LARRY ROSENWALD ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney, and today is December 20th, 2018. I am here at Wellesley College with -- would you like to be Lawrence for this, or --

LARRY ROSENWALD: You know, I thought you might ask me that. Everybody who actually talks to me calls me Larry. Everything I publish is published under the name Lawrence. You pick.

CW:Okay. Well, we can include both.

LR:Okay.

CW:So I don't have to pick. (laughs) But Lawrence or Larry Rosenwald. We're gonna record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

LR:Absolutely.

CW:Great. Well, I'd like to start with a bit of background. Do you know much 1:00about where your family came from?

LR:My father's family came from Hamburg, came in the late nineteenth century to California and New Mexico, somehow bypassing all of the obvious destinations on the East Coast. They became ranchers and raised cattle. My mother's family -- so on her father's side they came from Czechoslovakia. Alois Heitlinger came from Czechoslovakia to this country a little later than my dad's parents had in the -- before World War I because my mother's older brothers were born before or 2:00during the war -- for political reasons, however. He was a freethinker and an atheist and a socialist, and I think he needed to get out of Czechoslovakia. So he came to Chicago. My mother's family on her mother's side I don't know about. I don't know where they came from. I know that they had come two generations before my mom.

CW:And on your mother's side do you know what the professions in the family were?

LR:Her father was, in most of the stories that my mother told me about him, a man who had suffered paralytic effects of a stroke. But I think he had been a worker, some kind of factory worker, and union activist. What kind of factory I 3:00don't know.

CW:And where were you born?

LR:Chicago, Illinois, in Mount Sinai Hospital, at least that's what my mother said. And -- but grew up in one of the northern suburbs in Glencoe, Illinois.

CW:And do you know where your name comes from?

LR:From personal preference. My middle name is my father's first name. I don't know why Lawrence was the name they chose. It had no family connection. I wasn't given a Hebrew name, nor were my siblings. The brother not next after me but next after the second child was named Brian Dennis Rosenwald because my parents 4:00liked those quite Irish names. My brother Kent was given -- I don't know why Kent -- well, Kent -- because Kenneth is my -- was my dad's name. So nothing in family history, long family history, shapes those names, and personal preference does.

CW:Could you describe a bit about the home in which you grew up?

LR:Yeah. So 600 Vernon Avenue, six houses from the Glencoe movie theater, now demolished. Two-story house with one bathroom on the second floor. Glencoe -- well, by house you mean the architectural structure, or do you want something 5:00about the family?

CW:Well, let's start with the architectural structure. Yeah.

LR:Okay. So it had a big backyard. We played whiffle ball there. And a small front yard, where my mother gardened with increasing audacity as the years went by. Six houses from the business district of what was then a small, quiet town.

CW:And who were the people in the home growing up?

LR:So there's my father, Alan Kenneth Rosenwald, and my mother, Charlotte Heitlinger Rosenwald. "Heitlinger," by the way, is apparently usually a German gentile name, although this Heitlinger branch was Jewish. Four children: I'm the oldest, my brother Kent, my then brother Brian, who a couple of years ago became 6:00my sister Phoebe, and my sister Cynthia, in relatively regular chronological order. Kent's two years younger than I am, Phoebe's two years younger than Kent, then there was a miscarriage, and my sister Cynthia is four years younger than Phoebe. Eight years spanning the four of us.

CW:And what was Jewish about your home?

LR:At the time very little except the name. The name was clear -- that is, the identification was clear. My parents identified as Jews. They didn't hide that. They proclaimed that. They liked to talk about that. And that was about it. We 7:00celebrated Christmas and Easter. My mother continued to send me Easter candy baskets well into my years at college. We celebrated the Fourth of July, and we celebrated Memorial Day, all of those holidays being understood by my parents, my very secular parents, as American holidays. My brother Kent liked to make a joke that when we traveled, we were told that we had a certain amount of money to spend per day, and so he -- when the children read the menus, they would read them from right to left, from price to item, and that, said Kent, was the only time behaviorally he ever felt Jewish when growing up, when reading from right to left the prices of the menu. We didn't celebrate Jewish holidays. We weren't part of a -- well, it's not surprising that we weren't part of a synagogue. My mother told a story about that, which I don't believe to be true, but is 8:00indicative of what the temper of the house was. They had inquired about joining a synagogue, she said, and she was told what the fee structure was. She may have been visited by somebody to tell her what the fee structure was. And what she said to me when she told this story was that the annual fee for a family in Glencoe in the 1950s was $2,500, which is one tenth of what my parents paid for their house. That's why I don't think that seems plausible. But that's what she said. And then after she said, "We don't have that kind of money," a woman from the sisterhood came to talk to her and said to my mother, "Don't you have any of your own money?" Which my mother found insulting in half a dozen ways: the idea that she would have family money, perhaps the idea that she would be squirreling money away from my father and not being open and transparent with him -- I'm not 9:00sure which of those presumptions she found more insulting. And that, she said, was the end of any possible synagogue affiliation. It felt so intrinsic to our life that we weren't affiliated with a synagogue that it's hard for me to imagine a life in which we would have been. But that's the story she told. So no Jewish practice, no Jewish languages, no Jewish alphabets.

CW:And what was important in your family culture?

LR:Left-wing politics. I don't think I'm exactly a red diaper baby because by the time I was born my parents had become staunch Democrats, although my father I think voted for Henry Wallace in 1948. My mother had been a member of the Student Peace Union. She had copies -- more than one, I think -- of John Reed's "Ten Days That Shook the World," which was like a secular scripture for 10:00left-wing people then. And she had Leon Trotsky's "History of the Russian Revolution." She had a positive definition of communism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." She could get, you know, romantic and rapturous about the triumphs of the Russian Revolution. As I said, by the time we were born, and I was the first, and I was born in 1948, what had been socialism -- her father's socialism, her own socialism -- a positive sense of communism -- had become a positive sense of the Democratic Party. But that was important. Also, civic engagement was important. Voting was important. Conversation was important. Sitting around the dinner table and arguing and being interesting, those were all important. My mother liked to -- most of the 11:00time when I talk about my parents I'm talking about my mother, who was much the more memorable of the two, although my father was an interesting, if enigmatic, man. My mother told me a story about when I was first brought to her in the hospital. She was thinking of something memorable she could say to her firstborn child on her first encounter with him after the birth, and she thought, and she thought, and she thought, and finally she found herself saying, "In twenty-one years you'll be able to vote." Which is indeed memorable; hence my remembering the story as she told it to me. And that civic engagement that's suggested by that story -- that was central to us. Not having as much money as the neighbors was a central component of our identity, not being as wealthy as the people who were building new and bigger houses. Being smart, being cultured, those were all important.

CW:So what were the political issues that were of the time that -- as you were growing into those conversations?

LR:It was really important not -- well, to be a supporter of Adlai Stevenson was important, so national politics. Not to be part of the cult of John F. Kennedy was important. And in fact my parents -- I think it was both parents -- the night after the assassination urged me to go to a movie that had been scheduled to be shown at the high school, which I did. I mean, they drove me there, and it, not surprisingly, wasn't being shown, but my parents thought it was important for me to go and not maximize the assassination. So to the left of 13:00Kennedy, the Stevenson wing of the Party. There were other political issues I know that were important. My mom was a member of the League of Women Voters and of the PTA, I think. But I don't remember what those local issues were. Glencoe felt like a pretty quiet and un-controversy-wracked town at the time.

CW:And you said "cultured." What was the culture that you were exposed to?

LR:Yeah, so not for the most part visual culture, by which I mean going to museums. We didn't do that. And I grew up being intimidated by museums. Books. Lots and lots of books. There were built-in bookcases in the house, and then my parents bought bookcase after bookcase, and they filled them with what I would 14:00now call largely middle- to semi-highbrow books. They were, I think, subscribers to the Book of the Month Club and other book clubs like that. They had mostly hardbacks. And they were, in some way, classic books. They had Chekhov and they had Alan Paton and Dostoevsky, and they had Merezhkovsky's "The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci." That kind of book. Modern Library books, sometimes Everyman books, prestigious high art series of books. All in English; there weren't any other languages in my household except my mother remembered some German songs that her father and mother had sung. Music, very much not rock and roll, and it 15:00was an earthquake when my next brother, Kent, sold his classical Lorée oboe and bought a guitar because he wanted to become a singer -- which he did, in fact, and still is one. So not Elvis Presley, who was too vulgar and too raunchy, I think, for my mother. TV shows like "The Voice of Firestone" and "The Bell Telephone Hour," concerts at Ravinia, symphony orchestra concerts -- mostly not in the city. We didn't go as much into the city as you might think -- that kind of record. Also recordings of left-wing folksingers: Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger and the Weavers. That came along with politics, I think, that kind of 16:00culture. A certain kind of book that I learned in graduate school to look down on, and that later I came to admire, like "The Jungle" and "The Grapes of Wrath," sort of novels of social uplift and social justice.

