HAIM GUNNER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:Can you start by telling -- introducing yourself, your name?

HAIM GUNNER: My name is Haim Gunner. Originally, I come from Canada -- I was born in Ottawa -- and lived there with my parents till I was eighteen, at which point I went on to what was then the Ontario Agricultural College, which is really the aggie faculty of the University of Toronto. And the reason I went there was because at the age of ten or eleven, I was enlisted in a Zionist youth movement called Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir, the Young Watchmen. Actually a left-wing conglomerate of strange amalgams, like Freudianism and Marxism and the like. And 1:00that enlistment made me go to an agricultural college because I was going to dedicate myself to building a Jewish homeland in what was then Palestine. And I continued with my life in the youth movement as a kind of parallel to my studies. We had a very active youth group in Ottawa. And the whole movement was structured as a kind of Boy Scout model, where you had Cub Scouts, but we had what we in Hebrew we called "kovshim," would you believe it, "conquerors." And then we went on to -- as you grew older, you became Scouts, sofim. And then when you were eighteen you became bogrim, adults, at which point you had to commit 2:00yourself to going to Palestine, and you became a member of a kibbutz. Now, the kibbutz was an amalgam of all youngsters of this age from all the various branches of this movement. At the time we had branches in Montreal and Ottawa and Toronto and Winnipeg and Minneapolis, Los Angeles. And so, my movement to the aggie college, which was quite out of concert with my winning prizes in English and history at my high school, and my teachers raised their eyebrows: You're going to an aggie college? And I said, very -- how shall I say it? -- sternly, "Yes! I'm going to help build a Jewish homeland, no less." (laughs) And from then I went on to Winnipeg. At the behest of the movement, organized 3:00youngsters for this movement, and supported myself by -- as a graduate student at the University of Manitoba in, again, microbiology and soils. After all, I was dedicated to the land, and hence my focus in the college of agriculture. After Winnipeg, I was summoned to the headquarters of the movement in New York to be the editor, no less, of the movement's political literary monthly called "Youth and Nation." And by the opposition, "Euthanasia." I share that with you, and that, of course, is now our secret. (laughs) However, after a year and a half in New York, of organizing, I -- it was a wonderful time, actually. It was 1948. The State had just come into existence. Of course, the terrible battles of 4:00the War of Independence with -- being fought. And we were asked, the leadership group of the movement, was asked to stay in New York for many reasons -- to organize, but also, we were involved in really clandestine activities, getting everything from radar equipment to ambulances to enlisting fighter pilots. And eventually, in 1949, I was given the okay, and I left to go to Israel. And wound up exactly as my ideals had prescribed: to be in a kibbutz, together with about 120 other Americans and Canadians. And we found the kibbutz Sasa on the Lebanese frontier. And we stayed there for five -- six years. I married there, and we had 5:00our daughter, who is now the mother of this child who, as I described, was born yesterday and is now sixteen. My wife was very unhappy with the childrearing system, which at that time demanded that when the child was born, you gave her over to the children's house, and first the infants' house, and eventually into the children's house, where they had an independent, autonomous life -- although, of course, we saw the kids after the work day. But we returned them to sleep over. Anyway, my wife was very unhappy with this, and ultimately we -- although I was in leadership position in the kibbutz, to preserve the family, I left with her. And I took a job then at the Research Council of Israel, where my major undertaking was to set up an arid zone research institute. It was a UNESCO 6:00operation, which was supposed to be regional. But the neighbors refused, as they consistently have refused, to participate. And it became eventually a core building for the University of -- Ben-Gurion University. And there was a lovely moment which I remember. We were looking for a site for this institute, and the mayor of Be'er-Sheva came with us. And here we were in a howling waste of [less?] soil kicking up the dust, and I remember him saying in Hebrew, "Po tihiyeh universita g'dola." "Here there will be a great university." There was nothing there. And in fact there is now a great university, which dwarfs our little institute. So, it's nice to think back. Anyway, after we set up the institute and the then-famous prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, shook my hand, I 7:00decided it was time to go back to school and refresh my science. I'd been out for ten years. And I spent half a dozen of them in the kibbutz, and now I was working with Israel's major scientists. And I decided to -- so I went back to Cornell for my doctorate and then did a post-doc up in Ottawa, to pay back my guilt feelings for having abandoned my parents. And I stayed there for two years. Actually we had by then a flat in Jerusalem, but it was a very difficult time, during the '60s, before the Six-Day War. And really, I was urged by my colleagues in Israel -- I had this job offer at the University of Massachusetts -- to take it. So, I did. And that's how I came to be here. And this is the outline of my life.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

HG:You want to know about my life in Yiddish.

