JUDITH ELBAUM SCHUMER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is October 3rd, 2011.  I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Judith Elbaum Schumer and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Judith, do I have your permission to record this interview?

JUDITH ELBAUM SCHUMER: Absolutely.

CW:  Thank you.  So, I thought we could just jump right in and you could tell me a little bit about your father.  So, to start, where was he born?

JES: My father was actually born in Łódź, Poland, in 1904.  And he became a 1:00Yiddish journalist.  And he wrote for some of the most prominent Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw before the war.  And he was also, during the 1930s, the Warsaw correspondent for "The Jewish Daily Forward" in New York.  And because he was a journalist, he was more aware than perhaps other people as to what was happening in Europe with the rise of Nazism, with the rise of Hitler.  And they were living in Poland at the time that the war broke out.

CW:  Sorry, did he ever talk about his life before the war?  Do you have a sense of what that was like, living in Łódź before the war in what he talks about?

JES: Well, he was really a child when he lived in Łódź.  Most of his young adulthood he spent in Warsaw.  I know he was in the Polish army during the 1920s as a soldier.  And he met and married my mother in Warsaw.  And he was 2:00already, when they met, an established Yiddish journalist.  And he told us an interesting story.  He, my father, spoke English.  He had learned English from people, from books.  Not really from formal study, but he spoke English.  And in 1938, the foreign minister of Great Britain, Anthony Eden, was coming by train from Paris to Moscow.  And the train was going to stop in Warsaw at five thirty in the morning.  My father decided to meet the train.  He got there at four thirty, met the train, and got onto the train.  And because he spoke English, he had an interview with Anthony Eden on the train.  And the interview 3:00was really about what he was going to discuss with Hitler -- excuse me, with Stalin in Russia and what he felt was the prognosis for the war.  He was the only journalist, both from the Yiddish press or the Polish press who had gotten this interview.  And the next day, there were headlines in the Yiddish press, "Interview with Eden," but even the Polish journalists indicated, Wow, what a coup that one of our journalists spoke to Anthony Eden.  So, he was a very well-respected journalist in Poland.  When the Germans attacked Poland on September 1st, 1939, my parents -- and, of course, everyone in Poland knew that it was not going to be good for Poland.  They had high hopes that the Polish 4:00army might repel the Germans.  The story often was told that the Poles had a wonderful cavalry on horses.  Good-looking uniforms.  But the Germans had airplanes and tanks, so they didn't stand a chance.  Around the third or fourth of September, the Polish government said that journalists and other people should try to leave Warsaw, should try to leave Poland.  And my mother told my father, "You have to leave."  My parents at that time had a three-year-old daughter.  My older sister, Sarah, is three years old.  And my father said to her, "I can't leave you."  And she said, "You have to leave."  He had been a member of an anti-Hitler organization and she knew that if the Germans came in, he would be among the first to be arrested, not so much because he was a Jew but 5:00because he had written against the Germans.  And they went back and forth, "No, no, no," "Yes, yes, yes," and she finally convinced him that he had to leave.  And he did, with some other journalists.  It's a very, very long story about his journey out.  And he, through various means, managed to leave Warsaw and head towards Vilna in Lithuania.  Just a historical footnote: there had been a pact in the summer of 1939 between Germany and Russia.  I believe it was called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  And a large swath of Lithuania and eastern Poland 6:00was basically given to the Russians.  So, he was able to make his way to that Russian-occupied zone.  At this point, Poland still had not surrendered, had not been overrun.  And also, through various ways, managed to get to Vilna in Lithuania.  And Vilna and its surrounding area for a time were independent.  They were not under Russian sovereignty or occupation.  His message to my mother had been, before he left, "If Poland is able to repel the Germans, I will come back.  If not, I will want you to find a way to get to me."  So, my mother is left in Warsaw with my three-year-old sister.  And, again, the next six weeks are a very long, complicated story.  But one of the things my father 7:00had done before he left is he took a small photograph of my sister and a small photograph of my mother with him.  And this is actually what I would like to show you.  After the Germans had completely occupied Poland, Warsaw was under Nazi occupation, my father managed to get a message through someone to my mother.  And what he had done is he had a photograph of himself taken with a picture of my mother and my sister on a table so she would know that this actually came from him.  And on the reverse side of this, the message was: "Try to get out of Poland.  Come to me."  Manage to get out of Poland and the 8:00addresses of places that she could get to in Bialystok or in, excuse me, in Vilna.  And having gotten this, my mother knew it was time that she had to leave.  Again, her journey outside from Warsaw to Vilna is a very, very long story.  And what I'll just interject at this point: before my mother died, I taped my mother's story.  And I'm actually currently writing her biography as if it is -- it's really her autobiography but I'm writing it.  And I'm using her voice.  And my mother, when I taped her, it was partly in Yiddish, partly in English.  But what is special to me is I have her voice and I have her story.  So, that is not going to be lost.  But that's a different part of the 9:00story.  When my father was in Vilna, he started working for a Yiddish newspaper.  And, of course, they knew the war was going to get closer.  And Jews in Lithuania were trying to find a way to get out of Lithuania, to get somewhere.  And there were Jews who had befriended several foreign consuls.  One of the consuls was a Japanese consul in a nearby city.  In Yiddish, it was called the city of Kovno.  In Lithuanian, it was called Kaunas.  And his name was Chiune Sugihara.  And Sugihara agreed to try to get visas for Jews to leave Lithuania.  You needed not just an exit visa.  You needed something, an entry 10:00visa to some country.  Russia would not let you out of Lithuania or through Russia without some sort of a visa.  There was also a Dutch consul whose name was Zwartendijk, I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly, who also was issuing these phony, in a way, visas to the Dutch islands of Suriname and Curaçao.  And sometimes, these were joint visas, that they had an endpoint of Curaçao but an exit visa by Sugihara.  So, these were kind of joint visas.  And when Sugihara had requested from his government to issue these visas -- and this is now in the summer of 1940 -- the Japanese government said no.  The story is that he sent them three telegrams.  For the first two, they said no.  The third one said 11:00absolutely no, basically, Stop sending us any more of these telegrams.  We are not allowing you to do this.  And he and his wife took it upon themselves to make the decision that they would issue these visas.  And that's what they did.  And the visas were family visas.  So, if the Rubensteins had a visa, all of a sudden, the young man whose name was David Kaplan put his name on the visa, he was their cousin.  So, one visa could be good for four or five or six people who said that they were part of the same family.  