CW:Were you aware of or did you have friends who were in other types of Jewish affiliation who went to shul or --

LR:Yeah, I did. I mean, that's -- I know I must have because I'm still in contact with many of my friends from that period, and I know that that's what they did. But I had no part in it. I remember once, and really only once, being invited to a friend's bar mitzvah. So that was entirely bewildering, and I didn't build up a repertory of information that you might collect if you went to a series of bar mitzvahs. But I didn't do that. I know that my friends were 17:00observant from the fact that they didn't come to school on a High Holiday. My parents sent us to school regularly on the High Holidays. And that was extremely vivid because Glencoe was a seventy percent Jewish town, and practically nobody was there on those days. So I'm sure my friends were in shul. I didn't learn the word "shul" to describe that, by the way, until much later, but -- but yeah, I knew they were there. I just didn't know what went on there.

CW:So as a young person, what were you interested in?

LR:Well, let's see. I played tennis, I liked that. I bicycled. It was that kind of freer childhood that you sometimes get really gloppily sentimental descriptions of with relatively little regulation. Unhappily, I didn't love the lake. We were six blocks from Lake Michigan, and later I came to think that that 18:00was an extraordinary thing, but I for some reason disliked the lake. There were all these athletic contests that kids my age got into with tetherball, and I wasn't good at them, and I wasn't a good swimmer, and I just didn't like that. But tennis I liked, and bicycling to visit with friends I liked. Watching tennis. I obviously read some of the books and listened to some of the music that my parents admired. And I was shaped by them more than my siblings were. But not altogether. And I remember -- the Glencoe Library closed for two months during the summer. And before it closed you were allowed to take out a whole bunch of books to tide you over until it opened. And I took some books that I knew my parents would approve of and some books that I wanted to read, and most 19:00of the books that I wanted to read were genre fiction, what I would now call genre fiction, science fiction, chiefly. That's also what I spent my spare change on. I got my spare change by working as a page at the Glencoe Public Library for sixty cents an hour. And I learned quite a lot about books by shelving them, even if I wasn't reading them. So I read, but in a way that I think my parents found somewhat disreputable. I was a flutist. I liked being in band and orchestra very, very much in grammar school and middle school. We sang together as a family, and I learned all the Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger and Weavers songs. They're still stored in some part of my memory that's been secure, so far, against the deprivations of forgetfulness. Yeah, that's what I 20:00liked to do. I mean, I liked school. That's still -- I liked what we did in school, and I liked being good at it.

CW:What was your favorite subject?

LR:At an early point I liked them all, although the teachers who were most influential were my English and I guess what was then called social studies teachers.

CW:So how did you end up at Columbia?

LR:So by a series of small rebellions. And also by some ignorance and accident. I applied -- well, my mother spoke eloquently about what she didn't like about the University of Chicago, about how it turned well-rounded people into 21:00obsessive specialists and was unduly urban and unduly intense and abstruse. And the little that I knew about Columbia made it sound a little bit like the University of Chicago, but going there wasn't an act of direct disloyalty. And it was eight hundred miles away, which I found attractive. The ignorance has to do with what I remember saying to people, which is that I thought Columbia had a very fine department of semantics, whatever that meant. Maybe that was pointing toward some linguistic interests that I didn't have at the time. When I say that there's a certain amount of luck or "bashertness," depending on how you think about it, about how I ended up there -- I applied to Columbia and to Oberlin. I got into both of them. And my mother wanted me to go to Oberlin. It was a school 22:00that was less likely, she thought, to exacerbate my already obsessive competitive tendencies. And I was ready to go to Oberlin. My high school English teacher, also a charismatic and compelling woman, named Kay Rasco, said she'd like to talk to me before I made the decision. And she came in I think the morning of the day I was supposed to send in an acceptance. And she had a severe head cold. This was at seven thirty in the morning, seven in the morning, before class had started. And she said to me, "I'm glad to see you. I almost didn't come in. And really, I gotta go home and take care of this cold. But since I'm here," she said, "here's my advice to you. Going to Oberlin will be a cop-out for you. You need to go to a city, you need to go to a university, you need to go some kind of place you've never been. Don't go to Oberlin." I mean, she was more eloquent than that, but she did use the word "cop-out." And I called my 23:00mother and said to send in the acceptance to Columbia. So, that's how I got there. Then I liked it, a lot. But the things that I liked about it weren't things that I actually knew about it.

CW:What did you like about it?

LR:Well, I liked the curriculum, very much. Two years of fixed humanities and social science courses, and they were exciting for me, reading all those big books. And it didn't mat-- none of my instructors in those courses was terrific, but it didn't matter. It was intoxicating. Really. I wasn't a drinking person, but if I had been I think I would have felt sensations similar to what I felt reading Homer and Sophocles and Dante for -- not always for the first time, but for the first academic time. It was wonderful. I auditioned for two choral 24:00ensembles, the glee club and the chapel choir. The glee club people said: We'd love to have you; come to our orientation weekend. It'll cost $25. You'll meet all the people; you'll learn all the songs. The chapel choir people said: We're not sure about your sight-reading -- which was legitimate; I'd never sight-read -- but we think it might work out, so we'll take you on probation, and if it works out, we'll pay you $275 a semester. That was for three rehearsals and three services a week. But it was money. I loved the idea of being paid, and I loved the idea of being part of a group I wasn't quite good enough for, so I joined the choir. And that was a big, big deal for all of the years I was at -- well, not all of the years I was at Columbia, 'cause I moved over to sing at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. But that was choral music, early music, one 25:00in a part singing. The whole heritage of English choral singing, which I knew nothing about, but the Columbia Chapel Choir was in some sense a -- exfoliation of. And I just loved that. And three rehearsals and three services a week, that's a lot. And that extended gradually to other areas of early music. And after playing in a concert -- I was a recorderist. It's an easy switch from flute -- a duet with a fellow student and making a total hash of it, a professor named Joel Newman, whose consort had played at the same concert very well, called me up and said, "The Morningside Consort meets Monday nights at my house. 26:00We get together at seven and play for a couple of hours. You want to come play with us?" And it was magic. He's a wonderful musician. I learned an enormous amount from him and from playing. So I was doing a lot of music. So the courses themselves and being in them, and -- then they're -- reading stuff. There were two other things that I should probably note, both of them in one way or another indirectly connected with Yiddish. One is the obvious one: I was at Columbia in 1968, and I was at the margins of that movement. But being at the margins meant you could get hit in the eye by a police officer's billy club, and here you were part of this great anti-war insurgence, and I --

CW:Can you just, for people --

LR:Yeah.

CW:-- younger people who might not know what you're talking about --

LR:Sure, of course.

CW:-- explain what this movement is?

LR:In the spring of nineteen si-- so it's still Vietnam War, that's the first important thing to know. And Columbia was doing some collaborative work with the Institute for Defense Analysis. So Columbia was a participant in the war effort. And many, many students were profoundly opposed to the war, partly 'cause Columbia College at that moment was all men, and they were gonna get drafted. So it was a very pressing intensity of resistance to the war 'cause it was personal. In the spring of 1968, a number of students occup-- in protest against the university's involvement in the Vietnam War and the university's building of a gymnasium in Morningside Park, which was in Harlem but wasn't gonna be 28:00accessible to the residents of Harlem, and probably in relation to some other things, occupied a number of the buildings at Columbia, made it impossible for classes to take place, occupied the president's office, occupied the chief undergraduate classroom building, Hamilton Hall, and barricaded officers of the college in their offices for what seemed then like immense periods of time, and stayed in the buildings for -- in all honesty, I don't know how long. A month? Three weeks? One couple got married in one of the buildings during that period. And then, you know -- it was all that people talked about. 'Cause, for one thing, we weren't holding classes. 'Cause you couldn't hold classes 'cause there was nowhere to hold them. And politics became the most interesting thing to talk 29:00about and more interesting than it had ever -- much more interesting than electoral politics in my parents' household. And it got still more interesting when Grayson Kirk, who was then president of Columbia, called the police and they threw the occupiers out, and also they threw the people who were blockading the occupied buildings -- I was one of those -- onto the stairways and grassy patches around the buildings, and that created still intenser resistance and conversation. So that was a really big deal. It would have been a big deal to be a student at that moment regardless of where you were. Wordsworth says about the French Revolution, "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven," and that's what I felt like. The other thing that happened, of 30:00equally lasting importance in my life, is that I began to study living languages. And without -- and in particular German, which is how I came into Yiddish. So I was phobic, timid, about living languages, because you have to speak them, and I had, regarding the speaking of living languages, feelings similar to this quite intense stage fright I had at the time. So I studied Latin. And then I fell in love with a woman who was a German major at Radcliffe, and I thought, Well, maybe if I took German, I'd make myself more attractive. So I took the course pass/fail, first-year German, in the spring of my -- fall of my junior year. I felt I was doing something important, and I walked into the classroom. And about three minutes later, after the instructor had walked in in 31:00a three-piece suit and said, "Ich heiße Wolfgang Hoyz -- Wolfgang Haus [German: My name is Wolfgang Hoyz -- Wolfgang Haus]," I thought, This is how I want to spend the rest of my life. I love doing this. I loved everything connected with it. I loved making my mouth do things it hadn't done before. I loved all the drills and the repetitions and the conjugations and the declensions and -- I just loved that in my senior year, although I was taking a English seminar to finish my English major. The other courses I was taking were Greek, Latin, German, and Italian, and I was happy as can be.

