MIRIAM SLATER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is September 9th, 2011. I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Miriam Slater and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Miriam, do I have your permission to record this interview?

MIRIAM SLATER:Yes, indeed, you do.

CW:Thank you. (laughs) Can you briefly tell me what you know about your family background?

MS:Yes, and it can be very brief because my mother died when I was nine-and-a-half and I actually didn't live at home steadily after I was eleven. I lived with various families and did housework to support myself and to stay in 1:00school. And my family of origin, (clears throat) my mother was American-born but she was the daughter of German Jews who were essentially rather hostile to East European Jews and my father was an East European Jew. And I think when they married, my grandmother and grandfather thought -- my mother's parents -- thought that that was a misalliance and that she had actually married down. And, in some sense, she did 'cause my father was (laughs) uneducated, had come here, worked in the Framingham shoe factories in the late nineteenth century as a kid and went to night school to learn English. And my mother was born in America, so 2:00she was educated as much as she wanted to be and left school, I think, when she was fourteen. She didn't like school, but she was musically inclined and played the harp and the violin and the piano. And anyway, so their household was extremely secular, although I did hear Yiddish spoken when my father spoke with his relatives who occasionally came to the house. They spoke only in Yiddish. But they were totally secular and had no -- as I say, there was a certain hostility to being anything but Americanized and that meant no ritual of any kind. So, that was my early background. And then, I had guardians. From the time I was eleven I had a family that took me in from time to time when I needed someplace to go. And they were also secular, American Jews, whose parents and 3:00grandparents on his side were rabbis. And they were in hot revolt. They associated, as many people of that generation did -- they associated ritual with a kind of backwardness, which they were trying to divest themselves of and pretty successfully did. Although they did bar mitzvah their son, which I was a little surprised at. But the woman, her name was Faye -- the woman, my guardian's wife, was a Yiddish speaker and that was her first language. And she told me when I was a little girl that she learned how to read before she went to school. But she learned how to read the "Forverts" to her father, who was 4:00illiterate. And she would read the paper to him every day. And when she got to school, unlike today, everybody, of course, spoke English. And I don't know if you know the history but at that time, there was the Americanization project where all these immigrant children were encouraged to speak only English and to be as American, whatever the hell it meant, as they could be. And mostly, it meant WASP-y, as WASP-y as you could be and lose your accent and so forth. But anyway, she went into this class, didn't know a word of English, 'cause they only spoke Yiddish, and she learned English. There was no bilingual program or anything. They threw you in and you had to learn it. And fortunately, she was very bright, obviously, and she was able to. But subsequently, little later in my life, I worked -- I married Paul when I was sixteen-and-a-half. And I had 5:00graduated high school already and my guardian's wife owned a knitting store, what would be now a yarn store. And I went to work for her in the knitting store and gave lessons on how to knit and so forth. She had taught me how to knit and crochet and all that. And this is relevant because she was bilingual in Yiddish and English and this was right after World War II. It was in 1946, '47, '48. And in that part of Brooklyn where we were, a number of concentration camp survivors moved into the neighborhood, sponsored by other Jews. And they used to come to the store and they, many of them, told us their experiences. When you go to a knitting store, you sit for a while and you talk. And it didn't matter if they were French Jews or Spanish Jews or whatever kind of Jews they were. Wherever 6:00they were from, they all spoke Yiddish. And she spoke Yiddish, fluently, and she gave them instructions in Yiddish. (laughs) So, I heard a lot of Yiddish then and that was a very interesting experience. And then, skipping ahead, we bought the farm and we moved to, at that time, East Brunswick. At that time, in New Jersey, in Central Jersey, which is no longer -- these farms are no longer extant, but there was a whole chicken farm community in Central and South Jersey. But we were further north, in East Brunswick, which is now a bedroom community of New York, but at the time was a rural -- it was all farms around us and we bought a farm there with Paul's family. We bought the farm in partnership with his sister, Paul's sister and her husband. And we raised chickens --- 7:00actually, we sold eggs -- and then ultimately put in a broiler operation and had some sheep. And we sold sheep and just had them sheared and so forth. And we were there for seventeen years. And gradually, it built up to a suburban area. In the meantime, I went back to school, 'cause at the time, I'd been married quite a while, I didn't seem to be able to conceive. And I said to Paul, "Well, if I'm gonna work the rest of my life, I don't want to do it just on the farm. I want to do something." And I had taken jobs anyway while we were on the farm because there wasn't much money in farming. (laughs) And I said, "Well, if I'm gonna work the rest of my life, then I think I should go back to school." So, by that time, I was twenty-seven. And so, I applied to college and I applied to the 8:00women's college of New Jersey, which was Douglass College. That's where the president of now Smith College went to college and where Penina Glazer, who's on your board, went to college. And I met Penina there. Penina and I were undergraduates together, although I'm much older than she is. She was the regular age. And then, subsequently, when I went to Princeton, her husband was finishing up at Princeton. And so, we overlapped there. And then, I was invited to teach at Hampshire and Penina was there already. This is the beginning of Hampshire. And Aaron was an undergraduate there. (laughs) And was my connection, in that way. But anyway, so I went to Douglass and I became a history major. This is going somewhere. And I studied sixteenth and seventeenth century English 9:00history, which is Tudor-Stewart English history. I don't know what you know about that, but essentially, it's a lot of the history of Christianity, the history of Lutheranism and Calvinism and Puritanism and, of course, English Church of England and the English Civil War. That's the period that's studied. And then, one of the teachers there took me under her wing, which is the only way you get on. And she called me in one day and said, "Well, what are you planning to do?" I was a junior in college and I said, "Well, I thought I would teach high school." You have to remember that I was the only one in my family who went to high school, much less college. And you have to remember this is -- late 1950s, like "Mad Men." Do you watch that program? Well, women, the 10:00liberation had not occurred yet. So, what I was doing was extremely unusual for a married woman. Very unusual. And so, I applied there and they were not happy. It was a women's college and they were not happy because I was -- turns out, I find out later -- because I was married and I was sexually knowledgeable and they were gonna spring me on all these innocent undergraduates and I was gonna ruin their lives with my sophistication. (laughs) It was a time, and it's hard for someone of your age to imagine, but believe me. And this is the late '50s. So then, finally they agree to take me in. And then, in my third year in college, I get pregnant. I'm married eleven years now and I suddenly get pregnant. And the dean calls me and says -- (laughs) well, you should know that if you got pregnant then, they yanked you out of college. You were expelled, 11:00okay? Didn't matter if -- you couldn't be pregnant and be in -- 'cause the assumption was that you were pregnant out of wedlock. So, I said to her, "Well, I've been married eleven years." (laughs) She said, "Yes, but we'll have somebody who's visibly pregnant on the campus." I said, "Yes, you will." So, meantime, this other conversation with the teacher who called me in and said, "What are you gonna do?" She suggested I become a college teacher. That's before I got pregnant. And I was so happy with that prospect and she told me how to do that. She said, "You have to go for a PhD," which I didn't know. "And preferably, you have to go for one not at Rutgers. You have to change institutions so that you'll be more valuable. You have to study under different people." So, I'll make a long story short. Took me two years. Princeton did not 12:00take women, at all. I mean, Douglass took married women reluctantly. Princeton absolutely didn't take women and they didn't want to start a precedent. But fortunately, I was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. I got a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. And (laughs) I was actually pregnant when I went for the interview, but they didn't know that. So, I got it. They didn't give it to women and they particularly didn't give it to married women; my teacher told me that. She said, "But you'll come highly recommended with an excellent record. Maybe you'll get one." And that was designed for you to get a PhD. They supported you to get a PhD. For college teachers. They were training college teachers. They were not in large supply the way they are now. At the time, there was a shortage of college teachers, fortunate for me. Finally, after a two-year fight, which I won't tell you all the details of, they accepted me at Princeton on sufferance, I guess. 