CW:Well, I think I'd like to -- I mean, that was wonderful, just to get a scope of your life.

HG:That's the scope.

CW:Can we start at the beginning, with your family? What do you know about your family, as, you know, far back as you know?

HG:It's a very painful story. My family essentially left the Ukraine on the heels of the worst post-civil war -- or during the civil war, struggle between the White Russians, the residues of the pro-tsarist regime, and the Red Army. And there was a campaign, literally of Jewish extermination, which was driven by the White Russians, led by their commanders, Petliura and Denikin. And they 9:00swept through the Ukraine, from shtetl [small Eastern European village with a Jewish community] to shtetl, really annihilating the Jewish population. And they finally came to my parents' shtetl, a little town called Trostyanets, which has an even more terrible memory, which I will -- may come to. And there was a pogrom. And I'm named after an uncle who was shot in the street. Supposed to be a promising mathematician. My father was in the hospital with typhus, having been mustered out of the army. My mother was alone, and the neighboring thugs were looking for her. And she hid under a woodpile in the shed. And finally, a detachment of the Red Army came into town. And the guy who was looking for my 10:00mother wound up -- it was described like something out of "Doctor Zhivago" -- in front of a pigsty in the mud, looking up tearfully at this Red Army officer. And he turned to my father, who finally managed to be there, and he said, in Yiddish, "Antloyf! Hostu gornisht vos dervartn." "Run! You have nothing to look forward to here." And my father packed up whatever few rubles they had in the lining of his coat and, with my mother, who then had my brother in her arms, they went to the -- crossed the border to Romania. And, of course, the frozen river in wintertime -- out of a movie scenario. And they were caught. But the guards took pity on my mother because she was carrying this infant. So, they 11:00tried again, and they escaped to Romania. And because my father at the time had a sister in Canada, they managed, after traipsing through Romania to England, to get to Canada. And that's where they settled, in Ottawa, alongside my aunt. So, that's the origin of my family.

CW:And you said you were gonna mention something about the shtetl?

HG:The shtetl. The shtetl itself -- we were just in -- I knew that the shtetl Trostyanets had been turned into a death camp. We were just in -- we went to Israel to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of our kibbutz this summer. And my son had been very interested in seeing the origin of his grandparents. And my wife's family came from Hungary. Her father came before the 12:00First World War to escape conscription. And so, he wound up in Budapest and drove across the Great Hungarian Basin to Sighet, which was where Elie Wiesel was born. And their shtetl is now in Romania. The border has been changing. It's in the Carpathian Mountains. Very beautifully situated. They're trying to turn it into a little resort town. So, we went to visit the shtetl, of which there is nothing left, of course -- some wrecked Jewish houses and a cemetery, which is overgrown. And then, we went back to Prague to complete the circle. And there are three medieval synagogues in the old Jewish quarter. One of them, the Pinkas 13:00Synagogue, has a listing like in the Vietnam Memorial, the names of the fallen. But these are eighty thousand names of the graveless ones. And alongside the names of the major killing camps -- Auschwitz, Sobibor, Majdanek -- my son said, "Look, Dad. There was Trostyanets." And -- (sobs) so apparently it had become a regional killing camp. I had an aunt who must have been alive in '42 or '43. An 14:00interesting little sideline: She and her family managed to get to Ellis Island, I guess in the early '20s. But at the time, they were screening immigrants for every variety of disease on which they could turn them back. And she had trachoma, which is a very easily treatable infection of the eye. It's a Chlamydia trachomatis. And she said, "You will go, and I will return." So, her husband and the children stayed in America, and she went back, by herself. To perish. So.

CW:So, what was it like to grow up in Ottawa?

