CHARLES CORFIELD ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney. I'm here in Boulder, Colorado, on July 5th, 2011. I'm here with Charles Corfield, and we're going to record an interview as part of the Wexler Oral History Project of the Yiddish Book Center. Charles, do I have your permission to record this interview?

CHARLES CORFIELD: You have my permission to record the interview.

CW:Thank you. Okay. So, can you tell me briefly about your family background? What do you know how they came to this -- to England, it would be, right? (laughs)

CC:Yes.

CW:Okay.

CC:So, I grew up in a town just north of London called Welwyn Garden City, which was a new town, meaning it was started after the turn of the twentieth century. 1:00And people who used to live in London then moved out to these suburban cities. And London at that time had a lot of sprawl. So, they started a movement to do planned communities around London. And Welwyn Garden City was the second of those towns. And it turned into a dormitory community, so that people who wanted to work in London would have a way of living somewhere in a more pleasant surrounding than the unplanned sprawl which was creeping out on the arteries from London. So, during the First World War, they started clearing four farms. And the first house went up in 1920. And believe it or not, within a couple of decades, a healthy population had moved into the town. And a little bit of 2:00Jewish history here: around middle of the 1930s, enough professionals had moved from London to Welwyn Garden City and were looking for somewhere to start a shul. And it turned out that the local Friends meetinghouse -- and the Friends are the Quakers -- said, Well, we have some extra land; why don't you build your shul here? So, Welwyn Garden City is probably one of the few places on the planet where the shul is right next to the Friends meetinghouse. (laughs) And the two communities get on great. The Garden City, as the locals call it, is quite an ethnically diverse town. Intellectually, very rich. I think people would recognize the old politics there as being social democratic, shall we say. And that would be a familiar theme from the early and middle twentieth century. 3:00Now, my parents got there after the war. And they had married -- they had known each other in South Wales, which is where they grew up, near the city of Swansea. And by and by, they had gone to university; the war had come along; my father had, believe it or not, been part of the French resistance during the war; he got back to the UK; and one way or another, he and my mother met. I have no idea how that actually came to pass, but obviously they did meet, otherwise I would not be here today. (laughs)

CW:And do you know anything about your grandparents or great-grandparents? Did they ever talk about them?

CC:I know very little about them. I just about knew my grandmother on my maternal side. I did not know my grandfather on that side, and on my father's side, I didn't know either of the grandparents. They had either died or close to 4:00it when I was a toddler. So, I have not much idea of what happened in South Wales. My memory really begins growing up as a kid in Welwyn Garden City in the environment there and going off to school, where -- in a little side note here on Boulder, Colorado -- well, it turns out that the rabbi over at Bonai Shalom, which is Boulder's Conservative synagogue, he and I were at the same high school in England at the same time, albeit separated by a few years. We didn't know each other there. It took both of us coming to Boulder to finally meet up. So, it is indeed a small world.

CW:(laughter) That's great.

CC:Meantime, back at the Garden City -- so my upbringing there was one that surrounded -- very middle-class -- by English standards, very middle-class, intellectually oriented community. Schooling was everything. I mean, there was no ifs, and, or buts. You went to school to get a good education and go on to college. And it was a community I thrived in.

CW:Would you say you -- was your home very Jewish?

CC:Not at all. Totally secular. To try and put it in context, in the Garden City, people had come from all over and somehow had left it all behind. They had a view of -- it was just a different view of the type of country we were going to grow up into. So, it was, if you will, a very either secular or assimilated 6:00or very diverse and almost sort of mishmosh of different backgrounds. So, I really didn't think of myself as really having any background that I was aware of, particularly as a kid.

CW:Did you celebrate the Jewish holidays or --

CC:Didn't celebrate squat. (laughter)

CW:The national holidays?

CC:Well, there was, you know, a bit of that and what we might call some of the more secular things. But no, I mean, I was very focused on -- I guess school and growing up. To give you an example of how mixed an area it was -- so I told you about Rabbi Marc Soloway and myself going to the same high school. Well, that 7:00high school was in a town about eight miles away called St Albans. And the school we went to was, in name, a Church of England school. But everybody's view of it was, it was an academic elevator. If you wanted your kids to go to university, you sent them to St Albans School. They did not care what your background was, so we had people, whether they were, you know, as WASPy as WASP can get, Iranian, Egyptian, (laughs) Jewish, whatever. Didn't matter. Their whole view was, You come here, you work hard, and if all goes well, you'll get into university.

CW:And you mentioned that the Quakers and the Jewish community got along. And you mentioned some of the other ethnic groups. So, what were the relations 8:00between them? Was it always -- copacetic between the (laughs) different --

CC:Yeah, as far as I could tell. Now, bear in mind, I'm remembering back to when I was a child, not an adult. But there was an organization there called Welwyn One World, of which my parents and everybody else we knew were members. So, they had this notion that everybody was all there to get along. And when I think of -- just to give you a bit of color -- some of my friends -- so one of my good high school friends -- and, in fact, really from primary school on -- his parents were Quaker. And yet, you go to another of my friends and his dad was Egyptian and his mother was Scottish. Go figure. But that's the type of (laughs) community we were. Nobody cared.

CW:Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about your -- the physical space of 9:00this -- of your home and the community? What did it look like? Can you take yourself back there?

CC:If you were to go into Welwyn Garden City, into the town center, one thing that would strike you -- at least in comparison to English cities -- is how much open space there is. Now bear in mind that in the UK, you're fitting a population of sixty million-odd people into a place which is a lot smaller than California. So, land is at a premium. And yet, they have this enormous open boulevard down through the center of town. And the style of the original designers was to build something in -- which was to approximate some of the architectural themes of France. The architect for the town was one Louis de 10:00Soissons, and so he brought that, and so you have houses there which have shutters on them, which is not really part of English architecture at all, but that's what he wanted, so that's what they had. So, the drag through the center of town is this mile-long boulevard with trees and a fountain and rose gardens. And the initial design of the town was that every house was to have a garden. Again, a unusual feature, and certainly a reaction to what had happened in London, where tenements were being put up cheek by jowl, no gardens at all. And there was this intense reaction at the end of the Victorian Era to the squalor of London, a city almost smothered by smog, which there meant a combination of fog and coal dust from smoke. So, Welwyn Garden City was an extraordinarily 11:00extravagant endeavor for them to do and was never really repeated in the UK. So, that gives you an idea of what you'll walk into when you go there. So, the houses date back to about 1920. And there are a few buildings before that, but not many.