13:00And I find out much later that the committee that decided to admit me, against their better judgment, actually voted a hundred percent. Everybody on the committee voted to admit me. And what had happened was they had hired this wonderful Tudor-Stewart professor from Oxford, also lucky for me, the year before. And at Oxford, he had taught a few upper-class women, actually. So, he wasn't startled by the prospect. And my undergraduate teachers nailed him at a dinner party when he came to the States and said, We have this wonderful student who's very well-trained -- by them, and they were very good teachers. And she has a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and would you consider taking her on? And he said, "Sure." So, he said to the Princeton apparatus, "Listen, I have this 14:00student coming in and I'd like to teach her. Can she come?" And they said -- they were very unhappy about it and back and forth, And we won't give her any money and we don't want blah-blah-blah and we don't want to set precedent. But ultimately, they did, half of them because they felt they wanted to oblige this professor, Stone. He was a very famous historian. And the other half because they were sure that no married woman with two children -- by that time, I had a second child -- could possibly do the work. And so, they had a lot of faculty wives who were otherwise eligible to study there but who couldn't because they didn't accept women. And they didn't even want married men, which they said in their bulletin, that the course is so challenging that even married men are at a disadvantage. And of course, no women. They wouldn't waste their time on a 15:00woman. So, anyhow, I went. But the end of the story is that I went on to study Tudor-Stewart at the advanced levels. And again, it was a very Christian education. It was an interesting and wonderful opportunity, but it was a very Christian education. Didn't have anything to do with Judaism or Jews or -- they didn't appear except in an occasional footnote, not surprisingly. But that's the way it was, just like it was a very -- I realized at the time -- so, by this time we're getting into the '60s -- it was a very male education. Not only of men, but it was about men. You only read about men. I didn't read about women intellectuals of that period until I was teaching here, teaching at Hampshire, and we were giving courses. I mean, this is the time when the historiography and 16:00the history of women's activity was being published. But we were one of the early people to publish it. And Penina and I wrote a book about women professionals in America in late nineteenth and early twentieth century. And that was the first time anybody had written about the professionalization of women, or one of the early books on the professionalization of women, and why that was different and what kinds of problems they had and so forth. This is part of the feminist revolution. But again, I had to learn about the history of women and I realized, in that process, that what I had been educated to understand was that history was about men and about men's activities. And that's the way it was written until the women's liberation movement and the feminist historians began to include the other half of civilization in the discussion of 17:00history. And then, later in my career, when I was getting ready to retire, the Yiddish Book Center was right here and it was fairly new. I retired about sixteen, seventeen years ago. And it was fairly new, and Hampshire invited the Yiddish Book Center to come here. And Aaron put up the Center in Amherst, (laughs) in very WASP-y Amherst, which I thought was amusing at the time. But I realized in that process that I had always identified as a Jew, interestingly. I was not a self-hating Jew. I always realized I was a Jew, I always liked being a Jew. I was very happy about that. I didn't have the problems that my guardians 18:00had or that my parents had, for that matter, and their ambivalence about what it meant to be a Jew in America. They had their reasons for being ambivalent, but I was never ambivalent about it. To me, it was fine. But I had no religious orientation at all. But I did have a Jewish sense of identity. And then, when I came to work at Hampshire, Penina was there and she and I were intellectual colleagues and so forth. And she's very Jewish-oriented and comes from a family where Judaism was extremely important. And it was her style of Judaism which I found very encouraging, 'cause what I knew about Judaism as a kid was that it wasn't the best thing to be; you got beaten up every Easter because you killed Christ. If you were a little kid, you got beaten up on the street. And the 19:00little shuls that were around, little synagogues that were around -- there's the storefront synagogues that were around in the neighborhoods where I lived with all these old men in black things. And if a woman went in there, she went in a separate place and she didn't really engage in the prayers. She never went on the bimah or anything like that. Women had a very segregated place in those places. Of course, (coughs) I didn't realize that there were varieties of Jewish experience, even religious experience. And truthfully, I don't think there were the varieties that there are now for young people. There was no Modern Orthodoxy, there was nothing like that when I was young. And anyway, it was not something I would have searched out, because I don't have those kinds of needs. Never did. But I do identify with Jewish civilization and the history of the 20:00Jews and their intellectual contributions. And I understand it. And so, I realized -- at that point, not only had I had this very fine education, which everybody would say, Oh, my goodness, what an education, but I had not learned anything about women (laughs) until I undertook the activity of finding out. And I really had no idea about Jews or Jewish history. So, I took a course here to learn the alphabet and I was well into my seventies, so it was not easy, and learned how to read a little bit of Yiddish. And I thought, My God, there's half a million volumes here in Yiddish and I don't know how to read it, and I'm right here. So, I did learn to read, very badly, about the fourth-grade level, again. 21:00(laughs) And then, I got taken up with other things when I retired. And then, recently -- I don't know, now about five years ago -- I decided to join the synagogue in Northampton. I lived there many years and did not become a member of the synagogue. But I decided to join because my daughter was living in Texas and every year, we'd go cross-country by car during the winter break and see her, visit her in Texas. So, I spent a lot of time in Texas and I spent a lot of time going through the country, really by car, so, where you really see the country in some way, and back. And I was appalled by amount of anti-Semitism and how it lives on despite people's enlightenment. And I thought -- my husband and 22:00I are politically progressive people and we support this and we support that. We support all kinds of organizations and women's organizations and shelters. And not that we have a lot of money, but when we give support, that's where we give it, to all these things. And we didn't support the synagogue. So, I said to him, "Listen, we have to join this synagogue and support the synagogue because it's an important part of the community and it's a very welcoming and inclusive place," this particular synagogue, "and I'd like to join." He said, "Well, you want to join, join." (laughter)