And these said -- not only did they give permission to leave Lithuania, they were an entry to go into Japan, which meant people could leave and had someplace to go.  In a sense, they weren't valid.  But they were good enough to get people out.  When he was 12:00called back, what happened in, I think, June or July of 1940, the Russians decided that they were going to take over all of Lithuania, that the Lithuanians really wanted their protection and there was a phony plebiscite and Lithuania, all of Lithuania, became part of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.  The Russians said, Well, since we are now the overseers of Lithuania, consulates don't have to be in Vilna anymore.  And the Japanese government says, Yes, we don't need two consuls.  So, Sugihara was told that he had to go to Moscow.  When he left, and there are people who have a photograph of this, he was 13:00actually signing visas from the train window.  And he was stamping them with that official stamp.  And he handed the remaining blank visas and the little apparatus, the stamp, to Jews at the station, saying to them, "Continue on.  Sign my name.  Continue doing it."  And many people got those kinds of visas.  My parents eventually got one of these forged visas partly from the Dutch consul and partly from Sugihara.  And they managed to leave Lithuania in the early part of 1941.  They went to Moscow, had permission to stay in Moscow for four days.  From Moscow, they took the Trans-Siberian Railroad to 14:00Vladivostok on the far eastern end of Russia.  Of course, it's my mother, my father, and my sister Sarah.  From Vladivostok, they went to Shanghai, stayed a short time in Shanghai, and then took another boat to Kobe, Japan.  And in Kobe, they were waiting for permission to go somewhere else.  Some friends had gotten visas to go to Canada, Australia.  They never ended up with a visa.  In the summer of 1941, the Japanese government said that all Westerners are going to have to leave Japan.  Of course, we know in retrospect that Japan was planning the attack on Pearl Harbor and didn't want foreigners there.  So, they 15:00had no choice but to return to Shanghai.  There was no visa needed to go to Shanghai.  It was at that point considered an international city.  Even though Japan occupied a large section of China already, Shanghai was still considered this independent settlement.  And so, they went back to Shanghai.  At that point, there were probably about twenty to twenty-three thousand Jews in Shanghai.  After Pearl Harbor, Japan occupied all of Shanghai and they were under Japanese occupation for the rest of the war.  They lived in a small room.  My father worked again as a journalist.  He was the coeditor of a weekly Yiddish magazine.  He wrote whenever he could.  He wrote plays.  He 16:00wrote satires.  He told me a story once that he had written a satire in Yiddish about Hitler.  And one of the things that he did was he had made masks and the masks were of Hitler, Goebbels, other prominent figures.  Before the play was allowed to proceed, he had to hand it in to the Japanese censors.  But what he did, obviously they didn't read Yiddish, he translated it into English.  But the English version was comedy.  Had nothing to do with Hitler.  And it passed the censors.  But the actors, when they saw the script, said, You can't ask us to perform this play!  We're gonna be arrested!  And my father said to them, "Don't worry about it.  The censors said it was okay."  And that night at the 17:00theater, the audience already knew that this was going to be a satire about Germany and they were wondering, you know, what was going to happen because at the rear of the theater were some Japanese soldiers who had to watch what was going on.  But the Japanese soldiers did not understand Yiddish.  And they looked at the stage and they saw people wearing masks and the audience was laughing so they laughed, too.  And my father said the play was a huge success.  But this is one of the things that he did.  He would write plays and he would translate things and did whatever work they could.  And there was also some money from Jewish organizations: the HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Joint Distribution Committee.  The Japanese did not really distinguish between Jews and other Westerners.  The only difference came, and I 18:00think it was in 1943 -- there was an edict that all refugees, they did not say Jewish, but all refugees who arrived after 1937 would have to live in a restricted area.  Of course, the Jews called it a ghetto.  It was known as Hongkew.  And if you go to Shanghai today, you still see remnants of this area.  And in the last few years, because of the number of tourists that have come, there are plaques in that area showing where the Jewish ghetto was.  And in a nearby park, there is actually a plaque by the people of Israel thanking the Chinese for their generosity during the war because the Chinese really were very generous to the Jews who lived there.  But ghetto was not just Jewish.  19:00The Chinese people lived there, too, but it was a very poor area, very crowded.  You had to have a pass to get out of this ghetto.  But it was possible to get the pass and my sister went to school outside of the ghetto.  There had been three very wealthy Baghdadi Jewish families that had lived in Shanghai from the 1880s: the Hardoon family, the Sassoon family, and the Kadoorie family, and they were extremely generous to the Jews of Shanghai.  They built the schools, the Jewish schools.  My sister went to Shanghai Jewish School, which was built by the Kadoories.  The hospital that I was born in was built -- the Shanghai Jewish Hospital was built by the Kadoorie family.  Today, the famous Peace Hotel in Shanghai was, in those days, known as the Sassoon Hotel.  So, these were people who made life a lot more bearable for the Jews of 20:00Shanghai.  And of course, in comparison to what was happening in the ghettos of Europe, as my parents always said, they were together, they were alive, my sister went to school, and they managed.  So, after the war, it took my parents another two-and-a-half years to be able to get a visa to leave Shanghai.  You had to be sponsored by a family.  The Jewish organizations couldn't just say, We will take care of them.  And the Jewish organizations in New York went to wealthy Jews in America and said, You have to help us sponsor these people.  And we eventually received a sponsorship by a family named Klein who owned chocolate businesses in Manhattan called Barton's Chocolates and they sponsored 21:00us.  And we came to the United States.  My father had a job waiting for him, for a newspaper, a Yiddish newspaper in New York, "The Morning Journal."  In Yiddish, "Der morgen-zhurnal."  And he worked for that paper as a journalist until 1953, I think it was, when the paper merged with another Yiddish newspaper, "The Day," "Der Tog."  But they didn't need all those journalists, so my father lost his job.  And he was without work for about a year.  And then, he was hired by "The Jewish Daily Forward."  And he was hired there both as the city editor and also as a journalist.  And he had a biweekly column and he wrote his column on any topic you could think of.  In a way, he was a cross 22:00between -- what's his name, who just retired from CBS?  Andy Rooney.  He would write funny articles about something that just interested him.  David Brooks.  He would write political articles.  So, whatever interested him, he wrote on.  And he was the city editor.  And he worked together with Isaac Bashevis Singer who, in those days, was a journalist for "The Forward," and he also worked for Elie Wiesel, who was writing for "The Forward" at that time.  And he continued writing there till he died in January of 1969.

CW:  Do you remember his writing habits?  Did he have certain times of the day that he wrote or a desk that he always wrote at?  Do you remember any of that?

