do that. It wasn't in their town. I think she stayed with a relative to do that and I don't know how long she was there or what she studied there, except the word Schiller comes to my mind. So, that's one German writer, but who else? (laughs) I don't know.

CW:And she started writing first in German, right?

YM:Um-hm, and probably was writing in both languages when she came. And then, switched totally over to Yiddish because she was put in with a Yiddish crowd. You know, when you go down to Second Avenue and all the sheyne, yunge mentshn [handsome, young people] -- and all the writers of note went there. That's where they all cruised around. They met each other, they informed each other, they debated with each other, and that my father loved, also. That's why he was there and that's where, as I mentioned -- he met my mother there. But that back and forth -- but it's kind of interesting because my father's parents did come to 55:00America around the same time, obviously. They came together and settled in Lower East Side for a little while. He had a candy store or some typical kind of thing. And then, the Baron de Hirsch Fund was looking for Jews who wanted to be farmers because he knew that they had been deprived of land, Baron de Hirsch said, and this -- they would have an opportunity. And that's how my zeyde landed up in Ulster County at the foot of Mohonk Mountain, of all places, on Clove Valley Road on Rock Hill. But the fact is -- so, there were three Jewish farmers on a place that was mostly -- there was only -- and one Irish household along this whole road. So, I grew up in that kind of an environment. So, both in the summer and in the winter, back with the shrayber [writer] in New York. And so, the fact was, when you went into zeyde's house, the only books he had were 56:00prayer books. He didn't have the cultural stuff that one associates also as part of the Jewish world. And, in fact, even when I joined Riverdale Temple here in New York, the first thing that I was taken by was they were busy with just one aspect of their Jewish selves. And I didn't even know in those second and third-generation people who were congregants when I joined if they even knew firsthand, from at least a grandparent or a relative, what life was like back in those days. And I began myself to feel like an archaeological relic because I was the only person in the whole place who spoke Yiddish fluently, read the 57:00language, did -- and, in fact, because of my parents' predilections, I went to the linke [left-wing] shul, not to the rekhte [right-wing] shul, which was all part of the Sholem Aleichem Houses, which is another story that I'll tell you later. But the fact is that their story on that side was too watered down. If pure history -- if you separate it from the spiritual side of what Judaism also is, then you're just getting half the story and you're not understanding it within the context of the Torah or the mishne [first section of the Talmud] or the Talmud or even the shrayber that came afterwards for me to even notice the spiritual references my father used in his writing. I mean, there he is, writing about his life in the battlefield, and what does he say? "Ot bin ikh mit a tanakh in mir, birger fun der velt. [Here I am with a Tanakh in me, a citizen of the world]." He's standing there with this helmet on his head and the rifle on 58:00his shoulder and wearing this uniform, stuck somewhere in France, and this is what he's saying? He says, "What am I doing here? I have the Tanakh in me and I'm standing here with this gun. What am I gonna do with it?" Luckily for him, the war ended soon after, so he didn't have to shoot much. But the fact was he was there, confronted with the reality of the secular experience, as opposed to what do you do in the case of modernity and the whole issue of what it means to be a Jew and all the debates that we currently have in our society today about what is Jewishness and what makes one person less Jewish than another? How do you kind of discriminate between the two? And what makes one person better or not and what do you have to -- but here is something that is extremely important 59:00to me. And I was -- I believed, with my mother, that you have to remember and you have to know not just what you are but who you are. And if you don't know who you are, then you've lost a piece of yourself. And you have to not lose that. So, one day in my synagogue, I went up to the rabbi and I said to her, "Didn't you notice something missing here? (laughs) Our cultural self!" That's when I called Jonathan Brent and we started working together on the YIVO Jewish Culture Series, which still goes on. But the fact is, I used to sit there with focus groups with the people and saying, "I'm sitting here, folks, and I feel like an archaeological relic." I used to say that directly to them. I said, "If 60:00I open this door, do you know what's inside? Who's there?" Well, yes, my grandmother's there, my grandfather's there, but who else? Who is with them? Who came across to America with that culture intact in their brain, at least, and expressed it in their writings? Does that make them less of a person to forget that? Yes, I said, it does. (laughs) It's part of our history, whether it's an oral history or a written history, it's who we are because as we go forward, yes, we get shaped according to the times we're in. But we're richer for what we bring with us. Not what we leave behind, but what is there to enrich our current experience. And maybe we'll express it in a more modern fashion, but we will 61:00express it because what we are is not just (pauses) a label that says Jew. What does it mean? I mean, I had a lot of catch up to do on my side. I had to study Torah. I didn't know really what was in there; I knew it in such a general sense. I insisted -- and I said to the rabbi, "I don't know, I'm gonna do it. I want to read from this Torah." I wanted to be like my zeyde. (laughs) And every time my zeyde is -- I think of him, I think about that room when I was a little kid and used to watch him pray. And what does it mean to be Jewish? Let me tell you. When we used to visit my bobe and zeyde there in the country, this is the ones that -- I really had a bobe and zeyde that I could see -- one day, it was pretty cold, it was early spring, and my parents had come to check on them because my grandmother was sick and my mother used to come to give her a sponge 62:00bath, something. And she was very good about that. She was very gentle about that, very caring. And I walked into the living room and next to the Torah, what should I see around the wooden stove? Chickies! Little yellow chickies, chirping. And I look at my grandfather and my father explained, "It was cold in the barn, so he brought them in here." That's what it means to be a Jew. You care. It's not erased from it. Well, other people care, too, but the fact is if -- the Torah teaches us to be respectful of human things, of living things, and this is a respect. And my zeyde respected that. It was -- whenever I read the Torah -- and I go to shul every Saturday and we have a Torah class and 63:00everything else -- you know that some of it is mythology, but that's okay. It stands for things. And if you interpret the words and express -- and you can interpret it twelve million different ways (laughs) -- you can find meaning in the current day, not just from when it was written in the fourth -- in the rabbi period and AD, maybe the fourth century. But it's still not lost. And yes, it's respected all over the world, even by non-Jews. In fact, I said to my rabbi at the time -- we have a new one now and he's good, too -- my zeyde had some lilac trees in front of his house in the country. And, of course, my mother sold the properties and -- well, we won't go into that. (laughs) But I always remember how wonderful these lilacs bloomed every spring when we went to visit zeyde. And 64:00there was a storm in New York City and it knocked down one of the trees in front, in the temple garden. So, I went into the rabbi and I said to her, "My zeyde had some lilacs planted in front of the place he prayed. I would like to plant a lilac tree where that tree fell down. Do you mind?" She said, "No." Well, little did she know that I did a whole garden (laughs) and I put a stone in there that says, "Gershon Leyb Rappaport, in loving memory." I want people to remember that lilacs and Gershon Leyb Rappaport are connected to renewal and love. And then, somebody said to me when I talked about the lilac tree as being very important to me -- she said, "They do that in Europe. They have lilac trees for remembrance." I said, "Nobody ever told me that." But yet, I knew. Isn't that interesting? Very interesting to me that that happened. And the tree is 65:00beautiful now. It's five years old and it's beautiful, lush lilacs and they take pictures of them every spring and smell them.

CW:Can you --

YM:And yes, I planted a whole garden because once you do the tree, then the rest of it looks a little shvakh [weak]. But as far as I'm concerned, it was all for my zeyde, because he prayed and this is -- praying places need beautiful things.

CW:So, maybe you can talk a little bit about where your father's family came from? What do you know about that?