CW:So then how did you come to things Jewish? (laughs)

LR:Yeah. So to Jewish things I came by way of my friend Michael Wolf, who was a student at Yale and held a seder one spring when I was twenty-one, I think. And called me and said, "Hey, why don't you come to my seder?" I thought that was 32:00great. I thought it was even greater the year after. He wasn't himself available; one of his parents was sick, but he got me an invitation from friends of his at the Yale School of Music, and that was a fabulous seder. They were singers, (laughs) for one thing. They knew a lot of songs. And they were smart. And they had the wit to serve a relatively light meal, so the conversation went on, and the singing went on -- I didn't know any of the words, but I just loved it. I loved this conversational, dialogic, do-it-yourself kind of religion. And my pleasure in that was sharpened by the fact that the day after that seder was Easter Sunday. And I had to get up at five o'clock in the morning to catch a train from New Haven to New York so I could be at Easter services 'cause I was singing there. And that's the extreme other end of religious observance. There 33:00are three thousand people in the dark church, and the doors are -- the bishop comes 'round to the front door in full regalia and knocks three times on the door, and it's thunderous, and the doors are thrown open, and the light streams in, and the bishop says, "Christ is risen," and three thousand people say, "He is risen indeed," and then the state trumpet and the organ, which is the loudest organ stop maybe in the whole city of New York, starts blaring. And I thought, Given the choice, I know -- it's totally unfair to both religions, but given the choice, I know where I belong. So for a bit my Judaism consisted of going to various friends' seders. I loved them, but I wasn't learning anything, really. The connection with Judaism or deepened connection with Judaism is by way of connection to Yiddish and -- this is one of those stories where I have told it 34:00so often that I am aware of having made it up. I mean, I know that something happened that somewhat resembles the story that I tell, but I don't -- I can't get back behind my own narrative. But the narrative is as follows: So I was teaching at Lehman College. I stayed at Columbia for graduate school, and then I got part-time work teaching English at Lehman, and also teaching at Lehman was my friend Aaron Fogel, who is a professor of English at BU or maybe has retired from there. And Aaron grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home and with some real tradition to that, and I thought that was really cool. And I thought it was really cool when one morning we went out for coffee and he bought a copy of the Yiddish "Forward." I thought, Oh, my friend Aaron, (UNCLEAR), so wonderful. And 35:00then he reads this sentence aloud, and he says, "I'm not sure what this means," and I say, "Well, I think I know what it means," 'cause it was a very daytshmerish [Germanic] kind of sentence, and -- or at least that's what I think. 'Cause there's no other way for this story to come out the way it comes out. But I can't remember the sentence or whether it was a word -- I -- you know. But it was a big deal for me because it said to me: This Jewish language you kinda know, or you know something about, or you have an entrée to. And I thought, That's really interesting. Do I know this language? Do I not know this language? What would it mean to learn this language? So -- I can't have done this the same day, I think. Maybe. I don't know. I called the Yeshiva University bookstore, and I said, "Do you have a Yiddish textbook?" I don't think I could have asked them whether they had Weinreich's textbook 'cause I didn't know it existed. All I knew -- but they had a Yiddish textbook, so I walked four miles 36:00from my apartment on West 100th Street to Yeshiva to make a pilgrimage to buy the Yiddish textbook, which was indeed Weinreich's textbook, which is over there on my desk, and then I started learning the alef-beys [alphabet]. And there's a version of this story that's not true and that I know not to be true, and in the version of the story that's not true I devote myself with single-minded intensity to learning Yiddish until I get through the textbook. But I didn't do that. But I learned something. And I began to read those letters. And I did, in some way, learn the alphabet. I didn't learn it when I came later to learn some Hebrew. I realized that I'd learned the alphabet in a way that wasn't entirely adequate to Hebrew. But -- okay. I learned enough to be able to puzzle out and 37:00sometimes more than puzzle out Yiddish words. So. That's the first step. The second step -- I came to the University of Chicago as a Harper Fellow in 1978. And that was finally coming back (laughs) to the University of Chicago that my mother had denounced for so long. By that time she was fine with it, you know?

CW:And can you just mention what you were studying academically at this point?

LR:Sure. So I'd fi-- I was in the process of finishing my dissertation. And I hadn't finished it. And the dissertation was on -- I had this great revelation one day. I'd been -- I came home from -- I couldn't fi-- I'd finished my orals, and I had not the slightest clue of what I would like to write about for a 38:00dissertation. 'Cause I'd had it. I'd had too many classes and too many exams, and I didn't -- there was nothing I could really call mine. I was good at it, but it wasn't mine. And then suddenly, between one step and another, after Jimmy Vennett dropped me off by Riverside Church in Manhattan after we'd both been teaching at Lehman that morning, I said to myself, I know what I want to write about. I want to write about first-person, non-narrative prose written in the United States before 1865. Which doesn't feel like Paul -- Saul on the road to Damascus but was a real revelation for me, and the interest I had then in diaries and journals and autobiographies has remained important to me. So what I was writing about was three early American diarists, mostly pe-- diarists that nobody really wants to read very much: William Byrd of Westover and Samuel Sewell and Cotton Mather. But that's what I was writing about. And I was working 39:00on that during the years at Chicago. But I -- I don't know how this happened, 'cause I wasn't connected with the Hillel as a place to worship. I was beginning to celebrate Yom Kippur, although with such great ignorance that I got the date wrong one year, and I had to celebrate -- I had to fast on two days, the wrong one and the right one. But somebody said, "There's this Yiddish course at Hillel." And I went there. And I was very, very lucky in my teacher, who was a woman named Pearl Kahan. The wife of a very distinguished economist and Yiddishist named Arcadius Kahan. Pearl grew up in Warsaw. And there's some film 40:00image before my eyes that has a still photograph of her as a young woman. She's really luminous. I only met her later, obviously. But what I remember about Pearl was that we were told we had to buy or, in my case, to bring the Weinreich textbook. And then she said, "I just want you to know, Yiddish is a language like other languages. It's not a series of curse words; it's not a series of colloquial expressions; it's not a series of song lyrics. It's got a grammar, it's got a vocabulary, and you have to learn the grammar, and you have to learn the -- you have to do all the drills that people do when they learn other languages. If you want to learn it, that's what you have to do." I loved that. I can imagine other Yiddish teachers not insisting on that so prominently, and she insisted on that. And she was a very demanding, lovely, inspiring teacher. And I 41:00took that course, and then the second year we were there I asked for -- there wasn't a second-year course at the Hillel, not surprisingly, and I asked Pearl whether she would read some stuff with me. And this also was a very interesting experience. What she proposed reading was Isaac Bashevis Singer story called "Der shpigl," "The Mirror." And I thought, Great, this is my -- I still -- I remember reading the first sentence and thinking, I'm reading Yiddish literature. This is really exciting. But about halfway through --- I mean, do you know this story?

CW:I don't.

LR:Okay. So it's about demons, not surprisingly. And one of the things that demons do is hide in mirrors. And -- which means that they attract vain women. 42:00They can entrap vain women. And there's a vain woman named Tsirl, who spends too much time looking in the mirror. And once she looks in the mirror long enough and gets into conversation with this unnamed demon long enough she's entrapped by the demon. And she goes through all these hellish places of torment, like demon dimensions in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And at the point where we got to that part, Pearl said, "I don't want to read this. I don't know the vocabulary, for one thing. It's a very Kabbalistic vocabulary. And I hate it. I just hate it. I don't want -- it's -- it's --" -- I don't know what she said. "It's vulgar," "It's obscene," "It's pornographic," "It's voyeuristic" -- I mean, any of those things. And there's some justice in that. And that's where my formal study of Yiddish literature with Pearl Kahan ended, 'cause -- I think I finished 43:00the story as best I could, which wasn't so great. But she was a really important teacher for me. So that's -- by then I was -- you could say that I was reading Yiddish. Slowly but competently. And by then I had a dictionary, and by then -- you know, so stuff like that.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Well, I'm not sure how the parallels between these two strands are, but I'm curious about your having grown up in a secular home and being interested in religion --

LR:Um-hm.