JES: I do.  And it was interesting because even though he had a room that had a 23:00desk, he always preferred writing in the kitchen.  And if he had a story that the deadline was the next day, one o'clock in the morning, he was writing it.  He was absolutely a deadline writer.  And he had the old Yiddish typewriter.  You have that same typewriter downstairs.  And the first time I saw that typewriter down there, I said, I know that typewriter.  It was at my kitchen table.  He had that Yiddish typewriter and even though he wrote on a typewriter forever, he still used those two fingers.  That's how he typed.  Quickly, but those two fingers.  And he wrote at the last minute.  And I remember sometimes at four in the afternoon, he would say, "I have no idea what I'm writing about."  And then, an idea would come to him at ten o'clock at night and there he was, writing that article.

CW:  I know you mentioned earlier that there were a lot of people that came to 24:00your home, friends of your parents.  Do you remember any specific people that were important to you as a kid in the family?

JES: The truth is that I didn't understand that my home was unique until I was much older, because during the 1950s and '60s, when I was growing up -- I was born, by the way, in Shanghai in 1945, just after the war.  So, really, the times that I remember are the '50s and '60s, in my parents' home.  The people who came to my home were, at that time, the crème de la crème of the Yiddish world in New York.  All the actors and actresses.  The last of the great Yiddish actresses, Mina Bern, died about a year ago.  But these were people who 25:00were the actors and actresses.  Miriam Kressyn, her husband was one of the directors of WEVD, the Yiddish radio station.  Ben Bonus.  Reizl Bozyk, who was in the movie "Crossing Delancey."  And, of course, Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel, all the great Yiddish writers were at our house.  But I didn't know that my home was any different from anyone else's home because this is how I grew up.  It was only later that I happened to mention that so-and-so was at my house, that people would say, You know that person?  There was a comedy team who had survived the war.  They were considered the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis of the Yiddish world.  Their name was Dzigan and Shumacher.  And they were at my house and they would tell jokes to one another and we all laughed and we 26:00thought it was wonderful.  But I didn't know it was any different at anyone else's home.  And because my parents insisted that my sister and I speak Yiddish, there was no choice.  We spoke Yiddish at home and it wasn't, as in many homes, that the parents spoke Yiddish but the kids answered in English.  We spoke Yiddish.  And I went to the Workmen's Circle Yiddish school, the Farband Yiddish school.  And we spoke Yiddish at home.  So, anything that was going on, of course, I understood.  And I understood the jokes.  I think it was later, when I was a late teenager and especially after my father died and I reflected back, that I remembered what was going on in my home and the people who came into my life and who knew me and whom I knew.  And just as another interesting aside, my first husband was named Marvin Schwartz.  Marvin Schwartz was the adopted son of the great Yiddish actor Maurice Schwartz.  And, you 27:00know, yes, you know, when people say, Your father-in-law was Maurice Schwartz?  Yes.  But it was just part of my life.  And when I was a kid, even before I had any inkling that I would at some point marry this man, Maurice Schwartz needed a young girl in a play who could speak fluent Yiddish.  So, my father said, "Oh, my daughter would be happy to do it."  I think I was ten or eleven at the time.  And I said, "Sure, I'll do it."  And I learned the lines.  And a few times, they needed a girl who spoke Yiddish on WEVD for -- I guess it was kind of a Yiddish soap that was going on Sunday mornings.  So, I did that.  I didn't understand that this was unique because it was just part of my life.

CW:  Yeah.

JES: So --

CW:  Teglekh [Daily].  (laughs)

JES: Yeah.

CW:  Yeah.  So, I guess I'd like to hear just a little bit more about your 28:00father.  What was he like as a person?  Can you sort of conjure his image?

JES: My father was a very smart man.  My father was self-taught, really, because his parents died when he was very young and he was basically raised by a much older sister.  And he didn't really have a large formal education.  But he had been an avid reader.  He told me that he started out working as an errand boy at a Yiddish newspaper.  And he thought that being a journalist would be the most wonderful job in the world and basically learned what to do.  But he had always liked writing.  He was always a good writer.  He learned languages by himself.  He was, again, never formally taught.  But, of course, 29:00he spoke Hebrew because, as a young boy, he'd gone to a kheyder [traditional religious school].  So, he learned Hebrew.  So, he spoke Yiddish and Hebrew.  He spoke fluent Polish but he also spoke German and he spoke Russian.  And all self-taught.  So, he was a very bright man.  He was an avid reader.  And he was funny.  He always had jokes.  But I think I most remember him -- and again, I did not understand this when I was a child.  I understood it more as an adult.  He loved being a teacher and he loved being my teacher.  And when I wasn't resistant to it, he was able to tell wonderful stories and do a lot of teaching.  When I am in Reno, I live in Reno part of the year -- I had been 30:00asked shortly after I arrived in Reno to talk about my family's experiences during the war.  And one of the women who heard me speak, a member of our Reform congregation in Reno, is a teacher in the Reno public schools and had told me that in the literature book that the students use in the sixth grade in northern Nevada, there's a section on heroes.  And one of the chapters is about the Japanese consul, Sugihara, and how he made a choice, a heroic choice to do the right thing.  And she asked me, Would I be willing to speak to the students?  And, of course, I said yes.  And this actually started this enormous second career for me.  Of course, unpaid career, because I speak to 31:00the university and I speak to the high schools but I mostly speak to the sixth graders because they have read this article.  But I begin by telling the students a story about my father.  When I was eleven years old, my father took me to a photographic exhibit of Holocaust photographs at the Jewish Museum in New York.  And when we left the main exhibit, we went into the gift shop and he bought us both little pins, little brass pins that said, in Hebrew, "zachor," which means "remember."  And he put one on my lapel and he put one on himself.  And when we were on the subway going home, I started complaining as an eleven-year-old would.  "Why are you always telling me stories about the Holocaust?  Why are we always talking about the war?  Why are you always shlepping me to these things?"  And he turned to me on the subway and he 32:00pointed to the pin and he said, "I want you to look at what this pin says.  It says 'zachor.'  It means remember.  If I don't teach you and you don't teach your children and you don't teach others, then the world will forget."  After I do my presentation, I thank the students for inviting me because I tell them, "You have enabled me to keep the promise to my father."  Now, there's a little interesting story about the pin.  The students always ask me, Where is the pin?  I said, "I was eleven years old and I didn't know it was important, so I didn't keep the pin.  I remembered what the pin said but I didn't keep the pin."  This past winter, I was at some function and there was a lady, in Reno, 33:00there was a woman who came who I knew who was wearing a pin that said "zachor."  And I said to her, "Where did you get this pin?"  And I briefly told her that I had one when I was eleven.  And she told me that there is a man in Las Vegas, Nevada who has started a foundation called the Zachor Foundation.  He is a Holocaust survivor.  And when he first came to the United States, someone had given him that pin.  And he had always remembered about it.  And he decided some years ago that he wanted people to know his story, but he wanted them to have the pin.  And he invested his own money and has bought thousands of these pins.  And he has so far given away forty thousand pins.  So, I immediately called him and I told him my story and he said to me, "How 34:00many do you want?"  I said, "Well, how many can you send me?"  He said, "I keep them in groups of two hundred."  I said, "Send me four hundred pins."  And I asked him, "How much shall I pay you?"  He said, "I don't take a fee.  You can send me a donation if you want to."  Well, since I speak to so many students, I've now gotten more than six hundred pins from him.  And now, at the end of the presentation, I give the kids the pins.  And the teachers always have them write thank you letters to me.  And they've been very lovely sixth grade thank you letters.  But now, the thank you letters talk about the pin.  And they say, I will remember what your father told you and I will always remember.  You know, they're kids, but the fact that this is something that they say -- and for me, it's the memory of my father because this is what he 35:00told me.  And each time I do the presentation, I'm really honoring his memory.