CW:So, I wanted to just go back to the early part of your life and just get a little more of a sense of what -- I mean, your parents, it was a secular background. But what were the sort of Jewish things that you saw around 23:00culturally? You mentioned in your neighborhood having the shuls around, which -- you were not a part of that, but were there --

MS:No. That's one of the things Penina said to me. She said, "Didn't anybody from the Jewish community there when you were left" -- I had a very Dickensian childhood. My mother died of cancer, very slowly, and I took care of her. I was out of school and so forth and I had siblings and it's a very sad story, doesn't bear repeating. But what she said to me one time was, "Didn't the Jewish community, didn't anybody come to the house to see what was happening?" And I said, "No." It was the Depression and they didn't belong to the synagogue. And actually, we lived in Italian neighborhoods. I don't know what you know about Brooklyn, but you can have an Italian neighborhood here, and then, on the corner, there's an apartment house with Jews living in it. And then, you walk three blocks and there's something else. That's New York. So, we, for a variety 24:00of reasons, were always living among the Italian families. Celebrated Christmas. And as I say, at Easter, the kids would come back from church and beat you up because you'd killed their God and you're a Jew and so forth. So, everyone knew I was a Jew. But no, there was no connection there. And, if anything, there was a kind of, from my mother's family, who were the people that visited, my grandmother -- they were really self-hating Jews. Because they particularly didn't like Eastern European Jews, 'cause they had come -- the German Jews came over in the nineteenth century. By the time my father's people came, these other people were in their third generation. They were already well-to-do Jews in different parts of New York. They were not common Jews that were coming off the boat. And they were very patronizing and, I think, frightened. All the reasons 25:00people have those kinds of prejudices, whatever they are. So, that's what we learned from -- my grandmother had a -- yeah, I never hear that word anymore, but my grandmother used to call -- my German Jewish grandmother would call Eastern European Jews -- "Oh, those makes [plagues]," which was a very derogatory term for Jews (laughs) which I only heard her use. So, what I don't understand is how I had such a positive view of Judaism, I think partly from my guardians, I think, even though they also had some of this. It's a very strange thing. They also had this revolt against anything ritual, anything -- what they considered Jewish and so forth and so on, and their attempts to be assimilated 26:00in particular ways. She was bilingual in Yiddish and English. I never heard her speak it until after the war. She didn't speak it at home, she didn't speak it to her children. But after the war, when the other survivors came into the neighborhood and she had to deal with them and that was the only language they had in common, she was absolutely fluent.

CW:Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the store and the people that came in. Were you able to understand their stories and --

MS:Oh, indeed. Some of them had a little English and I heard -- these are people who had the numbers on their arms. Young people, those are the ones that survived, and they had -- some of the stories were terrible. Yeah, they would tell you bad stories. And one woman who was -- and it would come out unbidden. One day, I was packing some wool in a box for -- she happened to be a French Jew who survived, and I don't know how the hell she survived. One French Jew 27:00survived in slave labor camp and was very badly treated and damaged in a variety of ways. But this particular woman, I don't know how she survived. But I was packing and she suddenly became tearful and she said -- I was just packing the wool and she said, "That reminds me: my father packed up for everybody in the family for them to escape." And she started to cry, and she said that, "He packed up everybody, but he didn't pack for himself, 'cause he was sure that he could buy his way out. But everybody who had to leave came and my father did the packing for them." And that started her, and she subsequently told me that she had been sterilized. She was caught up and sterilized early on. I don't know how she survived. And she could never have children. I mean, (UNCLEAR) actually experimented on her. Then, there was another couple, a young couple that came. 28:00They had met each other in a concentration camp and then, in the DP camp, apparently got married, or shortly after they came here, got married. But they were separated in the concentration camp and he told me that he would sneak out and go to the fence, which --- (laughs) I remember him telling me this -- he would go to the fence and she'd come to the fence and they would see each other through the fence. And I said, "How did you manage that? That was very dangerous." "Oh," he said, "well, the Nazis would beat you up if they found you there," he said, "but she was worth a beating." That's what he said to me. I still remember that. It's like a hundred years ago, "but she was worth a beating." And I knew her, too, and they were obviously very much in love. I don't know what happened to them subsequently. But, yeah, there were a lot of people, you know, how these things come unbidden from those traumatic 29:00experiences. You never quite get over them and anything can prompt it. And they were comfortable because they could really converse with them easily and they were just beginning their English and what a relief it is -- you know how it is when you're in a country where everybody speaks something that isn't your native tongue and then they can speak to you in your native tongue and what a relief that is and how relaxed you get, so yeah.

CW:And where -- in addition to that as part of Jewish culture that you were involved in, did you have contact with sort of radio and films of Jewish American making?

MS:Yeah, of course, 'cause I wasn't conscious of it. I knew, for example, as 30:00Jews did in those days (laughs) -- they would track everybody: who's Jewish and who isn't? And a bunch, they still do, I think. (laughs) Oh, Jack Benny's Jewish. Did you know Jack Benny was Jewish? And George Burns, he's a -- very famous when I was growing up, on radio and in movies and, even later, on TV. George Burns and Gracie Allen, both Jews. All the doctors that we knew were Jews. Back when I was a little girl, (laughs) when I was a little girl, I thought for the longest time, when I was very young, that as you got older, you developed a foreign accent. (laughs) You were young and the young people I knew were American and they would -- at least their accents, to me, sounded American. Very Brooklyn accents, but they sounded very American, like teachers are supposed to sound. Not quite as good as a teacher, but clearly not a foreign accent. And I thought that as you aged, that's one of the things that happened 31:00to you, that you developed this accent. If you were Italian, it was Italian accent. If you were Jewish, it was the Jewish -- and I must have been at least eight or nine before I figured out, no, that wasn't the case. (laughs)

CW:Do you remember some of the Yiddish phrases that were around, or words, anything in particular?

MS:From my mother-in-law --- you know, I lived with my mother-in-law. Didn't tell you about that. When I first got -- oh, sorry.

CW:No, that's okay.