CW:And there really are gardens.

CC:And there really are gardens. And if you were to go to my house here in Boulder, you would of course see some of the influence of that, because what have I got? You know, I have a house. And there's no grass. I took that out. Everything around my house is on a theme of -- it fruits, it flowers, it's edible, or it's long since gone. So, I too am a (laughs) fan of gardens. So, 12:00there is -- at the moment, next to the house, you have a combination of a little community agricultural plot, where we do our little neighborhood farm. And right next to it is the wildflower garden, which currently, 'cause all the Flanders poppies being out, I guess looks like northern France and Belgium of many years gone by. (laughs)

CW:Wonderful. So, what would you say were the values of your home growing up, your parents? You mentioned education. Were there other values that you felt they were really trying to pass on to you?

CC:Yes, a certain equality and tolerance. So, if education was number one, then being a fair-minded human being was right up there too. Whatever they may have 13:00thought internally, they were never heavy-handed on us kids about what we should be when we grew up. About the only advice we got was -- from my dad was, "Don't be an architect!" (laughs) But other than that -- they said, you know, That's really up to you.

CW:Was he an architect?

CC:Yes, he was.

CW:(laughter) Okay.

CC:And it was not a career that I think he enjoyed that much in the end. (laughs) But their -- whatever we could be, that was up to us. And they saw it as their job to make the educational opportunities available. So, whether that's schooling or music, for example -- a lot of music in the house.

CW:What kind of music?

CC:In my case, piano, violin -- which I'm embarrassed to say I absolutely 14:00loathed -- and we found a way that we could -- there were a few organs around, so got a few organ lessons. But I don't think that's quite my -- (laughs) quite my scene, piano. So, piano was the -- for me -- the thing.

CW:And was that -- did you mostly listen to classical music in the family as well?

CC:I did.

CW:You did.

CC:Yeah. That was the predominant taste. Again, no real strictures handed down on it. But that's where we gravitated to.

CW:And what did you do in your free time as a young person? Did you climb mountains? (laughs) I mean, when -- were -- did that sort of looking to the out of doors begin, do you think, from living in this garden city? Or -- (laughs)

CC:Well, I think the out-of-doors stuff, if you consider the type of school, the schooling -- I think here high school rather than the earlier schools -- sports was part of the curriculum. And so, you had to do it. And then, in the latter years of school, there were the Friday afternoon activities, which were intended to be outside activities in one shape or another. And so, that's where I got exposed to -- courtesy what they called the Cadet Force or Cadet Corps, that you could go do things at the Ministry of Defense's expense around the country. So, go on what amounted to many expeditions up into the Highlands. Or various other 16:00military escapades. I think my favorite there were the escape and evasion exercises, because you would have various military people trying to track you down while you tried to avoid them to get to the -- (laughs) you know, to get to the goal, whatever it was. So, I kind of liked that, 'cause it tested your ingenuity and ability to move across the countryside undetected. Good thing for a delinquent to go do. (laughter)

CW:But you weren't a delinquent. You did well in school.

CC:I did well in school. We also had orienteering, which is a combination of map reading and running. And although I was a, shall we say, solid middle-of-the-pack runner, it was a sport I enjoyed. And again, the challenge of figuring out a optimal course as you had to go find all the points along the 17:00course and go clip your card that you had visited them. So, I was, yes, exposed to outdoor activities fairly consistently at school. And then, going forward a few decades to the States, of course, got the opportunity to do ultramarathons and expeditions and things like that.

CW:Yeah. Was there ever a time when you felt particularly Jewish growing up, or was it absent from the daily experience?

CC:Absent. I think first inklings or stirrings were listening to -- I recall listening to the radio when Singer won his Nobel Prize. And for some reason, it sort of sunk in. I mean, with all the other distractions you have in life, why 18:00on earth that particular news item should sink in, I don't really know, but it did. And when -- as a student, graduate student -- I was in New York -- you know, the place makes the opportunity. And that was when that memory stirred again. And it was going, Well, you know, you really -- you know, having been out in the boonies, and you've had this pretty good life so far, and never really had to think about where you came from, what you are, what you want to be, et cetera. And here you are now in New York City. And this is, in American terms, I guess, ground zero for Jewish culture and everything. And so, that was really the moment where the lightbulb went off, and it was time to start investing. And 19:00I went one day down to the bookstore, found my Weinreich primer on Yiddish, and the rest, as they say, is history. (laughs)

CW:But you had never heard any Yiddish previously.

CC:I had heard some. But it was kind of, Okay, yeah.

CW:From your grandmother or from --

CC:No, people around --

CW:Just people around?

CC:-- around the community. 'Cause of where people are coming from. I'd never -- nothing at home. But the irony was that -- I'm sorry, gonna leap around here.

CW:That's fine. (laughs)

CC:Many years later -- and this is now in Boulder -- J.J., who was -- I guess 20:00we'll leave that aside -- J.J. found -- we were looking -- browsing down the video catalogue, and we found this movie, called "Solomon & Gaenor." So, we pick it up, and here I am, looking at this movie, which is a story of an Orthodox bokher [unmarried young man] in South Wales who falls in love with a shiksa, and it all comes to some very miserable end. And I'm looking at this thing, going -- well, other than I'm stunned that there is actually a movie which is trilingual -- you know, English, Welsh, and Yiddish -- but I recognize all these places. (laughs) So, you know, it made me wonder also about what was going on there, that -- places I knew from family holidays which had never really been talked about. So, it was quite an eye-opening sort of movie, sort of that proverbial 21:00déjà vu, you know. So, when I did an inventory of words, as I was getting serious about Yiddish, realizing that these were -- there were words I already knew, then -- now this sort of piece of the puzzle drops into place. It's sort of a bit like finding that -- you open up a sort of cupboard one day, and there're all these things in there that you never knew (laughs) were there in the history, so to speak.

CW:And what did you discover upon entering the language?

CC:Well, what a lot of fun it is. And then, you start realizing how a lot of things you'd never really been aware of now start making much more sense.

CW:For example?

