SARAH ELLEN ZARROW ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:So, this is Christa Whitney and today is December 18th, 2018. I am here in Boston, Massachusetts. [BREAK IN RECORDING] So, I am here with Sarah Ellen Zarrow. 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?

SARAH ELLEN ZARROW:Yes.

CW:Great. And did I pronounce that all right?

SEZ:Yes.

CW:Okay, good. So, to start, can you tell me a little bit about what you know about your family background?

SEZ:Sure. So, my father's family is Eastern European Jews. His parents were both born in the US in Worcester, Massachusetts or near Worcester, Massachusetts. So, we have really deep roots in Massachusetts. And his grandparents came from -- 1:00one came from Lipnishok, which is now in Belarus. Another one came from Shpola in Ukraine and two came from Kharkiv. And my great grandmother from Lipnishok was alive when I was born although she wasn't in good health. My mother's family comes from England, from Germany, and her family has roots in the colonies from 1631. They're not Jewish, so I have kind of half East European Jews, half real Anglo-Saxons in the very literal sense.

CW:And I know that this great-grandmother that you mentioned is an inspiration to you, has been. Can you tell me a little bit more about her?

SEZ:Yeah. So, as I said, she was in a nursing home when I was born. I don't really have memories of her really being very communicative. But she had a lot of photo albums which my grandmother had, my nana. And growing up, I was really 2:00close with my nana because we lived in pretty close proximity. I would see her very frequently and I was just really, really interested in these albums and where -- my nana as a child. And there aren't really photos from the old country but they're all from Worcester from the 1920s and '30s, and letters back and forth. And when I was in third grade or so, we found out that we still had family in Moscow. And so, this also became kind of a big part of my childhood as -- figuring out, you know, after the wall fell, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, my grandmother travelled to Moscow to see our relatives and eventually brought them over. And then, there was this kind of renewed connection, I guess, with Eastern Europe that, for me as a third grader in a school where there 3:00really weren't other Jewish kids and there weren't other kids who had these kind of, I think, large family networks, it just felt special and cool and interesting. So, I used to look at these albums and I had this whole other family that arrived in third grade. And I think that that was, yeah, that was an inspiration for me to kind of -- I don't know, just to study Yiddish but also to learn about Eastern Europe and to explore my own family roots that I think took hold early on.

CW:Can you just describe what some of these pictures look like?

SEZ:Sure. I can show one.

CW:Yeah, okay.

SEZ:So, there's this photo of my grandmother as a baby with her mother. And for me, I think it was because I knew my bobe, who was my great-grandmother, as kind of a frail older woman, just to see, I don't know, to see her young and vibrant and very beautiful and with big dresses with full skirts and hats and this kind 4:00of -- just a totally different style of dressing but also to see -- my family's really large and just to see all of these people, some of whom I knew or I could tell who they looked like and these kind of millions of aunts and uncles that I didn't necessarily know, I don't know, something about it -- I liked the sepia-toned photos. I still really like antiques, I like flea markets, stuff like that. So, just looking at that and realizing, Oh, this was my family! This is actually -- this is pretty cool. But I think it was something about the black and the white, something about this kind of: Oh, this is a different world, although it's Worcester, Massachusetts, which I was very familiar with.

CW:So, where did you grow up?

SEZ:I grew up in Stow, Massachusetts, which is not near anything. But it is not far from Boston, twenty-six miles outside of Boston. But my husband is from 5:00Brookline and had never heard of it until we met. So, (laughs) it's a farming town.

CW:Yeah, can you tell a little bit more about it?

SEZ:Yeah. My parents moved there, I think they were kind of back-to-the-land type of people, so they grew up in a neighborhood community that was on a lake and we were kind of in the woods. And in that sense, it was this delightful childhood. Then, I would also say that there really weren't other Jewish kids and so -- my family always stuck out a little bit. My parents were a little bit older and I think that part of the reason I was so into weird family history is I think when you grow up kind of -- if you're the odd one out in school and you're bullied, then you either decide you want to be like everyone else or you decide: I don't want to be anything like anyone else and I'll just embrace this 6:00and I'll just be the weird kid. So, that's kind of the route I took. But I wouldn't move back there.

CW:Can you describe your house growing up?

SEZ:Yeah, we lived in a house that was originally a summer beach house. And because of that, it was like a very long and open plan. And I think the people who lived there before my family lived there had built an addition. But it was just kind of like this awkward addition, right? So, it's this huge house that was totally open plan. I lived in what had been the attic that has this really low ceiling and the floors were kind of all slanty. And it's just this rambling place, right? And the basement, which is very scary, and the people who lived before us there, they had done jams and jellies and stuff. And so, there were 7:00these old dusty jam jars in the basement that my parents were kind of afraid of and we didn't eat from. And there were all these little nooks and crannies. There had been a back staircase that was boarded up and stuff like that. So, I think, also, for a kid with an imagination, it's not like it was a big old Victorian house but there was enough there where you'd be, like: Oh, this is a secret passage and this is where the ghosts live and stuff like that. It was a good house for storytelling, I would say.

CW:And what would you say was Jewish about your home?

SEZ:I think that, well, I have to think about this. I mean, I went to a Jewish preschool and I think that -- my parents had a Jewish wedding. My mother didn't convert. And at some point, they just decided that I should go to Hebrew school. 8:00And until that point, I would say, we had mezuzahs on the door. I think we lit candles on Friday night. But at some point, my parents just decided, You'll go to Hebrew school. And I think I was very lucky because I really liked Hebrew school, which I think is not the case for most kids. But I went to a really special Hebrew school and I think it was just fun. It was interesting. I was kind of academically inclined. And then, so growing up, I think from then on we started to have Shabbat dinner. We went to shul a lot. So, I think that there was -- I wouldn't say that there was this -- I think it was an interesting Jewish environment. I wouldn't say it was a super full Jewish childhood. But also, my father's parents were very involved in their synagogue and I think, 9:00again, also, when you grow up, even if you're not so, so Jewish, if you're Jewish enough that you're not celebrating Christmas and you don't have a Christmas tree and Santa doesn't visit you, then you're already very Jewish in the kind of town I grew up in. So, I think there was a real sense of difference even though, if I really think about it, we didn't keep kosher, we celebrated Jewish holidays in a sort of minimalist way. But there was also this really, I think, live sense of family connection. Big family seders and just the idea that there are things in our house that were different. No Christmas tree. Mezuzahs and different holidays, taking days off of school and realizing no one else was, things like that.