YM:He came from a small town outside of Minsk in Russia. His father owned -- not owned but worked in a mill. He was grinding the wheat, corn. And I'm trying to 66:00think of the town. I do have a document from an interview that was done with my father about the town. So, we do know the name. I'd have to look it up. My father tells some interesting stories, though, about the town. Some of it came through that interview in the series. Again, people need to be urged to speak, otherwise there's silence or empty spaces. And he tells the story and it made sense to me. His sister, Fanny, was seven years older than he, which meant, because it was Europe, there were probably a few miscarriages in between. And 67:00there were. So, when his mother became pregnant with him, she went to the rabbi to ask him, "How can I be sure that this baby will mature and come out healthy?" And this is what he said. I guess they believed it in that town. "When he is born, you only dress him in pure linen. He's going to be a gebentshter fun got, blessed by God, and nobody can punish him." (laughs) I guess that was a good thing for him. (laughs) So, when he was born, she had prepared linen garments for the baby and didn't allow anyone to punish him. He became a pretty stubborn guy, 'cause he was always getting his way, so why shouldn't he be stubborn? And he survived, obviously. He was a healthy baby. And the other children, there 68:00were many of them, came afterwards. At that point, his parents were feeling frustrated 'cause the mill had burned down and his father was thinking what should he do as a profession? Ah, mir viln geyn kan amerike [Ah, let's go to America]. So, they were probably early immigrants because they came to America -- the date would be some-- let me just think. I think I gave you too early a date before. I think it was 1916, because two years later he was drafted, so it had to be that. I'm going with -- and mostly, they grew up up in Upstate New York. So, because there were only Jewish farmers on the mountain, who's learned English? Everybody spoke Yiddish to each other. Or even the people who were not Jewish, there were people some of the Soviet Union or related countries who had 69:00also settled there and they spoke Russian. Oh, my father was all set because that's his two languages. So, that's how he grew up with that. I think he probably learned whatever English he had gotten from the Army. He makes references to Sergeant John and training him, that kind of thing. But it was a wonderful experience. They lived in an 1849 farmhouse. It was small. It had four rooms. One room was where the parents slept and that's where they ate and that's where the fire -- cooking thing was. There was no running water. The well was next to the house. Even when I was a kid, there was no running water in the house. That's the way zeyde lived. He was a poyer [peasant]. And he looked like he was from Russia. He transferred locations but he -- same country, only here 70:00in America. He was not an American, ever, ever.

CW:What was his name?

YM:Gershon Leyb Rappaport.

CW:And you knew your bobe, too?

YM:My bobe, Chasha, was one of these very bossy ladies. She also dressed very traditionally. They were very Orthodox and she had a fatsheyle [shawl] always. Her head was always covered, a long skirt. I have a picture of them; you can see that. But Chasha was not kind of loved by people around her because she was pretty cross. I think part of her problem was she was pretty lonely. I mean, what do you do there? If you're not the farmer, what's the wife gonna do? I mean, maybe she helped with the chickens or whatever. But even when I was little, that place was pretty isolated. My father started a bungalow colony so 71:00he'd make some extra money. And my grandfather started a rooming house to make some extra money. So, maybe that's how Catskills and the (UNCLEAR) got started: these people came and then they didn't have money, so they had summer people coming. And so, everybody who used to be in this summer place, the rooming house -- and even the rooming house was constructed for those days because there was -- no kitchens with any of the rooms. You went to another building. Everybody had a little two-burner stove and a communal dining room and that's the way it was. And nobody questioned it. And we kids used to go there to see everybody and we'd sometimes put up plays for them. They didn't know what we were -- being so terrific to them. We were gonna give them entertainment (laughs) and they never stopped us. We said, Oh, we have a play today! And we would go up on this little 72:00platform in the communal dining room and we would sing and carry on. But those places were very communal. Maybe it was the communistic period and people had -- it almost felt like we were in a -- well, if you were in Russia, you would be in a commune. If you were in Israel, you would have this other experience of these kibbutzim who all were joining together and sharing everything. And essentially, that's kind of what it was. But it gave the -- my bobe used to go around screaming at everybody. Every time the shoykhet [ritual slaughterer] came, she was kind of policing it, making sure he was gonna do a proper kosher job. And we used to watch and hack, goodbye, chicken! (laughs) And everybody plucking and (laughs) the feathers -- it was an interesting world. And so, my father there, in relation to my parents, he was building this colony. But I grew up kind of in 73:00a funny kind of situation. If I go to a bungalow, my mother would say, Go to Likht's bungalow, go to Lessin's bungalow, go to Kahn's bungalow. And I realized later they were shrayber (laughs) and they used to come out and be there. And so, their bungalows were designate-- and they still had their name long after they were gone and they were still designated by their names. And even to this day, I'd say I know exactly what Lessin's bungalow looks like. But it was kind of -- everybody had their own little kokh-aleyn [bungalow in the Catskills, lit. "cook-alone"] kind of thing. You cooked and you -- and only two rooms. It was very simple. We used to walk through the forest to go to the creek, because who thought of swimming pools? That came much later. But the fact was that I, as a 74:00kid, kind of benefited from this communal nature of things. Probably that's what rescued me as a thinker because both in New York or in the country, the adults would get together and have conversations. Nobody made you go to bed on time. I mean, what kind of -- you stayed up as long as you stayed up because we'd get up anyway. So, they let us stay up. You can't supervise people who sleep in bungalows. When the parents get together, they'll sneak out anyway. So, we used to do that and we would -- but I would be able to hear the shrayber talking about things.

CW:Who were -- in their sort of gang? Who were the people that were around?

YM:Some that I remember is Mikhl Likht, Leon Kobrin. Lessin's first name I don't know 'cause he was always Lessin. They called people a lot by their last names, 75:00like my father was always Rappaport. (pronounced with Eastern European accent) "Rappaport!" Or Archie. They'd call him that, too. But "Rappaport! Okay, Rappaport, what do you think?" I mean, in Yiddish they'd say that, "Vos gedenkst [What do you think]?" There were others that I'd have to sit and remind myself -- it's so many years. But even when I was a little kid in (UNCLEAR), my mother always made me go to bed when -- and my father would signal that this was a special evening. He had on his smoking jacket with the special silk lapels and the embroidered fabric. And he thought this was the height of elegance. So, "Okay, pa. You want to wear that? Gezunterheyt [Good for you, lit. "Go in good health"]." And they would sit and have all kinds of debates. And the closest I got to those debates, even though I was big enough to peek, was to peek out the door of my bedroom 'cause I couldn't sleep. There was too many people talking.

CW:This was back in New York?

YM:In New York. But it was an equivalent to sitting in the crowd in this building where people used to get together to chat and get together and share things. Everything was conversations. A lot of it was debating about the war. They would debate a piece of work by someone. I had to almost get a hint of -- why are writers important? Why do they think they're so special? What is it about writers that are so special? I'm not sure I understand. And it's only later, when I began taking courses at the YIVO (UNCLEAR) (laughs) that I encountered, in a deep way, what some of these writers -- the depth of their work was very important to me because it explained a lot. And it gave me a 77:00different dimension of thinking about a world that felt rather remote to me because nobody explained. And I don't know if that was typical of other households because other households, there seemed to be more interaction between the children and the adults, at least that I observed. So, I used to kind of look for places that didn't have kids so they'd pay attention to me and give me some ideas about life and whatever. And it's kind of interesting to me that in a world that was filled with a lot of turmoil, I grew up in an unsteady period. My growth years were the war and everybody reacting to that experience, whether 78:00personally because of loss of some of their relatives or indirectly just because it was a terrible time. And my mother used to go to a lot of rallies in the Madison Square Garden where they would express their discontent or what it is that they need to do. My father didn't go, but she did. She felt it was very important to have a voice out there and communicate about one's ideas. She used to give speeches to the Pioneer Women clubs. She used to sell bonds, Israeli bonds. That was very important for her, to build Israel, and maybe to counter a little bit the loss she had felt and would continue to feel for the rest of her life. Israel became a very important dimension in her thinking. She was an early 79:00visitor. She was there in 1952. She went to read her poems. And, in fact, some of her books were then published in Israel after that. But again, always pulled back by the fact that life here was what it was. And my mother used to characterize herself -- she had a dual kind of identity and she has a poem about it, "I Am a Cinderella." And she describes washing the toilets in the bungalow colony, which she used to do every spring. They had to prepare the facilities for the guests. And she had somebody to help her clean, but it wasn't sufficient. She had to do that also, and she worked very hard in that. She managed the bungalow colony. In the middle of everything -- my father used to also work in the city and then he'd come out and he'd fix all -- he was a 80:00mechanic. Very unusual that he was one, but he went to technical school after he came out of the Army so that he'd have a trade, which was to repair commercial sewing machines. And that was what we lived on. It was very modest pay. So, there was a lot we had to kind of figure out on -- ourselves. And we were all involved in working on that, and goodness knows, I don't think there was a day after I was twelve years old that I never -- didn't work.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:What I wanted to hone in on was a little bit about each of your parents as writers. You mentioned a little bit about your mother, but what were the writing habits of your two parents? When did they write?