CC:That -- oh, turns of phrase. You know, you find yourself suddenly put on the 22:00spot to come up with an example. And -- oops! You know, the good ones go. But take for example a word like "nosh." You know, it never really occurred to me that that was -- growing up -- that that was anything other than just slang. But no, it was actually -- it's a good, zaftik [juicy] Yiddish word, isn't it? (laughs) We use mishmosh-- except we said mishmash -- but we use mishmosh all the time. And then, you start realizing that little pieces of grammar that you hear everyday around you -- "If he would have done something"? That's not -- that's not the grammar that came over with what I call English-ancestry 23:00speakers. That's a Yiddish grammar.

CW:Right.

CC:Which is --

CW:Volt [Would have].

CC:Yeah. Volt gemakht [Would have done].

CW:Right.

CC:So, it's sort of sud-- realizing that there were a lot of clues around that you'd never -- when you were rushed growing up, never really put everything together. I guess in some sense, the coup de grâce was -- J.J. and I, we watched a documentary, a National Geographic documentary, done by this fellow called Spencer Wells, who was looking at the migratory history of populations around the world. And so, it turned out that you could actually send in a cheek swab, and they could do a DNA analysis. And I'm sure this is all old news to 24:00everyone, but -- you know, I --

CW:This is the Geograph-- or what is this?

CC:There are DNA --

CW:The National --

CC:-- tests -- yeah, National Geographic.

CW:(UNCLEAR).

CC:But there are -- they happen to be doing one of these, and I gather there are these services for people who are curious. And so -- because having very little idea of what my deep ancestry was, if you -- 'cause not being able to crack open the proverbial family tree, it was somewhat gratifying to find that all these markers, which basically picked out sort of Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe -- so, you know, when I look at myself in the mirror and sort of wonder what may be there in the dog pound of history that -- (laughs) you know, it's another bit of a tale that -- one of these days I'll do a trip out there and see 25:00if there are more things that one can discover in this story.

CW: See if the people look like you? (laughs)

CC:Well, I daresay -- (laughs) the question is what were they, you know?

CW:Right.

CC:'Cause I think we'll find that genetically, I'm quite gemisht [mixed], as one might say.

CW:And how did your family react to your taking up Yiddish and --

CC:Oh, they thought it was neat. (laughs) No, thereby hangs another tale. So, roll on to a couple -- few years ago. And I had given some money to St John's College, Cambridge, where I had been a student, studying mathematics. And the opportunity had come up to take a building which was in front of the main gates 26:00of the college and turn it into another court. And in Cambridge terms, a court means really a residential area with a courtyard in the middle. So, by and by, they did the renovation. And it turned out that after the archaeologists had been in -- because they had to go down to the foundations and start excavating -- well, they came across a bunch of remains of things. And it turned out that the court that we were, in a sense, reconstructing, or gentrifying, was actually built over what must have been the old Jewish quarter of Cambridge in England. And who would have thought, but -- so the archaeologists tell me, you can see 27:00where they had found a refuse pile where there were bones that they said, you know, the marks you see are -- these are good examples of shekhtn [slaughters], and how they slaughtered the animals there. And then, I gathered that there is also what seems to be a Jewish cemetery on the grounds as well. Well, so there we are, and everybody's around in all their finest and about to unveil the plaque. And so, at that moment, inspiration hit. And so, as they drew the curtain back, I tossed away the lines I had thought of giving and adlibbed in Yiddish to (laughs) welcome everybody to the new court of St John's College on the old Jewish quarter of Cambridge. And you can find -- now as part of the 28:00university library, there's some archaeology reports now about what they have found there.

CW:Wow.

CC:So, again --

CW:What period? Do you know?

CC:This would have been eleventh century. If my recollection is correct on what I was told, this was a community that came over with the Norman invasion. So, it was presumably in the merchants-cum-administrators who came over with the Normans. Why they ended up in Cambridge, I have no idea. I mean, it must have been -- it would not have been my pick of places to have gone to, because it's basically a bog. I mean, it's about zero feet above sea level and twice as wet. So, why they ended up there I have no idea. But they did. And they would have 29:00been there until the expulsion. And then, you would've presumably had the big gap until all the, shall we say, conniptions in the rest of Europe, and then the Jewish community then gradually rebuilt in England.

CW:And so, you -- was this sense of acceptance, sort of ethnic mixing, common in England at that period, or was it something specific to your community that you grew up in?

CC:It's a great question, because -- I would like to say yes, but I'm not sure that -- I grew up in something which could arguably have been called a bubble. That area north of London was a particularly tolerant, open-minded, accepting 30:00county, if you will. So, not just the town, but the whole environ. But equally, you could see places in England which were just about as prejudiced as anywhere else on this planet. So, I think I grew up in a place which was extraordinarily favored.

CW:Did you, other than buying your Yiddish -- your Weinreich textbook -- did you explore the Yiddish/Jewish world in New York City when you were there?

CC:To some extent. Time was also limited, and, you know -- actually, my favorite place was just on -- down the block from me, which was the JTS. 'Cause of its library. So, when I wasn't doing academic things, you know, for the -- my 31:00astrophysics, I'd toddle along there and go spend many a happy afternoon in the library there. One thing I did stumble on was that being there at that time -- so what are we talking, around 1980, so you obviously had quite a good sort of (UNCLEAR) community there. Quite a bit of it now in retirement. And it meant that if you were so inclined, I mean, you could pretty much go to -- you know, down to, say, Riverside Park or something like that. And if you wanted to go hear an interesting story, you could walk up to a park bench. There'd be two 32:00people there and just find some way to break the ice, and, my goodness, you would walk away (laughs) with a head pounding with all sorts of stories which -- kind of unbelievable. But it -- that --

CW:If you had Yiddish. If that --

CC:If you -- yes.

CW:-- was the entry.