CW:Did you have a favorite holiday growing up?

SEZ:Oh, probably Passover. I don't know why. I think because we got to use great dishes. And again, we didn't keep kosher but we had -- there were Pesach dishes 10:00at my nana's house and just this kind of festive atmosphere. Obviously, as a kid, you also love Hanukkah 'cause of all the presents. So maybe Hanukkah and Passover are tied.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:I want to hear more about this third grade experience --

SEZ:Yeah.

CW:-- when this family arrives from Moscow if you can kind of put yourself back in that mindset. What was that like for you as a kid?

SEZ:Yeah, so I think, again, as one of the only Jewish kids in school, it was both a thing I thought was kind of special and a thing that was just so weird and I knew that kind of separated me from other kids. And then, at that point, I was already interested in my family history. And then, to think that we had family from so far away! And it's not just in the past. It's not like we have origins in Russia or something like that. It's we have actual family from there. And then, it was this exciting thing and I was an only child. And so, my cousin 11:00-- I'm trying to think how old she must have been when she came to the US. Young. I mean, she was a real -- I don't know, kindergarten or something like that, right? So, also the idea that I would have a new person, a new kid in my life was cool. And so, my uncle came to stay with us while he was looking for a job and thinking about a green card application and just his English wasn't great and he stayed with us for a while. We all kind of passed him around. And then, also, just as an only child to have another person in the house was so thrilling. And so, he wanted to know all the names for the different glassware, right? What's a cup versus a glass versus a mug, all of these things. And, again, I was so young, I was, like: I don't know. I don't know. But it was cool to also kind of be the expert in this weird way as a kid. And I don't know, I 12:00don't have really specific memories but I think I just thought it was a special thing. And it was something where -- this kind of consumed our life for a few months at least, right? Figuring out will our family be okay, will they be able to immigrate? Also, what is Russia without the Soviet Union? Where does my family even come from? My grandmother, she went in 1990 to Moscow and she brought back a Russian flag, right, which now I don't display anywhere because (laughs) the world has changed quite a lot. But the sense of, Oh, this is a new country, this is a new old country, and I -- thinking about it now, I wonder if that's where my interest in history and in governmental change came from? I'm not sure I would say that but it's a possibility. But just the sense that we 13:00have this family and they live really differently from us, they don't speak English, this is going to change my life.

CW:Were you, other than Russian from these relatives, were you exposed to any other languages growing up?

SEZ:Not really, no. I mean, my nana and papa spoke Yiddish but they didn't really speak to each other in Yiddish. I think when my father was a kid, he remembers them speaking in Yiddish so that he and his sister wouldn't understand. But, I mean, my nana did sing. She sang Yiddish lullabies to me, et cetera. And so, I have these kind of vague, vestigial memories of some Yiddish music, but not really. I didn't hear other languages growing up, which, again, was not atypical for the environment I grew up in. But I did have this early 14:00exposure to very, very minimal Yiddish through my paternal grandparents.

CW:And obviously, this interview's going to skew towards your Jewish side --

SEZ:Yeah.

CW:-- of your family. But I'm just curious to know a little bit about the other side of your family and what it was like for you to grow up also with these deep roots --

SEZ:Yeah, yeah.

CW:-- in another way in this area.

SEZ:I think it's such an interesting question. My mother is not very close with her family and so I think that, on the one hand, it's like, Wow, we have relatives that date back, I mean, almost to the Mayflower. But, at the same time, I know so little about them. And that, I think, is a funny thing. My mother's family is small and quiet and they don't talk a lot. They're not super close with each other. And then, I have this enormous Jewish family who does nothing but talk and who are very close or they're always fighting. But either way, you're engaging with these people all the time. So actually, I think it's 15:00kind of a weird, skewed, imbalanced childhood in a way. And actually wish that I were closer with my mother's family and knew more about them. But getting that information is extraordinarily slow and painful. And it involves a lot of, I think, traumatic memories on my mom's side, whereas accessing my father's family history was so easy because we have these photos and these stories. And now, I realize, as a scholar, some of these stories are not really true. Nevertheless, they were very available.

CW:So, we're not going to have time to necessarily talk about each phase of your education.

SEZ:Yeah.

CW:But could you just sort of list where you were educated?

SEZ:Sure. In terms of college and --

CW:Yeah, just starting from the beginning, actually.

SEZ:Okay.

CW:Yeah.

SEZ:Okay, so, I went to public schools in Stow, Massachusetts. And when I went to high school, I had a choice to go to the regional school I was supposed to go to or not. And I told my parents I wouldn't go. And I was really lucky: in Massachusetts at the time, you could apply to another school and if they had room, you could go to a different school. So, that's what I did. So, I was able to get out of Stow in eighth grade, which was wonderful because I think my earliest schooling was -- I had some great teachers but by and large, it just felt like a really stilted environment. I didn't like it, I was bullied, and that was just part of why I didn't want to go to school anymore. And so, I just went to a larger high school, which was just also a suburban high school. But it 17:00also sort of opened my world up. I was, like: Oh! And then, I had more friends who were immigrants or their parents were immigrants. It was just a larger place, but also a public school. And also, I started at that point trying to teach myself Yiddish on the side, which didn't work particularly well. And then, I went to college at Vassar and I majored in twenty different things until I chose to major in religion. And after college, I went abroad for a year, then did research and eventually came back and I didn't know what the heck to do. And I liked school and I think it's a dilemma a lot of people have faced that when you can't just be in school forever, what do you do? I eventually went back to school. I got a master's in Jewish education and then I went to get a PhD in Jewish history. Yeah.