CW:-- sort of through song and then these seders. What -- sort of personally about that journey of wanting some sort of religion in your life, can you talk about that?

LR:Yeah, I can. Um -- (sighs) if I were better at analyzing myself in a classic 44:00psychoanalytic perspective I could probably link both of these things to kinds of resi-- both languages and religion to resistance to or rebellion against the home I grew up in, which had neither language nor religion. I mean, that's the basic truth. I'm sure that's true. But it's gotta be something deeper than that. So I'm a musician, as noted earlier, and a singer, and I'm also a person who finds foreign languages, languages other than English, intoxicating. How intensely I would have been drawn to Judaism if it were spoken rather than sung in its religious practice and if it were conducted in English, I don't know. I don't mean that I was only there in order to be able to sing and in order to be able to sing in Hebrew, but -- because I think there is actually something else 45:00that's released in me by religious practice, some part of myself that I don't ordinarily have access to, and I don't know how to name that part 'cause it's not a fervently believing part. I retain my parents' belief system, but I didn't retain their observance system. Anyway, as I was -- when I was drawn to Jewish worship, Jewish practice, it was always in relation to what the language was and what the music was. And the pull was -- well, it was -- again, it's not a linear story. How does it work? I mean, I had friends at Wellesley who were observant and whom I was curious about, and I followed them to Harvard Hillel, where they 46:00were members of that then extremely vibrant congregation. That's how I met Ben-Zion Gold. I was bewildered by what was going on, but the kind of bewilderment it was was one that I liked 'cause you could learn. And I liked learning. I left that congregation around the time that it sent out a fundraising letter deploring the multiplicity of mixed marriages. My wife is a Quaker, grew up as a Baptist, and it didn't feel right for me to be supporting an enterprise that deplored the marriage I was in -- and am in. Then I -- what happened then? I also was -- I needed to learn something in order to function in that congregation. If I was gonna be a member of a mixed marriage I needed to 47:00learn some Hebrew. Or some more Yiddish. I'd learned some more Yiddish -- this isn't quite linear -- Kathryn Hellerstein came to teach here for a couple of years, and during those two years we were at Yiddish together. I went -- I did indeed learn some Hebrew, here, so I could be a member of Harvard Hillel and not be an ignoramus. But the draw was the same when I was able to come back or when I followed the former rabbinic advisor to Shir Tikva in Wayland. It was the way in which the religious practice, meaning the intellectual intensity of it, but 48:00also the non-- "Anglophonicity" is a terrible word -- the non-English-languageness of it and the musicality of it released things in me, parts of me that I don't really have access to otherwise. I've had a lot of conversations about belief with people who are surprised that somebody who's so staunch an atheist spends so much time doing something that you'd have to call praying, as I do. And the ans-- one answer to that is that some part of me has a different relation to belief if what I'm doing is chanting. As opposed to what my relation to belief is when I'm talking, right? So that's part of that. And I'm not saying anything that's at all new, but a lot of Jewish intellectual 49:00practice is text study, and I'm good at that, and I like that a lot. And we weren't affiliated with a synagogue either, but we thought that our kids should learn something. They're twin girls; they were born in 1980. And so for approximately six years, eight years, maybe, every Saturday, we'd -- which is both observant and anti-observant -- I drove them to Louie's Coffee Shop in Wellesley Farms, and we studied the Torah portion for the week over chicken shish kabobs. And we had books, which we somehow managed to keep unstained. We had Plaut's commentary and "The Five Books of Miriam" and Everett Fox's translation. I got an interest in translation by way of getting interested in Franz Rosenzweig's translation of the Bible. At first I only knew about that 50:00translation, that it was -- what Rosenzweig said about it was really smart. Later I came by way of reading and translating him to think about translation and Jewish translation more generally. I don't have a clear chronological sense of where these things happened, but they're all in pretty great force by the, I don't know, mid-'90s, something like that, a dozen years after I arrived at Wellesley.

CW:You've been involved in various chavurot [Hebrew: learning communities]. Can you explain what the Chavurah movement is (UNCLEAR) --

LR:Yeah, I can.

CW:Thank you.

LR:So it's easy in a way because the chavurah [Hebrew: learning community] I've been involved in is arguably the first of them, Havurat Shalom in Somerville, and that came into being for two reasons. One is that there were a lot of young 51:00men, fervently observant Jewish young men, who didn't want to fight in the Vietnam War. So they founded a seminary, their own seminary, and for a long time that was what Havurat Shalom was officially designated as, "Havurat Shalom Community Seminary." And for a long time the dues that people paid were called tuition.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

LR:But also they were people who found the structures of organized Judaism at the time empty of life. There just wasn't anything going on there. It was dead and (sighs) dusty. And they made it up themselves. The "Jewish Catalogs," which are a kind of do-it-yourself Judaism and are an imitation of the "Whole Earth Catalog," are: How do you make up a Judaism if you're not being offered one by the structures available to you? So the chavurah, the fellowship, was an 52:00institution created to answer that question. It's not accidental that its services take -- that they bought a house. It was never gonna be a synagogue-sized building. So they bought a house when you could buy a house in Somerville, in the late '60s, and the congregation is still there, and the living room is the davening room, and the -- what would have been somebody's bedroom in the second floor was the library, and the dining room is where you have business meetings, and the cushions are what you sit on 'cause people like the idea of sitting on cushions rather than chairs 'cause there was a synergy between Eastern religion and chavurah Judaism. Anyway, so, I really know little about other chavurot, but that's the pattern for the one that is mine, which just had its fiftieth anniversary celebration.

CW:And when did you join that one?

LR:So I joined in 2004 -- 2003, 2004. And the story of how I got there is, for 53:00me, at any rate, interesting, so I'll tell you that story. So my wife's a Quaker, as noted, and I was going with one of our daughters the day before the first seder to buy a fish at Wulf's Fish Market in Brookline, which is what I always did on that day. 'Cause I always cook the same dish the first night, which is actually a French -- a Provençal dish. But -- and on the way back, Lily, the ten-minutes-younger daughter said to me, "So tell me how it works out for you being a member of a congregation that doesn't accept me as a Jew." And I was back at Harvard Hillel at the time. And I thought about it. There's no way for me to convey this correct-- I know that's the question she asked, but it sounds confrontatory, and it wasn't. It was actually inquiring and curious, and I love that. So I spent six months thinking about it. And I talked to Ben-Zion 54:00Gold, just ascertaining whether this was in fact the policy, and he was by then retired from being the advisor, but I cared for him very much and wanted to talk to him. I talked to Norman Janis, who was his successor in that role and who was also a close friend. Then I thought, "You know, it doesn't -- she's right, it doesn't work." So I wrote a regretful letter and then thought, Where am I gonna go now? 'Cause I was used to going in. I like services, and I like conversations, and I like observance. It's -- at the time my wife and I went into Cambridge together on Saturday mornings, and she got off at Central Square for her tai chi class, and I stayed on the Red Line till Harvard Square for my davening. So we were both going to our spiritual exercise. I had heard of 55:00Havurat Shalom because people had told me that it didn't charge for admission to the High Holiday services and also that it had done sanctuary work during the Contra wars. And I thought, Well, if this is a congregation that might work for me, then I would just have to stay on the Red Line for two stops more, and we could continue meeting on the way home. It was transportationally efficient. So I got in touch with him, and I said, "The first thing I have to know is what are your views on the children of intermarriages?" And I got an email back from somebody, and I didn't know at the time, obviously, but have come to know and like very much, saying, "Well, our position is that people who identify as Jewish are Jewish, and, by the way, if your wife would like to come to services sometime she'd be more than welcome." And I thought, "Fine, that sounds great." So I showed up one summer morning, and -- I'm realizing, by the way, as I'm 56:00talking, that an important leitmotif of this story is the number of times I've been attracted to something that was difficult and disorienting, from chapel choir to, as it's gonna turn out, to Havurat Shalom. Because the thing about Havurat Shalom -- it was a Hebrew liturgy, and I was entranced by that because I thought: The only people who would accept our kids as Jews are Reform Jews, and they mostly don't have Hebrew liturgies, and it's not gonna be participatory, and I'm not gonna get to do what I do at Harvard, and how am I gonna work that out? Anyway, so here's this congregation that would, and it has a Hebrew liturgy, and I think, Hallelujah, except that I can't read it because it's all been rewritten or to a significant extent been rewritten along gender lines and names of God lines and ways of referring to non-Jews lines and certain modes of 57:00violence lines, and I couldn't -- I mean, I could read part of it, but then every time I began to feel that I was in a familiar place, the text had been changed, and I was suddenly in an unfamiliar place. And I thought, What? Which is partly just not having very good Hebrew at the time and not knowing the feminine forms for all these verbs, but also there were bigger changes than that. But I found that too to be really attractive. I found it politically attractive. I liked the idea of a rewritten liturgy. But I found it philologically attractive. I liked the fact that I had to learn more grammar (laughs) in some way. And I liked the -- and there was a fervor to it. There was a non-anonymity. I like being places where you can't hide in the woodwork. So anyway. Then one thing led to another. I stayed and learned how to lead services and eventually learned how to leyen [teach Torah] there, which I had never done, 58:00for obvious reasons. And that's the -- that's that story.