CC:Yes. 'Cause they were very happy that somebody of the younger generation was taking an interest. And maybe it was their sense that at some point, this was all going to pass on and be gone. At the time, I do recall thinking, At some point, this will be no more. And I had a sort of inkling of -- that as this community -- this generation -- died out, that so its literature was going to 33:00die out with it. Now, I'm not a big literary buff, but even I had worked that out. And so, when eventually I heard about the project for the National Yiddish Book Center, I instantly related to it, 'cause I'd been thinking back when I was a student wondering what was happening to all this stuff. So, that was why when I first got wind of it, it seemed a no-brainer to jump in and join in. The other thing about New York at that time is there was WEVD. So, there was the radio program in Yiddish. So, I listened to that as well. Research meant that I actually had very little -- there was only so much time I had to do whatever I could do. So, to this day, I'd never really spent much time, say, checking out 34:00what was at YIVO and such like. So, it was a somewhat narrow, opportunistic (laughs) acquisition and exploration. And the day before I left New York, I had one last visit into the JTS library. And as luck would have it, I cracked open a book, and it turned out it was a play whose title would have been something like "Alts gut ende gut" -- "All's Well That Ends Well," I guess literally. But it was not by one Bill Shakespeare. So, at some point I'll go see if I can find out who it was that actually wrote that play. And I would not be shocked to find that in fact, the basic story had been floating around Europe for some time, and (laughs) had surfaced in one incarnation in William Shakespeare and maybe in 35:00another incarnation with some Yiddish author. Maybe I should go send Itzik Gottesman an email and see if he can explain what it was that I saw. (laughs)

CW:But you really learned from a book? I mean, you real--

CC:Well, no, you lear-- you can pick up the grammar, but the rest of it -- as it turned out, there was a little clothing store down somewhere just north of 100th Street, on Broadway, where the proprietors were two Yiddish-speaking owners of the store. And so, I would try my best with them and buy the odd cheap sweater and cheap pants, and -- so yeah. But the reality is that day in, day out, I'm 36:00not in a Yiddish-speaking environment. You know, it's not like being in Crown Heights or somewhere like that. So, my contact during most of the year with Yiddish -- at any rate, sort of what's going on comes through the "Forverts." So, my Shabbos reading is to sit down with the "Forverts" and (laughs) go see what's going on.

CW:Do you remember any of the people that you met during this period through the language? Just curious.Any characters?

CC:Yeah, the sort of sorting out the stories now that the -- teasing them apart at this remove is gonna be a challenge. Maybe I'll have to sit down and think about that --

CW:Okay.

CC:-- and send you an email --

CW:(laughs) Sure.

CC:-- on the --

CW:Sure.

CC:-- who did what.

CW:Sure. Well, what was I gonna -- so meanwhile, that you were learning Yiddish, (laughs) you were also a -- can you just briefly walk me through your education and how you came to the business that you are now in?

CC:Yeah. So, let's get this start back in the UK. So, high school was St Albans School, after which I went to St. John's College, Cambridge, where I studied mathematics and astrophysics. I came over to New York, to Columbia University, to do a PhD there in astrophysics and fluid dynamics. And that was where I got the idea for going into technology. And so, after New York I went out to Silicon 38:00Valley to start a company along with a few other people. And we grew that company, and ultimately sold it off, and -- so I was in New York -- sorry -- in California for a while doing technology. I then had a little detour out of day-to-day high tech when I ran into Brad Washburn of the Boston Museum of Science, who had a project to resurvey Everest using GPS. So, I was involved with that for some years. That finished in '99. And it was through that project that I saw Boulder, Colorado. And so, somewhere around 2000, I was free to move, and so relocated to Boulder, Colorado. I have done a number of startups or emerging technology companies. And I also do buyouts and spinouts, which are 39:00more mature companies, and do that through an investment vehicle called Silver Lake Partners. And now the place where you are currently filming -- we're sitting in a room in a company called nVoq, which is in Boulder, Colorado. And it is in the voice-recognition space. And in a nutshell, it does real-time voice recognition based in the cloud. The cloud is one of these computing bits of jargon that's very popular at the moment. And we provide a way that we can save people keystrokes, is what it amounts to. People speak faster than they can type, and now we let them talk to their computers to get their work done. "Star Trek."

CW:(laughs) Yes. So, what appeals to you about this field that you are in? What 40:00appealed to you first, I guess, backing up, about math?

CC:Math was a second choice. And its greatest appeal was that I wouldn't have to spend any time in a physics laboratory. Laboratory work left me colder when I was a teenager, that it seemed a lot of time, when in practice you already knew the answer, so why were we doing all this -- (laughs) this work in the lab? So, mathematics was my second choice. As it turned out, it was a pretty good second choice because at Cambridge, it turned out that, far from being a mere doer of sums, was I turned out to be pretty good at it and got a good degree and racked up a few prizes along the way. But the irony is that what you think you are or 41:00you are not is often set earlier than when you discover that you may have a talent. So, at high school, I had come to the conclusion that I was a competent doer of sums but certainly no mathematician. I did not react to mathematics problems in the way that I saw, quote, "math geniuses" reacting to them. (laughter) And yet, it turned out that when my colleagues at school, who were more like the mathematicians that I imagined -- that when we all went off to university they seemed to slow up as the math got harder, and I just kept on plodding right along and getting on with it. So, to this day, although I have a degree in mathematics, I've never quite seen myself as the classic mathematician.

CW:So, what adjectives would you use to describe yourself? Or --

CC:I can plod with the best of them. Stamina. I have a lot of stamina. And that's probably why I'm willing to do startup companies and why I'm willing to do ultramarathons in my spare time.

CW:(laughter) Right. Did you ever -- did your Jewish identity develop separate from your business and academic life? Did they ever intersect?