HG:Ottawa was a very divided town, in the sense that -- it was divided at many 15:00levels. But the greatest division was between the French and the English. Canada was conquered by the British in 1759. And the wound of that conquest never healed. And to this day, they are still having votes in Canada. There's a separatist movement in Quebec, as you probably know. But that was one of the basic cleavages. So, you grew up in this divided society, where the French were really trapped by their own educational system, very Catholic, and huge families. They were the hewers of wood and drawers of water. Very much in a sort of subsidiary role, which the blacks occupied (laughs) in the United States. And 16:00they're in the general sentiment of anti-Semitism, which prevailed -- remember, I'm growing up -- this is now the late '20s and '30s. But it was a period which spawned Hitler. And the anti-Semitism of the French was violent. The anti-Semitism of the British was contempt. So, if I was going home from school, I would either be attacked by a gang of French kids from Sainte-Anne or, to the north, from the Irish kids from Saint Brigid's. So, you learn to fight your way. And as a matter of fact, my sport was boxing. 'Cause my father would not tolerate having me run. So, I learned how to box and defend myself. So, growing up in Canada as a kid, you grew up in an environment of overt anti-Semitism. 17:00Now, the one saving grace was that it was a government of law. And a lot of Jewish kids could make their way by taking civil service exams. And so that was a point of entrée into a kind of middle-class existence. Now, if you wanted to get into university, your average had to be at least ten points higher than your neighboring gentile. And you knew it. In schools of engineering, they would tell you, There's no point in your applying, bright as you are, because nobody will hire you. Jewish engineers were not hired. Until the great transformation of the Second World War. So, you grew up in an environment which you knew that you were really marginalized. And this gave, of course, a much greater incentive for the 18:00interior life of the Jewish community, which was based around the shul, the synagogue -- and in my case around this youth movement, which was propelling us to create an autonomous, independent Jewish life in Palestine, which at the time wasn't ours. The only thing we had was the Balfour Declaration, which had been subverted by the White Paper of 1939, which cut off Jewish immigration at seventy-five thousand. That was the end of it. And Ben-Gurion foresaid, "We will fight the White Paper as if there's no war; we will fight the war as if there is no White Paper." And Jews in droves enlisted in the Jewish Brigade. But your question about life in Canada was a life in which you -- as a Jew, you lived on 19:00the margins. Didn't mean that you couldn't advance in the civil service, which was -- I mean, there was a rule of law. But the sociological structure was one in which you were on an excluded rung.

CW:So, who were your friends?

HG:Jewish! They were all in the youth movement. Kids on the street. And these were my friends. In high school, I did have non-Jewish friends. But these were kids who were also marginalized. One of them came from a family, very distinguished family, of newspapermen. And so, he was himself, you know, an oddball. And there was the son of a member of Parliament, who also couldn't fit into this very staid community. Ottawa was a very provincial town. It was 20:00Canada's capital. But you had to appreciate that when I was growing up, it had 250,000 people there. And Canada itself, until the Second World War, was basically a producer of raw materials. It only became industrialized in the course of the Second World War. But it was lumber, mining, paper products, this sort of thing. So, you lived in a country with great potential, whose nature was determined and whose ethos was really an ethos of a primary producer. I mean, there were university circles and people who tried to write poetry, but in Canada, the notion of a sufficient readership to support, say, a writer was not 21:00realistic. And Canadian writers went to England! Morley Callaghan, in my day, was in England. Even my friend Norman Levine, who became one of Canada's best short story writers, went to England. That's changing now. But in my day, it was a provincial country, vast, with a sense that if you went a hundred miles from the American border you were in the forest.

CW:What did it look like?

HG:Ottawa was very much conditioned by an attempt to emulate the British values. And in fact, the man that you see before you is chained to that tradition. You 22:00haven't seen a fellow wear a tie in how long? In my day, we couldn't -- our dining hall in the university was called, if you please, the refectory. And you couldn't get in there without a tie. So, the notion of what was appropriate was very British. And everybody aped the British. In fact, for a time, even the announcers on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were trying to emulate a British accent. So, it was provincial and driven by an image which was totally unrealistic for the Canadian reality. There we were, wearing our tweeds and our flannels in the heat of the Canadian summer! (laughs)

CW:And speaking Yiddish?