MS:When I first got married, I lived with my mother-in-law and father-in-law. And it was right after the war and we got married in '48 and there was a terrible housing shortage. And Paul was discharged out of the Navy and I moved in with him. I was fifteen-and-a-half. We weren't married yet, but I moved into his parents' apartment and there were only two bedrooms. There was their bedroom 32:00and his and his sister's bedroom. This is New York. And he was in the Navy a lot of the time. But when I came, I took his bed and he worked nights, so that worked out well. And on his day off, he'd sleep on the floor and his sister was in the same room. She was a college student. And subsequently, we got married, but I was still living there. So, I lived there for about two-and-a-half years, from the time I was about fifteen to -- time I was about seventeen or eighteen when we got a little apartment of our own. And that's when I went to work for my guardian in the knitting store. And my mother-in-law would tell a lot of stories about Europe and about her childhood. Remember that most of these people came 33:00over as adolescents and these things they remembered had the advantage of the vividness of recalling childhood memories and stayed with them in a way that other memories don't. You're not old enough yet to know that, but the memories from your childhood really stay with you. That script stays a long time. In the middle, you forget some and blah-blah-blah. But even when you're old, if people write memoirs, most interesting part of a memoir is generally their childhood because that's what they remember most vividly and that's the most exciting and imaginative part in -- person's life, I think. So anyway, they would talk about what life was like in the shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community]. And I learned shtetl, and she had certain expressions that I learned. Interestingly, I didn't learn those from my guardian. Occasionally, she 34:00would use a word and she would explain it to me because it was not easily translated into English as some of the idiom in Yiddish is, it's so wonderful. But my mother-in-law would have all kinds of expressions that she would use. And mostly, when these immigrant parents -- the immigrant people on my father's side -- they always spoke very fondly of Europe, mainly 'cause they were young then. And of course, in my father's case, there was some justification. I mean, when he was young, before he was eleven or twelve, he was living in a shtetl, whatever that meant for him. And then, when he came here, he worked in a factory ten hours a day as a kid and was very angry with his parents for -- so naturally, he looked back on that time as a much nicer time. And was regularly 35:00beaten up, I remember, by the Irish kids around. There was an Irish community there and one immigrant group beats up on another immigrant group. It's sad. They're all poor, essentially.

CW:Yeah. Where was your father's family from, or your father from?

MS:From Russia. And my mother-in-law was from Poland, Russia, you know, the boundary went back and forth five hundred times -- three times, actually -- during the nineteenth century. So, she spoke -- there's the other thing about these people: they're all polyglots. My mother-in-law spoke Polish and Russian and English and Yiddish. And she could read Russian and Yiddish. I don't know about Polish, but I know she could read English, Russian, and Polish. And this is a woman that went to night school. I mean, she -- never formally educated. 36:00This is self-education and it was really -- I always thought that was amazing, yeah. And she had read Dostoevsky in the original and so forth. These are people with no formal education, and would write -- at that time, people wrote letters to each other. Even when they were all in the States, they would write to each other and they'd write in Yiddish so that nobody would know what they were writing. And my husband was not bar mitzvahed. He's one of the few men you'll ever meet of his age, Jewish men, that was not bar mitzvahed. These were socialists. His side of the family was socialist, from Eastern Europe, who were very fiery progressives who wanted equality for the working man and all that sort of thing. And they sent him to the -- but they were very identified as 37:00Jews, so they went -- he was sent to the Workmen's Circle and learned Yiddish. Paul didn't know how to read Yiddish when he was a kid. Well, he did not learn Hebrew, which he would have had to learn to be confirmed, to have a bar mitzvah. So, he went to the Workmen's Circle, that sort of thing. And these were very deliberate, thought out ideas. People did not lapse into these ideas. They thought them out and this was a commitment that they had to a certain kind of Judaism.

CW:Do you remember any of the specific phrases that your mother-in-law would use?

MS:Oh, yeah, she had a million of 'em. I'll see if I can dredge them up now. (pause) She said, in Yiddish -- I don't know if I can do the Yiddish, but she said, "You never show a fool a half-finished work -- zet nisht a nar a halbe 38:00arbet." Oh, she had many things and I won't be able to think of them now. But, yeah, I'm going to go out and see a -- I could look at an ugly face but a new one. I can't stay in the house anymore. A naye punim [A new face]. Some negative thing about a punim [face] and then -- ober a naye punim [but a new face]. (laughs) Yeah, she had a million expressions and she would tell me what they meant. She had words for household and for chickens and chicken pupik [gizzards], and I don't think she knew the English for that. But chicken pupik, 39:00and she always called my husband "my zindl [darling son], my zindl," the diminutive of my son. My zindl, my zindl, and very enamored of her zindl. And she told me the name for daughter-in-law, shviger [mother-in-law]. No, she was the shviger, I was the schnorrer. That's right, shviger is the mother-in-law, right? Do you know Yiddish? Yeah. Shviger is the mother-in-law and I was the schnorrer. She taught me all that, all those names, yes. And she would speak to her sisters in Yiddish in front of me and I sometimes could gather what they were talking about.

CW:And then, I wanted to ask about -- you mentioned before that you listened to the Molly Goldberg radio show and saw maybe some Yiddish films.

MS:Oh, yes. Yeah, I did. In Brooklyn, where I lived as a kid, there was a little storefront movie house. And they would play old films, and in that neighborhood, they would also play what were even at that time old but not that old -- (laughs) old films with subtitles in Yiddish. And occasionally, I would go -- I went once with my stepmother. She wanted to go. Not my guardian, my stepmother, and she understood Yiddish very well. And she would explain some of the things to me, some of which I really knew 'cause I could read the subtitles. I don't know if she could. And I would see these movies, some of which you show here, 41:00sometimes. I mean, I've seen some of the same movies. And of course, Molly Goldberg on the radio, everybody heard that. And the thing about Molly Goldberg, I didn't know anybody like Molly Goldberg. That was not my experience. But it was like everything else: when you went to the movies and you saw houses that had an upstairs bedroom in the movies -- I had never seen a house in real life that had an upstairs. We always lived in apartments. So, as a kid, you have ways of explaining those kinds of realities: Well, that's movies. Those are the houses in the movies and Molly Goldberg is a Jew on the radio. (laughs) And that's a Jewish life on the radio. And that's how I explained it away. I also knew that a lot of, as I told you, a lot of the comedians were Jewish, a lot of the doctors were Jewish, dentists were Jewish. All the dentists were Jewish. I never went to a non-Jewish doctor until we moved to New Jersey, 'cause there 42:00were plenty of doctors in New York and they were all Jewish, (laughs) most of them trained in Europe. Not in the United States, 'cause they didn't take Jewish boys to -- the medical thing. But that's another whole story. Yeah, so that was the extent of my Jewish life. And I never thought it was peculiar that, when I went to grade school, we sang hymns to Jesus Christ. This is in public school in New York. And you would sing a hymn to Jesus Christ, our Lord, blah-blah-blah. And on the wall of the school, not in church, of the school, was "The Last Supper" painting. And then, Christmas was a big deal. And it never occurred to me that this kind of hegemony was not exactly fair, (laughs) not exactly 43:00inclusive. I just thought, Well, that's America. (laughs) And as I say, I tell the story on myself, even though I went all through graduate school studying about European history and so forth -- and a lot of it, because of the period that I'm interested in, is about religion, about Christianity. So, I read all of Calvin's "Institutes," though nobody reads that except somebody in a seminary. I must have read at least four or five hundred sermons, Protestant sermons, as part of my training. And the Church of England, the correspondence between the archbishop and somebody else that they killed and so forth. So, I knew all about that and it didn't really dawn on me until I was working that it had been a very 44:00one-sided historical enterprise, which left out all women, not to speak of Jews or anybody else.