CC:No, it's separate. When I'm in a academic or business environment, that is one aspect of life. And when I'm outside the daled amer [four square cubits, minimal space for a number of questions of rabbinical law], so to speak, of business, I -- whatever life is out there. So, here in Boulder, for example, I'm 43:00a member of Bonai Shalom, served on its board of directors for several years, took under wing the office and administrative structure there so that it could then basically bring its administrative infrastructure up to what I see in the commercial world. So, it's sort of an adopted project and community life in its own right. And then, one of the other rabbis -- he will occasionally need some Yiddish translation done, so I will get things thrown in my direction (laughs) and then turn around and supply English back to him. So, I get a little bit of 44:00use out of the Yiddish. But there's not an enormous opportunity here for people to speak it. We had for a while -- we did a -- sort of a yidish-vinkl [Yiddish group], like a book club. But it was hard to keep that going, 'cause I found that since I was ending up being the weekend organizer, I found it tough to do that plus do any racing as well. So, that has lapsed for the time being, though I'm cautiously optimistic that if we're patient, we'll get a generational change here where it'll become interesting again, and the fact that we now have a Jewish studies program that started up in the last few years on campus here, 45:00that this will inevitably lead to students in the younger generation who will take an interest, and we can breathe some life back into it. And, you know, having somebody like an academic, a first-rate academic like David Shneer, will help anchor that process. But we will -- you know, sadly but inevitably, we'll be losing the generation of Shoah survivors who grew up speaking Yiddish in the home, albeit -- now, this is interesting -- take some of the women, that they spoke it, but they were never taught it grammatically. So, their command is a 46:00colloquial Yiddish but not something they read. And then, very, very few men who actually learnt it more formally and grammatically and, in a sense, have a sort of academic command or sort of literary command of it as well. But here in Boulder, it's limited. Down in Denver, I'm sure it's more developed. It's just, believe it or not, I have not spent much time down in Denver. I seem to run out of oomph. (laughs)

CW:Well, how do you keep up your Yiddish?

CC:Because in my own house, I have my books. I can stay in touch with the news via the "Forverts." I have noticed that there is more stuff creeping online now 47:00with Yiddish videos. So, that's encouraging. And then, what will happen is eventually I'll be out of job jail, and so there are all these places I want to go hang out. So, at the moment, it's on the list of fantasy things to go do. But -- (laughs)

CW:Like Yiddish programs and festivals --

CC:Oh, absolutely.

CW:-- and things?

CC: Come find out what the interns are doing at the Book Center and maybe go off to one of the programs in Europe somewhere. And go hang out there for a few weeks. And then, who knows? Maybe at some point, one will find another little bit of the project of Yiddish culture to go give a oomph to. If you, for example -- in a recent "Forverts" article, Rafael Goldwaser, who has been doing a 48:00one-man show around America and Europe, makes a very cogent point that what Yiddish theater is lacking is a formal theatrical school for theater techniques, that you have this mixture of people who are gifted amateurs but have never been through theater school, people who have been through theater school but really don't know Yiddish -- I mean, they're basically parroting stuff. They've just sort of learned it by heart, by rote. And they're drawing upon their acting talent. So, it seems to me, you know, maybe at some point there is a gap there to be nursed along. Which will be one of these sort of things where you -- you do it for the goodness of the community, although I am not by nature much of a theatergoer myself. (laughs)

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Do you read Yiddish novels, literature? What --

CC:Sure.

CW:-- what do you like?

CC:Oh, well, I guess, you know, the classics, everything from Motl Peysi to Peretz -- you know, YIVO has put out anthologies over the years. What I find -- if I had the time, it would be kind of nice to be able to sit down and basically go through what would amount to collected works of someone. But the force of time, one really has to do -- take more of a sort of dilettante's approach of sampling as one can get the time in and sort of bookmarking things to come back later. Because in the way my time gets spent at the moment, I do quite a lot of 50:00physical training, which obviously is time where I'm awake, but I do not have a book in hand because I'm out running. Well, things like that will eventually -- the body will run down, and I won't be able to do that so much. And so, it'll be -- then, you know, come up with plan B, and so I expect my interests by that time will be spent more with my nose stuck in a book of some variety.

CW:Now, I read somewhere that you listen to Yiddish music on your iPod while you're training. Is that true?

CC:Yes. Because that I can do. So, one of the things you can do is -- in terms of laziness, I'm seeking stuff out. Here's how it goes. Artist X gets it into 51:00their head that they should go record some Yiddish songs. And thank goodness there are people who are willing to do more than just the potboilers. CD goes into the "Forverts" editorial office. It then gets reviewed. I read the review. I get the CD. I then rip it to my computer and then put it out on my little MP3 player. And then, somewhere at some aid station on a fifty-mile run, somebody makes the mistake of asking, "Oh, what are you listening to?" (laughs) and gets a very unexpected answer. (laughter) So, that's the flow of how it comes that I listen. There are also now what amount to books on tape, where -- or books on CD. So, it is actually possible now just to (UNCLEAR) erase -- put in something 52:00which is -- comes in what one may call bite-size chunks, like Singer's short stories "In mayn tates beys-din shtub [In my father's court]," for example. You know, those are short stories. There's always an interesting twist to them. They're quite listenable to, when you're out there on a long race. And, you know, I may have ten hours of running ahead of me, so (laughs) it's quite a lot of time to digest things.

CW:Does listening to things like that make it a Jewish experience? Does it infuse your running with -- I mean, does what you're listening to affect how you run or the way that you think about going for your next practice?

CC:Well, of course it is a Jewish experience, because while everybody else on Shabbos is of course dutifully sitting inside shul, admiring the scenery of the walls of a shul, I am out in the great outdoors, having a terrific view of creation. So, my observation of Shabbat, I bet you, is a hell of a lot better than other people's. Because it's just so much more stunning. Sorry. Slightly tongue-in-cheek, but (laughs) what's not to like about a Jewish experience of running fifty miles or a hundred miles with ten to twenty thousand feet of elevation gain in the most stunning parts of the world? On a more serious note, you might be quite surprised how many top-flight athletes there are out there who are actually of Jewish background. Take Dave Mackey, for example, who is one 54:00of the elite ultrarunners of the country and was USADF number one ultrarunner a few years ago, you know? He's a member of the tribe.

CW:Does he listen to Yiddish too? (laughs)

CC:I doubt it somehow. I mean, you know, if I'm pretty secular, I think he makes me look fairly frum [pious]. (laughter)

CW:Can you describe a favorite climbing trip?

CC:I sense you are fishing for Mount Everest. (laughs)

CW:Well, no, not necessarily. I mean, that's the easy question. I'm asking a different question. (laughter) It doesn't have to be your favorite.