HG:Yiddish? No. The Yiddish was the other side of my life. My father decided when he came to Canada that there were two options for him. He could either go to the Socialist Labor side, which had begun to emerge in his youth in the shtetl. There was a period which you know, being a student of the Haskalah, the Enlightenment. The people who wore, as they said, the kurtse reklekh, the short jackets. They didn't wear the long kapotes [long coat traditionally worn by observant Jewish men]. My father was a member of that generation. So, if you see a photograph of him, say, taken in 1916, he's wearing a very elegant double-breasted suit with highly polished shoes and, of course, clean-shaven. But he decided when he came to America that -- he was an intellectual snob, for one thing. That the people from the Socialist Labor side simply were not -- they 24:00were not sufficiently grounded in his kind of Talmudic studies. So, he decided to become Orthodox. But beneath his Orthodoxy was obviously this skepticism, which his sons and daughter inherited. So, although there was a Talmud Torah, religious school, in town, my father decided to send me to the folkshul [Yiddish secular school], where they taught Yiddish. And his fellow parishioners said, Leyvi, vos iz mit dir, shikst dayne kinder tsu di apikorsim [Levi, what's wrong with you, sending your kids to the heretics]! I can tell this to you because you understand what I said. My father said, "Religye veln zey hobn bay mir in der heym [They'll have religion with me at home]. Dortn veln zey epes lernen [They'll learn something there]." And what did we learn? We learned to pick up apikorsim [heresy]. But I studied Yiddish, formally. But the town itself -- not 25:00only was it stuffy and stratified on many levels, but the Jewish community itself was stratified. And they were terrified at the influence of this Yiddish-speaking, liberalizing force in the Jewish community. They choked it out. They wouldn't fund it. And eventually, it had to fold up. I can also tell you that one night while I was studying -- and this was at all these after-school studies -- I'll never forget a rock being thrown through the window, landing in the classroom. Those were the neighbors. So, the notion of the overt violence and the contemptuous violence was -- always played itself out. So, that's how I got involved in Yiddish. And Yiddish was our language in the house. So, I was a native speaker who learned a cultivated Yiddish. My 26:00parents' Yiddish was a Ukrainian Yiddish -- and there, of course, I learned a vilner yidish [Vilna Yiddish]. "Vos zogstu [What are you saying]," not "Vus zugste." So then, I went on to the Hebrew school. But meanwhile, I had a very intense life in this youth movement. We were already studying Freud and Marx -- in a very half-baked way, but we -- as you know, at sixteen you can consider yourself a real authority.

CW:So, when did that begin, the youth group?

HG:Youth group, I was -- at eleven. I can tell you the exact moment.

CW:Please do.

HG:My brother was enlisted by youngsters who came from the Montreal branch and found a haven, of course, in the folkshul, which was socialist, progressive. And Julius Wolff -- I remember him because he ate up a ton of apples in our house. My mother said, "Where are all those apples?" In Julius. So, he enlisted my 27:00brother Max. And my brother Max said, "Haim, I want you to join my club." And I, having heard what the neighbors said, said very staunchly, "I will not join your communist club." To which my brother, who was very diplomatic, said, "Not only will you join the club, but Albert and Lionel and Louis and Shia and Archie are going to join, and you will be secretary." Well, unable to resist the blandishments of high office even then, Christa, I joined. My brother, because the war started in '39, went off to the air force, and I went off to the Canadian army, but on leave to go to study science at this aggie school. And it was an intense life where I led other youngsters, and we had a space in the Labor Zionist clubrooms in town, so we had a meeting place. But it was a whole 28:00program of hikes and lectures. These poor kids used to say to me, Haim, why do we always end up in Palestine? Whatever we talked about, it was always the virtues of Palestine, of which I knew virtually only what I had seen in pictures. And there were summer camps. The summer camp was modeled on a proto-kibbutz. We shared everything. There was no distinction between boys and girls. It was all very liberal and very puritanical. But these summer camps really bonded us and gave us a sense of the breadth of the movement, because the branches from Montreal and Ottawa, for example, got together in the Laurentians, for a month. And during the time, it was semi-Scouting, where we learned how to tie knots and build shelters and swim. On the other hand, we had these -- what we called "sichot" or "sichat" -- discussion, lectures -- about Jewish history 29:00and about Zionist history and about socialism. Imagine, at age twelve, thirteen, fourteen. So, we were -- I won't say indoctrinated, but imbued, to put it more mildly, with this whole set of values of recreating an autonomous Jew. The socialist man. With the whole notion of the emancipated woman -- why we called it the socialist man and the emancipated woman, because already, the notions of the equality of the sexes was implicit in everything we did.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

HG:And eventually, of course, it became a real existence, because at eighteen you were asked to commit yourself. And many, of course, at the time -- most of us were going off into the army. And so, the movement dispersed, and it was the women members of the movement who really sustained it. My wife, for example, left school; she worked in the headquarters office in New York. But we got 30:00through the war somehow, and this whole group of 120 of us. Some of us during the war were stuck in Lebanon; some worked on the exodus, taking refugees -- you may remember the exodus. So, we were all very much engaged. And I had the great honor of being chosen to represent the youth movement when Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, came and addressed a crowd at Madison Square of 250,000 people, and I spoke on behalf of the youth movement. And my father got a clipping from the Jewish newspaper of New York, and he said, "You know Chaim Weizmann also spoke?" (laughter)

CW:What do you remember about meeting him? Or did you meet --

HG:I didn't meet him. There were so -- you can imagine. He was, after all, a 31:00principal figure, and so there were many of us on the platform. And I was there alongside all sorts of officials and important people. But there I was, paraded as the representative of the Zionist youth movement. It was very exciting. I can assure you that I do not remember a word, not even a syllable, of what I said. But it was extraordinarily eloquent, as my father attested many times. (laughs)

CW:How did you feel the first day you arrived in Israel?