CW:Great. Can you tell me about this high school, teaching yourself Yiddish phase?

SEZ:Yeah. So, my nana was a member of the Yiddish Book Center and I think at that point, I was very close with my parents, I was close with her, and I thought it would just be fun. And I think, again, even though I had a much better experience in high school than earlier, I still felt a little bit like the odd kid out and I again kind of decided to embrace it. And so, I had gone at some point to the Book Center and I had bought Sheva Zucker's book and I was, like, Oh, I'm just going to teach myself Yiddish and this will be fun. And my nana claims that she doesn't speak Yiddish but when I say a sentence to her, she knows how to answer, right? So, she does speak Yiddish, actually. She just hadn't used it for years and years. And she didn't read or write but she did know a lot. And so, I realized then, okay, teaching myself is not really going to work. You can't do this without a community. I think that's true of any 19:00language. But I realized, that, Oh, she does -- we actually can communicate a little bit. And I think I probably tried seriously for two months to teach myself Yiddish. I gave up, fine. But then, after my first year of college, I needed a summer job. I wanted to make money. I didn't want to live with my parents. And that's when I realized that I could learn Yiddish and work at the Book Center and get paid before the current internship program. And so, that's what I did. And then my life went downhill from there. (laughs) So --

CW:Well, let's talk about that a little more. So, because the summer program's gone through these different iterations, can you just explain what it was when you did it?

SEZ:Sure. So, first of all, it was almost accidental. I was looking for a 20:00program where I could learn something and do something cool and get paid. And there aren't a whole lot of paid summer internships. And I remembered: Oh, nana belongs to the Book Center. I wonder if they have a paid internship? I went on their website from a public computer at school. I remember what room I was in. It was, like: Oh! So, I applied. Then I realized I had to get myself up there for the interview. I was, like, "I don't have a car. I don't know how to do this." So, my friend, thankfully, drove me. It was raining. I went to the interview. We had Chinese food. I went back to college and then I got the internship. So, this was the summer of 2001 and we were four young women, one of whom is also at this conference, so I think it's just funny and strange.

CW:Who was it?

SEZ:Liora Halperin. So, it was Liora Halperin, Stephanie Douglas, Abby Howell and myself. And I think we were there for eight weeks and a friend of one of the 21:00other interns was going to be living in a house in Amherst in the fall. He was an Amherst College student and they had a lease on the house but it started in summer. And they actually needed people to live in that house and pay the rent for the summer. He was in a secret frat, an underground frat at Amherst. Amherst doesn't have official frats. So, this was going to be the frat house. And so, we kind of secured a lease on this place, which was very, very cheap at the time. I understand Amherst has gotten a lot more expensive. And we four vegetarian Yiddish learners lived with this one frat boy (laughs) in this huge house. It was a secret underground Republican frat. They didn't have any furniture. They only had beer fridges that also had Bush/Cheney on them. And that's where we 22:00stored our books and our belongings and we all lived together and we cooked together and we had stupid house arguments together. And every day, we went to the Book Center and we had an hour of Yiddish and then we worked and we stacked books and we learned about the Book Center's operations and we made a nuisance of ourself. They were always telling us to be quiet. We made up dumb songs. A couple of us were very into puns. Not me, but some of the others. So, we figured out how to translate "Baby Got Back" into Yiddish, which I don't remember but other people do. And it was awesome. And we coughed all day 'cause of all of the book dust. And we learned about, I don't know, we learned about shelving books. But in the meantime, we also learned about the centers of Yiddish printing 23:00'cause if we found something rare, we had to pull it. So, we learned about anything printed in Yiddish after 1939, we had to pull. It needed kind of special attention. All of the works of Sholem Aleichem, we had so many they had to go into overflow storage, right? So, I also got a sense of this whole Yiddish book world. And so, yeah, it was wonderful and we were in this obviously very beautiful location and then we went to Montreal and we did a book pickup there and we started to have literature class with Aaron Lansky. And I think, for us, who were kind of -- we were just college students. And to have people say, Oh, what you're doing is important and special and the labor that you do is really important but also we're going to teach you and also, here are some free books, 24:00it was one of the best summers of my life.

CW:Who else was teaching or were you working under?

SEZ:So, Henny Lewin was our Yiddish teacher, Neil Zagorin supervised us, and then we had this literature class with Aaron. And the staff, I think, has gone through some turnover. But Catherine Madsen was there, as well. And just thinking about, Yeah, what do all these people do at this Book Center? What is this place? And visitors would come, they would go on a tour, and sometimes we would end up being part of the tour. And we really annoyed people a lot 'cause we just talked all day. It was fantastic.

CW:So, then, I mean, were there moments in that summer that you felt like this was something you wanted to keep doing --

SEZ:Yeah.

CW:-- or moments of inspiration that you want to --

SEZ:Yeah.

CW:-- talk about?

SEZ:I hadn't had the experience before of a job that was so satisfying. I had done different things. I had worked at my dad's office a summer, filing stuff, which is not totally different from stacking books, right? But I think the sense that work can be fulfilling and still be work is important and also something that I really learned that summer. And that you can keep -- I was in between my first and second years of college, right, so I intended to finish college, which I did, but just the sense that: Oh, okay, this is a thing I could do with my life, theoretically. I could work with Yiddish, I could do something with books. I don't know that there's a path to something like that. I don't think I ever felt before that like -- not that you have to feel in college like you have a 26:00career. I think it's actually better to be more open. But just, Oh, there's a potential here. This is really interesting and cool. And then, the next summer, I went to, along with one of the other interns, to Vilnius to study Yiddish there. And I was, like, Oh, right, if only I could do this the rest of my life. And then, when I graduated college I was, like: No, I can't do this. Now I have to go to the real world. I have to work. I worked in a hospital, I did some other stuff. Then, I went to grad school and it was, like: Well, this is sort of similar to (laughs) this kind of work/play balance, theoretically. Not that it's not enormously difficult and different from that experience. But it was like, Oh, yep, you can learn your entire life and you can make your work fun.