CW:  So, what kind of stories would he tell you when he would -- or, you know, you mentioned going to this exhibit.  But what were the types of stories that he would tell you about the war?

JES: Well, he would often tell me stories about things that happened in his childhood.  But most of them were stories about what it was to be a young adult in Poland.  When he was in the army, he was one of the few Jews in the army unit and what it was like being a Jew in the Polish army, the often overt anti-Semitism that he experienced.  He would talk about things that happened when he met my mother.  And he told me once a wonderful story.  When they had 36:00one of their first big dates, he was inviting my mother to a ball.  It wasn't just a party.  It was a ball.  And my mother had bought herself a gown to wear to this wedding -- excuse me, to wear to this ball.  And at this ball would be the crème de la crème, again, of Yiddish Polish society: the Yiddish actors, the Yiddish actresses, the writers, the artists.  But there was a huge snowstorm the night of this ball.  And he was wondering how to get my mother, pick up my mother, and he decided to rent a sleigh, the kind of sleigh that you see in picture books.  Cinderella type of sleigh, pulled by two horses because this was the only way he felt that they could get through the snow.  And he 37:00picked my mother up in a sleigh.  He went to her door.  He was wearing -- they used to call it a smoking jacket.  He wore a tuxedo and he picked her up and he took her to the ball and they went with a driver in a sleigh through the snowy streets of Warsaw.  But, of course, the way he told me the story, I could just picture the snow and the sleigh and my father and mother going through them.  They weren't married at that time and my mother told me that that was the night she knew that she and my father would get married.  So, these were the kinds of stories that he would tell me.  But, of course, a lot of the stories were about the war.  This was a big topic in our home and the one I complained about when I was eleven years old on the subway.  In the '50s, there were two types of Holocaust refugee families.  There was one kind of family that we also knew 38:00that didn't want to talk about it.  Their children grew up, whether they were born in China or if they were born in Russia and came to the United States or if they were born in the United States, they knew almost nothing.  I have cousins in Canada who knew nothing.  The parents did not want to talk about it.  It was done, it was finished.  They did not want to talk about it.  And then, there were families like my parents where this was something that they always wanted us to know about because they kept saying, We can't let the world forget.  You have to know.  And that was what we talked about.  But my mother would often talk also about not just the bad things, but what life was like in Shanghai, the school that my sister went to, how my mother would shop at the peddlers, how my mother learned rudimentary -- they lived in Shanghai 39:00six-and-a-half years -- how she learned enough Chinese to be able to talk to the street vendor, to whoever she needed to talk to.  My mother also learned Russian in Shanghai because many of the people, the refugees who lived there, were Russian.  And it was similar enough to Polish that she was able to pick up Russian in Shanghai.  So, those were predominantly the type of stories that were told in my home.

CW:  Well, I want to ask just one question.  We've talked about your father, Moshe Elbaum.  And what about your mother?  What are your memories of her?

JES: My memories about my mother are much clearer because they're much later.  My mother was born in 1910, but my mother lived until her late eighties.  And it was when she was about eighty-two that I decided to tape her story.  Because 40:00all these years, I had heard all of her stories.  And they were disjointed.  She would tell a story and then she would digress and I never quite heard the end of the story.  So, I sat with her, with a tape recorder, and just similar to what you're doing with me now, I asked her questions.  But when she would digress, I would gently move her back to the story.  And when she would say to me, when I would ask her, "How did this happen" -- and she'd say, "Don't ask."  I would say, "Well, I am asking."  "Don't ask."  So, I brought her back to the topic and I was able to get her to tell me exactly what happened.  My mother managed, in terms of the war, to smuggle herself and my sister across borders.  Now, part of it was German-occupied Warsaw to the Russian-occupied territory of 41:00Poland and then to temporarily independent Vilna.  And she was able to do this.  So, you know, I wanted all of these stories.  But I also wanted some of the stories of her childhood.  Stories, again, that I had heard tiny bits and pieces of.  And one of the stories she told me was -- and she explained it in a little bit more detail -- when she was about four years old, her family that had lived in a town outside of Warsaw called Mińsk Mazowiecki, moved back for a short time to Warsaw.  And they lived in an apartment building.  And my mother developed the mumps.  And she told me that if you have the mumps, often something happens to your eyes.  You become very sensitive to light.  And her mother was very concerned about her eyes.  In their building, there lived a 42:00prominent eye doctor.  And she called the eye doctor down and he examined my mother.  But the name of the eye doctor was Ludwik Zamenhof.  And Zamenhof was the man who had -- I guess the word is invented the international language of Esperanto.  And he's not that well known these days but in the turn of the century, in the early 1920s -- well, it would be before that because my mother was born in '14, so -- in 1910 -- so, this would probably be around the turn of the century, the early teens of the new century.  Esperanto was very, very popular in Europe.  And Ludwik Zamenhof was considered a star.  And this is the man who came down to examine her.  And years later, that street was renamed 43:00in his honor when -- I think he died in 1914.  The street was renamed in Polish, Ulica Zamenhof, Zamenhof Street.  So, again, when she told me the story, I got all of the details about exactly what happened to her.  She became a kindergarten teacher.  She had gone to a Polish school in Mińsk Mazowiecki, a high school.  And the high schools were called gymnasium.  They were on a very high level.  But they all had a Jewish quota.  It was very hard for Jews to get into these schools.  And she was very fortunate, she had taken a test and she was admitted into the school.  When she graduated, it was as if she had gone to junior college.  And at that time, she moved to Warsaw because one of 44:00her sisters lived there.  That's later, where she met my father.  And she was a kindergarten teacher in a Jewish school until she got married.  Women in those days, of course, often stopped working when they got married.  But that's what she did.  And she would tell us stories about her childhood in Mińsk Mazowiecki.  She would go ice-skating on the frozen pond when it was cold in the wintertime.  She came from a fairly well-to-do family.  Her father owned a lumberyard.  He was more worldly and less religious.  Her mother was a more religious woman.  But they still had a kosher home.  The daughters, though, didn't -- in those days, there were no yeshivas for girls.  So, the girls went to the public school, which was a Catholic school.  The boys did go to a Jewish kheyder and that's how my mother ended up in the gymnasium.  There was no 45:00Jewish high school for girls in her city in those days.  So, she would tell me stories about her childhood and how she lived.  One of her brothers, probably from the way she thinks her mother described it, he developed polio.  And both her mother and father had, excuse me, gone to a lot of places in Europe, a lot of the spas, which were the baths, thinking that that would help him.  And I think he died when she was quite young.  So, she doesn't have a very vivid memory of him.  But she does remember that this brother of hers was ill, and her mother spent a lot of time away from home trying to find a cure for him, which, of course -- there was no cure for polio in those days.  So, those are 46:00some of the stories that she told me and I was finally able to get her to focus on her life when I taped her.  The highlight of it was really the way she managed to escape from Warsaw to Vilna and I have all that on tape and I have that.