CW:So, what was it like to be the only woman at Princeton?

MS:Yes, that was very interesting. (laughs) A very interesting -- well, when they interviewed me, they said, One of the reasons you can't come here is that there are no facilities for women. Now, I don't know if you can appreciate that, because even I understood immediately -- and I thought to myself -- can you imagine that? Every secretary, every staff, all of the technicians, all of those people were women and they had to go to the bathroom someplace. And admittedly, there may be one or two females in the faculty, you know, maybe. But it was 45:00really a male bastion. But they had the nerve to say, Well, the reason they couldn't take me on as a student is because they had no bathrooms for women. So, I said -- and I knew that was coming, so I said, (laughs) "Well, that's okay, I have excellent self-control," which was a lie, of course, and it sort of -- it was a lie and also it was a way of giving them the dig because, I mean, how stupid did they think I was? And I didn't know -- where did all these women go? In the garden? (laughs) But part of that had to do with not only their misogyny, but their hierarchy in that they had separate bathrooms for faculty and staff, of the same sex. So, they certainly weren't going to let -- where would they put the student who was the wrong sex? And they had mostly male bathrooms. It really was inconvenient. And the engineering building where they held the first seminar 46:00that we had happened to be held in the engineering building. But there was a plaque on the wall and it said, "No women allowed in this building after ten o'clock." And I said to somebody, "Why are they worried about women coming here after ten o'clock? There are no women!" (laughs) Well, it's 'cause they used to take women of the night in -- and so, in order to avoid having them come into the building to see the men in the evening, they had a plaque, "No women allowed in this building after ten o'clock." I was not allowed in the graduate student dining common. I was simply not allowed in there 'cause it was only for men. So, I had to go off-campus if I wanted to get something to eat. And I had a few little incidents, but -- and the students were resentful. I mean, the graduate 47:00students were resentful. Not all of them, but -- some of them became lifelong friends. But some of the others, oh, were very vile when I first came there. They didn't know what I was supposed to be doing there. You see, it's a very competitive situation, 'cause the pressure on place is very great. So, the year that I was admitted, for example, there were eleven student historian -- who came to study history in the graduate school. And that's eleven people chosen from around the world, not just from America. So, the competition is extremely keen. And then, they see this -- I'm older than they are. As I said, I started school, I was old, and I'm married and I have a couple of kids, why are they wasting their resources on me? What am I ever going to do for academe? That's the way they saw it. So, when I sat down -- I came into the first year, it's so 48:00hierarchical and so masculine. Terrible. There was a first-year graduate student reading room and it was -- at that time there's no -- you have reserve books. There's no computers or anything. You can't download anything. You have to share the books that are assigned and they're put on the wall like that and you sit in the reading room and you read them and then the next student comes and he reads them. So, anyway, I sit down to read, and a guy comes over to me, another student, and he says, "You're sitting in my chair." So, I'm from Brooklyn. Give me a break. I turn around and I say, "I don't see your initials carved in this chair," (laughs) I said to him. He said, "Well, I want you out of that chair. That's my chair. That's where I sit." So, I said, "Okay." I said, "I'll get up now," I said, "but tomorrow, I'm gonna bring my husband here and I want you to 49:00say that to me while he's standing here and see if you want to say it when my husband's here." Of course, I could've decked him myself but (laughs) I figured he wouldn't understand that. So, I said, "Oh, tomorrow, have my husband here." Another time, I went down into the bowels of Firestone Library, which is a gorgeous, wonderful library. Has several floors below the ground. And anyway, I went down into the bowels for something and there was another reading room for more advanced students there. And I went in there to look at whatever it was I was gonna look -- and there was a man sitting there, this student, and he said to me, "Can I look in your purse?" And I said, "Okay." And I knew what -- and he fondled my purse and then he gave -- fondled my lipstick and then he gave the purse back to me. And there were just -- it was sexually starved people there. I 50:00mean, it was really obvious. And the only other place I had ever seen that was in the prison, (laughs) where men want to fondle your purse because they're so starved for feminine companionship. Was very sad. I told my husband about it when I came home. He says, "So, you gave him your purse?" I said, "Sure, why not? He wasn't gonna do anything." (laughs) It's a pity -- so, yeah, it was kind of hostile. There was one woman ahead of me, actually, who had gotten in. Every woman who came had a very special category. And in fact, when they -- the only one who was studying with somebody who was really popular and that they wanted to keep there -- I was the only woman that was taken on that status. But even I 51:00was called, for the first year, an incidental student. They didn't know what to do with me. They didn't want to make me a real student, a regular student, 'cause that would set a precedent, so they would call her an incidental student. So, they made a special category. Yeah, it wasn't very welcoming. And this other woman did medieval Latin. And the reason she was there was, A, she did medieval Latin, which almost nobody can read, and her husband was a student there. So, she was there with her husband. Then, they found that she could do medieval Latin, so -- and they were very short of -- what man is going to do medieval Latin? Who really wants to make a career? Not too many. And so, they allowed her to come in and she was very good. I mean, clearly. But so, she was there because her husband was there and then she could do the medieval Latin and the medievalists that they had wanted a student who could read medieval Latin, who 52:00could fluently read it, who could be fluent in it. And so, she was there. But that's it. And then, they had one more woman -- came in the year after me. And then, they had a real problem because the Vietnam War was on and they were having troubles filling the places. So, they had a whole study about why they should begin to think about letting women into the graduate school. And they had had a good experience with me. I didn't burn any buildings down or anything, so -- and a few other people. But you were there on sufferance. It was not welcoming; it was not inclusive. They were doing you a favor and if you slipped up, so much the better because then they could say, Well, look, we gave her a chance. She was very talented and we only care about merit. We hire on merit, we 53:00accept women on merit, and she certainly was meritorious and she still couldn't make it because women who have children and are married, they can't do it. Just too hard. It is hard. Was hard. But it was doable.

CW:And when you were learning -- you mentioned, when you came to Hampshire, starting to learn about women in history and some about Jewish history. How did that sort of change your point of view on these topics that you had been studying?