CW:I'm curious, on the sort of more academic side or getting more specific whether there were certain topics that called to you early on?

SEZ:Yeah. So, I think, especially from this literature class, I really thought that I wanted to study Yiddish literature. And I think already by the time I was an intern, I had realized that -- in high school, as well, I loved English class and I loved reading. And I took an English class in college and I didn't do so well. And I think I had, at some point, a realization that loving to read and wanting to study literature are too entirely different things. I still thought I could do Yiddish literature and it turns out I can't. I'm just glad -- I don't think -- that's not the way my brain works. And I have a lot of colleagues in literature but it's not my thing. But I do think that that was a way that I got into studying history, I think. I was developing kind of a rich background in Jewish life in Eastern Europe or representations of Jewish life in Eastern 28:00Europe. And I think that that's how I got into studying history and it really came from this kind of Polish-Lithuanian literature context and then broadened to include Polish language study and thinking about Jews who weren't particularly invested in Yiddish and didn't use Yiddish in their daily life and where they fit into our ideas about East European Jewish life. And so, yeah, and I'm much more suited to being a historian than a literature person. So, I'm glad I figured that out. But it did come from literature, I think, and just a real joy at reading these stories and then reading them in a group with other people who were really interested. And obviously getting this historical context, I think this is something -- I work with my students now on kind of -- when people are describing what their shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish population] looks like, well, what did they look like? They didn't look like the 29:00town we live in now. So, what did this look like? Who was there? What kind of figures populated this place? So, it does come from literature, even though I'm not a literature person.

CW:Was your time in Vilnius the first time you had been in Eastern Europe?

SEZ:Yes.

CW:So, what was that like?

SEZ:It was the best. (whispers) So, I mean, I have to say, also, to this day, I really have not -- I spent hardly any time in Western Europe, which I think is unusual. Yeah, I went to Vilnius and then, when I was there, I also went to the town my bobe came from. I went to Belarus for a day, which was great and weird. I loved it. I thought it was amazing. I loved being on my own. I loved trying to -- I had traveled abroad before to Ireland with my family, so I wasn't entirely -- it wasn't the first time I was out of the country. I think I had also been to 30:00Israel. But I just thought it was great. I liked the landscape, I liked the setup of the city and thinking about this kind of Old Town and New Town and also just getting the sense, right -- now that I travel regularly to Eastern Europe, I meet a lot of especially Jewish tourists who think that it's going to look like their impression from either "Fiddler on the Roof" or literature they've read or that it's going to somehow feel very Jewish because that's how they've encountered it in literature. But I think being there early in my academic career and early in my life, as well, made me realize, No, this is a living, vibrant city that has its own history that has a lot to do with Jews but also a lot not to do with Jews and just getting interested in the architecture and some 31:00of the Soviet architecture and thinking about this, again, newly independent country and the mix of languages and just trying to navigate kind of quasi on my own, 'cause I was in this program but I came alone. It was fantastic. I mean, I remember getting up every day and being: What a weird thing I'm doing. I like this.

CW:That's great. Did you have any specific mentors in, say, learning Yiddish?

SEZ:Yes, I did. I mean, I have to say all of my teachers, who, at this point, are sort of too numerous to name, but thinking about Henny Lewin, and thinking about Yitskhok Niborski, Avrom Lichtenbaum, Anna Verschik -- all of these amazing teachers who have such a thorough knowledge of language and culture and 32:00also are really great teachers and all very different from each other, I think. It's so nice to study a subject with different people and realize that people have just different approaches to really the same material, which is something, again, I try to impart to my students, that studying with me and studying with another historian will be different, not because we disagree about something but just because we have different -- we emphasize different things or we bring a different approach. And I think, as well -- let me think about who else. I would say when I was in college, as well, although they weren't Yiddish teachers, but Deborah Dash Moore and Andrew Bush, who were advisors and just encouraged me a hundred percent to go to Vilnius, for example, and helped me find some funding for it and just thought: This is great and you're going to do cool stuff with this. And I took a Yiddish literature and translation class with Deborah, who I 33:00also saw at this conference, right? So, it's nice to kind of re-meet these people and be in touch. And I did some research assistant work for her. So, these relationships continue, as well, which has been a surprise and a pleasure. But they just thought it was interesting, what I was doing. And again, this is an enormously -- it's such a privileged position to go to college and to have people say, "Oh, yeah, you're going to do great," for no reason, right? They see something in you, they think you can do it, and they say: Great, go do this totally impractical thing, right? And that takes a really close mentoring relationship and a lot of faith and it's a very lucky position for me to be in, as well.

CW:So, I guess adjacent to the classroom, around the classroom, did you get 34:00involved in sort of the Yiddish svive, Yiddish scene, around --

SEZ:Yeah.

CW:-- and how and when?

SEZ:I was. When I was a senior in college, I took an ethnography class and I decided to do an ethnography of a local Yiddish svive that met in New Paltz, New York. And so, I went there on Sunday mornings and I was perhaps not surprisingly the youngest person there. It was kind of a bagels and coffee and muffin kind of thing. And that was fun and we read and we talked. And then, beyond that, I never -- in New York, I was a little bit involved in a younger person's Yiddish svive, which was actually sort of -- it was a little bit difficult, I think, because I also realized that I don't necessarily want to speak Yiddish for the sake of speaking Yiddish with people who I don't really feel like I'm friends with, which is also a really hard realization -- and I think kind of an 35:00important realization -- that you can't -- this work of improving Yiddish and maybe also cultural preservation, that you don't have to do it if you don't want to. I don't know, that sounds -- it's a funny thing to talk about 'cause I think that I just didn't gel with this group. I think that my interests were different and I eventually just kind of fell out with the svive, which was sad but it was also a realization that -- I can do this in a different way. Studying Yiddish doesn't mean I have to shove myself into this one group. So, I don't know, we broke up on amicable terms, I would say. (laughs)

CW:And I know you've also been involved in dance --

SEZ:Yeah.