HG:It was enormously exciting. First of all, I arrived -- we went through Europe as a group of six, the last of my group. Then, there was a successor group that took over the leadership of the movement. We were the fifth American kibbutz. 32:00And the sixth one followed -- they stayed in New York to look after the movement. Someone else took over the editorship of the magazine. And we visited our fellow shomrim [Hebrew: members of the kibbutz movement, lit. "guards"] in London, and then we went to France. And in France, we went to visit a transit camp filled with refugees, the sh'erit ha-pletah, the survivors of the Holocaust. And we left to go to Israel on a boat filled with refugees from North Africa, from -- one day out and all the toilets were stuffed and everything, and we spent that day on the deck. But the excitement, the potential of going, was just overwhelming. We got to Israel on December the 19th, 1949. A driven, rainy day. You know, there it's a Mediterranean climate. It rains in the winter, and 33:00then in the summer it's lovely, sunny, and bleak. And there were two friends of mine waiting -- one a real friend of mine, who had been the previous editor; the other a fellow Canadian -- and I wondered why he had come. Later on, I realized why: he was in charge of field crops, and he couldn't wait to get out of it and have me take over, because, after all, I'd been to agricultural college. Not that I knew beans about field crops in Israel. Anyway. But there was Haifa, signs in Hebrew, speaking Hebrew. And the bullet-shelled, pocked and bullet-pocked walls of Haifa. We came in the last truce which had been organized in the war. And then, of course, the drive up to the hills, through the Galilee. It was enchanting. And we finally get to Sasa, which is an abandoned Arab village, with destroyed buildings and a few pre-fabs set up. And this is it, mud 34:00and cold, and it begins to snow. And I had brought two pairs of skis with me, would you believe it? Because we were just a few miles from Baalbek, in Lebanon, which is a famous ski resort. And I was convinced that we'd be skiing in Baalbek. Meanwhile, we had snow in Sasa. We were cut off for three days. And we trudged around. Couldn't do much skiing between the rocks, but it was enchanting. And it was very, very harsh. Actually, I slept in a bed which was vacated by someone who was then the governor of the Port of Haifa. He was a naval engineer, and he had been an officer in the American navy. So, Davy went 35:00to Haifa, and I slept in his bed until they could find another bed for me. And then, of course, I got time to go see the country. So, I went down to Tel Aviv. And you can imagine, I was wearing my sheepskin-lined jacket. I get to Tel Aviv; it's springtime. And I had a friend there, whom -- family I stayed. That's another interesting story. The (UNCLEAR) nature of Israel community, which I discovered in its sophistication, as well as the thousands of refugees who came from -- you know, battered and bruised or totally bereft of any cultural connection with the twentieth century, those who came from North Africa, from the Maghreb, the hills, the Atlas Mountains, who didn't speak Arabic; they spoke 36:00Berber. So, this vast array. And, of course, building a community on this rock pile, where I had to learn how to conduct agriculture on a place where the terraces were too narrow to do anything with really modern machinery. And we had temporary fields down in the Hula Valley and on the coast. So, it was a time of great challenge and -- you didn't notice the privation. Everybody was on rations. But I felt enormous excitement, the thrill. At one point we got fields down in the Negev. So, we go down there one evening, and our little pickup is commandeered because the police had just captured an infiltrator. And he was 37:00wounded, and for the first time I saw what a bullet wound looks like going through somebody's thigh. But it was wonderful. There were a crew of us. We pitched a tent in one of the kibbutzim nearby, and plowed around the clock with a stand gun banging on, which was probably more dangerous to me than it would have been to the enemy. The stand gun popped off it regularly. It was a pipe with a spring. But you had to be armed. But it was -- you know, it gave moments of sublime. I'll never get one moment -- just the dawn came up. And there, on a little hillock, was a Bedouin with a camel, it was like out of a movie -- silhouetted against the skyline, with the light coming up behind him. So.

CW:So. So then, you came back to --

HG:Yeah. Came back to Amherst.

