MARTIN BRODER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is December 1st, 2011. I am here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Martin Broder, Dr. Martin Broder, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Martin, do I have your permission to record the interview?

MARTIN BRODER:Yes, you do.

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

MB:Well, I'm starting with my father's side. My father's family came from a town of about twenty thousand people in the Lomzhe -- I think the Polish people pronounce it "Łomźa" -- district of northeastern Poland, sort of on the road 1:00from Warsaw toward Bialystok. The town was called (pronounces as "Zem-brov") Zambrów. It's also been pronounced (pronounces as "Zahm-brov") "Zambrów." I've seen both pronunciations. One of my uncles, my father's younger brother Jack, told me that the family had gone to Zambrów from an even smaller town called Czyżew, which I have not been able to locate on a map. But basically, they were from that northeastern section in the Lomzhe province of Poland.

CW:Do you know what their occupation was?

MB:My grandfather, the man whom I'm named after, Yitzhak Meir, was a carver of tombstones. In Yiddish, it's called a "matseyve kritser." He carved the inscriptions in the tombstones. And I think he also made vinegar. He was never a 2:00particularly wealthy man, but he was known for his artistic ability in carving tombstones. And some years ago, when my daughter Jennifer went to Poland and Israel on the March of the Living trip, she accidentally ended up on the road from Warsaw to Bialystok and went through my father's town. They weren't able to stop, but she managed to get a postcard of the cemetery in Zambrów with toppled tombstones. And I looked at that cemetery, the toppled tombstones, and I thought, My grandfather carved some of those tombstones. It was a wonderful feeling. That was my father's family. My mother's family came from a city, a larger city in Poland, due east of Warsaw, almost at the Russian border, called 3:00Biała Podlaska. There are lots of "Białas" in Poland, apparently, so the second name is very important: Biała Podlaska. My understanding is that it was a somewhat larger city than Zambrów, which was about twenty thousand people. My mother and father did not know each other; their families didn't know each other in the Old Country. My mother and father met here in the United States, in New York. So, that's really -- and I don't know where -- how the family -- my mother's maiden name is Weisman. In Polish, it probably would have been spelled W-a-j-s-m-a-n, but they spelled it W-e-i-s-m-a-n. I don't know how the Weisman family got to Biała Podlaska originally or how many generations they had lived in Biała Podlaska.

CW:Did you know anyone from your grandparents' generation growing up?

MB:Well, I knew my grandmother, my father's mother. My grandfather, the man that 4:00I'm named after, died many years before I was born. I'm named after him, so he couldn't have been alive. I knew my grandmother as a wonderful, wonderful woman. As I -- (begins to cry) she used to call me "katshkele." "Katshke" is the Yiddish word for "duck." Why she called me "katshkele," which means "duckling," I have absolutely no idea, 'cause I didn't look like a duck or walk like a duck or quack like a duck, but -- she was a lovely woman. I was eight years old when we moved away from Brooklyn, which is where I knew my grandmother from. So, I didn't really know her terribly well. But every Passover, my father and I would go back from Detroit where we had moved back to Brooklyn for the Passover seder, and I would always see my grandmother, and she would call me, "katshkele, katshkele," with the inflection in her voice. So, that was on my father's side. 5:00On my mother's side, the Weisman side, I knew them very well, because we moved from New York, where my father's family was, to Detroit, where my mother's family was, and that's where I grew up. And my mother's mother, Binya -- her English name was Bertha -- was a very savvy businesswoman, very sharp, very smart. Her husband, my grandfather Gotl -- George -- very different man. It was an arranged marriage. In those days, marriages were arranged. They were really not a terribly compatible couple. But they raised children and lived together and died together. He was a -- worked with his hands. He used to make mattress springs. He was a tinsmith. There wasn't anything that my grandfather Gotl couldn't do with tools and with his hands. He was very much a workman, not an 6:00intellectual type, whereas his wife, my grandmother, was a little bit more of a cerebral thinker. I knew them very well.

CW:Did they ever talk or tell stories of the Old Country?

MB:Not really very, very much. I learned more about the Old Country really from my father's side. My father had this idealized memory of Zambrów in his mind. He talked about Zambrów all the time. There was a -- my father was the middle one of five brothers. And his father, my grandfather, had left Poland to go to the -- to New York, to work and make some money, so that ultimately they could bring their family over. It was a fairly standard sequence. But he was away for many, many years, and my grandmother raised these five boys all by herself. They 7:00were very depende-- they were totally poor. They almost had nothing. My grandmother, again, I think she made cider vinegar or something, and they used to describe going out into the fields around Zambrów where the peasants would leave a little bit of food, a little bit of unharvested crop, for the poor people to come and get food. They were -- things were pretty tight. So, my father and his four brothers would often have meals around in other homes where they would be invited in to help Chana -- my mother's -- my grandmother's Yiddish name was Chana -- Anna. So, the support network in Zambrów was very strong for my father's family. And he remembered Zambrów with great fondness. 8:00He used to talk a little bit about -- a lot, actually -- about sort of life in the Old Country and the way the boys would run around and get into trouble like boys would always do and that sort of stuff. My mother's family didn't talk too much about it.