CW:-- and singing. When did you start doing those things in your life?

SEZ:Yeah, I think it was -- well, after college, I had this wonderful fellowship and I went abroad to Eastern Europe and Central Europe to think about Yiddish cultural revival and dance and music and these kind of singing communities that formed.

CW:This was a Watson?

SEZ:This was a Watson Fellowship.

CW:Yeah.

SEZ:And, again, an enormous stroke of ridiculous luck to get. And so, I packed up and I left for twelve months. And in doing this kind of participant observation, you also learn about song and dance. And I had never been a dancer. I had sung most of my life in choirs and I really enjoyed singing. My mother sings, as well. But my parents didn't want me to do dance as a kid because what was available was ballet and girls' wear, fluffy pink tutus. My parents were not 37:00into that. And so, I just was kind of not allowed to dance, I guess. I mean, it wasn't something they encouraged me to do. So, getting into this dance world, I had a really strong music background, so I had good rhythm, I had a good sense of what -- sometimes I think people come to dance and it's really hard for them to just hold a beat. But I actually could do that. So, learning this new art form and this new way to be with other people and to do something that is related to Yiddish language but is not language was thrilling. And so, that's something I've actually really -- I've tried to keep up, now that I live outside of New York where it's enormously difficult to find these kind of cultural circles. But when I was in New York, I was regularly going to Yiddish dance workshops and I took a dance leader training and did some kind of zingeray 38:00[sing-along] type of stuff. And so, that also became a way that I related to Yiddish outside of language and literature. And that's something I'd like to get back into. It's tough in the Pacific Northwest (laughs) but it's something that I try to keep up with. And I went to KlezKanada a few times. And I think that the dance -- and also, just other folk dance styles. I spent a year in Romania a couple of years ago as a post-doc and did Romanian folk dance classes with my friend and felt: There are so many great similarities here. This is something I can do. This is something that's so, so fun for me.

CW:Well, I want to go back to maybe a bit about your academic work. So, how did you come to the specific -- maybe starting with what you ended up writing about 39:00in your dissertation: how did you come to that topic? Can you just sort of introduce what it was?

SEZ:Yeah, so my dissertation was about Jewish museums in Poland and this kind of presentation of Jewishness to a Jewish public and then also a broader, non-Jewish, Polish Catholic public. And I came to that, I think -- so, I had done this Watson Fellowship. I was interested in ethnography. I also realized, I mean, similarly to realizing, Oh, I love literature but I'm not a literature scholar, doing ethnography and realizing I'm not sure that participant observation is what I'm cut out to do. At that point, I was too shy and I felt like I had all this data and it wasn't very good because I didn't ask enough follow-up questions. And I was, like, I don't know if I want to go forward with this. But in the process of doing that research, I realized that there's also this whole longer tradition of Jews researching Jews and kind of putting them on 40:00display. And I was thinking about Jewish -- people who collected Jewish art, people who collected Jewish folk art and also fine art like portraits of famous Jews and put them in -- Jewish Museum in Warsaw or Lwów, in L'viv, today's Ukraine, and that there is this really funny, rich history that actually doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with Yiddish but does have to do with Jewish life in Eastern Europe. And so, that's where I decided to jump off with my dissertation, was that deep dive into a few specific museums and just what the founders and collectors thought that they were doing. Like, why, right? So, now, we're here in Boston, we have so many museums, especially art museums but other places as well, Jewish museums, which end up being kind of history and art 41:00combined. But how did people do that in the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth century? What were they doing? How did that relate to the way Jews were actually living in their cities? I know when I go to the Jewish Museum in New York, for example, I think, Does this really relate to my life or not? Is this really about Jews or is this about a very specific narrative of Jews? Usually, I think it's about a very specific narrative. So, I wanted to recover those narratives from 1890 until the 1930s, basically, in Poland. And so, that's what I worked on for years and am still working on 'cause the book's not done. (laughter) So --

CW:Great. And I know you've studied some other languages. How did that experience compare with learning Yiddish?

SEZ:Oh, I think once you start studying languages, other languages, they follow. 42:00I think one of the things that I've noticed: when I first started studying Polish, for example, there was a real divide between people who had plenty of other languages, especially Europeans who spoke other languages fluently -- but even here, just people who had pretty good Spanish and pretty good German and then were learning Polish. And on the other hand, mainly Americans but not only, who were monolingual -- and I think at some point, studying languages, you have to realize that languages have their own internal logic. So, English speakers study other languages and they say: How does a table have a gender? That makes no sense to me. But once you accept it, it's: Okay, fine. Tables have gender and they have a gender in Spanish and they have a gender in German. And you just learn it. You just accept the weirdnesses of language. So, I think in that regard, studying any language helps with any other language 'cause you have to 43:00realize it just has its own logic and that has nothing to do with what I think it should look like. And then, also, of course, studying Polish, it's, like: Oh, a lot of these words are very familiar to me. And I didn't grow up in a Polish-heavy environment. I think there are some --- some words are in English. But thinking about Yiddish and thinking about this construct in Polish, "cze," which we use for kind of if: Is it this or this? I want to know if you're going out today, right, and how you use that. And I was in a Polish class with another Yiddish speaker and I was, like, "This is really hard for me to wrap my head around." He said, "It's just 'tsi.' It's just the same as in Yiddish." I was, like, "Oh!" And then I could do it. And so, it was also -- the relationship between Polish and Yiddish is so fascinating to me. And it was also just fun. Most of the people that I study spoke Polish and Yiddish and sometimes Polish 44:00much better than Yiddish. So, to think about these languages feeding each other in this way was great. It was a great experience. And also to be in my first Polish class with another Yiddish speaker was very, very helpful, which was just accidental.

CW:What was the landscape like of the field when you entered it?