CW:Well, to go back to the sort of Yiddish language thread --

LR:Yeah.

CW:-- so after you had star-- after this time at University of Chicago --

LR:Um-hm.

CW:-- where does that thread take you?

LR:Yeah. So as I said, so Kathryn Hellerstein, who you've probably interviewed or know about, who's a very accomplished translator of Yiddish, came to Wellesley. She's a Wellesley alum. We hired her; we in the English department hired her. And I was untenured at the time, so I wasn't a mover and shaker. But I loved the idea of having her come. And I had the Yiddish I'd learned at Chicago, and then I had read occasionally. I was more familiar with the Hebrew 59:00alphabet because I was in services sometimes. And I don't know whether I was reading anything, but I could read what she proposed that we read together. She and a woman named Eleanor Grummit and I read a story by Yud Yud Singer called "A fremder," "A Stranger." And we read that together, and I thought that was great to read it together. And I also thought, I could translate this. And I did. In fact, that's the first published translation I did.

CW:Do you remember why you wanted to or --

LR:Why I wanted to translate it? Because translation is for me the most central way of knowing a text. When I was an early music singer in New York I was in groups where a lot of texts had to be translated, and I volunteered usually to translate them. And sometimes they're pretty dopey, those texts, and they have a 60:00lot of clichés in them, and sometimes they're old, and you have to look up a lot of words in multi-volume dictionaries of Middle French or whatever it is. But I always volunteered to do that. 'Cause I love doing it. It's a mode of knowing. And it's how I came to read Rosenzweig. So the -- I me--, I don't want to pretend that I didn't think, Oh, I could translate this story, and then I can publish it, 'cause that would be nice for me. But I loved doing the translating. So I did. Then it turned out somebody had translated it before, and then I had to invent an argument explaining why my translation was different, and it was a good enough argument to get it published. But -- so that was one stage. And working with Kathryn was great. She wasn't exactly my teacher, but she wasn't exactly not my teacher either. Then -- so that was in the mid-'80s. And -- I 61:00can't remember when the Mendele listserv got established. But pretty soon after that I was on it. And pretty soon after that I was (pause) getting to be known at the college as one of the people who did Yiddish here. There were, at the time, two, and now I'm really pretty much the only one.

CW:Who was the other one?

LR:A guy named Alan Shuchat, in the math department, who grew up with it. And has a very nice, nuanced literary sensibility, even though he says he doesn't do that. But he does. He's fun to talk to. And he's a polyglot. Grew up I think in a Russian-speaking, Yiddish-speaking family, so came with a lot of accents, grew 62:00up with a lot of accents and modes of speaking in his ear and in his mouth. And somebody gave me, therefore -- got in touch with me and said, "I have these letters that I'd like to get translated. Can you help me?" And I -- none of my study of Yiddish had prepared me to read Yiddish handwriting, and I still read it very badly. So I posted -- I sent a query to Mendele, saying, "Can anybody help me with this?" And I got an email and a call from Harry Bochner who said, "Yeah, I can probably help you. Let's -- send them to me," or something like that, "and I'll see what I can do." This is the way I remember it, at any rate. And then he said, "So --" Maybe I said, "Can I take you to lunch?" or something 63:00like that. And we met at some Thai restaurant in Harvard Square. And we talked, and I liked him very much. And then he said to me at the end of lunch, "So, in all honesty, I've been a little auditioning you." We were speaking English; it wasn't a language audition. He said, "'Cause I'm the organizer of this Yiddish-speaking group, and I was thinking of asking you whether you'd like to come speak Yiddish with us, but I wanted to see -- I wanted to make sure you weren't a certain kind of person connected with Yiddish who talks all the time." You can meet people like that if you go to any of the Yiddish lectures at the Workmen's Circle, so -- anyway, I'm not that kind of person, despite all the talking I'm doing this afternoon. And so I went to join this Yiddish group. And that was amazing because there were all these people, not all of them older than 64:00I, speaking this really rich and accomplished Yiddish about things that interested me a lot. About the whole Yiddishist world. There was Harry, and I think Richard Fein, a translator, was a member of that group, and Solon Beinfeld joined it later, and Marion Aptroot, who now teaches in Dusseldorf, was part of it. And a guy named Dovid Brown. It was just wonderful. And intoxicating. And again, a group where they were -- there were a lot of people who spoke Yiddish much better than I did, to put it mildly. But I thought, Yeah, I can really learn a lot from these people. And a guy named Norman Miller. And I don't know whether that's a name you know. He was another of these social 65:00scientist-Yiddishists, like Arcadius Kahan at the University of Chicago, whom he had been friends with, and that's how we sort of got to be friends. And he was, along with Len Prager, was the founder of "The Mendele Review." And he took a liking to me and an interest in my way of talking or thinking, and he invited me to review a translation for the first issue of "The Mendele Review." Do you want me to explain these two things? Does that -- I mean --

CW:Yeah, but just briefly with the "Mendele Review."

LR:So the -- Mendele itself is just a listserv for people who want to talk about Yiddish. "Mendele Review" is founded in order for people to write somewhat longer and more scholarly pieces about aspects of Yiddish -- 'cause there were a lot of scholars in that group of people who liked to talk about Yiddish or speak Yiddish and -- and Norm invited me to review this work, Golda Werman's 66:00translations of some stories by Dovid Bergelson. And then he lent me his copy of Bergelson's stories, which I -- I didn't have that many Yiddish books, and I wasn't starting to grab them for Yiddish Book Center or whatev--. Heaven knows they weren't available online. And I looked at it, and I think that in entirely good faith I thought, This is crazy. This is a travesty. Because there were all these unnecessary, gratuitous, arbitrary changes, which weren't really explained by Werman's preface and seemed to me to make the story considerably worse. And I -- it wasn't one of those -- Bergelson's text wasn't a text where you had to reconfigure it in order to make it work. You could keep his paragraphing and his 67:00sentence structure, and you didn't have to reorder the information. It worked fine. And Joseph Sherman's translation of the story "Opgang [Departure]," published some years later, does all those things, and it's really great. So I wrote that. And I attribute to that review quite a lot of what brought me into the Yiddishist world. It certainly wasn't the translation, but what happened when -- it wasn't the translation of the Singer story that I published. What happened was -- you probably know this -- but in the Yiddishist world, people don't like to say bad things about other people, and especially about translators of Yiddish because, as it says on the back cover of the "Penguin Anthology of Modern Yiddish Verse," "Every translation of a Yiddish poem is a 68:00blow struck against the pernicious effects of the Holocaust," right? And I -- and that's true, by the way, and I don't -- it's really important to translate this stuff. So by and large people don't say, This is a terrible translation, because the impulse to say, Isn't it wonderful to have this in English? dominates over the impulse to say, This is a terrible translation. And as courteously as I could, I said, "This doesn't work as a translation. You can't get Bergelson from this translation." That unusual review in the Yiddishist world caught the attention of Dovid Ruskies, who then -- whom I knew slightly, but I don't know how -- who then started inviting me to join things. He invited me to join the advisory board of the Library of Sholem Aleichem in English translation, which never produced a volume, but I met a lot of people, and David 69:00had appointed me as the -- as what Seth Wolitz called the Savonarola of translation, which meant that it was my job to read all the extant translations of Sholem Aleichem and say whether I thought they could be used in the series or whether we needed new translations. So I did a lot of translation examining, and I wrote a piece about it, actually came out of reviewing those translations, that was published later in the "Pakn Treger." Then Dovid invited me to join the advisory board of the New Yiddish Library, which meant also more connections with Aaron and --

CW:Lansky?