YM:My father had a writing corner in the living room. He had bought himself a special antique desk. It was a Chinese desk. Black desk with a black matching 81:00chair, carved, and he was very proud of that. And he had a stand for his pipe and a blotter for his writing. And when he went into the living room, into his writing corner, that was hands-off. Nobody goes in because pa's writing. He used to write essays. Very few books were published, but he seemed to be always writing. And my question is, what happened to some of those essays that he wrote? Particularly, I say that because his first book was published in 1925 and it was an interesting experience for me to see a book that had nothing in there that was not Yiddish. Even the page numbers were written out: "Nayn un tsvantsik, draysik [Twenty-nine, thirty]," it went on like that. And if you didn't know Yiddish, you wouldn't even know what page you were on because that's the way it was. There was no thought of any integration into any other society 82:00except the Yiddish-speaking one. And actually, in a way, the way he wrote in that book, which was, "Oyf fayervent," "On the Walls of Fire," was his experience in World War I. He was a very vivid expressionist in the way he wrote. I was actually astonished because I did not associate him being such a masterful, really very well-written stories in -- it was a narrative about what it was like on the sea, for example, in the boat that he was on overseas. And when I read the way he described the ocean waves lapping against the boat, it was beautiful. I was so used to the fact that other writers that I had known, 83:00including my mother, would never have written that way. His narrative -- people had said about my father that his writings were very serious and they were very -- like essays. And I say, No, they were beautiful feelings expressed, but in a beautiful way. An English writer who -- I'm trying to think who I could compare his writing to -- would be someone who's just very expressive in very clearly discerning out of the physical space the emotional effect it has on a human being as you describe this place. And he put himself in the middle of the story. The story was very central to the way he thought and -- unusual for him because 84:00he never talked that way in actual daily life. But perhaps it was through his stories that his real self could be expressed. And he did the same in his "Mayse-shap [Story-shop]," which was published ten years after that, in 1935. And I was just so taken 'cause I read it the other day -- one example of a story is he describes what is being made in a particular shop. And it's animals. And he describes them. And you see them lined up and you feel the joy of, let's say, a mechanic coming into a place and having something joyous there. Not just a garment with a seam but an animal with an expression and the way they looked and what they were like. Oh, excuse me. And the fact is that what I found about it, it kind of humanized my father. I found a dimension about him -- my gosh, my 85:00father died in 1964, I think. And it's these many years later -- we are in 2018 -- and I just realized that. I feel sad that I hadn't read this book before.

CW:Because what was he like in person?

YM:Quiet. Very silent. Often brooding, as if something was oppressing him but he couldn't let it out. So, he'd sit in a chair with his head bent down and his arms against his head and just sat there, silent. And sometimes, I'd come in and I'd sit next to him and say, "Hey, pa, what's the matter?" And he couldn't really say. And I think something troubled him, but maybe too long ago and far away that he didn't even want to let others know how he felt. I'm sure he must 86:00have been very lonely at a certain level, 'cause my mother was very dynamic and running around all over the place. And here he was, as he expresses himself, mit der tanakh in him. He sought to communicate about himself and had some trouble. And I found it interesting, in his last book that was published posthumously, my mother had written the introduction, kind of giving a little bit of an overview of my father because he wasn't expressing it for himself. So, she did that as almost like a memorial kind of statement. And I learned then that -- probably years ago, maybe around the time he had written the first book, he had sent some of his stories that he had written and other essays to Bialik in Israel. He was 87:00in Israel. And she published in the book two of the letters that were the reply. And there was interest in his work and Bialik said to him, "Please send me thing-- I'm really interested in what you're writing. Please send me more." And I could see why he'd say that, because there was -- very deep feelings expressed about everyday objects. Who wrote -- I don't know even in -- I'm not that good in English literature, but I have to say, somebody writing about the tools of industry -- and this was a big-time thing, commercial sewing machines. The whole industry for sewing clothes was down on Seventh Avenue in New York City. And he would be there in the middle of all this industry, repairing the machines to keep the process going. And he wrote about it almost as -- someone who 88:00understood so much about the machines and what they produced, what they made possible, and the joy that he felt in the production. And he described it as a daily kind of experience. To go into one of his stories, I was in that shop and I saw the animals, and I said, What a cool place! I wish I could have seen it. I would have been there with you, pa! That would have been fun! And maybe he would have bought me one, 'cause I didn't have very many toys. So, I would have loved that. It would have been so great, my pa, to have that. He used to do that in the country, also. We had a pump house. He'd go and sit. This pump house had a very noisy pump because the water was four hundred feet down. It was an artesian well. And after he'd monkey with the pump and its pipes and so forth, he'd sit there with his head in his hands, reflecting on something. "What are you 89:00thinking about, pa?" "Ver veyst [Who knows]!" (laughs)

CW:What was he like as a father?

YM:Well, actually, he and I had this thing. Nobody -- but if I didn't approach him, it wouldn't happen. So, if I saw he was going in his car someplace, I'd say, "Where are you going?" And he said, "Well," let's see, this is in the country, "I'm going to Cross's." "What are you gonna do there?" Oh, you know, they have pipes and things. I have to look and see." "Can I come with you, pa?" And I would go there and he would be going through the aisles and I'd go over to him and Mr. Cross and I'd say, "What's this?" And I was trying to build a connection for him and myself by the products that he was interested in. And so, he talked to me about that. And every once in a while, he'd read me something he 90:00wrote. I didn't remember him reading to anybody else. But I was kind of patient with him and had time to listen because he was my pa. And I knew he was a difficult person. He had problems. I don't know exactly what they were. It's too many years later to really understand it, except to know that he was troubled and he was angry often and what made him angry, he wouldn't say. But I know he felt thwarted because he was talented, too, and most of the talent energy was not directed at him because he had a competitor in the household. And this often happens, I guess, in writers' households where the people have (laughs) certain agendas and they're not going to be stopped. But he was stopped. And his work is beautiful. I've never read -- the last one is a play. It's called "Dvoyre di 91:00nevie," "Deborah the Prophetess." And I said to myself the other day when I looked at it for the first time -- this was published in '61, you see, and I haven't read it. I said to myself, I think I'll read the Prophets first at shul and discuss them with the rabbi. Then I'll go and read his book, 'cause I won't give it justice if I don't do it that way, because I know he read the Prophets. He did read the Talmud and he loved reading, but silently. And I think he got that from his father, who really spent all the days of his life -- after whatever industry was going on around him in his dairy farm or whatever, reading the Torah and the related books. There were no other kinds of books in the house. In our house, we had a lot of shrayber books and he did read some of them 92:00and he enjoyed talking to people. But he didn't have a chance to do enough of it because most of the day was -- it was really hard work down in the shops. And you had to keep these very large commercial machines going and he knew how to do it and he was always welcomed and excited about being welcomed. He liked the fact that they appreciated him. I don't know, even though I know my mother every once in a while tried to encourage him, et cetera, she was too busy being Malka Lee. (laughs)

CW:So, what were her -- when did she write?

YM:My mother always -- I mean, that's the standard -- wrote as soon as she woke up. And it was a well-formed poem. So, she did not sit there trying to think of what rhymes with such-and-so or what sentence would fit. She just wrote it. I 93:00have a theory about that. I think people who are poets -- after watching her for so many years, I said to myself -- after all, I went to college, I studied all these subjects, psychology, et cetera, and I couldn't help thinking that her subconscious -- and other poets, as well, she's not unique in that -- have a stream that's closer to the surface than other people. And that stream is the brain at work playing with sounds, playing with words, trying to kind of organize what happened the day before, because that's what we do when we go to sleep. Some of the dreaming is related to our brain sorting out our activities and what is meaningful and maybe what we should pay more attention to. And her poems came out whole. And maybe she'd do a little fixing afterwards, but essentially was whole. First, she wrote totally -- using a pen. Never in pencil, 94:00mostly in ink. And then, when technology allowed it, she had a computer -- not a computer. She never had a computer. She had a portable typewriter, Jewish letters, and always wrote with that.

CW:Where in the house would she write?

YM:She had a desk in the bedroom. My father got up early, so that didn't bother him. And it was always set up, ready to roll. (laughs) It never got put away. And other than that -- I think at night she was tired. She used to go to bed early, but she used to get up very early because she wanted to do her poem. And then, if you said to her -- if you talked to her at the wrong moment, that was no good because the stream was flowing and you don't interrupt a stream. And we learned to see where the ebbs were (laughs) and where the flows were and kind of dynamically deal with that. We had a forest at the back of our bungalow in the 95:00country. Sometimes, she'd walk there and maybe have an experience, a creative moment, because there's something very dreamy about a forest. I love forests 'cause it does kind of surround you. It's a very safe place and my mother liked to do that. But we always walked separately, not together. She had her dream time.

CW:(UNCLEAR)

YM:It's like you're dreaming while you're awake and the consciousness of being awake gives you words to formulate what it is you have been thinking about. And if you look at all her poems, one of the things you observe is that there's a timeliness for everything, that it is reacting to the environment, it is reacting to people, it is reacting to some visual process that has attracted her.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:What would you describe as her main subjects of writing, of her poems?