MS:Well, once I got into feminist scholarship and those categories of analysis, then that opens you up to look at other things critically the same way and about Judaism and so forth. And I'm a historian, so, I mean -- and I met people who 54:00had survived the Holocaust. And other people at Hampshire were very interested in the history of Jews and one of the early Holocaust courses was given at Hampshire. I'm pretty sure that's correct. So, I was aware of all of that and I realized that this was something that I'm interested in and I want to know about. So, that changed my view about what was possible as a Jewish person and as a part of my Jewish identity. And clearly, that was part of my identity. My guardians lost people and I knew a lot of people who had lost people in the Holocaust, people who had remained in Europe. Just didn't get here. And so, that 55:00made a difference. And I think for having Jewish friends for the first time, having close Jewish friends who were more religious, I -- that really happened after I came to Hampshire. I had Penina and also, when I lived in Northampton, I met Louise Bloomberg and a whole constellation of people who were not only Jews, obviously, but people who were Jews who I knew well and who had varying degrees of Orthodoxy, I don't know. When I lived in East Brunswick, when I lived on the farm, it was only non-Jews in the area then. Now, it's different but at the time, there were only non-Jews there. And when I was a kid in New York, I knew 56:00Jews but I didn't -- I knew people who weren't Jewish and that didn't influence the way I felt about it, particularly.

CW:Were there any specific experiences that made something shift for you? Something you read or an experience in terms of your Jewish identity?

MS:You mean a turning point?

CW:Um-hm.

MS:No, I don't -- I guess part of it is the trips to Texas. I think that, looking back -- I haven't really thought about that but, yeah, my awareness that anti-Semitism was very much alive and not talked about all that much because Jews are very successful in this country.

CW:How did you experience it?

MS:Oh, I don't know. I think, for example, my daughter is an academic. And she 57:00went to faculty meet-- and my daughter is very irreligious, very non-religious. (laughs) She's anti-rel-- I don't know what the hell it is with her. But anyway, she doesn't have any feeling for it at all. Doesn't understand why; she's a scientist. She doesn't understand why anybody would be religious at all. And she called me up one day and she said, "How do you" -- but she's Jewish-identified. It's very interesting. Called me up and she said, "How do you like this? We have -- go to the faculty meeting." This is a major university. She's on the graduate academic -- she's teaching in the veterinary college, teaches graduate school. "So, we have a faculty meeting and we start off with a prayer. But not just a prayer but a prayer to Jesus Christ, at the faculty meeting!" So, I said, "So, what'd you do?" She says, "Well, I went up later and I said to the person holding it, I said, 'How come you have a prayer to Jesus Christ before the 58:00faculty meeting?'" And he looked at her like she was crazy. And he said, "Oh, we always have a prayer. Who are we gonna pray to?" And there are a million things like that. And we'd stop at places and they'd say -- not mean things. Nobody beat us up because we killed their God or anything. But it's just that kind of prejudice which you -- I mean, made no difference in my life. I was immune from anything that they could do. But nonetheless, it was very annoying. And as far as my daughter is concerned, I mean, that business with the prayers before faculty meetings -- I told her, That's ridiculous. You make a protest and you say it's inappropriate. And there are people there who aren't Christians. Not just Jews, either. I mean, there are people there who aren't Christians. So, 59:00that was part of it, I think. We'd stop at various places along the way in Louisiana and elsewhere. And as soon as I open my mouth, they know I'm from New York and they assume that I'm a Jew. I mean, I can tell what they say to me afterward. I know they think I'm a Jew and I am, of course, a Jew. But I might not be. I could have this accent and not be Jewish. But for them, anybody from New York is a Jew.

CW:Can you --

MS:And if I ask my students at Hampshire what percentage of the US population is Jewish, you know what answer you get? Do you know? You get twenty-five percent, forty percent. I say, "Really? What do you think if I told you it was two percent?" Oh, that can't be. This is Hampshire students. This is not somebody from Louisiana. I said -- How can that be, they say. "I'm telling you, that's 60:00what it is. Most of you are from the Northeast and you've had your life in urban areas and so forth and so on. And that's where Jews are congregated and you think the whole world is Jewish but it's not." I always say that to my students in class to get 'em thinking a little bit, yeah. If it wasn't for the fact that I told them and they knew that I wasn't gonna tell 'em anything that was untrue (laughs) in that way, statistically untrue, they wouldn't have believed it.

CW:Right.

MS:They were absolutely flabbergasted.

CW:So, I wanted to ask you about --

MS:The chicken farm.

CW:-- the chicken farm. Can you just first kind of close your eyes and imagine what it looks like?

MS:Yeah, I know what it looks like.

CW:Can you describe it?

MS:There was a big house in the front, which we turned into two-family -- and my 61:00mother-in-law and father-in-law came to live there. And her daughter and her husband and her children lived downstairs. And way in the back was a workers' cottage from -- the previous people who owned it had workers living on there. And my husband and I moved into the workers' cottage, which was a little three-room cottage way in the back, surrounded by fields and a pond in the back. And when I started school, started college, I started from there. I learned how to drive --- you know, I was from New York, I didn't know how to drive -- because I had to commute back and forth to college. And then, in the surrounding area were these chicken houses. We had -- I forgot how many now. About ten thousand or twelve thousand chickens and a flock of sheep. And sheep, unlike 62:00other mammals like human beings, when they -- one of the things a shepherd does is to watch the flock. But also, one of the things the shepherd does is deliver the sheep because a sheep mommy will labor for a little while and then she'll give up, whereas a human being or a dog will labor and labor and labor until they die, actually. But not a sheep. A sheep will just give up and croak. So, one of the things you have to be able to do is raise an orphan sheep that you deliver and the mother has died. So, I used to have them in the living room, that little thing, and bottle feed them and so forth. And then, we had one that the children, my children and my sister-in-law's children had as a pet, and it was a male. And these were horned sheep, so the male had a rack like this and 63:00male apparatus. And male sheep look like male sheep. They don't look like females. They're sexually dimorphous and that sheep used to follow the kids around. And when they went to wait for the school bus, it would wait at the place, was waiting on the bus, for the bus. And the kids would get on and then, in the afternoon, he'd come back and wait for them again. And one morning, he decided to go to school with them on the bus and his rack got caught in the thing and the bus driver was screaming and we got a call from the superintendent of schools saying, "You can't let your sheep go on the bus! It's scary!" And the children weren't scared; they were delighted. But anyway, the children on the bus thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Yeah, so the kids, my kids were brought up on the farm until we came here.

CW:How did you and your husband decide to move onto this farm?