LR:With Aaron Lansky. Yeah. Right. And, you know, I had become a person who spent a lot of time opining about or judging translations of Yiddish literature. 70:00And since translation fascinates me, and since I hold a number of views and principles in that area, and since Yiddish fascinates me, I love doing these pieces. And I did an essay review for a proof text when Joseph Sherman's translation came out. So I was in this tsar-like position, which I didn't entirely like because every theorist of translation should do enough translation that other people can critique his or her translations just as he or she has been critiquing theirs. So. So I did some more translations that emerged from my connection with these enterprises. I did a translation of Lamed Shapiro's story "New Yorkish" for Leah Garrett's volume in the New Yiddish Library series.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

LR:So there's another -- there's a crucial extra step to this involvement in 71:00Yiddish. And it's crucial because the world I was part of, which was the Mendele world and the Yiddish Book Center world and Dovid Roskies's world, which is also Ruth Wisse's world, you know, all of those worlds have some things in common. They emerged from some of the same traditions. And the same books or writers are central to them. I mean, they're richly complicated people, and they have different taste. But it felt in some way like a homogeneous world, which I was eager to get more into and to know better. What happened then, though, was that by way of Marion Aptroot, whom I mentioned earlier, who'd been in this reading 72:00circle called the "Khalyastre," "The Gang," I learned about the existence of some Europeans writing about Yiddish literature from perspectives very different from the ones that I knew about. Marion's own perspective, I think, is different from the David and Ruth and Aaron show. And I know that they're all different, but there's also a lot of connectedness among them. What happened was that I saw announced as a talk in -- at this symposium, this European symposium that alternates between Dusseldorf and Trier, a talk being given in German on Christ 73:00imagery in the poetry of Itzik Manger. And I'm interested in that 'cause there's this surprising phenomenon when you look at Yiddish literature before the Shoah, which is that a lot of Yiddish writers think that they can write about Christian themes. It's all open to them, right? It's this -- and a lot of American writers in particular find it intoxicating. But not just the scandalous works like Sholem Asch's "The Nazarene" but also Anna Margolin's cycle of poems called "Mary." Anyway, so I wrote this person, Efrat Gal-Ed, in German because that's what her talk was in. And she answered. And I got to know her. We -- I don't know what you know about her -- she's an Israeli-born Yiddishist who writes in German.

CW:What's her name?

LR:Efrat, the first name; Gal-Ed, Gal hyphen Ed. She teaches at Dusseldorf as a colleague of Marion. And she turned out to be not only a really good and dear friend -- and there was a really wonderful moment -- you know, German, like Yiddish and like some other languages, has formal and familiar pronouns, and we were exchanging emails in formal pronouns 'cause we hadn't, like, met, and at some point I couldn't figure out who was the right person to offer the use of the familiar pronoun 'cause she was the quasi-native speaker, and I certainly wasn't. But I was the older person. Anyway, I wrote her and said, "Maybe we could say 'du [informal "you"]' to each other." And then we finally met at some point. But she turned out to be this fanatical -- in the best sense -- scholar, 75:00a ransacker of archives, and a graphic artist before she was a scholar of Yiddish who designed everything in her articles and in her astonishing, pattern-breaking biography of Itzik Manger. It's just beautiful. It's in multiple columns; it looks like a Talmud treatise. It's really just great. And she brought a perspective to my thinking about Yiddish that I just didn't have. She comes from a more -- sort of like Pearl Kahan. She's sort of saying, "Yiddish is a wonderful language, I'm spending most of my life reading about it and writing about it, but I'm also a secular Israeli intellectual, and I read 76:00Peter Weiss on the aesthetic of resistance, and let's --" She's much more hospitable to certain kinds of theory than a lot of Yiddishists used to be, at any rate, and has an absolute need to be precise. In date, in place, in philology, and I found her work exhilarating. And she also is the person who invited me for the first time actually to write about Yiddish literature as opposed to writing about translations of Yiddish literature. And I thought, Oh dear, how am I gonna do that? 'Cause it's easy to talk about translations, right? You compare the original -- translation, and you say this or you say that, and you say yae, you say boo, whatever. But Efrat was inviting me to write about some text, and that felt scary. But I did, because the text -- it was one 77:00of Itzik Manger's poems, the first of the "Khumesh lider [Bible poems]," called "Eve and the Apple Tree," "Khave un der eplboym," which I think is a really great poem. And I turned out to have a lot to say about it. (laughs) So that part of me, the part that writes about Yiddish, came in late, at the very last moment by way of an invitation from Europe, in a way. Anyway, in some sense that's where I am now. If the University of Texas Press had found the money, I'd be busy translating Efrat's book, but it didn't, so I'm not. But other than the mentoring work I've done for the Book Center's Translation Fellows program, 78:00that's more or less where I am at the moment.

CW:Well, I'd like to hear a bit about -- I mean, I know you've written about it, but I'm gonna ask you anyway -- about translation and specifically Yiddish translation, if there's a difference for you. What are your views of what is important to preserve and --

LR:Yeah, I'd like to talk about that. The first thing I should say is that I'm friends with all kinds of translators. (laughs) And I admire their translations. I have a set of principles, but I don't think they keep me from admiring very high quality, regardless of how it's produced, regardless of its distance from the original. So I'm good friends with my former colleague, David Ferry, whose translations of Middle High German poems and Virgil's "Aeneid" are done in ways 79:00that are different from the ones that are normative for me, are fr-- "free" is the wrong word -- are reconfigurations of those texts in ways that are different from the ones that are more normative for me. But they're fantastic and brilliant and sometimes better than the originals. That said, when I started reading Rosenzweig's essays about the translation and then Buber's essays about translation, about the Bible translation, what I found most attractive was their commitment to precision and fidelity. I've grown up the way people my age would have grown up in the translational world, with a disdain for the letter and an 80:00admiration for the spirit, with translations that translate not word for word but sense for sense. But that was in some way unsatisfying for me when I reviewed translations. It was unsatisfying for me when I reviewed Golda Werman's translation. What Rosenzweig gave me was a vocabulary for saying that, for exalting fidelity, for suggesting what the patterns are that you can see and reproduce if you notice the patterns and regard yourself as bound to reproduce them. Rosenzweig also said some things more brashly than I would've said, but they were inspiring or energizing for me. He said most of the reason that translators don't reproduce rhyme schemes is sheer laziness. It's not the only 81:00reason, but it's often the reason. And their translation is really great. And I don't just mean that it's great because it's faithful; that's a different matter. It's great because it's beautiful. But not a beauty that you get to by saying that beauty and fidelity are opposed; rather, the beauty that you get to by saying it's an amazing text, the most faithful reproduction possible will give us the most extraordinarily radiant text. And it did. It really, really did. And you can see it on a page and you can hear it in the recordings that Buber made of it. So that's where I'm located. I'm an opponent of easy dismissals of literal translation, and I'm a celebrator of people who are passionately faithful to the original. I believe most of the time in writing 82:00idiomatic English, and what's "translatorese" is something I don't like any more than other people like it. But the confident and easy dismissal of literal translation seems to me wrong, just unconscionable and untenable. Partly 'cause I don't think people know what they mean when they talk about literal translation. They mean some bad example of it. They mean -- you know, the two characters in "Casablanca" who are trying to learn English, and they're native speakers of German, and one of them says to the other at the bar in Casablanca, "What watch?" "Six watch." "Wie viel -- sechs Uhr [German: What time -- six o'clock]." Or they mean Nabokov's terrible literal translation of "Eugene Onegin," or they mean something that's awful. And those things are awful, and it's important to say that. But that's not because the principle is wrong. So I 83:00care a lot about fidelity. I care about formal schemes and retaining them. A good example of that: I am friends with Richard Fein, the translator, and I love his translations of Itzik Manger's poems and Sutzkever's poems and -- they're great. He's a wonderful translator. But he never reproduces rhyme schemes. And I just kinda want him to 'cause that's one of the ways those poems are built. And one of the reasons for my almost idolatrous adoration of John Hollander's translations of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern is that he's as good at rhyming as Halpern was. And they're just dazzling. I mean, Hollander was a virtuoso. One of the sad stories I have about being connected with Yiddish is connected with Hollander. It's to his credit. But -- so Dovid Roskies said to me, "The New Yiddish Library 84:00should have a volume devoted to the poetry of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, and John Hollander should translate it, and you should edit it." And I thought, That's a crazy idea, why is John Hollander gonna pay any attention to me? I mean, what am I gonna tell him, I don't like the way that line works? He's a poet. But I thought it would be interesting to be in touch with him. So I wrote him or called him or something and said, "So, this is what Dovid Ruskies said. What would you -- can I -- are you interested in this? What can I do?" And he said, "Well, I'd like to know what poems you think should be in such a book." So I went through a lot of Halpern, and I sent him a list. And I sent him a copy of the Niborski dictionary 'cause I think he'd like the idea of having a Yiddish-French dictionary, and he's a polyglot. And I thought, Maybe he's gonna do it. Maybe he's actually gonna do this. (UNCLEAR) And he called me up, and he 85:00said, "You know, I just can't do this volume. I can't do the poems you want me to do because if I were gonna do the poems you want me to do, I'd be dead before I finished. And that's not what I want to spend the rest of my life doing." And then he -- I don't -- he spent the rest of his life writing poems, and then he died. And I would love to have seen that volume. He was totally right. I knew exactly what he meant, and I honor him for having the good sense to know what he wanted to do. But that's -- I also would have liked to see that Halpern book. So.