YM:One was loss, the home she left behind, the parents she'd never see again, her siblings. She had many poems like that. Another was the Holocaust and what it had done, not only to her family but to her town. And great weeping, but through words. She was very expressive about that. She loved Israel and there was a stream here and there of stuff on Israel. And she actually did one beautiful one on Israel called "Am yisroel chai [Long live the Jewish people]." I think Lazar Weiner did a cantata of that. I heard it once, but I looked for it 97:00and I didn't know where to look again. But it's there someplace, Lazar Weiner's. Periodically, after certain events in Israel, she sometimes gave me a poem, a present, one that she had read at the consulate on Independence Day for Israel. That was very special for her, so she said, "This is written" -- and she wrote me a little statement on the paper of why this was a special poem and why she wanted me to have it, because it was Independence Day for Israel, celebration of that. And then, the fourth element was childbirth and creation, which I didn't fully experience until a few years ago, to read those poems. I felt very sad because, for example, when I got married, she wrote a poem to me and to my 98:00husband and told my husband to take good care of me. How come I didn't know that poem? I don't know. But the poem is there to remind me.

CW:Did she ever read poems to you or share poems with you?

YM:She'd mostly read poems to leyenkrayzn [reading circles] and to -- let's say if she had an ovnt [evening] when a book came out, she would read poems. People would come and celebrate with her that the new book was published. She would sell some books. You always had to try to sell your books. That was part of the Yiddish experience, the shrayber experience. And she would read poems there. And, of course, I was at those events. In the house, I don't remember that, except maybe one or two special poems she might have read. (pauses) And some of 99:00her poems are really very powerful capturing of the loss of her town, for example, and what she remembers about the town. And you read it and you say, Oh, that was a loss. Or she wrote a poem the day I was conceived, (laughs) but she thanked my father for giving him a child. How she knew that that particular moment in the forest was me, well -- but she decided that's when it happened. That's why I'm named Chave, Eve, Garden of Eden, something like that. (laughs) But she did write that. I read it. I was kind of -- couldn't believe my eyes when I read it, actually, but there it was. And it's beautiful. She made love 100:00sound just so ecstatic and wonderful. Or her poem -- there's a whole bunch of poems about me, which -- she said to one, "Veyn nisht, mayn tokhter -- don't cry, my daughter." And she's seeing me there, but she never told me directly. She told me through her poem.

CW:I wonder if you would mind reading one of the poems that she wrote about you?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

YM:This is a poem that I only learned about, again, (laughs) from another person who had asked me about a copyright. She had translated it in English. R.I. Turner was the person who had contacted me. And I said to her, "Let me look at your translation." And then, I read the original. And what is particularly 101:00moving for me was I finally met my mother. It sounds weird, but there was the mother I had, my mother, without any embellishments. She was just my mother and I was connected to her. It was when she was pregnant with me. And I have to say, of all her poems, this is so important to me because, as difficult as it was to have a poet for a mother, in this poem she was real. She was my mother. I wasn't a representative of her mother. This was just me and her. "'Es togt mayn yeder 102:00glid': Es togt mayn yeder glid mit dir, mayn kind;/ikh bin durkhgeveygt mit dir, vi boym mit vint.../Ikh vaks mit dir, in ale vortslen fun mayn guf;/du vekst zikh in mayn layb, vi velt bashaf fun shlof.../Durkh ale roymen, durkh ale vegn klingt dayn shtim;/du zingst in mir, vu ikh gey, un vu ikh bin.../Baginen loykhstu af durkh a shtral fun zun;/mit dayne ale fedim vebstu mikh arum./Ikh bin ful mit dir, vi di zun iz ful mit likht --/es togt a kind aroys fun mayn 103:00loykhndik gezikht...['Dawning in all my limbs': My child, you dawn in all my limbs;/I'm soaked with you, like a tree is with wind./I grow with you, down to the roots of my body;/you wake up within my flesh, like the world awoken from slumber.../Your voice echoes through every room, through all the pathways;/you sing in me, wherever I go, and wherever I am.../You light me up, like a sun's ray;/you wind through me with your every fiber./I am full of you, like the sun is full of light --/a child dawns in me through my shining face...]." It dawns a child.

CW:Do you know where the one about the day you were conceived is? Is it also in that one?

YM:I don't know. Let me see. If not, it's -- "In vald [In the woods]." Oh, yes, here it is. (laughter)

CW:Would you mind reading that?

YM:I guess so. Well, no, it's okay. I don't mind.

CW:Okay.

YM:Least it has my father there. (laughter) I have a father, too, right? (laughs)

CW:Right.

YM:"'In vald': Ikh hob zikh dir in vald avekgegebn, vi der boym tsu gezang fun vint. Ikh hob gezungen dos lid fun lebn un du host in mir farzeyt a kind. Gekukt 104:00in dir vi in a himl klorn, gezen dikh in dayn erlikhkayt, du man. Vi a planet in umendlekhkayt farlorn bin ikh geven fun dayn otem flam. Vi midber trinkt a heysn regn, getrunkn dikh mit mayn durshtlikh layb. Bay dayn zayt in vald ikh bin gelegn vi lebn admon a mol dos vunder-vayb. ['In the forest': I gave myself to you in the forest, like the tree gives in to the song of the wind. I sang the song of life and you sowed a child in me. I looked up at you like at a clear sky, saw you in your honesty, you man. I lost myself like a planet in its infiniteness, like a flame to your breath. Like the desert drinks a hot rain, I drank you with my thirsty body. I lay next to you in the forest like Adam's wonder-wife once did.]," Odmen -- Adam. Here we go. "Nit shuldik bin ikh farn lebn shvern, vos tsayt hot oyf mayn guf farfleyst durkhn gang fun zun un on fun shtern tsum onheyb mit der durkhgekreyst. Vi yam vos vasht avek fun regn di shteyner, vet tsayt mikh oykh avekvashn in gang. S'hot der vald gezungen mit 105:00shtume tener, un ikh bin geven dos eybike gezang. Ikh hob kegn lebn nit farbrokhn, s'hot di tsayt mikh geshnitn vi a bayt. Itst zig ikh in vaybelekhn netsokhn. Ikh trog in zikh a kval fun eybikayt. [I'm not to blame for the difficult life that time has impressed on my body as the sun's orbit and the passing of the stars have since the beginning been slipping by. As the sea washes away the rain on the stones, my time will also be washed away. The forest sang silent tones, and I was its forever song. I am not broken by life, time hasn't cut me like whip. I am now victorious, a wife's victory. I carry in me the well of infinite time.] " She's victorious as a wife.

CW:That's beautiful. How do you feel when you revisit these poems now?

YM:This one's hard to read. (laughs) But it humanizes the whole process. It's not poems by a poet. It's my mother and my father. But I always knew it, though we never had a conversation. She used to call me "di vald meydele," the forest 106:00child. "Un du zenen [And there were]" -- (sighs) yeah. And the story about why I got to be Yvette is kind of strange. She wanted to call me Eve, like the first woman, she always says. In Genesis. She's always referring back to Genesis. And my cousin was an actress at the Folksbiene. And she said, "Eve is such a plain name. You should call her Yvette. So, she did because Chana told her. Chana was her second mother. I had two mothers, in a way. The birth mother and Chana, (laughs) who controlled my mother a bit.

CW:What was Chana's last name?

YM:Levin.

CW:Levin.

YM:She was an actress in the Folksbiene. I have to thank Chana about that because I got to see a lot of Folksbiene stuff in its earliest days. Usually, a 107:00kid doesn't go to the theater, at least in those days. But we always were there and we were always backstage and we were always looking at all the -- and it was -- I remember that with great fondness and joy. It's like going into the toy things in my father's shop that he worked in.

CW:And it was when it was down on Second Ave, or the --

YM:Wherever it was.

CW:Yeah.

YM:But it was the original location.

CW:Well, I wanted to ask about your mother and her feminism and sort of what your perspective is on that aspect of her identity?