CC:Actually, a favorite one around here is -- there is -- up in Rocky Mountain 55:00National Park, there's a mountain called Mount Ypsilon. And Ypsilon is the Greek for "Y," and it's so called because if you look at the -- look at it at the right angle, you'll see a snow couloir on it, which -- top is like this, comes together, forms a couloir, makes a Y shape. So, hence Ypsilon. And as you look at that couloir, on the right-hand side is a ridge. And it's a great ridge to go and climb because, while most people probably do use rock-climbing gear on it, you can in fact climb it without rock gear and certainly go a lot quicker. But the views from it are very impressive, and you are right up there with the whole world around you. And it's pretty impressive scenery up there. And then, of 56:00course there -- out in the Himalaya and Nepal, Ama Dablam. That was an amazing climb. Nineteen ninety-seven, in winter. So, December. So, twenty-two-, twenty-three-thousand-foot mountain. So, we decided to do it as a winter climb. And winter is supposed to be the dry time of year, but for some reason when we were up at Camp Two at around twenty thousand feet, three foot of snow showed up, in a storm. And what surprised me was that I was expecting the whole upper mountain to be completely impassable with that amount of snow on it. As it turned out, the winds had been blowing so strong that basically they'd blown all the snow off the top of the mountain, and it all landed down in the valley. So, everybody down below was wading through about four or five feet of snow. And we actually had the mountain pretty much to ourselves, great conditions. And I'm 57:00told since then that -- and possibly an impact of global warming -- that the route that we got to do now no longer quite exists, that we got to do it on snow and ice, and now it's a lot more exposed rock that people are on. So, perhaps not as pretty or perhaps not as -- you know, we had it easier on snow and ice. But Ama Dablam is a spectacular climb.

CW:(pauses) Just letting that image stay in my mind for a minute.

CC:I'll tell you a different mountain story --

CW:Sure.

CC:-- as you are gathering your thoughts. So, it's inevitable if you spend any time in Nepal that you will get to know the Sherpa population. So, pretty much 58:00all of us who have ever climbed in Nepal, we know Sherpas. And so, it came to pass that one family I knew, the daughter was looking to see if she could get over to America for an education. So, another family here in town, myself, basically we sponsored her through first high school and then undergraduate, and then finally last year, she graduated as a physician assistant. And when she was looking for physician assistant schools to go to, I suggested that maybe she didn't want to go into a nice suburban area, that when the opportunity to do one in New York City came up, I said, "Go for that one, because you are gonna be exposed to so much more variety." And indeed, variety she was certainly exposed 59:00to, because with her clinical rotations -- and so the patient community she got exposed to -- as it turned out, she got to see a lot of the Hasidic community who would come into her practice. So, it was interesting listening to Dawa's impressions of part of the Jewish community which, shall we say, is fairly far from your suburban, professional, academically-oriented (laughs) Jewish family. So, it was interesting talking with her about what she'd seen and explaining what she was seeing. And I actually cheered it on because I was thinking, Well, you know, Dawa, you've come from halfway around the planet, and this is a great way for you to see what a whole different mix of people there are in the United 60:00States. Well, she's now off practicing on her first job out in Arizona, in a rural area, but I think of her as being a sort of extended part of the tribe, so to speak. Hardworking, no fuss, no muss. And of course, she's had some experience now of the range of the Jewish community. And as you get to know Sherpas, you understand that in some sense, sort of they are like honorary members. (laughs)

CW:Earlier you mentioned sort of hoping for a generational shift and a return to Yiddish. Have you seen any of that yet? I mean, what do you envision for the 61:00future of Yiddish?

CC:Yes, I think it's hit its nadir, shall we say, perhaps a decade or so ago. And I think -- and I'm gonna draw upon an experience that they had in the UK as perhaps a point that may well happen with Yiddish. The Welsh language in the UK was pretty much on its last legs. Its native speakers were pretty much restricted to some mountainous rural areas in parts of North and parts of South Wales. It was surrounded by a very dominant language of English. And the BBC started up a service -- BBC Wales -- and they started Welsh programming. And at 62:00the time, that seemed kind of one of these touchy-feely type of things to do, that it seemed a sop to -- and I say "seemed a sop," and this is the criticism of it, that here was a language that there was no way of rescuing it; why are you spending all this money? Well, it turned out to be a great success -- not overnight. But the fact that there was now programming available in Welsh meant you could teach Welsh in school to kids and they would have something they could watch and some reason to carry on with it. And so, the result is Welsh is now -- has been growing back as a language. So, how does this apply to something like Yiddish? Well, with the -- obviously the events of World War II and then all the 63:00native Yiddish speakers basically either being killed or uprooted, and therefore their kids growing up in a language of another environment where there really wasn't a sort of kehillah in which to speak Yiddish. I mean, it was something that your zeyde [grandfather] and bobe [grandmother] would speak. Maybe your parents understand a bit, but that was kind of it. So, here in America, you'd grow up speaking English. Or in France, French. Or in England, you know, English again. And now the equivalent of the BBC Wales is what the internet has made possible. So, now we have, courtesy of the Book Center, we basically have, say, twenty thousand titles are now available online. So, this is something that here 64:00I am in a remote place from a Yiddish point of view, which is Boulder, Colorado. But I can download and have downloaded titles onto my computer. And if need be, I can print them out, because you can do on-demand printing as well. So, access to the language -- the barrier to access has now dropped dramatically. And technology means that you can now have the equivalent of TV programming. You don't need the budget of a BBC to go and do TV programming. As the "Forverts" has demonstrated, you can have a video camera with some researcher in China who has learned Yiddish as an adult and has the moxie to stand up in front of that 65:00camera and prepare an interesting five-minute video of material which would be of interest in any language. And so, that's why I am very optimistic, because we're, in a sense, generationally Shmuel Perlin --- to use his Yiddish nomen [name] -- is demonstrating what's possible; others will surely follow suit. You, for example. Of course, anybody watching this video has no idea who is behind the camera at the moment. But let me assure the viewer that there is one very capable fellow -- female fellow -- who no doubt will be in front of the camera at some point with a -- I hope -- presenting a program with a -- speaking a real prekhtik [pristine] Yiddish. (laughs) So, that's why I am now optimistic for the future. And there are enough people, I think, who are willing to chip in and 66:00help things along that I think it's here for -- it's here for good now.

CW:Now, some people would hear that argument and say, Well, but it was really this assimilation and this movement to secularism that moved or made Yiddish not necessary as a vernacular language anymore. How do you see -- I mean, other than being interesting and fascinating -- and I'm playing the devil's advocate here -- you know, what is the role of Yiddish towards the future? What is it -- yeah, what do you imagine it -- what does it mean to you, and what will it mean to 67:00future generations?