MS:Oh, 'cause Paul, as a kid -- there are certain people who are born loving animals. They just are. Doesn't matter if they're from Brooklyn or -- I know a lot of veterinarians now 'cause my daughter's one, a veterinarian. Some of them come from families that live in apartments in Manhattan and never had any kind of pet for this kid and the kid becomes a veterinarian 'cause they love animals. For a lot of people, they just are born that way, I think. So, he was born that way and even though he lived in this Brooklyn apartment during the Depression, they could hardly feed the kids, he would -- wanted to feed the cats or whatever. And during the summers, one of his older cousins used to work on a farm in Vermont, summers. And he got on a -- it was a dairy farm in Vermont, 65:00outside Burlington, (UNCLEAR), actually. And when Paul was a little older, when Paul got to be twelve or thirteen -- this is during Depression -- he used to come up there on the train to Vermont from New York and spend the summer, work on this dairy farm. And he loved it and it was during the Depression, 1930s. So, this farmer was a poor farmer and he wasn't mechanized. They worked with horses. So, he plowed behind the horse and he hayed behind the horse and -- oh, he was in seventh heaven. He knew always that he wanted to be a farmer. It would be work with animals. And then, when he graduated high school, he told the counselor there, whoever, that he wanted to apply to veterinary school. He wanted to become a vet. And he said, "Oh, no, oh, the quota on Hebrews there and 66:00-- very small, so chances of you getting in are nil." And so, he didn't even try. He graduated high school, he was sixteen or fifteen-and-a-half or something, very smart kid, and he went to the Long Island Agricultural Institute. And he went there for a year or two and then the war broke out. And he took a job in the Navy Yard and when he was eighteen or nineteen, whenever he could sign himself in, he joined the Navy and went into World War II. He's a veteran. And then, when he came out, he met me and he told me immediately he wants to have a farm. Meantime, he didn't have a house. We didn't have a place to live and he wanted a farm. And so, we had the farm and never made any money at it. And it was hard work but he was happy there and the children were happy 67:00there. And I decided, I'd go to school as long as I'm stuck there. (laughs) I was not as happy there and it was not for me. But, on the other hand, I was situated -- the farm was situated between Rutgers and Princeton, which was very nice for me. So, that worked out well. That was a piece of luck, although one of the things I had to do was -- in order to get my Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the then president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation -- my teacher fixed up an appointment with him. We had lunch together and he said, "I'd like you to apply to other universities and apply as a half-time student, as a part-time student, because a lot of -- Columbia, for one, and a number of other colleges don't tell the applicant if they're applying for a PhD that if they put down that they want 68:00to come part-time, they automatically file them in the round file. But that's what they do." So, he said, "We have to get a candidate who has superlative credentials, have that candidate apply half-time, as you will because you're gonna have a baby." At that time, I was pregnant with my first child. "And you'll probably do that and if they don't let you in, then we'll sue." This is the beginning of opening -- and the reason they did that was not to get women in --- just so happened that I was a woman candidate that they chose -- but because there was an influx, particularly in Columbia, there was an influx of Puerto Rican men at that time and a lot of them wanted to go on with their education. They had to work during the day, so in order to go on with their education they had to apply half-time, part-time, and they didn't know that they were being 69:00discriminated against because they applied part-time. If they checked off PhD or master's and part-time, checked the box for part-time, they automatically turned them down. So, Wilson was looking to promote these men into academe. He said, "You do that for us and I'll support you for two years in a part-time -- in graduate school." So, I said -- he's, "Where you gonna go?" I said, "Well, I might have to end up in Columbia, commute to Columbia. But I really want to go to Princeton because there's this guy there that's an expert, a world expert in Tudor-Stewart and that's what I want to study." "You haven't a chance," he said to me. "But if you apply and they ask me, I'll back you." So, I said, "Fine." He says, "But you haven't a chance because they don't even want married men," which I knew from their bulletin, which told you, We don't favor married men because 70:00it's too hard. It's too hard; the curriculum is too difficult. So, (laughs) I can't believe it. Anyhow, so he wanted to have a farm. And so, we ultimately begged, borrowed, and stole (laughs) and went into partnership with his sister and her husband. So, that's how we were able to afford a farm. And on the farm, when you sell off the flock, the laying flock, when it's too old to be commercially viable, you have to sell 'em off to Campbell's Soup or somebody. So, you have to have these -- you cull out the flock. And these guys would come and they would collect the culls and take them away to be made into soup. And there were two guys, both of them concentration camp survivors. And their name was -- oh, Paul probably remembers their name. I forgot. I knew it a minute ago, 71:00but I've forgotten now. I'm getting tired. So, doesn't matter. But they met each other in the concentration camp and they came to America together and they went into this business together. Two Jews. And they were the nicest guys and they'd come around and, "Give us a cull! Give us a cull!" Paul would make a play on words, "Give us a cull." They had very heavy accents and they were really great guys who had not allowed this horrible, horrible experience -- I mean, their whole families were killed in front of them -- to embitter them or to -- just amazing how people can pick themselves up, come to a new country with a new language from that background. I mean, after all, they were going through this when they were adolescents and young men. They were not adults. And it was a horrible, horrible life -- and come and make a success out of this very hard 72:00work and remain cheerful and decent. It was amazing to me. I'm very admiring of that capacity to survive, especially when you see some people who were given everything who can't get out of their own way and they just think that the world owes them a living or something, I don't know, or that every little walnut shell that gets in their path, they trip over it. But these people were not like that. So, getting back to this, it's -- my exposures to a variety of Jewish life was quite elaborate and these people were -- I found them very admirable.

CW:I wanted to ask if there's -- if you can try to articulate, what is your 73:00Jewishness now? What are the things --

MS:Oh, my Jewishness --

CW:-- that are important to you now?

MS:Yeah, I can articulate that easily enough. I did join the synagogue and I'm still a non-believer. I'm still an atheist. And I go to rituals sometimes. If my friend's kid is getting bar mitzvahed or something, I'll sit through that. But I don't go to services. It doesn't do anything for me. But I do go every week to shul and I study with the rabbi. The rabbi has a reading group, a Bible reading group. And this is a very interesting group of people, everything from -- all 74:00highly educated. Some people are sitting with yarmulkes. They're Orthodox people. And some people are like me. Couple of 'em are like me, are just totally not religious but who are interested in Judaism and interested in the Bible. 'Cause I know the so-called New Testament very, very well, but the only acquaintance I have with the Old Testament or the Jewish Bible -- they don't call it the Old Testament, really, the Pentateuch -- is from reading hundreds of Calvinist and Protestant sermons. Almost all the imagery is drawn from the Pentateuch, which is an interesting sideline on this. So, I have familiarity with the characters and so forth, but I've never actually read through -- and of course, read through with explication. And so, every week, I go -- except in the summer we don't hold it. But every week, I go to the synagogue and we have a 75:00wonderful rabbi there in Northampton. Do you know him, or of him? He's a very scholarly, very smart, wonderful teacher and a really nice guy. And a good person. But also very, very smart. And he takes this disparate group --- which is very hard to do. I mean, there's no homework. You come, we read a passage, and then we talk about it, okay? And these people are very articulate and some of them know a lot about Judaism. And there's one in the group who reads fluently in Hebrew as well as Yiddish. And she can read from the scholars on this. She'll translate from the Hebrew and the scholars on this and blah-blah-blah. And so, they run the gamut from people who know really nothing to people who are very scholarly and know a great deal about it, to the rabbi 76:00who knows a very great deal about it. And it's enormously interesting. I go every week and that's part of my Judaism. Also, the rabbi lives across the street from me, as it happens, and I see him on the street. (laughs) And he's a young guy. I mean, young to me. He's a guy, I guess, who -- he's about my daughter's age. He's late forties, early fifties. And he's very, very -- he knows that I don't come to the services. He knows that. But he knows I also come to this thing religiously and that I enjoy it. And when I'm not there, people say, Well, Miriam's not here, we don't know the answer to that if it's some kind of historical question. I'm supposed to know all the answers to all history, which, of course, I don't know. (laughs) But when they have historical questions, they turn to me. Well, now, when Penina's back in town, she can take 77:00it over. And she very often comes to that, too, when she's in town. But there -- number of people there that I know through that circle and I just love coming there 'cause it's very interesting. It's the kind of thing that historians do all the time and it's something that I care about, yeah.