SEZ:In terms of East European Jewish history? It's so funny because I think when you enter a field you don't even know what the landscape looks like. So, I'm trying to think what was my impression at the time. I think that, I mean, eventually I came to realize that there was a whole cohort of Poles working on Polish Jewish history. But at the time, I think, when I first started, I really was much more familiar with the American academic scene. Most of the people I 45:00read and studied with were men, which I think is changing. That was something I didn't realize until I was in a room. I was: Oh, I'm the only woman here. Or all the women are also under thirty and everyone over thirty is a man. So, that was interesting and I think also fueled some of my interest. Now, I study women's education in Poland and I think these earlier experiences may have contributed to that. And I think there were a lot of -- I mean, I was lucky to enter the field when there was a huge interest in ethnography and in folklore and cultural production aside from --- that there's so much on Jewish politics in Poland, which isn't to say that there's enough on it but there's a lot. And I entered the field when doing work on culture, I think, was becoming more accepted, that 46:00studying the ways in which Jews produced culture, interacted with culture, music, dance -- including museums, right, what I do, where that was accepted and it wasn't not legitimate because it wasn't political history. I think there's a shift that's still going on there which I'm very happy to be a part of. (laughs)

CW:And what was it like being a young woman in that room?

SEZ:Um, again, I think it's something I didn't realize at first. But once you're the only woman in the room for enough occasions, you start to question it and think about it. And I would say, since then, I've also found a number of female mentors, right? So, I think my first impression wasn't necessarily correct about the field. But the senior level scholars were -- or at least the ones I was interacting with -- were almost all men. And that's been part of my, I don't 47:00know, academic journey, I guess, to think about why -- now that I'm studying specifically women and gender and education, that field is full of women. And since we're here at the AJS, one of the interesting things that some colleagues and I have noticed is that when we see panels that are all women, all women scholars, respondents, chairs, you can almost always bet that it's a panel about gender, which to me is really sad. It means that women are of interest only to other women whereas men are of interest to everyone. And I hope that changes and I hope that that's not a correct impression. But it's definitely one you get from looking around the room at a session on gender and it's a largely female audience, generally all women panel. Women and LGBTQ folks and then you're: Oh, 48:00well, the straight men don't think this is of interest. So, that's depressing but I hope it changes.

CW:Yeah. How do you think -- I mean, do you have any vision of how that could change or --

SEZ:I mean, I think in very broad terms, right, the study of gender is different from the study of women. And I think that the idea that gender is always relevant -- gender is not only relevant when we're thinking about women, right? It's not like men don't have gender. And so, when we think about history, right, who are we thinking about? And I think when you're thinking about Jewish history, sometimes we leave out youth, for example. How does whatever we're 49:00thinking about impact youth as opposed to more middle-aged people, right? And I'm hoping that looking at gender becomes a normal thing that people do in all research rather than being a separate field of analysis. And I do see, especially amongst scholars of my generation, a much greater willingness to look at gender. Or not even willingness, just -- you look. That's something you look for from the get-go in your project. It's not something you think about at the very end and say: Oops, okay, now I'll add on two pages to this two hundred page manuscript on gender, right, because you got to do gender -- that it's just a primary thing that people think about. In Jewish studies, we look for religion all the time. We look for language, I think, all the time. And I hope that gender will become something we look for all the time, at least to determine if it's relevant or not, which -- spoiler alert -- it always is. (laughs)

CW:Are there other stories or moments along your academic path that I wouldn't know to ask about that you want to bring in?

SEZ:I'm trying to think about the academic path. I think one of the things I've noticed with being in the Yiddish world but maybe not a Yiddishist, not somebody for whom language is their primary focus -- first of all opens up this entire world of social connections. And this is how I became involved in "In Geveb," right, is that I knew the founding editors even though we were in different fields because we had this connection. And to me, it's such a special thing. I 51:00think as a younger scholar, it's so flattering when someone thinks of you. They say, "Oh, I'm putting together a book. I think you should contribute." "I want to do a conference. I really think you should be there," right? So, I think with Yiddish, especially because there's such a -- or maybe it's not so large but a growing kind of younger cohort -- there's this kind of natural academic, social flow, which is not always a positive thing but I think generally is. And I think that that's been something that I don't know that I would have known that from my first year as an intern, right, even though obviously we established all these lovely connections there. But just to realize: Oh, I was nineteen at the time. It was almost twenty years ago. Yeah, and actually, my life kind of still looks like that, I'm still -- I live with because I am married to another former 52:00intern at the Book Center, right, from a different year who was friends with one of the interns, Meyer, and that's when we first met, although I don't remember meeting him then. And we got married at the Book Center, right? And it's just very strange and wonderful, all of these great connections. Maybe that happens in other fields. I don't know but I suspect in this Yiddish studies world, it's a little bit more prevalent (laughs) and it's just weird and great.

CW:Yeah. I guess to push that a little bit, I think this was something you wanted to talk about, the blur of practitioner and subject --

SEZ:Yeah.

CW:-- in Jewish studies and what, I guess -- yeah, what do you want to say about that? (laughs)

SEZ:One of the things that's been so interesting for me is starting off my teaching career in New York, teaching Jewish history broadly. First of all, understanding that my students are coming from a variety of religious and not religious backgrounds, right? But I think from my very first Jewish history course, people assume I'm Jewish. People assume that Jewish history is somehow for Jews. And I think that this is something that people who work in Jewish studies face all the time, that either your students assume you're Jewish or that you have to be Jewish to get a good grade in the class -- and this is something we work against, so much now I work in an area of the country where the vast majority of my students are not Jewish, which is refreshing but also really interesting because I think sometimes they expect me to be a purveyor of Jewish culture, which I don't want to be for them. That's not my role. But I 54:00think within Yiddish there's an even stronger sense of that identity, identity plus subject matter kind of overlap. I didn't grow up with Yiddish. I have half of my family with deep Ashkenazi roots and half not. And I like to think that I can bring both halves to the table. But I don't even know that my identity there is relevant. So, I think that -- and I know that for other scholars who have no Ashkenazi background, their legitimacy as Yiddish scholars is questioned. And I think that that's something that the field needs to really reckon with. Yiddish is a culture and it's related to a particular ethnic group but it's also a 55:00language. I can study French and I don't have French family and no one's ever going to say, "Oh, it's so strange that you speak French because you don't have any French family." And I think the fact that that still happens in Yiddish is frustrating. And I would like that kind of identity and academic work to be less entangled, I guess. But I also think that that's something that's happening. Again, I think that newer generations are understanding that just as you don't need to be frum [observant] to speak Yiddish, you don't need to be Ashkenazi, you don't need to be Jewish to love Yiddish literature, to love Yiddish language, to study it, to want to interact with it in some way in your own life. At the same time, I'm married to another Yiddish speaker and that informs the 56:00way we run our house. And so, there's a tension there, I think.