YM:She certainly joined women movements early on in the game. She belonged to Pioneer Women and, as a Pioneer Woman, she would make speeches all over the 108:00place to sell Israel bonds. That was very important to her. And she actually flew around the country to sell Israel bonds. Also to read her poems on the side. But that was very, very important to her. Clearly, it all started when, back home, her mother actually -- plant the seed of what it means to have independence as a woman and what are your rights as a woman, equal rights. Maybe even more so depending on the situation. And the fact that she rescued my mother's poems from the stove that -- where my grandfather had put them, and then, as a result, declared firmly to my zeyde that this ticket that came from America is going to go to Malkele because she has to be free to write. And I thought it was very brave of my mother at age seventeen to leave everybody 109:00behind, even with her great attachment to her mother, and go to a land that was free for somebody like her to be what she thought was important for herself and to promote that everywhere she went when she finally became recognized as a poet who people did enjoy listening to. It was interesting for me to watch this powerful lady who happened to be my mother when she allowed herself to let go with that force. As I indicated, she also had this Cinderella side of her where she had to subvert that ---

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:To think also about her role as a woman in the Yiddish writer scene, which was male-dominated, what --

YM:Well, I'll give an interesting example from that. In 1952, there was, in 110:00Russia, a serious event, as everyone knows who knows Jewish history, where the shrayber were murdered. And she knew those poets. And my mother had been associated more on the linker side of the political stream. And she was horrified that Stalin had done that. It was an act that finally -- she moved on the -- there wasn't too much movement in the Yiddish writer area. But she was so mad, she decided she was gonna call B.Z. Goldberg, who's Sholem Aleichem's son-in-law. And he had a column in the "Tog" and said, "Can I borrow your column? I want to make a declaration." And she did. She said, "I will no longer publish my works in the 'Freiheit.' I have told everybody that what Stalin did was a very terrible deed and I cannot identify with people who still believe in 111:00Russia in that capacity." And she actually tossed down the act of making a movement when others still had not expressed themselves. And people were very proud of her. She got phone calls from a lot of people. I remember that day because it was such a special event. Phone call after phone call from a lot of different writers, were saying, Congratulations that you did that. And she never wrote for the "Freiheit" again and her works appeared elsewhere. And I thought that was a very courageous piece on her part because it wasn't just a woman's thing. It was a political message about what she believed was correct and is still correct for those people who still say, Ot shtarbt a mentsh [There died a person] who never did anybody wrong. I have heard people say that about Stalin, 112:00which is ridiculous. And so, the fact was I knew many people in the Sholem Aleichem Houses who were -- I mean, it was called the "linke hayze [leftist houses]." That was one of its extra little pronouns, I should say. And she just declared herself, "That's it, folks. You have to believe what I'm telling you. This is not right." And to this day, I laud her for that. I have been looking for that article. I know it's in 1952, but I don't know where. I spent a whole day at YIVO looking and I still haven't found it. But there's a lot of newspapers. (laughs)

CW:You touched on this earlier, but I'd like to ask you to talk about what it was like for you being the daughter of writers growing up.

YM:I was having difficulty expressing my identity. It was hard because being the 113:00kind of writer that they were, they were always seeking attention to themselves. And their word was supposed to be much more significant than anything I could ever say. I think that being a child of a writer -- at least the ones that I had met, (laughs) can't speak for everyone -- was very isolating. The activities in the household vis-à-vis the parents were -- they were busy writing. It's an isolated craft. It's not something that you do -- sharing. And if I wanted to talk to a parent and they were busy thinking, they were busy thinking and that 114:00was always priority. I would also say that because they were pushing their ideas forward, I always stayed back. And I became, for many years, an observer as opposed to being a participant. It took me actually to get married and out of the household to find that kind of personal freedom that I missed because everything else, it was kind of supporting parental requirements and parental needs. Though I have to say every once in a while, my mother had a friend who took her daughter to concerts. So, she always bought a ticket for me and my mother would come, also. So, luckily for other people who pulled my mother out of it and gave me an opportunity to go to the ballet or something else. We lived 115:00in New York; we should be able to see these things. Being up in the country with the bungalows, I had to do the day camp since age fourteen until I -- even after I got married, we did it a little bit and then we quit. But the fact was everything was subordinate to the fact that these people had a message that they wanted to send out into the world. I don't think they did it on purpose. It was just what happened. It wasn't done angrily, it was done -- I think poets are needy people. I do believe that. They are very -- otherwise, they wouldn't have this stream of consciousness connection to the world. It's not a direct road that they have to the world. It's circuitous through the brain and then out again. (laughs) It's like watching my mother in the morning, and then I went to 116:00school. In those days, nobody escorted kids to school because the streets were safe. Even as a seven-year-old, I used to walk to school myself. Nobody was there to bother me and I'd go with other kids. So, that was okay. But she was always there to give me lunch. I always had to come back for lunch 'cause there was no lunchroom in the building. So, we used to come back for lunch and then go out again. She'd give me a nickel and I could get myself a treat, which was always a pickle because I didn't eat candy. But that's what happens when you have diabetic tendencies. But the fact was that's the way it was. And she was very concerned about my health. She was hovering about that: nothing should happen to me. "Oy dos kind [Oh my child], you have a headache, oy vey!" You know, Go do this and go do that. And I had to kind of -- it was almost like she, 117:00because I was an extension of her in her mind, she had to protect me in the way she would protect herself. I had to protect myself from invasion and that was not simple. Somehow, I managed, though. I don't know what was my survivor's instinct. But if I didn't have that, I would have been very much limited in what I thought I could accomplish and perceive. I remember once, even when I was teaching -- Jewish schools had no money and I was teaching nursery school. And one of them was in a building where there was an upper level of a gym; they had rooms, and she came to visit me one day. She wanted to see this place. And she was absolutely horrified that there was not a very well-protected fence between the hallway we were going on and the floor of the gym, which was a story down. 118:00And she went to the director and as Malka Lee, almost, she said, "What are you doing?" And they put chairs. They lined them up to make a fence so that I would be safe. Of course, the children would be safe, too. But I appreciated that intervention, but it's almost as if I was an extension of her, so she was protecting this unit that she felt needed protection. And probably as an adult, that affected kind of some of the ways we did not relate because I had to maintain my independence. It wasn't an evil thing, it was -- just happened. It's somebody who lost her mother, needed to protect her mother's substitute, whatever it was, and that's the way it was. It was not simple. It's very 119:00difficult to be a parent of -- see, a Freudian slip: to be a parent of a poet is what I said. (laughs) But I was, in part. Not only in part. I mean, she still had -- but it was difficult to maintain order in the household and stuff like that. But sometimes, she'd let go. I used to take piano lessons and she used to come and listen to me play. She liked that. But maybe that's why I quit. (laughs)

CW:And what was the relationship between your parents?

YM:They were very much attached to each other, but sometimes with difficulty. (laughs) There was -- differences of opinion. It wasn't an easy relationship, I think. It's two personalities who are creative people but each in their own way 120:00and very different from each other. Physically, they were very attached. They liked each other a lot. But there was this drama always about things.

CW:Do you -- oh, were you gonna say something else?

YM:No, it's okay.

CW:Okay. Do you think that your parents, very different writers, have an audience today, a readership?