CW:  That's great.  Well, we've been talking about your parents' lives and a little bit of your own childhood.  But I just would like to hear a little bit more about your childhood from your perspective.  So, you grew up in Brooklyn.

JES: Yes.

CW:  And can you describe sort of the home as you remember it?

JES: The neighborhood we lived in in Brooklyn was, I would say, forty percent Jewish in those days and quite a number of people were also refugees from the 47:00war.  We came to the United States in April of 1948.  But basically, I remember the '50s and '60s.  For the first six years of school, I went to a Jewish day school called Kinneret.  And the man who was the principal was a man named Yerachmiel Weingarten, who my parents had known in Poland and he had done the similar route escaping through Lithuania, through Japan.  But he managed, he and his family, managed to get a visa to Canada shortly before we arrived in Kobe.  We, of course, never did.  So, I went to the Jewish day school.  In those days, we were surrounded by people, as I was saying before, people like us.  It was a very rich Jewish, Yiddish life.  My family was not religious.  48:00My parents were socialists.  We would all go to the synagogue on Yom Kippur at the little, tiny synagogue that belonged to a very Orthodox friend of theirs.  The philosophy of my family was sort of we don't go to the synagogue but the synagogue we don't go to is Orthodox.  So, once a year, we would go there, but we were not observant at all.  As I said, my parents were socialists.  They actually called themselves Labor Zionists.  They were socialists very much in favor of Israel.  Some socialists in those days were not.  But they were very much in favor of Israel.  But we were very Jewish at home.  We celebrated all the holidays.  Our seder was a Yiddish seder.  Our Haggadah, I think it was 49:00probably the Workmen's Circle Yiddish Haggadah.  I always asked the Four Questions in Yiddish.  My father answered the Four Questions in Yiddish.  Hebrew prayers were said, but at Hanukkah, in addition to one or two pro forma Hebrew songs, the songs we sang were Yiddish Hanukkah songs.  My father thought of himself as a Yiddishist and he really wanted the Yiddish language to continue.  He would have been delighted beyond words at this wonderful place here, the Yiddish Book Center, just delighted beyond words that this place could come to be.  In the '50s, he saw the decline of the -- one Yiddish newspaper 50:00after the other was closing.  So, he saw this happening.  But he was trying very hard not to let it happen in his home.  So, the summer camps that I went to, Boiberik, were Yiddish camps.  And a lot of the songs we sang there were -- we sang English, but it was Yiddish songs.  The name of the bunks, especially -- these Yiddish Jewish camps were not just camps for children.  They had an area where the children were but there was always camp for adults.  They ate separately and they certainly didn't come for the whole summer.  They might often just come for a weekend.  But in Boiberik, there was a place called "under the tree," "untern boym."  And they asked people of note in the Yiddish world to give lectures.  And often, my father would come up there and lecture 51:00untern boym.  And that's actually where, as a young adult, I met my first and ex-husband who was Maurice Schwartz's son at this Camp Boiberik when I went there as an adult with my parents.  But these were the camps we went to.  And I didn't really know that there was another world.  But when I was in seventh and eighth grade -- Kinneret did not go up beyond sixth grade -- I started public school.  It was sort of a rude awakening for me to be in a public school world because everyone around me was not Jewish.  I was actually embarrassed to speak Yiddish in public.  When we were on the subway, I preferred not speaking to speaking Yiddish to my parents.  My sister and I used to speak Yiddish to one another, I think, when we were very young.  But as we grew up, she and I 52:00only spoke, even though she was as fluent in Yiddish as I was -- but as young adults, we only spoke English to one another.  I absolutely did not want my parents telling anyone that I was born in Shanghai.  I thought this was the most embarrassing thing in the world because inevitably, this is what they always said to me: Shanghai?  You don't look Chinese.  And after the thirteenth, fourteenth time I heard someone say that, even in jest, I told my parents, "Do not tell anybody that I was born in China."  Of course, they didn't listen.  They did.  It took a while for me not to be embarrassed by this world that I was living in because I began to see that none of my other school friends had this same world.  And none of my other friends' fathers 53:00worked for a Yiddish newspaper.  And for many years, when teachers or someone would say, Where does your father work?, I would just say, "He's a journalist."  If they pried further, I would say, "Oh, he works for a newspaper in New York."  I didn't want to say he worked for the "Jewish Daily Forward," for "Der Forverts."  I was a teenager and I wanted to be like my friends.  And it was hard for me.  As an adult, of course, I could look back and say it should not have been but I wanted to be like my friends.  Their fathers had normal jobs: an optometrist, someone who worked in a store, who worked for the post office.  So, I had wanted my father to have a more normal job.  I think it was later, of course, that I understood.  Also, when I was a teenager, after I no longer went to Kinneret day school, I would go on Sunday to mitlshul [high 54:00school], which was the Yiddish Jewish high school.  I think at one point, it was run by the Workmen's Circle and then I think it was the Farband and Workmen's Circle.  So, I would go there on Sunday mornings.  Actually, it was pretty much Sunday all day.  And there, the rest of the young people my age whose parents were forcing them to continue their Jewish education.  But looking back, we read wonderful stories in Yiddish.  This is where we read stories by Peretz, by Sholem Aleichem.  We read Yiddish literature.  We spoke in Yiddish.  I probably honed my Yiddish there, because at home, even though my parents always wanted to speak, especially my father, literary Yiddish, correct 55:00Yiddish, it was still the Yiddish you spoke at home.  When you're reading, you get the exposure to a whole different vocabulary, which is what it did for me.  Now, when I speak with my Yiddish club in Reno, Nevada, I lose words.  Where I live in Reno, when I moved there, I found out that there were three or four people who spoke Yiddish.  And we started this Yiddish club and there are about -- between eight and ten of us who meet every other week.  Only five of us are fluent.  The rest understand Yiddish, speak a little bit of Yiddish, want to speak Yiddish.  So, we are speaking and we're translating at the same time.  But I will be saying something and all of a sudden, I don't have the word.  And 56:00we have Weinreich's Yiddish dictionary with us all the time.  And Ethel, who is our doyenne, who is ninety-five years old and speaks fluent, fluent Yiddish always says to me, and my Yiddish name -- in Hebrew, my name is Yehudit, but I was called Yudis.  She'll say to me, "Yudisl, look up that word," with her finger.  "Go find that word in the dictionary."  And once I find the word, Ah, of course I knew that word.  But if you don't speak, you lose it.  And my husband doesn't speak Yiddish.  My children are furious with me that I never spoke Yiddish with them.  So, we sometimes have to search around for a word.  But going to the mitlshul, to that Hebrew high school, the Yiddish high school, really enabled me to hone my Yiddish and to read the more adult Yiddish literature that I was able to do.  Even though I fought my parents tooth and 57:00nail about going, in retrospect it was wonderful. 