CW:Yeah. How did you feel about leaving?

HG:Well, I didn't feel it was going to be permanent. I was going back to school. So, I came back to Cornell. We had an apartment in Jerusalem, and so it was temporary. I'd had a senior position; I was the coordinator of agricultural-biological research for the Research Council of Israel. I'd been giving grants to everybody and I knew the entire academic sphere. And one of my first jobs I had with their council was to do a census of research, what was 39:00going on in the country. So, I got to know really a wide circle of people in the scientific community. So, I thought there'd be no problem getting back, except there was. And I had met a group of colleagues at an international conference in Montreal where I was giving a paper. So, afterwards we met, and they said, Well, why don't you come back? We'll give you a job in microbiology at Hebrew University. That was in 1962. I kept waiting and waiting and writing and writing. Nothing happened. Finally I got this offer at the University of Massachusetts. So, I remember wiring them: "Please wire collect" -- I was going to pay for it -- "if and when position available. Offered academic position in US." So, I'll never forget -- they wired; they said, "Accept position without reservations." In Hebrew it's, "Bli histaiguyot [Hebrew: without reservations]." "Don't even think about it." Well, what a letdown that was. And I understood. It 40:00was just very difficult. I worked like a demon, and I got a full professorship in half a dozen years, the idea being that if I was going to go back to Israel, you had to go back with some reputation, because they are murderous in their demands. So, here I was, full professor with a whole gaggle of publications. And then, we did it with great brilliance. We took our son. Our daughter was at school in Ottawa. We took our son. He was going to have his bar mitzvah at the Wall, and we would go back and stay there. We had our -- came back to our apartment. Wonderful moment. Our milkman, with whom we used to argue, Hegel, same milkman. And they used to bring milk to the door. So when he came, he said, "So what took you so long?" (laughs) Only in Israel. It was wonderful. Anyway. 41:00So we had a wonderful bar mitzvah at the Wall. But my son had become a great skier, was very verbal, and it would have been very, very difficult for him. In fact, he lived traumatized by the possibility that we'd go back to Israel. Because even as we'd taken him to Israel, back and forth, when he was nine and ten -- summers we kept going. He was in summer camp there. But the idea of abdicating a language. He was a ski champion. And by the way, he participated in the 1972 ski contest at Mount Hermon, and won. The junior -- he keeps saying, Well, I was the only one who skied. That's not true. I have a friend who said, "You know" -- later on, he said, "I saw this kid with a maple leaf on his cap, 42:00and he was just like a dream coming down." I said, "You're looking at my son." So, he won the championship. But we felt it would be just too costly for him. We'd brought our daughter back at age five. We'd taken her out of the kibbutz. And that was very problematic for her. So, we decided that, in spite of all the wonderful offers I got, we'd come back. Meanwhile, I'd set up a unit in biological control at Tel Aviv University, where I'd lectured that year. I'd also been asked to be a consultant, setting up the Israel Environmental Protection Agency. So, I had those contacts. I was running all over the -- would you believe it, I was the consultant to the Knesset Committee on the Environment? And I would have lunch in the Knesset cafeteria. So, it was a great year. And I've maintained those ties to this day. I've had a couple of other 43:00careers, which if -- we're gonna have to have another session. (laughs)

CW:Okay.

HG:At least.

CW:(laughs) Sure. Well, I mean, you can talk about that if you want right now, or we can go on to something else.

HG:Well, one of the things that -- so we came back. And I resumed my academic career. At the time, there was a great problem with pesticides in the environment. In the early '60s, it had been discovered that major groups of pesticides -- a group called the chlorinated hydrocarbons -- you may remember the name DDT. You should remember it, young lady, because you, as lovely and as elegant as you are, harbor six to seven parts per million of DDT in your tissues, not to mention five to six parts per million of PCBs. But I want to 44:00assuage the pain by sharing the fact with you that I also am harboring the same amounts. So -- how shall I put it? Does that make us related under the skin? Probably. (laughs) Anyway. So, there was a big issue with pesticides. And the problem was, as a microbiologist, why are microbes incapable of decomposing these substances? Because they can decompose everything -- we thought. You know, when you rake up the leaves in the fall, by the time the spring comes around, they're vanished, mostly. Where have they gone? They've been dismantled by the enzymatic factories which microbes represent. So, I began to -- and then I had worked with a second family of these insecticides called organophosphates. And 45:00they were sold because the parent compound disappears after all. But it turns out that in spite of this disappearance of the parent compound, there were really very profound changes taking place in the soil ecosystem. And it turned out that what happened was that the major part of the molecule, in fact, was dismantled, but side chains were connected in a way which -- or, as we say, polymerized -- in a way which made the residue about a thousand times more toxic than the original compound. So, I was very concerned. I began to look for biological options. And at the time, the target insect which was commanding most interest was one which appeared in warehouses and apartments. And I will let you 46:00conjecture which insect would that be?