YM:My mother does. I don't know who knows about my father anymore, because the communication to the larger world was limited. And I hope they get to read his works. There're not too many of them but they're wonderful expressions -- 121:00sometimes you go into a museum and you see these artists who depict industry. And he does that in words. And I don't -- I mean, some of the works that were done on battlefields, there have been some very fine writers about that. But my father should be added to that list of -- what about his work -- it's like, the YIVO right now has an exhibit on Jews in space. And the astronaut who went up there is gonna be speaking, actually, to an audience at the YIVO about his experience bringing a Torah up in space and a dreidel and some of the other symbols of what it means to be Jewish. And for my father and industry, the Jewish piece of what is added to his experience, it's not simply interacting 122:00with industry, but it's a Jew interacting with industry. And does it add another dimension? I don't know. I'd have to kind of read in depth myself, which I will do when I have more time -- about that. But even for a connection to the humanness of the experience that we can identify with. So, even now, maybe you go into a bottle factory -- I've been, for example, at Anheuser-Busch, and there's one person monitoring hundreds and hundreds of bottles going by, getting filled. It's a robotic experience. You wonder in the manufacture of garments, what has become more automated but what still requires the human interface? And in that experience, what kind of thing happens when you bring the dimension of 123:00creation with you? In other words, you're going into that environment as a skilled technician, but you're also going into that environment as a writer. And how does that get integrated into the total experience of what it means to be communicating about something that is industrial? And I think that the experience that my father has shown me from reading this, beyond the first few pages, which I had in previous times, but now I read much more into depth, I'm saying to myself, Oh! And even my own experience with "Dvoyre di nevie," I started reading it and I say to myself, Is he presenting it in a secular way, in a poetic way? Is he taking license with the Torah? What is he doing? And I decided I'll go back to the original first and then read it to see what he 124:00brought to that experience that would make it logical for people to want to read what -- this play that he had based on those characters. And then, you think about it, "Dvoyre di nevie," she's the only female prophet -- (laughs) semi-prophet, well, good enough -- (laughs) to achieve memorialization from the Torah. And so, to me, the whole thing is very interesting, particularly since he brought that all to his battlefield experience. "Ikh bin du mit di tanakh in mir." He's standing there but he's thinking about something much larger and something much more profound than the crazy battle stuff that can go on by anyone who -- whether they think Tanakh or not. But what dimension would he have added to that experience that says to somebody, Hey, this battlefield had some 125:00larger-than-life connections to it that need to be explored simply because we know how important the Torah is in the lives of many of us Jews. Made into a play, what does that consciousness make us aware of further? When you read some of the books by the various authors, including Sholem Aleichem, who was a very popular culture kind of writer, when they add the dimensions -- it's even when you read "Yosl peyse dem khazns [Yosl the cantor's son]" [sic] and he's going to America and he's commenting about the pillows and, "There's pillows everywhere! What are they doing with pillows?" And he's trying to adjust to this society. What is it about the fact that he's Yosl peyse dem khazns, as opposed just to a kid who came off the boat -- does that add to that experience? I don't know. But 126:00now I'll go back and check because I'm thinking about things a little differently after reading my father's works from a different viewpoint. I have always read my mother's books, but not every poem. And usually, it's the ones at the back of the book that haven't been read (laughs) and those are where all the birth ones are. And she has a whole set of stuff like that. What does that mean? The fact is, when you are a writer who's actually possessed by the activity of writing, it's almost like -- my mother would say it controls her, she doesn't control this. It's like a stream that's overflowing, and you have to release the waters or you're going to be overwhelmed. And so, writing down these words 127:00helped her manage the flow. What does that mean to a poet to have to then, because they're also a person in the world -- how do they balance this world against this flow that they are dealing with, often beyond their control? And some of these poets who can't control it, as we know, commit suicide. We've heard of Sylvia Plath and others who have done that. They can't deal with this subconscious that's so strong. My mother found a way to deal with it, twice. One is by writing every day and making sure that that came through. But the other was to take her works and use them in a different way. Selling Israel bonds, she'd go and read poems to attract them, but then she'd do her sales pitch. And then, it's interesting with my mother: my mother's poems are fairly consistent 128:00in the way they express themselves. Some, of course, much more powerful than others, but when you have a big flow, some of them will turn out to be really spectacular like Niagara and another is, okay, it's a nice little quiet pond. But on the whole, pretty good. And romantic, though. But before I went to Israel, I was looking at one of her books where she was writing about Israel. I wanted to see what she said. And I came across a description that she had done of Israel while she was there. She commented on the strong mountains; it was not typical of her flow. It was almost like a grounding in a space that she was connecting to based on just her visual connection of what this place made her feel like. And it was a beautiful poem describing the strength, the physical 129:00strength of this country, this little country.

CW:Do you know which book that one's in?

YM:I'd have to look around. But I could look. But the fact was the year that I went, I discovered -- she had died a week before my birthday and -- not that year. Way before. But I realized it was her yortsayt [anniversary of death] and nobody had ever said kiddush for her. Nobody. So, I said to my husband and I said to my relatives, I said, "Nobody said kiddush for ma." My brother didn't; I know that. Nobody else. I said, "It's her yortsayt while I'm there. I'm gonna find a shul and I'm gonna tell them I want to read that poem." They let me do that. I thought I was just going to give them the poem and they said, No, read it. So, I read it to everyone and then I said kiddush. And I said to myself, after I finished, I said, "Ma, now you can rest." This is in Israel. It really 130:00counts. (laughter)

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

YM:This is "Gezangen [Songs]." It was published, I believe, in 1940. This is the one that has my birth poem and my creation poem among others. But it also was before my mother's family were killed. So, I would say the majority of the poems were songs about the world and different expressions; a cow being born. She even wrote about her -- I just opened this -- about the Pioneer Women. She loved the concept of Pioneer Women who were doing this and their work. I'm just looking to see -- "Baym brunem [By the well]." Well, there's a lot of descriptive things. "Frimorgn [Dawn]," "A ferd on a rayte [A horse without a rider]," "Gezang fun harbst [Autumn song]," "Lider fun mayn land [Songs of my country]," and so forth. There's a lot of stuff that expresses her joy. But then, towards the end, 131:00I think things were starting to get bad in Europe. And I just opened this at random and it says, "A bintl nervn in geheym, a hoyfn oysgeshrayen mit zikh aleyn. Vos iz a mentsh? [A secret bundle of nerves, a courtyard crying out. What is a person?]" She's starting to express disappearance of whatever that meant and no singing anymore. "Ver darf den men hobn lider? Ver darf, in teg fun groyl-gezang, fun tsvingt, men shnayt fun yidish layb lebedike lider? Vel ikh nit zingen mer mayn yidish lid. [Who needs poetry now? Who needs it, in these days of forced horror-songs, when living songs are cut from Jewish flesh? I will no longer sing my Yiddish song.]"

CW:Wow.

YM:So, you know when you read my mother's poems, you know the stream is current because as she hears of issues, they appear in her poems. You know the world's activities. Here's -- no more the Yiddish lid [song]? No, because that was a 132:00time when the murders began. This book was published in 1940, so I think '39, '40 is -- or even '38, things were happening that were not --

CW:Well, things were happening even before then, too.

YM:Right. So, the songs were stilled but the poems go on. The flow is there. They follow the news of the day or the feelings that are encountered around a particular event. And my mother is like that. It's almost like a journalism of poetry. "Kines fun undzer tsayt [Laments of our times]" obviously would be the one -- this was -- I think in '45 it was published. So, right after the war was stilled and all this -- in fact, there is a poem, I don't know if it's in here -- well, if it's not, I'll find it in the other book. But this is -- all books about what's going on with the Nazis. And she has one called "Mame": "Mitn ruf 133:00fun mayn blut, ruf ikh, 'Mame.' Berg, mayne berg, tsetrop itst mayn kol. Es entfern di berg baym himlrand, 'Mame.' Es ekhot op mayn eygn vider-kol. [With the cry of my blood, I cry, 'Mother.' Mountains, oh my mountains, my voice is beginning to fray. From the edge of the sky, the mountains answer, 'Mother.' My own echo echoes.]" She's calling for her mother and her mother is never to be found. Murdered. So, these are the things that -- and this is the one, actually, yeah. This was '45, where she said here, "Khavelin, mayn tokhter vos vet geyn, hof ikh, in mayne vegn. Zol zi leyenen un gedenken. Dayn mame. [Dear Chave, my daughter who will follow, I hope, in my path. May she read and remember. Your mother.]" "Kines fun undzer tsayt." She's telling me, "Remember this happened and recall who your mother was." She saw herself as a reporter or her brain did 134:00because she had to keep on producing. People don't know that about my mother, that if you read it in its entirety, all the books and the flow of them, you flow through life and its various challenges and what the world was confronting her with and the loss that she had to encounter and how she began to recover her strength with the birth of Israel in 1947. That was very important to her. I remember her joy. The fact that it's so many years ago doesn't mean anything. I remember that very well. It was a wonderful experience to see that joy coming out of all that sadness that filled my life since my mother was confronted with the pain of the Holocaust. So, "Durkh loytere kvaln [From pure springs]" was published, this one, was published in, let's see, 1950. And she mourns -- it's 135:00still more epitaph. She's mourning her town. But I have a poem in here that I found. Let me see if I can find it. No, wait a minute. Is it here? Yeah, it's very short. But I think it expresses the aftermath. It's called, "Der farzhaverter shlisl -- The Rusty Key." "Ikh hob gezen a shlisl fun zhaver, a shlisl fun a farshlosener tir, a shlisl vos kumt fun gaz-kamer, mit blut un mit zhaver gezhvir. A froy hot im in kamer bahaltn tsvishn di toyte vent in geheym. Di hant vos hot im gehaltn farshmolsn in zeyf ir gebeyn. Geblibn iz lebn der shlisl, er zukht di tir fun zayn heym. Er zukht a mentshlekh gevisn. Vos zol a 136:00shlisl farshteyn? Oyfshlisn der velt di oygn, dertseyln vi mit a lebedik moyl. Er hot blut in zikh ayngezoygn fun pakhad un a gnize un groyl. Ikh hob gezen a shlisl, a krumen, mit zhaver vi a blutike shpir. A shlisl, on a nomen, zukht dem shlos fun zayn tir. [I found a rusty key, a key from a closed door, a key that came from the gas chamber, speckled with blood and with rust. In the chamber, among the dead walls, a woman hid it secretly. The bones of the hands that held it greasy with soap. The key remains, looking for the door of its home. It looks for a human conscience. What can a key be expected to understand? The world unlocks its eyes, telling as much as with a living word. It has absorbed the blood of terror, of a Genizah, of horror. I found a crooked key, rusted like a bloody memory. The key, without a name, yearns for the lock of its door.]" That's her epitaph, her lost key, no longer finding its place. And she writes about her brother, Benjamin, who died and all that stuff. But then, she gets to "Yehude-menakhem hot geshpilt farn hern-folk in berlin in derklert muzik iz 137:00internatsyonal un nit natsyonal [Yehudah-Menachem performed for the gentlemen in Berlin and declared that music is international and not national]." So, she says, "Shpil, yehude [Play on, Yehudah]!" She's kind of encouraging him. "Geburt [Birth]," here we go again. This is about animals giving birth. So, this one, I would say, is aftermath. There is an order and a sequence to her work, but this was around the time America locked its doors, after the war, to people. Her brother couldn't get in. He had to go to Canada and she wrote a poem, "Loz mayn folk arayn, amerike [Let my people in, America]." Sounds like today, doesn't it? "Loz mayn folk arayn, amerike." She goes on: "Yesoymim, bruder un [Orphans, brothers and]" -- she talks about her brother who landed in Canada. "Dos hoyz fun sholem [The house of peace]" is the UN. Oh, and here's one to the Sholem 138:00Aleichem hoyz [building]. "Ot iz dos hoyz vos mir hobn geboyt, yorn un teg do lign, fartroygt. A hoyz iz gemakht fun tsigl un laym, mir hobn gekholemt a yidishe heym. [Here lies the house that we built, occupied for years and days. A home is made of brick and lime, we dreamt up a Jewish home.]" And that's what they dreamed in the Sholem Aleichem Houses, that it would be a place where Jews, writers, artists can get together and freely create. And for a while, it seemed that way. I used to go down to the basement as a kid and watch Gudelman sculpt. And he never minded that I came in. I was always this observer, but I wanted to see. And they never locked me out, 'cause I was quiet. And it was wonderful watching him create a sculpture. He did all the covers for my mother's books or most of them. This is one of them he did and there's others.