CW:Well, I want to switch gears a little bit to talk about "In Geveb." Can you first just tell me what it is?

SEZ:Sure. "In Geveb" is a born-digital journal of Yiddish studies. So, we are online only. We have never been a print journal with an online edition. And we produce academic work that's peer-reviewed but also more popular blog entries, cultural criticism, book reviews, and translations.

CW:And how did it start?

SEZ:So, first of all, I'll say it didn't start with me. It started -- David Roskies, Alan Mintz approached Saul Zaritt and Eitan Kensky, who are the 57:00founding editors, with this idea and this potential for source of funding, which is important in all things Yiddish -- is the funding. (laughs) And Saul, whom I knew socially but just through Yiddish and through friends -- and this, again, is kind of a funny social network -- approached me and said, "Hey, I think that it would be great if you worked on this." And we lived near each other in Brooklyn at the time, so we went out for coffee or we went to his apartment, I forget, and said, "Great, let's do this." And it just started with the three of us. And then, very quickly after, Mendel Cohen, as well, and just kind of adding to the staff and figuring out: How do you run a journal? What do we do? And how do we run a journal that's a serious academic journal that also has popular 58:00appeal but that can be respectable in the academic world as well? And, by the way, that looks awesome online because so much that's online looks terrible. And how do we do -- we worked with a web design studio called "Familiar" who -- I knew one of their principals from college who didn't study Yiddish but who had a great visual sense. And we met with them for the first time we're like: Yeah, these guys know what they're doing. But how do you produce a Jewish studies journal, a Yiddish studies journal that doesn't look cheesy and doesn't look -- we said: No blue and white, no fiddlers, no roofs. How do you make this so that it's cool and avant-garde and obviously Yiddish but not this nostalgia? No 59:00bagels, no knishes, none of this. And they got us and then they gave us our visual identity, which I actually think propelled -- it's so much easier to talk about who we are when we can show somebody: this is who we are. We are much more like Moscow Yiddish Theatre than "Fiddler on the Roof," right, or something like this, right? So, using our visual identity to try to explode people's preconceptions about what we do. Yeah, and then it took off. We got so many submissions and we were able to raise more money and we brought on new staff. And now, there's been turnover, which is good because I think we're all young scholars and we're all kind of moving on with our careers. And so, we just talked a couple of days ago: How do we bring in new people and how do we make sure that we're reaching people who want to be involved who we don't necessarily 60:00know? We don't want to replicate ourselves. We want to find people who are great regardless of whether they're our grad students or our friends. And that, I think, again -- it's so easy to be in this friend bubble in this world and we want to kind of go beyond that now.

CW:Are there any pieces that you were especially excited about in the history of "In Geveb" so far?

SEZ:Yeah, so when I was there, I was working partially as the pedagogy editor. So, one of the things that's kind of an ongoing conversation is thinking about teaching Yiddish to classrooms of students whose families aren't mame [mom] and tate [dad] and kinderlekh [children], right? And how do we talk about that in 61:00the Yiddish studies classroom? How do we talk about two mothers and how does that work? So, shepherding through pieces that think about gender and Yiddish studies and gender and Yiddish language classrooms, that's been super exciting. And doing interviews. I interviewed Eve Jochnowitz about her translation of "The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook." And I went to her house to do the interview and we were just thinking about vegetarian food in this world of restaurants and thinking about the recipe in there that's supposed to be kind of like a pot of cappuccino, right? Like, how do you do a frothy coffee drink? You do it with eggs and I love eggs, so we made it during the interview, right? And it's just like getting to work on pieces like that and then see them published and then see them shared. And because it's born digital, we have an idea of how many 62:00people read it and we know how many times it gets shared on social media. And that's really thrilling, especially -- three people read mayb-- or five people read my dissertation. Ten people will read my book. My parents have no idea what I do for a living 'cause it's totally incomprehensible. So, to work on something where it's: Oh, people can understand this. Everyone understands blog posts. And even our academic articles are much more accessible, I think, than is usual. And so, that's actually the best.

CW:Well, now that you've been -- you've mentioned this a little bit but what has it been like for you to teach different student populations?

SEZ:It's the greatest challenge and joy of teaching, I think. I have students 63:00who -- so, to my mind, it's not different, teaching students with Jewish background, to students without Jewish background. Sometimes, a Hebrew school education gets in the way of an academic Jewish education because there's a narrative in Hebrew school. We have very strong Chabad on campus. There's a narrative from Chabad which really is not the same as the narrative of most Jewish historians. Historians of the Jews, that is to say.

CW:Maybe you should mention what campus you're on.