CW:  Right.  Looking back on that time, and I guess coming into your adult life, as well, I'm wondering, are there moments or experiences that were particularly formative in your Jewish identity in the home or once you moved away?

JES: I think my true Jewish identity was always with me because this was part of my waking up and my going to bed.  Going out into the secular world when I did at seventh grade, I first realized there was a larger world.  And, as I said, I wanted to be part of that world more.  I grew up in New York City.  I went to 58:00Hunter College.  Again, even though there were certainly large percentages of people who were not Jewish, it was still a very Jewish world and was very easy to keep my Jewish identity.  When we moved to Nevada in 2005, we moved there because our older daughter, Rena, had gone to graduate school there and she and her husband really wanted us to retire out there.  We had gone out many times to see them, we liked the climate, we liked what it was like there, and we decided -- they wanted us to move there, we moved out there.  It's not Jewish.  (laughs) And one of the decisions we made, we joined a synagogue, a Reform temple.  Not because we are religious but because we needed that Jewish 59:00focus.  We needed that center that would enable us to find a Jewish voice in this place, in this area that is certainly not Jewish.  And most of the people we have met at Temple Sinai, where we belong, have joined for similar reasons: that they would like to find a Jewish community in an area that does not have very many Jews.  I never found it difficult to center myself in a Jewish Yiddish identity.  Even when I resented some of the things that my parents did, like speaking to me loudly in Yiddish on the subway, it was still there.  It was still there.  Going to the Yiddish camps, going to Yiddish programs, it was 60:00still there.  So, that really was never hard for me.  But I found that when we moved to Nevada, I really needed to bring it back.  We needed to have it back.  And one of the things that we do in our family is my daughter and her husband have two kids.  And we always do Shabbat dinner at our house.  That's part of keeping that Jewish flame going in our home for our daughter and to keep it in Reno, Nevada, which -- you have to work to be Jewish there. 

CW:  Yeah.  It's an interesting insight about sort of moving out of the city, I guess, in a way.

JES: Yeah.

CW:  How do you go about deciding what traditions, how to shape the traditions 61:00in your own family.  Were there specific songs that you knew from your childhood that you bring into the Shabbat ritual, for example?  Or growing up in a secular world, how do you create these new rituals for your family?

JES: I'll tell you something that we do.  Rather than Shabbat, I'll tell you something that we do at Passover.  In my parents' home, of course, we had this Yiddish Workmen's Circle seder.  When I was, I guess, probably nine or ten years old, my father told me that there was a poem that he wanted me to read in Yiddish at the seder.  And, of course, I did not really want to but it became part of our tradition.  The second night of Passover was the night of the 62:00beginning of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.  And there is a poem by a Yiddish writer named Bunim Heller and I will just say the beginning of it in Yiddish:  "In varshever geto iz itsts khoydesh nisn" -- "In the Warsaw Ghetto is now the month of Nisan."  The poem is four stanzas.  I always read two of them in Yiddish.  When my husband and I started having our own seder, I told him we have to do the poem.  And when we were living still in New Jersey, a family that always came to our seder -- this is even after my parents died -- was a family also of Holocaust survivors, except that the husband and wife had 63:00been in the Warsaw Ghetto.  And their sons also came to our seder.  And this went on until we moved in 2005 to Reno.  So, the poem was always -- I always read it in Yiddish and I translated the poem into English.  And usually, our younger daughter, Lauren, who now lives in Washington, DC, would read it in English.  Some years ago, we had used sort of a Reform Haggadah.  I didn't like the Haggadah.  And I decided to write the Schumer family's Haggadah because it incorporated things from my tradition, from the tradition that I had.  It also incorporated some feminist things.  I had been to women's seders where, instead of the four sons, we read about the four daughters.  So, we 64:00incorporated, as the mother of two daughters, I incorporated part of the feminist Haggadah into our Haggadah.  A lot more English than in other Haggadahs.  But the central part of it that my son-in-law introduces, I always tell why I'm going to be reading it and then I read "In varshever geto."  And Lauren always reads it in English.  And when I do it, my parents are sitting there at the seder.  On Shabbat -- you know, Shabbat, we light the candles.  It's the traditional Shabbat.  One of the things that we do that really we did not do in my parents' home but we learned from friends: on Friday nights, we go 65:00around the table.  And usually, my grandson asks that night -- you ask each person why they're happy tonight.  And you're not allowed to say "why I'm sad."  It has to be "why I'm happy" at Shabbat.  And it focuses a little bit on it being a special night.  We are not religious, so it doesn't have that religious aspect as much as it has the cultural aspect.  And we think one night a week why we are very fortunate people and why we are happy that night.  We used to do that with our children growing up and, of course, now we do it when my son-in-law and daughter and grandchildren and any guest who happens to be at the table -- so, we've added that.  At Hanukkah, we sing "Maoz Tzur [Hebrew: Rock of Ages]," but we immediately go into the Yiddish, "Oy khanike oy khanike, 66:00a yontev a sheyne [Oh Hanukkah, oh Hanukkah, a beautiful holiday]," sing the Yiddish songs.  So, those have come in.  My grandchildren know how to sing those now.  I would say I sang lullabies to my grandchildren.  They're now eight and six.  They still like to hear lullabies and they still like to hear the Yiddish lullabies that I sing them.  That's what they will ask for and they know them.  They don't always understand what they mean.  I translate them but those are their favorite songs that I have to sing.  After the story and the lights go out, I still have to sing that lullaby, those lullabies in Yiddish so they hear that.