CW:Yeah, the thirty -- yeah.

YM:But you know what she says after many years at the Sholem Aleichem Houses: 139:00"Di tsayt hot undz oft mit gezires farflukht. Vi kinder gekrigt zikh dem emes gezugt. Gepakt un gemozlt a gilgul fun tsayt, nor eynike vend in kampf un in shtrayt. [Time has often cursed us with persecution. In truth, we squabbled like children. A metamorphosis of time, captured and infected, but there was only one victory through the fighting and stuggle.]" And she talks about, "Undzer hoyz iz a teyl fun likhtikn land, shkheynim zoln hoyzn in fridn banand [Our building is a part of this golden land, may our neighbors live together in peace]," they kind of spread out away from there and went on to their own spaces. But growing up in the Sholem Aleichem Houses was probably the best experience I could ever recommend to anybody anywhere. It's like growing up in a commune or it could be a kibbutz. Everybody took care of you and you took care of yourself, but in a way that was fun. It wasn't lonely. You wanted somebody to talk to, you knocked on somebody's door and they let you in and there you were. If it was dinnertime, you had lunch or something -- dinner with them. Or if you wanted to play their piano, they let you. And I made a lot of good verbal connections. That's why, 140:00later on, it wasn't hard for me to be a related person. Not for my parents. but from these people who gave me welcome, love, and -- the whole feeling of belonging not just to one set of people, but we were all there together. And that was just -- I can't even think of a better place to grow up anywhere. It doesn't matter how much money people did or didn't have because we had each other. And I had very few toys. Maybe I had a Spaulding ball and I had a few books. And maybe once I had a doll. Kids didn't have toys then, but we figured out things we could do, and we didn't feel deprived. It was interesting. So, 141:00that's kind of what this book is about. And, oh, she has a letter she sent to her khaverte [female friend] in Israel. When I went to Israel, her friend lived on Mount Carmel. She had -- was by then gone, but I stood there and I said, "My mother stood here." (laughter) And it was a renewal to be able to be in a place -- as my mother used to say, "Yidishe politsey [Jewish police officers]." She was so impressed with the Jewish policemen she could hardly breathe about that. It was just so wonderful for her to experience a Jewish land with Jewish soldiers and Jewish policemen. In other words, all these enforcement people were Jews, so they wouldn't hurt her, which they would have in Poland and did.

CW:Right.

YM:But it was one of those kind of places. Oh, here's the "Am yisroel chai" from Lazar Weiner's -- that's on page 110 in "Durkh loytere kvaln." It's called "Am 142:00yisroel chai." I recommend that. (laughs)

CW:Well, let's look at your -- I want to make sure we get your father's books on here, too.

YM:This is "Durkh fayervent," Aaron Rappaport.

CW:Could you just hold the cover up?

YM:Yeah. And let me just read one little thing from his book. He names it Aaron ben Gershon ben Moishe, that's him. "Ikh bin nit kayn higeboyrene, mayn kinderfreyd hob ikh do nit oysgeshtift. In onheyb, vi a farloyrene, hob ikh zikh du arumgezukht. Dos shtibl hot di mame dan a shokhn kimat avekgeshenkt. Ikh, mit dem tanakh in mir, do aynvoyner gevorene, birger fun der velt. [I wasn't born here, the frolicking of my childhood didn't happen here. At first, like someone lost, I looked around. My mother almost gave away our house to a neighbor. I, with the Tanakh in me, came to live here, a citizen of the world.]" He was in Europe and then he came to America and --

CW:It's interesting, that has that "Tanakh arayn" phrase in it that you were mentioning.

YM:Yeah, well, that was him. And he understood Torah. He did. And I see there's more about that here. But he describes lots of things about himself as a soldier. And when he comes back, there's a section called "Lider fun opru un andere [Poems of rest and others]." In other words, miscellaneous stuff. And he even wrote a poem about his mother, but his mother was in -- United States. But anyway, so this is "Mayse-shap." You notice Aaron Gudelman added --

CW:It's an amazing cover. (laughs)

YM:-- this kind of feature. It's almost left-wing looking with the hand up and the --

CW:This was in '35?

YM:This was published in '35, right? "Mayse-shap." But, you see, here's -- more 144:00dramatic-looking when you see it. And he identified well that this was a powerful book for my father about a powerful subject. And here's a little bit of -- just a little bit of one thing here. "S'iz a shap aza! Makht men dort lalkes, ketselekh un hintelekh, meydelekh un yingelekh, un afile malpes! Di khaye, khayelekh fun horike gevantn, di mentshlekh fun layvntn un zeydns. Un fun gibst di teyln vos men shemt zikh nit tsu vayzn, un men shtopt dos on mit klotshe. Ale, ale loyt dem furem fun dem vos shnayd tsu, fun dem vos shnayd. [What a shop! They make dolls there, little cats and little dogs, little girls and little boys, and even monkeys! The animals, the little animals are made of furry fabric, the little people from linen and silk. Then you take the parts that you're not ashamed to show and you stuff them full of fiber. You sew together everything, everything according to the models.]" And he goes on about the machines and he goes on. But it's really lovely.

CW:Even the back has some of the --

YM:Does it? Let's see.

CW:-- continuation of the art, there.

YM:Yes, the city look, right?

CW:Yeah.

YM:He was on Seventh Avenue and around Thirty-Eighth Street. That's where they all were. This is "Dvoyre di nevie un barak ben abinoym [Deborah the prophet and Barak, son of Avinoam]," this is the guy she -- commanders together. (laughs) And it's a play, actually. And let me just -- here's my papa. We have to get a peek at it. This is Isaac Raboy's son. Max Raboy wrote this -- created this portrait. My mother did a foreword here where she writes a little bit about him. But I wanted to just share one of the letters that she had printed here from Hayim Nahman Bialik to my father when he sent him some stuff. They were translated from the Hebrew. "Khoshever fraynt, Ikh hob bakumen ayer lid 'Shoym' 146:00un mit dem shraybn drik ikh oys mayn dankbarkayt tsu aykh. Ikh hob oykh gikh durkhgekukt dos lid azoy vi shteyendik oyf eyn fus. Der ayndruk fun ayer lid iz shtark biz gor. Ikh vel batrakhtn vi a groyse toyve fun aykh oyb ir vet mir shikn fun tsayt tsu tsayt alts vos ir vet farefntlekhn. Mit fuln derekh-eretz, Hayim Nahman Bialik. [Dear friend, I received your poem 'Foam' and I'm writing to thank you. I read through it quickly, with a sense of urgency. It left quite a strong impression. Please send me from time to time everything that you publish. I would consider it a big favor. With my deep respect, Hayim Nahman Bialik.]"