CW:Well, there are a couple things that you indicated wanting to talk about that I'd like to bring in here.

LR:Sure.

CW:One is your sense of the political versus literary commitments that you have.

LR:Yeah. So the literary commitments I've talked about, and they're kind of 86:00implicit. I'm a professor of English, and the books I've written are about literary multilingualism and about Emerson's diaries, and they're about published essays on translation. All of that is -- you can do all of that without having any politics at all. But politics come from some other source -- or maybe it isn't some other source. Anyway, it feels like they come from some other source. So I was a mem-- a part of that anti-war movement, but a pretty timid one, and I felt an obligation towards people who were more courageous than I was. And I was also becoming philosophically or politically a pacifist, and in 1987, I think, my wife and I became war tax resisters, which is an illegal form 87:00of civil disobedience involving the refusal to pay the military percentage or any percentage, depending on what kind of war tax resistance you're doing of the military -- of your taxes. And for a long time I kept that separate from my work here, and my work here separate from that, and it came up when I talked about the role of civil disobedience, but not very often. But I feel as if in one way or another I've been trying to work out what the relation is between those two things, between the literary person I am or the translator I am and the cantankerous pacifist that I am. I began teaching here in the program of Peace and Justice Studies because I was invited to 'cause people knew what I did in 88:00the world, partly 'cause my salary had been levied at the college by the IRS a couple of times. And then I was trying to think, What's the relation between my teaching in English and my teaching in Peace and Justice Studies? I started writing essays that were trying to bridge that gap. There's one called "Nonviolence in Literature." Every time I wrote something I thought, Okay, I've figured that out, but then it turned out every time I wrote something I opened up questions that I was gonna end up coming back to. And the large project that I'm working on now is on literature and pacifism. And it's partly about how literary writers depict pacifists and how pacifists write, which you should be interested in whether you were a pacifist or not, but it's partly about how a pacifist critic sees the world. So if there's an intellectual issue I'm dealing 89:00with right now and have been dealing with for a long time, that's that issue. Whether that has something to do with Yiddish for me is a different question, and I think that it does, but in really strange ways. I don't think there's -- or at least Efrat tells me this, and so I'm sure she's right -- there aren't a lot of peace poems in Yiddish. It's a cantankerous tradition, right, an oppositional tradition. But it imagines opposition not as nonviolence but as --sometimes as trickery, like the Hebrew midwives in Exodus, and sometimes as revolutionary violence. So it's full of ballads about assassins and exhortations 90:00to be militant in the struggle against the bosses and the owners and -- it's a very bracing tradition for somebody to confront who's a pacifist shaped by American, Gandhian, often Christian nonviolence. So that's pertinent. But there's also something weird that's not in me but that I think is weird in the world of Yiddish scholars. And this came to a head for me a couple of years ago. I was at this grand conference to mark the centenary of the death of Sholem Aleichem. And it was a conference that began in Jerusalem and went to Tel Aviv. But everybody was there, or at least a lot of dignitaries in the Yiddishist world were there. And it was kind of intoxicating to be there. So we spent the 91:00first days in Jerusalem, and there was a lot to say about Sholem Aleichem but not very much to say about his politics. And nothing that linked his politics with any questions that might present themselves to you if you were meeting at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Even though if you looked down from Mount Scopus you could see what looked like police actions or something that might be a political demonstration. Anyway, so the conference in Tel Aviv, the part of the conference in Tel Aviv where I was speaking was also in some way apolitical. It was wonderful. Again, there were all these people talking about Sholem Aleichem, and he's a wonderful writer and wonderful -- it was great. But the bus 92:00that took us from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, the driver decided to take the highway that goes through the occupied territories rather than the main highway because he thought there'd be less traffic. Which I think turned out to be right, and we got to where we were going on time, and that was great, except between the Sholem Aleichem conference in Jerusalem and the Sholem Aleichem conference in Tel Aviv, there was the wall. And barbed wire emplacements and machine guns. And I'm thinking, What on earth is the relation between -- not that I have an answer with this question, but what's the relation between the Jerusalem conference and the Tel Aviv conference and the way we talk about Sholem Aleichem and this? And then there's another moment -- less interesting, because that's really graphic and kind of public, but -- so a couple of years ago -- by which I mean -- yeah, in this case I do mean a couple of years ago -- I was invited by Jewish Voices 93:00for Peace here, the chapter here, to give a talk about politics, progressive politics. And I did. It was called "Jewish Texts and Progressive Politics." And one of the texts I chose to talk about was "The Ballad of Hirsh Lekert." Do you know that? No. Okay. So it's -- and I sang it. And it's great. And I explained that one of the -- it was useful for me as a pacifist to be reminded that a tradition very close to me was a tradition of assassination. So I just shouldn't think that it's not -- Jewish tradition generally has a lot of thought about peace and a whole minor Talmud tractate devoted to the question of peace. But the Yiddish tradition, which is so dear to me, is a tradition of sometimes violent resistance and strikes and stuff like that. Anyway, I thought that was important to acknowledge. So after the talk, which was well attended and civil and a happy event, a number of students came to seek me out. And I thought they 94:00were gonna come seek me out 'cause they wanted to talk about politics. But they had no interest in talking about politics; they wanted to talk about Yiddish. Except they'd encountered my sense of Yiddish by way of Jewish Voices for Peace. And the students I've taught Yiddish to here when I've taught Yiddish at all, the one I've done the most work with is at the very right wing of Middle Eastern and Halachic politics, and two of the others are members of that same Jewish Voices for Peace chapter. And Yiddish as a -- I don't know what role it plays in politics or in my figuring out the relation between politics and literature for me, but it's got an amazing comprehensiveness and capaciousness for joining people together. Maybe that's the way I should try to figure out the relation in myself is by figuring out what Yiddish can offer pointing in both directions. 95:00Anyway, that's something about politics and literature.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Would you label yourself as a Yiddishist?

LR:I didn't used to. Martin Buber once said that he was a shtikl yidishist, a little bit of a Yiddishist. I'm more of one than I used to be. I feel like an amateur when I'm around the real thing. I feel like a professional when I'm around people who know less than I. And I feel like I'm the person who speaks on behalf of Yiddish sometimes. So yes and no. (laughter) Sorry to be evasive, but --

CW:Yeah, and what does it mean, that label to you?

LR:It's for me a scholarly and intellectual label. Lots of people are fluent speakers of Yiddish and lovers of Yiddish literature who might not call 96:00themselves Yiddishists. I think they often become Yiddishists when they teach. When they teach they have to figure out at least a language pedagogy praxis. They have to think about the teaching of Yiddish. When they write about it, when they get interested in its history, when they have opinions about what loanwords you should use and what loanwords you shouldn't use and how much English a Yiddish speaker or how much Lashon HaKadosh [Hebrew: holy language] stuff a Yiddish speaker should incorporate into Yiddish -- when it becomes an explicit concern, then I think they've become Yiddishists. And for me it's -- for me to get to being a Yiddishist is just a different route. I always had the intellectual questions. I just didn't have enough stuff, enough language. And the more language I acquire, the more I read, the more films I watch, the 97:00thicker the texture is, and then I feel more like a Yiddishist than I used to.

CW:Is there a favorite text or writer that you've translated?

LR:So yeah. I mean, I -- partly by way of Efrat's influence I think Itzik Manger has become a favorite author. Partly also because I get a fair number of opportunities to talk about his poems in religious or congregational settings. When my congregation celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last May, there was a sort of like a series of TED Talk session, and at the end of it I talked about one of Manger's Ruth poems. I taught a couple of times at local synagogues works 98:00having to do -- Manger's retellings of Biblical stories. So they're very important to me, those works. I think they're brilliant. And I write a fair amount of theater verse -- narrative verse for early music theater -- and I perform it. And I wrote a purim-shpil once for -- oddly enough, for Christmas Revels in Cambridge. So I spend a lot of time rhyming things. And Manger just awes me. It's like, How can you do that? How can you make it seem so inevitable but have it be so surprising at the same time? How do -- it's just stunning. So -- both because I like the poems as commentaries and I think they're extraordinary, and because I'm in awe of the gifts. He's a person I would identify as my dearest author at the moment, at any rate.

CW:From your perspective, where is Yiddish nowadays?