CW:  What are the lullabies that you sing, or one of them?

JES: One of them is -- and again, I don't know if it's truly a lullaby, but that's what we sang.  There was, "Yomi, yomi, zing ikh mir a lidele.  Vos dos 67:00meydele vil?  Dos meydele vil a kleydele hobn, darf men geyn dem shnaydern zogn.  'Neyn, mameshi, neyn,' [Yomi, yomi, sing me a little song.  What does the girl want?  The girl wants a dress, we've got to go to the tailor.  'No, Mom, no,']" and my granddaughter knows those words and those are among the songs that she likes me to sing to them.  Sometimes, "Oyfn pripetshik [By the hearth]," but that can take a long time and that's when they want to prolong going to sleep.  But "Oyfn pripetshik, brent a fayerl [A fire burns in the hearth]."  So, they know those songs.  But those are the songs my mother sang to me.  And we sing those at my Yiddish club.  We always end our class with songs.  We have a whole song sheet and we always end with songs and the traditional songs that we hear.  We also, when we have the Holocaust memorial service at the temple, our Yiddish club sings the Hirsch Glik song, "Zog nisht 68:00keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veyg [Never say that you have reached the final road]."  After that, when we finish that, there's not a dry eye.  I mean, that is just such a poignant song because we also sing it in translation for those who don't understand the words.  So, we sing that also.  And that's one of the things I brought in there.  I said, "If we're going to sing at Holocaust memorial service, you have to sing, 'Never say that you have gone the final way.'"

CW:  Yeah.  As we've been talking about these traditions, I wonder what you've observed in your own life and then also in those of your children and 69:00grandchildren in terms of how the Jewish experience has changed in America?

JES: My children did not have the same Yiddish experience, Jewish experience as I did.  My husband didn't either.  My husband was raised in Great Neck.  He had a bar mitzvah, but his home was a secular American Jewish home.  And yet, as the mother, my children did not have that experience because they did not have the parents or the environment that I did.  I think it's really an impossible experience to duplicate in current America.  I didn't speak Yiddish to my children.  I could have, I should have, but I didn't.  I was working.  I can give you tons of excuses.  I didn't.  The Jewish schools that my 70:00children went to were at the Reform synagogue.  It was different.  Their Jewish friends' experiences were different.  Even in the community that I lived in when we were in New Jersey, which has, to this day, a very, very large and increasingly so, Orthodox population.  It's a different experience.  It's a yeshiva, religious, Jewish experience.  They don't read -- most of them don't speak Yiddish.  The ultra-Orthodox, who do speak Yiddish and who do teach Yiddish to their children, I have heard them speak.  The mothers speak a Yinglish.  We were at an airport some years ago and there was obviously a very religious woman sitting opposite me in the lounge, in the departure lounge, 71:00waiting for the plane to take off.  And she had a few children and she was trying to take pictures of them.  And she said to one of the little kids, "Yose, lakh cute."  Now "lakh," of course, is "laugh" in Yiddish and "cute" is English.  She didn't say the Yiddish which could have been "Lakh kheynevdik," which is laugh in a charming way.  "Lakh cute."  And that has kind of become the way I describe the Yiddish that a lot of the Orthodox speak.  It's lakh cute, it's Yinglish.  I've heard talks on the radio by ultra-Orthodox rabbis who speak Yiddish.  I don't understand their Yiddish because so much of it is interspersed with Talmudic biblical expressions which are in Hebrew.  So, that's a different Yiddish, also.  It's not the Yiddish of the books that you 72:00have here.  And sadly, as much as I would love to outwit history, the experience that I had and the Yiddish that I learned and that Jewish experience is very difficult to duplicate.  My father did not want us to use English words if a Yiddish word were available.  And I remember many years ago, we were probably in Boiberik, one of the last times I was there as a young adult with my parents.  And we met a family who were friends of my father's.  Their last name was Schaechter.  And I believe that one of Schaechter's sons-in-laws writes for the "Pakn Treger."  He translates.  He was an ultra-Yiddishist and 73:00his little girl came over to him and asked him in Yiddish if she could have a lollipop.  And she said to him in Yiddish, "Ikh vil [I want] a lollipop."  And he said to her, "Dos iz a lekerl [This is a lollipop]."  It is a -- I guess, I never even heard the Yiddish word.  I figured out "lek" means "to lick."  He gave her the Yiddish word for it.  And my father would do a similar thing.  If there was a possible Yiddish word, he would prefer for us to use that.  That was a very unique Yiddish experience, to have that.  I think it's unduplicatable.  We tried to give our children, our daughters, a cultural Jewish life.  But they grew up in a secular world and their interests -- I 74:00mean, I became an English teacher.  I did not become a Yiddish teacher or a Hebrew school teacher.  Their interests, their university work was in the secular world, not anything to do with Jewish life, although our older daughter, who went to Wesleyan University, took a class in Yiddish literature.  And a few days after the class began, she went to the professor and she mentioned to him that her father had been the city editor -- excuse me, her grandfather had been the city editor of the "Jewish Daily Forward" and that her grandfather had been Maurice Schwartz and he said, "My goodness, you have a lot of yikhes [ancestry].  What a heritage you have!"  But they were raised in a different world than I was and my world is unduplicatable, I believe. 

CW:  So, you did have this Yiddish growing up and it's obviously still 75:00important to you.  I wonder if you think that -- or what your opinion about the place of language, in this case Yiddish language in identity -- what do you think the impact of language is on your identity?

JES: Yiddish was part of my early identity.  It has become increasingly so in recent years, partly because of my being in the Yiddish club and my promoting activities with my Yiddish club.  Occasionally, we'll be -- the Yiddish club will be invited to speak at some kind of a lecture series.  And we take turns talking about Yiddish.  We use Muriel [sic] Weinstein's book -- I think it's 76:00called "Yiddish: A Nation of Words" for some information about the history of Yiddish.  We always show "Outwitting History" as what has been able to happen with Yiddish books.  So, it has become increasingly so.  Language, I know from experience, is very much a part of identity.  I spent the bulk of my teaching years teaching English as a second language.  And for at least twenty of those years, most of my students, because I taught in northern New Jersey, probably twenty-eight of those years, the students were Asian.  In the beginning, mostly Japanese, later Korean and Chinese.  I know that language and identity cannot 77:00be separated.  Teachers would often say to me, Why don't you encourage so-and-so, tell them to speak English at home.  And I would say to them, They cannot speak English at home.  Even if they know how to speak English, you speak your mother tongue at home.  When you come home after a day of American school and English, (exhales) you take a deep breath and want nothing to do with speaking English.  Most of the time, the parents don't speak English.  But even if they do, you want to go home and speak Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, whatever that language is, because language and identity are so intertwined.  And I know how difficult it was for my students to learn English.  And the schools would want them to teach them faster, teach them faster.  You can't teach them faster.  Language, it isn't just acquiring the words.  You need to acquire the nuances of a language.  You need to feel the 78:00language.  You need to be able to sleep in the language.  And as someone who was raised bilingually, there was a time that I remember having dreams in Yiddish.  I think the last week or so, in anticipation of coming here, I definitely believe that there was Yiddish in my dreams, or there was something about Yiddish in my dreams.  But you cannot separate them.  And these last years, especially, as I said, being part of the Yiddish group, I have found myself thinking more about Yiddish and certainly thinking more about my parents.  And any time I sing a Yiddish song, it's there.  It's there for me.