CW:Um, cockroaches?

HG:Brilliant. (laughter) Do I have my gold star? (laughter) Anyway. So, I began to look for biological -- that could control cockroach. And I did, eventually, get to identify a fungus. There are groups of fungi which are called entomopathogens. "Entomo-": insect; "pathogens." And they have coevolved with insects, and they really live off them. And so, we developed eventually a sense that this roach family -- we didn't want to kill the roach; we wanted to infect it, so that it would bring the infection back to what is the harborage, which is the assembly. And it was very effective. A very interesting sideline to this -- 47:00did you ever study chemistry?

CW:A little bit.

HG:A little bit. So, maybe you remember this from your chemistry.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

HG:Interesting thing about these roaches was that I would have them walk across a Petri plate with the fungus. And sometimes they would get infected and die, and sometimes they wouldn't. And I couldn't figure out why it was so chancy. And then, one night around four o'clock in the morning, I had this vision, and I understood. The fact is that roaches are very, very sensitive to anything on their legs. And they preen them. So, what would happen, I said, if I flipped the plate over, and they walked on plain agar, but I created an aperture so narrow 48:00that they would have to squeeze and brush the fungus from the roof of a plate onto the back of a plate? And it worked. Now. Why did I ask you about chemistry? That's a parallel to a great discovery made by a chemist called Kekulé. And what was his discovery? If you remember from your chemistry, the benzene ring is a ring of six carbons, with hydrogen poking out and everything else. In the 1830s and '40s, when organic chemistry was taking off with meteoric speed and interest, they couldn't figure out the structure of benzene. And Kekulé one night had a dream. And what was his dream? He saw a snake with its tail in its mouth. (claps hands) And he said, "That's it. That's it! That's the structure." 49:00So, I had a sort of Kekulé moment. Not quite as important. Anyway. So.

CW:So.

HG:Where did this roach take me? The dean of the school of business said, "You know, Haim, you've got a commercial venture there. Why don't you do something with it?" And I'm always interested in taking a research idea beyond just publishing a paper and giving it reality. So, in the best tradition of American entrepreneurship, my wife and I decided -- although she said a classic statement: "Couldn't we do this in the garage, dear?" -- we mortgaged our house, and we set up a company, and eventually this company was identified by venture capital people, and it became a very large enterprise with about 150 employees, called EcoScience. And the roach became a commercial entity. And I also -- I ran 50:00the discovery lab, because the investors said, You know, Haim, you may be a great scientist, but you don't know anything about business. We're gonna put a real businessman in there. So, they got somebody out of the chemical industry. May have known a great deal about the chemistry industry, but he certainly did not prove to be a very good businessman for EcoScience. But they got exactly what they wanted. And this should be an object lesson for you, in your future career in business. 'Cause you don't know where you're going to wind up yet. They wanted someone who the venture people would see as the appropriate manager of their investment. Six foot two, former football player, rugged, handsome, very bright. And, of course, he was perfect for the investors. So, we had an IPO, which means an initial offering. And people who bought stock at $2.50 51:00immediately were able to sell for $11. And a lot of dentists in Worcester made a lot of money. And the company ultimately got together on $60 million. So, it was no small enterprise. Unfortunately, as good a businessman as that gentleman was, they never got the marketing off the ground, and they did some very, very unfortunate things. And the company was eventually subsumed by a greenhouse company which we had bought as a venue for our biological control. So, I went back; I continued research with other biologicals and set up another company. I took a step back and developed an organic fertilizer. And now I have my own little lab, and I'm continuing to work on biologicals, which will control fungal 52:00disease and other insect pests. So, I'm continuing in this -- how shall I say it? -- in this professional thrust. But more with the idea of trying to get something which will be environmentally appropriate. And I'm working with a very -- this time -- with a very, very good marketing group. They really know how to propel products into the appropriate niches, which has been something that has been lacking in what other ventures I've undertaken. So, this is where I am now.

CW:Well, can we switch gears, since you only have a few more minutes, and talk about the Book Center?

HG:Of course!

CW:Yeah. So --

HG:No.