CW:Wow! (laughs)

YM:That's my papa. This is my mother's autobiography, "Durkh kindershe oygn." I think this is probably her finest work, is her story of life, reporting about her village and her parents and her town and --

CW:And this one's in prose, right?

YM:This is all prose. This is a poetese [poetess] picture, (laughs) you notice. 147:00It's not a regular portrait. (laughs) It's more -- (laughs)

CW:And you can see the braids that you were talking about.

YM:Yes, she wore them curled around her head in different fashions. But that was kind of European. When I used to go to school, I had braids till I went to high school. And my mother would insist that I put a ribbon on each side of my head to curl it around, very Russian style. And so, you make a loop, which is a big mistake in New York City schools because if you sit down with a loop, then the nearest boy is gonna pull your hair. And they always did. (laughs) But I did look like a Russian kid. My mother had no impression of what an American little girl should like. So, it was long skirts, my hair like whatever, high boot shoes 148:00-- and later, she used to tell me, "You don't have any sense of clothes." So, I said to myself, Ma, (laughs) I don't think I learned how. (laughs) But you know what? It didn't stand in my way. I don't care. You want to see me one way or the other? It's me you want. The clothes are a side issue. But it's kind of interesting that the world of these people, if you look at the whole panorama of time, when my father at the beginning of the century comes to America, he experienced two World Wars, one directly, one indirectly, all this loss that my mother felt, what was going on in Europe, a reaffirmation of life with the birth of Israel and hoping that her children could help fulfill what she perhaps could 149:00not and that she expected us to follow her trail, to be like her, to go forward in her way.

CW:Meaning with Yiddish or with writing? I mean, what does that mean?

YM:That remains to be analyzed. (laughs) But I would say to be a good Jewish person, whatever one's definition of that -- to help others. Her way was always as a helper, you know, the Pioneer Women expression, the stuff that she helped my father with in the country where she made the bungalows clean and beautiful so we could all enjoy a summer together. That was very hard work but then we, the children, were expected to kind of work on all of this, following whatever 150:00their leadership was going to be providing, which probably was too heavy a load to ask for because we were our own individual people. And my mother herself, if you thought about the reason she originally came to America, was so she would have opportunity of something she wanted. That gradually faded for her children. We were supposed to be good, devoted children. I was supposed to be a devoted daughter. And a devoted son -- my brother had a PhD in history and in the summer, he would dig septic tanks. That was part of your role in the family. You do what we ask you to do if that's what we need. And he would say as he's digging -- he'd say, "Look at me!" (laughs) After a while, we stopped doing that because it was too much. I wish -- maybe if we had grown up in a different time, 151:00would it have been different? Who knows? But the complexities of the world are always changing and the dynamic -- if there's anything that my mother taught me, and my father, is to be a good Jew, however you interpret it. They were happy that you don't give that up, that that's something you sustain yourself with. We owe it to not only ourselves but to our people, 'cause we're not very many. And what are we, about a million in the United States? Maybe at the most, two million in the world? But it seems in New York, you -- seem everybody's Jewish so you don't know that in many other places, there's nobody at all. They've never met a Jew. And so, I was going to various places -- in traveling with my own work, I found many places that the identity was not focused on Jewishness 152:00but on whatever that particular group was creating for themselves and their community and it was often very Christian in the way they practiced whatever they practiced. And so, the fact is that I think probably from all of this, I probably inherited from my father that message that the Tanakh is in us and we don't forget that and we make that part of our life. And I think by adding that later in my life when I didn't have it really before has enriched me a lot. And I think that's a wonderful present I had from my father. My mother, what did I get from her as a gift? Certainly a directiveness (sic) of personality. When I'm 153:00in a situation, I end up being president, I don't know why. (laughs) It's always -- I start expressing, "Why are you doing it this way? You should do it the other way." That's my mother. But she was in control of her bossing in those days, except I was quiet. And also, I think the joy of being able to express oneself about what people or the world means to you is something that's very important to me. I like knowing that it's all right when you're in an environment to just let go and say, What a wonderful place, this is what it makes me feel like if I used words. Maybe I use some of the stream of 154:00consciousness my mother did. On the other hand, maybe not. But there's other ways you can express joy about where you are and appreciation in a way that she was always able to connect to emotionally. For her, it was a very strong experience. Maybe it was like a very strongly developed extra sense that she had in her own need for survival because of where she came from and the world as it -- was what it was. Things hit her very hard and directly. But there's pros and cons with that. If you are very open to your feelings in situations, then what is happening is that you really experience things that maybe others don't have a link to as directly, so when the sun is shining and the flowers are out, you really experience growth and joy of spring and the way the sun shines. And when 155:00you're with your husband, you really experience that relationship. It's not just something that people relate to as a marital couple, but their role has a higher power. It's creation, it's the future, it's -- life is to be lived to the fullest emotionally when you're sharing it with another person. And certainly, there's a lot to be said about that. So, the question is, what's the balance? Do you be like my father who keeps everything inside or my mother who lets everything out? (laughs) Hopefully, some balance in between. But in that teeter-totter world that if you're a kid you would experience, what is it, then, that makes you who you are? I can identify with them as to what makes them that 156:00way and why, maybe, certain life experiences created certain reactions. But what about the person I am? How do I want to react? How do I want to feel, not as an echo of theirs but related to my own consciousness and my own being? And maybe I'm a little richer in that regard because I've been exposed to someone who so fully expressed herself that no part of the world was immune from that encounter of experience. And so, when you read her books, for example -- and you have to kind of read them all to get the flow of it, otherwise you miss it -- is that this flow that has come out of her is always linked -- it's not just her flow. It's linked to the environment and the world's experiences --

CW:Right.

YM:-- and she has to react because her consciousness, her being is overly, maybe 157:00particularly sensitive to that. And so, she uses this flow to allow herself to not be overwhelmed by the experience. It gives her an outlet. It gives her a way to express some very sad feelings, some very joyous feelings, some very puzzling feelings better than if she either locked them in or didn't know how to let them out in a way that would be healthy for her. I think that's what kept her from falling apart on certain levels because some of the experiences were very terrible. And yet, if you can write a poem about a rusty key that has lost its door and in that one little poem it says the whole world about the Holocaust, if you understand the origins of where that came from, you don't have to say it 158:00more complex than that, and it helps her unlock her own feelings about an experience that maybe if she totally described directly as she does in the "Shikhelekh" -- or she wrote a poem about -- what's her name, who made lampshades out of -- Ilse Koch, who made lampshades out of people's hair -- she wrote a poem about that. That's a direct encounter with a disgusting and awful experience, and yet, take it once removed, even describing the shoes and remembering the people who once they were shoes for, you are helping contain but communicate, in turn, to others that this was a profound event that should not be ignored but remembered. And that is very, very critical. Same thing with pa, only in his own way. See, when I think of my father, I think of him as pa, 'cause he is pa. (laughter) He's my papa. But my papa was so locked up, only 159:00occasionally -- one book every ten years or so. That was too hard. He should have been more like my mother. It would have been easier to survive.

CW:Well, I really want to thank you for sharing so much about your parents and you've added so much to what we know about them and through your experience of living with them and reading them, as well. So, I really want to thank you for taking the time and opening all of this to us.

YM:Well, I don't know what to say. (laughter) It's good to let things out, isn't it, as I was saying. And if we're gonna study people, it's not just what they are but who they are. And who is very important when you're looking at writers 160:00and creating spirits and what it means to the next generation after that. What have we learned from that experience and that encounter with a force that was almost too powerful to bear? Because the creative force is very powerful when it's let go strongly -- probably overwhelms a lot of writers' children. I know that. It's not easy and I think it's good to have experiences on our part to share the difficulties of what it meant and to say, Well, but at least it was not just a one-level experience. We can see the ranges of the encounters and how some of it -- were actually life force enhancement, I think, when your parents 161:00are not that kind of person. I don't know how people then find certain kinds of experiences that help them reach out from within themselves to kind of take a risk and be more of what they're thinking or feeling. My mother had no risk. She just did it. (laughs)

CW:Well, and you did, too, in your life, as your life and biography shows. You found and accomplished --

YM:Well, yeah, when I was asked to start the National Cristina Foundation with my co-founder who was supplying the funds and also some good thinking there, of course --

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

YM:When I was asked to start the National Cristina Foundation, I said, Oh, my God, I've just completed my doctorate in organizational studies and now I'm gonna create an organization. And you start with an empty desk and nobody to 162:00call and then you figure it out as you go. Yes, that's good. It's good to be creative, but maybe not so hard the way my parents were. (laughter) Could have been a little easier.

CW:That's a good -- that's a great eytse [piece of advice] (laughter) to end with, I think.

[END OF INTERVIEW]