CW:  Yeah.  Well, I have just one other question, a very specific question about the summer camps that you went to because you went to Kinderwelt, 79:00Boiberik, and Hemshekh.

JES: Hemshekh, yes.

CW:  So, curious a little bit about how you ended up involved in all three camps.  And maybe, yeah, just that story, of the camps.

JES: Well, when I first was sent to summer camp, I was sent to Kinderwelt.  And for whatever reasons, probably because of one of the girls who was in my bunk, I didn't like the camp.  She was in my class at school and I did not want to be with her in the summertime.  So, my parents then sent me to Boiberik, which I loved.  I absolutely loved Camp Boiberik.  It was a great camp.  Later, when I was old enough to become a counselor -- in Boiberik, you had to be seventeen.  But in Hemshekh, they would take me at sixteen to be a junior 80:00counselor.  And my father knew the director at Hemshekh, so I ended up going there.  Hemshekh was a very left-leaning camp.  Very left-leaning.  And even though my parents were socialists, they were not as left-leaning as they were at Hemshekh.  So, that was a very, very interesting summer.  But I met some wonderful people there.  When I lived in Teaneck, there was a friend of ours who had also been to Hemshekh and we became reacquainted.  But I'll just tell you a funny thing about Kinderwelt.  I was only there one year.  Three weeks ago, my husband says to me, "You have an email from someone who says he went to camp with you."  And I said, "Who is that?"  Well, someone who I went to camp 81:00with -- now, I was eight years old when I went for one year to Kinderwelt -- saw my profile.  Actually, couldn't get in because he was not a friend of mine but he saw my picture on Facebook.  And he saw my name, Judy Elbaum Schumer.  And I still don't know how he ended up finding my -- he did not use my Facebook email address.  He somehow found another email address for me and sent me a note if I'm the one who went to Kinderwelt.  You know, he went there, also.  And I remembered his name and he sent me a photograph of the two of us from -- we're talking about 1953 --- '53?  Yeah, '53.  So, there he was and he had found me.  And he lives in Westchester and wanted to connect.  So, Facebook is 82:00a very interesting place.  But there he was, so I remembered him from Kinderwelt.  He was actually my first boyfriend.  So, as much as you remember a boyfriend from when you're eight years old, but I did remember his name.  But that's why I ended up at three different Jewish camps. 

CW:  And Boiberik was really --

JES: I loved Boiberik.  It was a terrific camp.  And in your garden, you have in the plaque of the Yiddish writers, you have a plaque for Leibush Lehrer.  And Leibush Lehrer was the director of the camp.  And we used to sing, "Leibush Lehrer talks to us in Yiddish.  Leibush Lehrer tells us what to say.  Leibush Lehrer talks to us in Yiddish, and now we know about the Boiberik way."  And when I go to your garden of writers, there's Leibush Lehrer, and my husband took a photograph of that.  So, I remember that very well.  It was a wonderful camp 83:00and just -- I have wonderful memories there.  Good friends. 

CW:  Yeah.

JES: As a matter of fact, two of the people in my Yiddish club in Reno, they have a son who went to Boiberik.  He was a little bit younger than I was, so I don't really remember him.  But there's, again, the Reno connection to my Yiddish world.

CW:  Well, this has been great.  Do you have any stories that you wanted to be sure to tell today that we haven't gotten to yet?

JES: Well, I think we pretty much got to all of them.  I'll just add a little something that, when the kids ask me, when I do the presentations, they really get into it, some of them, and they ask me, Is there any other story that you 84:00could tell us?  So, I tell them that when we arrived on April 20th to the United States -- now, again, you have to remember this is a story that has been told to me.  I spoke mostly Yiddish at that point.  I was two-and-a-half years old.  My sister spoke English and Yiddish because the school she went to, the Shanghai Jewish school in Shanghai was run as a British school.  And my parents spoke English, my father fluently, my mother some English.  But I spoke mostly Yiddish.  And we arrived in San Francisco and all our worldly possessions were in two large wooden crates that my father had nailed shut when we left Shanghai.  And we were on the pier, waiting for immigration.  And we were 85:00somewhere in the line and as the line was progressing and the immigration officer was coming to see everyone's papers, my father saw that he was making everybody open up their suitcases.  And my father was very concerned because he had nailed the two wooden crates shut.  He had no hammer.  He had nothing that he could pry these crates open with.  And he had said to my mother, "I don't know what I'm going to do.  I can't open them."  And at that point, I was two-and-a-half years old.  I stood up on one of the crates.  And as the official came over towards us, I started singing the one English song that my sister had taught me on the boat.  And I started singing, in English, "God Bless America."  And the story in my family is that the official is looking at 86:00me and everybody around us was very, very quiet.  And he is looking at me and waits till I finish the song, takes my parents' papers, stamps them, and says, "Welcome to America."  So, the kids always clap at that point and many of them put that in their thank you notes to me, I liked the story of how you sang "God Bless America."  So, that was probably one of my first English songs and that got us into America.

CW:  Wonderful story!  I'm wondering, as a closing, if you have advice for -- you can imagine maybe your grandchildren or future generations -- from your life experience?

JES: I think parents always hope that their children, their grandchildren have 87:00memory.  There are lots and lots of memoirs being written now.  It's become very popular in universities.  They have life experience classes where people start writing their memoirs.  I want my children and grandchildren and other people's children and grandchildren to remember the stories.  I have tried to tell my children these stories.  And that's why I feel it's so important to get my parents' stories -- it's really my mother's story -- down on paper and get it for them because I want them to remember their heritage.  They have a very rich heritage.  It's harder to remember it, generations going on.  It's going to be harder for my grandchildren to remember it.  But I will try to teach it to them.  And I hope that they understand it at an earlier age than I understood 88:00it.  (laughs) I didn't appreciate it till I was probably in my twenties or later.  But I want them to know their background, to understand their history, and to remember from whom they came. 

CW:  A sheynem dank [Thank you very much].

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

[END OF INTERVIEW]