CW:Two more questions. As a historian, have there been social, historical events that have been particularly influential on your life? Living through the feminist revolution and the civil rights movement and other things?

MS:Well, yeah, I suggested what -- the women's liberation movement made a tremendous difference in my opportunities and also in the kinds of work I did. 78:00The book that I wrote on England, on Tudor-Stewart history, is on an English family. And I wrote it from a feminist perspective and wrote about the women in the family as well as the men and what marriage meant to the women in that family as well as what marriage meant to the men in that family. And just the whole view that I took of it was a feminist view. And even there, you found that -- and I read about ten thousand letters and manuscript-- in order to write this book. And at one point, one of the members of the family, a woman, marries a Catholic, which was anathema to these Protestants. And somebody writes in -- letter referring to her decision to marry this guy that he's -- and this is 79:00during the civil war -- "that perhaps some lucky bullet will (laughs) free us from this terrible calamity," free the family from this calamity of having her marry a Jew -- a Catholic. But then, they said, while she was being courted, there was a series of exchanges: My God, she's going to marry a Catholic, blah-blah-blah-blah. And then, they said, Well, we thought she was going to be all right but then she's a Jew again. Nice. So, doesn't mean that she's a Jew. Meant that she was so outside the pale that she was a Jew. This is a term for that. That's the only reference in all those letters and that's the way they used the word Jew, derogatorily to suggest that she was beyond the pale. If she's gonna contemplate marrying a Catholic, she must be a Jew at heart or something. (laughs) But I don't know, I think that, as I said before, I think 80:00the women's movement gives you kind of a -- well, if you were involved in it, it gave you a critical view on a lot of this and what the meaning of inclusiveness is and why it matters and what the tension is between wanting to be included and wanting to remain autonomous in one's own beliefs and so forth. And there's always a tension between those two things. So, in being a Jew in our society -- on the one hand, you are not a Christian. This is really a Christian society. It really is in many ways and -- so far. And on the one hand, you want to feel part of it. On the other hand, you have your own autonomy, your own identity to 81:00maintain. And to the extent that they let you do that -- it's a little awkward for Jews now, I think, in some ways because we are, as a group, extremely successful and that always makes you a target of envy. So, that's a problem for a lot of Jews, I think. If they want to fit in, it's hard for them to fit in if they know that they're so much better off than so many other people, so that -- one of the things, when you go South, you go to the Midwest, there are people there who have not been favored by fortune and they see you as a rich Jew.

CW:Well, how -- coming just to end on a note about Yiddish specifically, what is the place of Yiddish for you today? What does it mean to you?

MS:Well, I'm very, very happy that this institution has been established. I'm extremely pleased with the way this has gone and the fact that now there's an educational function because I think that those late nineteenth, early twentieth century writers, Jewish writers, Yiddish writers had a contribution, a very important contribution to make, with or without the Holocaust. Of course, the Holocaust makes it more poignant than otherwise. But it was very great literature and it deserves the kind of attention it can get in a situation like this. So, I think that Aaron has done a marvelous job and I certainly am very 83:00supportive of his efforts in every way I can. And I profited by being able to learn Yiddish here and the remarkable experience of being able to establish this locus for Jewish intellectual life in Western Massachusetts. (laughs) I think that's a remarkable achievement on his part and the people that work here, for that matter. And I feel very attached to it, not only because I was at Hampshire but from Northampton also. And it's a kind of intellectual engagement which I appreciate enormously. And I do come to the events and I participate as much as I can. And I think it's very worthwhile to see yourself, your ideas reflected in 84:00a larger society here. That's important to me, yeah.

CW:Last question: do you have any advice for (laughter) future generations?

MS:Well, I'll tell you what I would have -- I'm eighty years old. Most people eighty years old, they're full of regrets of this kind or another. I have almost no regrets. Been very lucky about that, 'cause I did what I wanted to do. So, I'm not saying, Oh, I should have done this, I should have done that. I don't feel that way at all. I feel very good about what I accomplished and I'm very happy about that. But one place, and I think I was a wonderful and lucky parent -- part of it is luck -- and have two very wonderful, very accomplished children. But I think I would have -- if I had it to do over again and if I were 85:00living in Northampton with that synagogue, I would have joined the synagogue with my children. And I would have bar mitzvahed my son and I would have bat mitzvahed my daughter and made them part of that community and given them that to aspire to and to hold onto, which I didn't give them. And they could still be who they are now. It doesn't really matter. I mean, you can do all that and they could turn out to be very secular and blah-blah. But they are Jewish identified and they're very sympathetic to Judaism and so forth and so on. I managed to transfer that to the children and the importance of Judaism and why it's important to be a Jew and to identify as a Jew. I would do that differently, I think. And that's the only thing I think I would do differently. And that's the 86:00advice I would give -- I mean, if I had had that particular synagogue when they were young and I was ready to do that then, that would have been good, I think. Good for them. But there's nothing I can do about that now. But I think that's the advice I would have given: to give kids the opportunity to make a choice if you -- I thought I was giving them the opportunity to make a choice by not saying, You have to do this or that and practice this way or do that. But it wasn't -- I mean, 'cause I didn't introduce them to one option of being a practicing Jew. It really wasn't giving them options 'cause they didn't know about it. And yet, my daughter realized that that was absolutely wrong, to have a prayer to Jesus Christ at a faculty meeting at a university -- not a seminary, 87:00but a university -- and other things that happened to her there. I mean, she became much more Jewish identified in Texas than she was here. (laughs) And she is very happy to come back. She's now kind of relocated and she's very happy to have relocated back here. So, that's all the advice I have to give, yeah. (laughs)

CW:Well, thank you.

MS:Thank you very much for giving me the chance to go on and on.

CW:(laughs) It was great.

[END OF INTERVIEW]