LR:Well, so there's a very happy -- I have a very happy feel about that right now for two reasons. Avraham Novershtern likes to say that we have lost a lot. And I know exactly what he means. He said it at one of the initial speeches at the Sholem Aleichem conference. We don't have a reading public; we don't have native speakers; a lot of native speakers have died -- meaning the non-Hasidic native speakers. I know that's true. But I also know that the academic study of 100:00Yiddish is flourishing in really great ways and great ways that teach people how to speak Yiddish as well as great ways that teach people how to write dissertations about Yiddish. Academic studies should ideally be connected with some life in the world, but it's pretty good. And it's also itself changing in just terrific ways. I'm thinking chiefly of the people centered around "In Geveb," who have brought into Yiddish, I think, a lot of the theory that the study of Yiddish used to be hostile to and are finding out new texts and -- all kinds of texts, politically radical texts and despised texts and marginal texts and science fiction novels and -- it's exhilarating! And they're very smart, and 101:00they're very -- not exactly iconoclastic. They're not shattering things. They're just cheerfully exuberant about how much there is to talk about and how many ways there are in which to talk about it. So I feel totally happy about that. So one -- two other stories that are pertinent to my happiness. One is -- this isn't an event that repeated itself, but it still strikes me as a great image of possibility. So one time whoever was running the Yiddish lecture series at the Workmen's Circle in Brookline invited a guy named Hirsizarky, I think, from one of the Hasidic houses two blocks down Beacon to walk over to the Workmen's Circle and give a talk about the Rebbe. And lots of people came. And it was really -- and turned out to be extremely interested in questions about Hasidism 102:00and questions about the Rebbe. It was wonderful. It was also really interesting because Hirsizarky's Yiddish, although extremely fluent, obviously was totally unlike any of the Yiddish I'd ever heard, partly because it was so daytshmerish. I guess it had a lot of constructions that I gathered people weren't using anymore, and he used a lot of vocabulary where more amount of speakers -- the speakers I knew would use Slavic or Lashon HaKadosh vocabulary. And I thought that was great and totally fascinating, and I wish that we'd then gone there or he -- but it was a nice image. But the other image is my one encounter with a really famous Yiddish writer. So I went to hear Bashevis speak at Brandeis. And this is when Kathryn I think was still at Wellesley, so it's a long time ago. And it wasn't a very satisfying reading. But there was a moment when a very 103:00well-spoken, polite young man stood up and asked Bashevis -- it was after he'd given the reading, and he asked in Yiddish, "We're members here of the Yiddish class at Brandeis, and we would love to have you read something in Yiddish, and would you be willing to do that?" And he was very civil and very sweet. And Bashevis then read a little. And then he broke off, and he said, "This is ridiculous. Nobody speaks Yiddish anymore. I mean, it's preposterous to speak Yiddish in a place like this, and if you want to speak Yiddish with me, come to the Garden Dairy Restaurant in New York, and we can speak Yiddish." But it was -- they weren't gonna go -- (UNCLEAR). Anyway, so I sat around feeling disappointed -- and talking with Kathryn Hellerstein, in fact. We were both feeling disappointed. And we stayed long enough that when we left, Singer himself was leaving. And in a way that's totally uncharacteristic for me 'cause I'm shy, I asked him a question in Yiddish. And Kathryn did too, but I don't 104:00remember her question. But I asked him about the future of Yiddish. 'Cause it was an obvious question to ask. And he said something like, "The future of Yiddish -- a hundred years ago Yiddish was on the brink of doom, and fifty years ago Yiddish will be on the brink of doom, and right now it's on the brink of doom, and a thousand years from now it'll still be on the brink of doom, but it'll still be there" or something like that. And I -- as pessimistic and dismissive as Singer was about Yiddish in America, what he said in that improvisation seemed right. It's an endangered language, but it's got a lot of people defending it, protecting it. So I feel very happy about that.

CW:Well, is there anything that you wanted to be sure to include that we haven't?

LR:Let's see. I paid tribu-- well, yeah, I do want to tell a story, one story. I don't know whether you all ever got around to doing an interview with Saki Berkovitch? Sacvan Berkovitch, my doctoral advisor and later very, very good friend, who -- very distinguished and influential Americanist. And Saki grew up in Montreal Ghetto as a native speaker of Yiddish and did some remarkable translations of Yiddish that are -- of Sholem Aleichem in particular. I think the translation of "The Pot" that's in the Howe volume is by him. It's terrific. Once or twice I invited him to come to this Yiddish-speaking circle, and he came, but it was too remote for him. But whenever we'd get together it was 106:00always a variety of subjects, public subjects, how are you, how's your health, whatever, how's your family, stuff like that for the first hour and a half, and then the last hour or whatever it was was partly about Judaism and a lot about Yiddish. And it felt like where he was really home talking. And right at the end of his life he said, "I want to translate one of Manger's poems, 'The Ballad of Old Harlequin,' because it was my sister's favorite poem." And I think his sister was alive at the time. "I'd like to give it to her," or "I'd like to show it to her," something like that. "She doesn't remember any Yiddish, but I'd like to do a translation." And could he help me, he said. So I wrote Efrat, who has 107:00photographs of Saki, who was a family friend of Manger's; I should have made that clear earlier -- has photographs of Saki in her book and who had interviewed Saki a number of times to get as many memories as he was willing to provide of growing up with Itzik Manger. Anyway, I wrote Efrat 'cause I couldn't find the poem, and she found the poem for me, and then Saki and I thought we might collaborate on a translation, and he would send me a version and I would send him a version and we'd go back and forth. And at some point because I think his cancer was getting the better of him he stopped providing his own versions, and I went on to finish a translation of the poem and sent it to him, and he said very nice things about it. And I -- from the moment we met, Yiddish had 108:00been in the background, or his background in Yiddish had been in the background, his ancestry. I only came -- we abortively coedited a volume of American Yiddish writing, and it was always something hovering. But it became a means of -- one of the last means and expressions of our friendship, and I count myself very fortunate. And if I'm gonna use that as my last story, then I'm gonna say that a thing I've become aware of talking to you is the degree to which Yiddish is in fact the binder, the bridge-maker, between -- not just for me, obviously -- but between people of different politics, literary standards, commitments. It's got 109:00an astonishing bridge-building capacity. So. That's a nice thing to be able to say about a language.

CW:Yeah. Great. Well, one thing I did want to just mention that we didn't touch on is that you've also performed some Yiddish at some point.

LR:Yeah, I have. So I'm a singer, and I like to perform that, and I like -- when I read, part of my theater experience is basically being a, you know, what used to be called a retsitator in -- a reciter. So I've given little lecture-demonstrations about Yiddish with Yiddish song. Yeah. I like doing that. I like those songs very much. I've performed some art songs with Norman Janis -- Yiddish art songs -- the other rabbinic advisor of Harvard Hillel whom I 110:00consulted at that moment. I don't actually love those. I mean, they're very smart, but they're not distinctive. And I love Yiddish folk- and theater-song. So yeah, I've performed that. 'Cause it's really pretty great, you know? And sad. I have a melancholy turn of mind, which is why Yom Kippur is in some ways a much easier holiday for me than Purim. But yeah, I do that. I love doing that. And I love certain singers and reciters of Yiddish. There was an amazing moment at that Sholem Aleichem conference when a Belgian-born Yiddishist whose name I've forgotten gave a dramatic reading of Sholem Aleichem's will. And that was 111:00just fantastic. And I also should say that I love the performative tradition. I love the fact that people get up and recite poems at taverns or -- and you can get interrupted, but you can be as theatrical as you want. And when I listen to recordings of Manger I'm aware that his mode of reciting is very different from that kind of normatively neutral and flat way that a lot of American poets recite their works. I just love that, so it's an -- it gives me a chance to release that part of myself.

CW:Great. Well, I usually like to close by asking if you have any words of wisdom or eytses [advice] to people sort of coming into this world.

LR:Words of wisdom or --

CW:Eytses.

LR:Eytses. Sorry. I mean -- (sighs) hmm. That's a really interesting question. I think the advice I got from my teacher, from Pearl, was the best possible advice for people coming into this world. Not necessarily for people learning to speak Yiddish but for people coming into the world of Yiddish who want to write about it or explore it or -- which is: You gotta learn stuff. You gotta learn a lot of stuff. You gotta learn -- I don't mean you have to do that or you can't enter the world, because there are lots of points of entry, and it's an amazingly welcoming world. But what I mean is that if you want to go further, go deeper, 113:00then it's a matter of learning everything that there is to learn. Learning all the grammar and reading the literature and figuring out the sentences and having all the dictionaries -- knowing that there's an immense accumulation of knowledge that you can draw on but that you have to draw on it. Knowing that there are some extraordinarily eloquent speakers of Yiddish and listening to them and listening to performances -- just -- yeah, learning a lot. That's the -- for me, the -- if I were giving advice that would be the advice I would give.

CW:Great. Well, thank you so much.

LR:My pleasure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]