CC:Well, I think there's the historical context here, which is there is, after all, a cultural background here, which is a few thousand years in the making. And so, we go through -- all of us, we all have our own window into that history. And our personal experience of that, which is but a few decades. So, after we're gone, of course, we don't get to witness what comes after us. We certainly have some idea of what came before. And I don't think we should write off what technology will do and the fact that people will be sorting themselves into communities regardless of what the technology is. So, what has happened is that if the shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community] was an example of you have people in a physically confined space preserving community, well, now people are geographically dispersed, but the technology now allows 68:00people to begin to maintain community again without being physically in a shtetl. But they can certainly be in a virtual shtetl. And so, I think we're just on the beginnings of that. And while I have not had the benefit of spending a summer in a program, say at the National Yiddish Book Center, you consider the number of people who -- here they are as young adults, being put in not only physical but intellectual touch with that corpus of work, and surely out of this will start emerging -- people will start authoring and thinking about -- you know, there will be vibrant discussions about where Yiddish goes from here.

CW:(pauses) What do you think Yiddish can teach that is not found elsewhere? 69:00What is it -- you mentioned what sort of opened up to you when you began studying Yiddish. But can you articulate sort of -- is there -- are there values, lessons, wisdom that are contained in this -- you know, you can't quite contain it, but this Yiddish language and culture that are different?

CC:Arguably, yes, because if you look at Yiddish as being a language of -- certainly some of its written form goes back about a thousand years. And it -- 70:00having grown up in a context of a community which was -- never had its own country within Europe but was certainly a community apart and within a wider context and always had to live with sort of things varying from being a rather illegitimate community on the outside of what was permitted, to a community which, come nineteenth century and emancipation and Enlightenment and the Haskalah and the what-have-you, that a sense that it captured values which had kept a very identifiable people and their values and what they had to deal with, both being within a community and apart from it, in a way that we don't really 71:00-- is not true today. I mean, I don't walk around Boulder thinking in myself that there's a line I have to be very careful about crossing 'cause if I do, I will get what for. But up to fairly recently, the Yiddish-speaking community definitely, there were limits, places you did not go. You were in czarist Russia, always on the edge there of what would be tolerated, what wouldn't be, the fear of the pogrom or -- that violence was an undercurrent around. And so, that sort of stark life of human values around survival and threat. And also, intellectual vibrancy under difficult conditions. I mean, it's sort of -- it's 72:00sometimes hard to imagine that a community which was materially as challenged as it was, and yet every male from about age five onward was basically literate. So, there's sort of dialectical values which come down there -- sort of what other communities spent so much time arguing with no one ever to be like the Pope and say, "This is -- bang, here's the right answer"? I mean, it's -- No, you know, so-and-so said this, so-and-so said that. And, well, you know, who's right? Everything is debatable. And I guess that's something I do feel here in America is that I am very conscious that there is part of America for whom everything is black and white. "No, there is an answer." Not comfortable of what 73:00they cite to support it, but (laughs) they -- definitely a view that there's an answer, as opposed to, "No, there may not be an answer." You're gonna have to argue it out. You're gonna have to find your own toyre [Torah].

CW:Well, have you noticed or -- I don't know how much time you spend in England -- but have you noticed a difference in the attitudes or the place of Yiddish in the US versus other places you've been?

CC:Yeah. So, just take that trivial example, in some sense, of just being in New York. You can pop your token into the subway stile, walk through, get on the 74:00subway, and go out, and you can see signs in Yiddish. You can go to a place where -- it's in the subway station; it's in the shop window; it's people speaking it. Sort of the -- even though it's an environment which I would not choose to live, but the fact is, people have kept the lights on, kept it going. Whereas you couldn't really find that in London or Manchester, which would be sort of your nearest equivalents in the UK. It's just a much more assimilated 75:00population. I mean, even if you're Orthodox, it's so much more assimilated there than you can find over here. I mean, you really do have a sort of shtetl. There really is a sort of shtetl life actually in Man-- not Man-- in New York, in the boroughs. So, that's, in hindsight, not something I would ever have latched onto as a kid, but now as an adult -- so you get a little bit more discriminating or discerning about coded language in adult speak. Now I'd say, Yeah, you know, there was certainly a vein of mild anti-Semitism you could pick up in parts of English culture, particularly intellectuals for whom, for some reason, they -- 76:00it's almost just like a sort of badge of -- I wouldn't say badge of honor, but just a sort of casual throwaway attitude they can have and get away with, and it's kind of cool to be anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, that sort of thing. But if you confronted them and said, "You rotten anti-Semite," I'm sure they would defend -- say, "Oh, of course I'm not -- I'm not that. No, I just disagree with the government of Israel." Et cetera. (laughs) So -- yeah, now I think I spot things I just never spotted as a kid. And now I would -- slang that I now realize that there was in the UK, there were terms of -- shall we say dubious epithets 77:00reserved for all sorts of ethnic backgrounds. And it was pretty equal opportunity. And as it turns out, there were some pretty choice terms for Jewish ethnicity as well. (laughs) Whether full-on anti-Semitism, I'm not sure. I think it's more sort of casual -- you know, just sort of casual one-upmanship. A casual disparaging of those who were different.

CW:But this sort of casual anti-Semitism never -- I mean, did you ever feel restricted because of it, or was it enough in the background that --

CC:No. That's what I mean. You had asked me as a kid, it would never have dawned 78:00on me. Ask me as an adult, now I see the coded language. Now I can see the parents of, say, my school peers, that if their son or daughter for some reason had married somebody outside -- so, for example, do a mixed marriage -- there would have been definite comments by the parents.

CW:Was there ever a time that you -- or -- sorry. Have you ever found Yiddish useful in a place that surprised you?

CC:(pause) Well, not yet. (laughs)

CW:But you're planning.

CC:But (laughs) it would be -- well, I suppose the closest thing to that was -- it was traveling around with some friends. And we ended up staying over with some of their friends. I mean, it's -- I guess at the time it seemed a little surprising, though it shouldn't have, was I'd find myself doing a little bit of translation for them. But now -- it's kind of -- you're expected to run across all sorts of stuff. People give you things, Can you translate this? Or my friend -- they're trying to work out what ha-- you know, what their uncle did, and here's a postcard he wrote while he was basically a traveling salesman down in 80:00Baltimore, and he's writing back to the Bronx, and as it turns out, it's not terribly (laughs) interesting what he wrote. Although the orthography is, because what you notice is that there'll be bits which are written in English where it's a very phonetic English, and you notice the same is true with the Yiddish, that the spelling is, shall we say, not YIVO standard. (laughs) So, you realize, of course, probably writing it in largely unschooled.