CW:-- you were around.

HG:I was around. Well, "around" probably hardly fits my physiognomy. Very 53:00interesting question. And I thought about it in advance of our meeting today, since you have such an authoritative voice, you frighten me into -- (laughs). So. I grew up at a time when, because of the emergence of the State and because of the collapse of the entire essentially Yiddish-speaking civilization in Israel, Hebrew was thrust into the foreground, and Yiddish was considered to be a language whose existence was simply destroyed by the Holocaust. And I grew up with a -- although I love my Sholem Aleichem dearly, and I'm a Yiddish speaker -- and not only that, but I followed Itzik Manger -- I mean, you know, the 54:00literature of Yiddish is something which I kept an interest in. But my attitude towards Yiddish was as a lost and -- part of our heritage, and that Hebrew really was the language, our language of the future. And then, as I grew up, I realized that that was a very naïve and very limited approach, and that the whole point was to rescue whatever components of the culture we could. Whether it's Ladino or Yiddish, of course we must do everything. So, I heard about this kid, Aaron Lansky. And he must have heard about me, because one day I got a telephone call that there was going to be a meeting in the house of Jules Piccus 55:00with some professors, and we're gonna talk about what Aaron Lansky had in mind. Fine. I said -- you know, by that time I had become more enlightened about Yiddish. I should tell you that part of this enlightenment came because of two Jewish comics, called Dzigan and Schumacher. Have you ever heard of them?

CW:Hm?

HG:I mean, if you couldn't appreciate Dzigan and Schumacher, you were dead. And if you could, of course, you loved Yiddish -- you fell in love all over again with Yiddish. I mean, the flexibility of the language, the puns, the innuendos -- I mean, the richness of the language. It awakened it into me once more. Really, I have to tell you. Okay, well, I went. And there we were, in the house 56:00of Jules Piccus. And Richard Alpert was there, and Bob Rothstein, and Lenny Glick, and me. And Aaron started talking about collecting these Yiddish books, how the material essence of Yiddish culture was disappearing. We had to collect the books. So, I said, "Fine." I said, "Well, if each one of us puts in fifty bucks, we'll have $300, and we'll get going." And that's one of the launching moments of the Yiddish Book Center. Somehow, I became vice president of the operation. And we began to meet -- our first haven was in Florence. We rented a little place which didn't have heating. Somebody was making pottery down below. 57:00But I was, at the time, also a trustee of a small fund, which had been set up by a druggist in Northampton. A Levin. His name was Levin. And I always imagined him with his group smoking cigarettes out of a long cigarette holder. And he must have felt very much above the Jewish storekeepers in town, because he was part of the Russian intelligentsia. So, he set up a fund, the Levin Fund, to promote Jewish culture except religion. Well, that was perfect for me. So, they asked me to join the board of directors, and I -- fine, I said, "I've got the perfect investment for the fund. Well, let's give the Yiddish Book Center a thousand dollars." And that was our first thousand. And that, I think, must have paid the rent for that miserable place in Florence. Then we got hold of this 58:00Northeast Street, this little school. And that was already luxurious. And Aaron then began to -- you know, how could we begin to sustain this? And my feeling was, We're going to do it on the base of membership commitment. Once you have a member, that's an annual contribution. And that's how we really got going. And then, of course, books started coming in, and you can read all about it in Aaron's book. Aaron went to New York to get this big collection that was being put out in the rain by the Arbeter Ring, Workmen's Circle. And then, Sidney Berg came along. I take it you know all of these things. Sidney Berg was our first philanthropist. And Sidney Berg was a Yiddishist whose family had donated a 59:00Yiddish library to Brandeis. When he heard about the Yiddish Book Center, he was absolutely enthralled. So, Sidney brought in a New York crowd, and the board took on more than just a local structure. And from that, I persuaded a friend of mine, Joe Marcus, who was a wonderful guy and unfortunately died very young, to become president. And Joe engineered the movement out to Holyoke, where the books started to really accumulate. And that's how the Center got going, with a small group of local folks interested, this handful of professors -- and, of course, Aaron's great talent to move it forward.

CW:What did you think the first time you met him?

HG:I thought, What a wonderful, bright kid. A mania for Yiddish, it's wonderful, 60:00he's going to -- I mean, everything can happen. He's bright, he's determined, and he has a vision. I said, Fine. I joined them, and I put my back into it, because he was so engaging, so winning, and so promising. And my intimations have been absolutely confirmed. (laughs)

[END OF INTERVIEW]