SEZ:Sure, I am at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. And most of our students are local: Washington, Oregon, Idaho. And, yeah, so some -- so, people -- oh, a lot of the times, students think Jewish history is very sad. That's something Jewish students or students who've come in and kind of self-identified as Jewish seem to think. Other students also seem to think that or that it's mainly about the Holocaust. And that is a, I think, common 64:00conception about Jewish history. Washington State mandates some Holocaust education, which I think is great. But when Holocaust education is the only thing you know about the Jews, then that's a problem. And I think that, you know, something I try to tell my students is that -- first of all, all students come in with some sort of background, right? Either some academic background. Maybe they took a lot of European history, so they can kind of slot in what they learned in my class, into that. And that's great, to come with a schema that you can already work with is wonderful. But sometimes, students will come in and say, Well, I'm not Jewish, so I don't really know, but -- and it's always a challenge, I think, that you have to interrupt that and say, "Look, this is not necessarily relevant, whether you're Jewish or not. None of us in this class are a Jew in Spain in 1491, right? No one can speak to that experience." And so, 65:00that's something I think that needs to be emphasized and reemphasized all the time. But students take my class who don't have Jewish background for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, they've just learned that they had a Jewish relative that they never knew and now they're super curious about their family. And that's great. I've had students in my class who have relatives, distant ancestors, who were members of the Nazi Party and they're interested from that angle, right? And so, I think with all Humanities subjects, we come at them from such different angles that it's not about student identity. But sometimes, that can be hard. I mean, I think some students really come in and say, "Oh, I won't be good in this class because I'm not Jewish." Or, "I don't know Hebrew." Or, "I 66:00had a Jewish education but it was really weak and this class, I'm trying to make up for that." And, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And I think that that's -- when a student comes in and on day one starts apologizing for who they are, who they aren't, that's something that's a real challenge. But I think when you can say, for the class as a whole: We have to move beyond this narrative of -- being born into a certain identity doesn't make you an expert. Research makes you an expert. And I think in this country, we're at a place where expertise doesn't matter. People don't like experts. They're elites, et cetera, and I think -- so, to understand what is expertise and where it comes from and that it doesn't come from some weird concept of blood is so important.

CW:Yeah. Well, where do you see the role or the place of Yiddish in the broader 67:00Jewish studies right now?

SEZ:I think that Yiddish is still kind of claiming a place, which is so funny because if you're teaching a Jewish history course and you have a focus on European Jewry, immigration history, why wouldn't you have quite a bit about Yiddish there? Maybe not as a language, per se, but documents that have been translated from Yiddish. We're teaching about people who were speaking Yiddish on a daily basis, thinking about the kind of multiple languages Jews in Eastern Europe spoke in different contexts. How is Yiddish absent from that teaching? I don't know. One of the things I think is really important for students is to understand this multiplicity of Jewish languages. So, I think that living in the Pacific Northwest, which has a very strong Ladino-speaking community 68:00historically and today, as well -- just understanding that there are all of these kind of -- the Jews are a diaspora but within that there are different cultural norms, different cultural identities, different languages, different foods. That's something, I think, especially for a group -- either for a group of students where there's a somewhat more homogenous Jewish contingent or for a group where people don't know any Jews, I think emphasizing this diversity is so important. And I think that language is a good way to do that. Students will immediately understand that Jewish languages which have components of Hebrew and Aramaic, but also other components from different places that Jews have lived and loan words and strange morphology that comes from different cultural contexts, that's something I think students, when they're exposed to it, think is cool and interesting and want to continue with.

CW:What are your feelings about "Yiddish revival"?

SEZ:Well, I think the term is sort of problematic. And I know I used it earlier 'cause it's so available. But to think, first of all, that there's -- right, for a revival, there has to be death. And did Yiddish die? No. People kept saying it was dead or going to die or being revived. But I think, to my mind, I'm both excited about it and slightly wary. I think that, on the one hand, it's awesome when people are inspired by -- I don't know, cultural forebears. I mean, you could say this person or this group or this movement is an example for me on how I live my life. And one of the things I try to do as a historian, mainly of 70:00inter-war Polish Jewry, is to say this is not a story that leads to the Holocaust, right? The people I study thought about their future in so many different ways. And individuals thought about multiple options for themselves like anyone else. Am I going to do this, am I going to do this? Am I going to stay in Poland and am I going to move to Palestine? What's that going to look like? But also, there were internal debates within Jewish communities. So, I think that seeing that and seeing how much of that took place in Yiddish and then being inspired by that to create new works, to learn the language, to think about songs, to think about politics is really great. I think that when there is an assumption that you have this kind of Hebrew hegemony and that Yiddish is 71:00always in opposition to Hebrew and that Yiddish politics is different from Hebrew politics and that to be a lover of Yiddish or a user of Yiddish means to necessarily be on the left is just not true, historically, and that makes me think that, Okay, what I think of as maybe this revival is so -- there's such a potential for cultural richness that I'm so worried that -- I say I'm so worried; it's not like I lose sleep over it -- but that I worry that it's going to be this kind of: There is Yiddish, there's Hebrew. There's a kind of new socialist identity and there's this Netanyahu-supporting Zionism. And, eh, that's so -- it's so derivative, it's so not historically accurate, and it's kind of the opposite of what I try to do in my work. That said, when people get 72:00into Yiddish and they start composing Yiddish music and they're inspired by labor organizing that took place in Yiddish and they want to build a better future with that as an inspiration, more power to them. I'll just be the one being like: Well, it was a little more complicated than that.

CW:Well, before we end, I wanted to see if you might want to sing something?

SEZ:Oh, no! (laughter) No, no.

CW:Okay.

SEZ:I don't want to but thank you. (laughter)

CW:And are there any other topics that you wanted to be sure to cover that we didn't get to?

SEZ:Um, no, I think I'm good.

CW:Okay.

SEZ:Thank you.

CW:Well, to end, do you have any words of wisdom or eytses [pieces of advice] for people --

SEZ:Yeah.

CW:-- coming into this --

SEZ:Yeah. Oh, but which ones are the most important? Let's see. I think, oh, 73:00God, like people coming into learning Yiddish for the first time: Welcome to a really strange world. And I don't know, learn from everyone you can, right? There are great teachers. There are Yiddish speakers who are not necessarily going to be great teachers of language but who will open up new worlds to you and just -- I don't know. I feel like it must be like coming into a new -- a little bit like on a new planet. And also, just use Yiddish to communicate with people who don't -- if we're thinking about native English speakers -- who don't speak English and have Yiddish be your shared language. And that's just -- it's so special, especially in an American context.

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

SEZ:Nishto far vos [You're welcome].

CW:-- for taking the time.

SEZ:Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]