CW:Well, is there -- are there any other stories you wanted to share with me, with us, today?

CC:Yes. So, we're in Colorado. We're in Boulder. And there is a little town up in the mountains called Leadville. And it's about ten thousand feet high. And 81:00every year in August, they hold a hundred-mile running race. They also do a mountain bike race as well, similarly a hundred miles. So, imagine my surprise when at the end of one of the Leadville races I'm talking to the lady who's serving up the potato soup, and --- I don't know, this is oh dark thirty (laughs) in the tent at the finish -- and she's telling me a little about the history of Leadville. And who would think it, but a block or two away from the finish line is a shul. So, the highest shul in America is in Leadville, at ten thousand feet. And it survived being burnt down at least once. And it has been restored to beautiful health. And if you go wander off down one of the roads, 82:00there's a cemetery. And you can turn down one of the dirt roads which goes in the cemetery and go all the way down to the end, and you will find some nineteenth-century cast-iron railings and a gate. And the top of the gate says, "Hebrew Cemetery." And you can go through that gate, and there you can see a collection of matsevas [tombstones] from the Jewish community of the nineteenth century that was up there in Leadville. So, the shul is still standing -- and as I said, they've done a beautiful job restoring it -- and how does that connect to the outside world? Well, Leadville is where the Guggenheims made their money. So, when you're in New York visiting the Guggenheim Museum, you can think about 83:00Leadville, Colorado, up at ten thousand feet, and that's where it all came from. So, I would not be shocked to find that if I poke around a little bit more in the annals of the history of Leadville, I will find that there are probably a few things, documents there which are recorded in Yiddish for the community that was up there at the time. But that's a project for another day.

CW:Once you're out of job jail?

CC:Once I'm out of job jail, yes. (laughter)

CW:Anything else?

CC:Yes, well, actually, you know -- again, the sort of things you think about being out of job jail is that -- although computerization moves along apace, I still wonder though that there's still gonna be a lot of grunt work to translate 84:00material that's just collected there. And now that it's digitized, it is accessible. So, it sort of occurred to me that there may come a point where -- you know, life in its cycles, they always change -- is that maybe I will find there'll be time to indulge myself and go pick away at something in the archives and make that random choice and stumble across something which turns out to be really, really interesting. And go at least translate it into English. And --

CW:Would you just choose at random, or is there something you really would want to translate?

CC:Well, no, I think -- there's a principle called serendipity, that sometimes if you're too purposeful, you end up going where people and the fashion dictate you should go. And, of course, many of the most interesting stories that you 85:00ever hear of are actually based where somebody went off the beaten track and did something which didn't look like there was anything remotely interesting about it or had the least chance of success. And they dug around, and what do you know? They come up with something really interesting. So, that's why I think, you know, if it turns out everybody's been over here, it's probably an excuse to go over there and see what one can dig up. So, who knows, maybe I will at some point get a -- shall we say, pay my dues more, and do some translation work. And maybe if I'm very lucky, I'll stumble across something which everybody else will find interesting too.

CW:I have two closing questions, if you're up for that. Do you have a favorite Yiddish phrase or word?

CC:Favorite phrase or word. (pause) I'm just like a proverbial Rorschach of what -- what sort of things first comes to mind. And sort of -- so I guess the old colloquialism, "Vos hert zikh? Di bobe yert zikh. [What's going on? The grandmother's getting on.]" (laughs) You know, that sort of casual greeting on the street that sort of seems to capture a whole lot of things that could be going on.

CW:And can you explain what it means?

CC:So, "Vos hert zikh?" "What do you hear? What's going on?" "Di bobe yert zikh." "Granny's getting older," (laughs) sort of -- something terribly 87:00everyday, you know. "Not much. Same old, same old."

CW:(laughs) And do you have any advice for future generations of Yiddish speakers?

CC:Oh, how to say that I should advise? Take an interest. Just eat it up. Read what you can, and see where it leads. I'm cognizant of the fact that we seem to be here at the beginning end of what technology is enabling in terms of a revival. And so, I'm cautious, you know, sitting here in June 2011, realizing 88:00that five years from now, what will be part of the social milieu of young adults who are now starting to think about their roots and what they will learn is -- realizing that any advice I could give now would seem so hopelessly hackneyed in as little as five years from now. Although I think the best advice is, Jump right in. Enjoy. Find your group. Find your groove. And make your own, I guess, virtual shtetl. You can pick who it is. I mean, suppose, for example -- let's take a technology du jour. A lot of young people have found their way onto Facebook. Facebook in its current form -- maybe it goes on for a long time; 89:00maybe it turns out to be a flash in the pan to be overtaken by a new form of social networking technology. But my sense is it'll be something like that in which the virtual shtetl will grow up. And where to expect it to come from? Usually young adults who are quick adopters of technology, and they'll find themselves, and then they'll make the language their own. And when they need a new word, they won't need to come to any of us old fogies for it, because it'll either be there in an online resource, or they can make one up! I mean, where does a word like "mobilke [cell phone]" come from? I don't know. I mean, somebody had to make it up. It's now part of Yiddish.

CW:Right.

CC:So, make up your own words! Previous generations did that. Why should anybody be any different?

CW:True.

CC:Yeah. And don't let anybody get on your case too much about whether or not something is Yiddish. The question may be not whether it is Yiddish, but where it is Yiddish. So, if that's what people use in your community, then it's Yiddish.

CW:Great. Well, that's a great vision to end with. Thank you so much for sharing your story with the Book Center.

CC:Well, you're welcome, and I'm actually much more interested now in seeing all these people who I -- you know, I look at myself as being sort of a -- culturally a poor relation into this whole enterprise. And so, I rather like the 91:00fact that you're out there capturing things so that I can then go and see and watch and hear about all these people who are just so much more interesting than anything I'm ever going to bring to the (laughter) whole shooting match.

[END OF INTERVIEW]