CW:So, I want to transition a little to your experience growing up. What was Jewish about your family growing up?

MB:Well, what was most Jewish about our family was the Yiddish language. My father had originally started studying to become a rabbi. In his early or mid-teens, he threw that whole tradition over. He did not get smikhe [rabbinical ordination], which is the act of becoming a rabbi. And he became basically an agnostic. Didn't have any use in his own personal life for organized religion; 9:00we never were members of a synagogue when I grew up in Detroit. But the Yiddish language was a totally wonderful thing for him. And he was typical -- and my mother -- typical of this generation of what were called secular Yiddishists. They did not have a religious life of any great consequence, but they were very concerned with social justice, with working conditions for the poor, with all that sort of stuff. And that was grounded in the Yiddish language. So, in our home in Detroit, Yiddish was spoken all the time. My mother and father got multiple Yiddish publications. Every day in the mail, there was something. There was the "Fraye Arbeter Shtime," there was the "Tsukunft," there were the -- the Yiddish "Forward" came in. It was around us all the time. I remember listening on the radio on Sunday morning, there was something called the "Yidishe shtunde," the "Jewish Hour," and they would play Yiddish music. So, the Jewish 10:00part of my identity had nothing to do with religion. We celebrated all the holidays: Hanukkah, Purim, Pesach. We had the seder and this kind of thing. But it wasn't religious at all. But I was surrounded by Yiddish. And although some people my age will tell you, or they have told you, that their parents spoke Yiddish when they didn't want the kids to know what they were saying, that wasn't true in our house, 'cause we knew what they were saying. And if they didn't want us to know, they had to go into another room and talk privately.

CW:They didn't go into Polish or anything?

MB:My dad knew a little bit of -- a few Polish words, typically some swear words and some vulgarities, which he taught to me, which I use occasionally. But they didn't usually lapse into Polish. I don't think they were particularly fluent in Polish. And there was no Russian, no Russian whatsoever. Even though Russia was 11:00not that far, there was no Russian.

CW:You mentioned the holidays. Did you have a favorite holiday growing up?

MB:Yeah, I think my favorite holiday was Passover. And it was for several reasons. I think the major reason was, as I mentioned, when I was eight years old, for a variety of personal and family reasons, my father and mother decided to move away from Brooklyn, where they were part of this big nuclear Broder family with all five boys and their wives living basically in the same area of Borough Park, which at that time was not as religious as it is now. But they moved away to Detroit. It was a big, big move for my dad, because he was very tight with his brothers. And the four other -- my father was number three of five, so there're two older, two younger. And all of the boys described him as 12:00sort of the linchpin of the family. He was the one that was the peacemaker, the mediator, the arbitrator, the leader. He was a very important member of the family. But for other reasons, it was important for him to get away from New York and from Brooklyn. But he missed his mother, and he missed his brothers enormously. So, even though we didn't have very much money growing up in Detroit -- my dad was never a wealthy man -- every Passover, we would take the train from Detroit to New York and go back to New York for the seder, for the Passover seder. And so -- and I looked forward to that enormously. It was interesting -- well, it was my brother and I. My brother's four-and-a-half years younger than I was. So, when I was, let's say, twelve, he was seven-and-a-half. So,my mother had to stay home with my brother. We couldn't afford all of us to go; that was just financially not possible. So, my mother would stay home with my younger brother, and I with my father would get on the train in Detroit, and we'd sit up 13:00on the Wolverine -- it was called the Wolverine. We couldn't afford a Pullman. So, my mother would pack us a big shoebox of the traditional, you know, chicken legs and hard boiled eggs and all this stuff, and we would sleep sitting up in the coach section and pull in -- the train left at eight o'clock in the evening and pulled into Grand Central Station seven o'clock the following morning. I was always very excited about the whole thing. And so, I have a lot of very fond memories of getting together with my grandmother and my uncles around the seder table. The other reason it was important was that my grandfather, the man after whom I'm named, died actually as a relatively young man. He had diabetes, and he had complications of diabetes, and at that time there was no insulin, so it was a very tough disease. My grandmother married again, much later in life. And she 14:00married the man that she had originally wanted to marry in Poland, in the Old Country. When she was a younger woman, there was this man named Zalman. And Zalman was a scholar and a -- intellectual. But there was some problem with the dowry. There wasn't enough of a dowry or something. But for economic reasons, it was not possible for my grandmother to marry the man that she really loved. She married another man, Yitzhak Meir, my grandfather. He died. They hooked up again when my grandmother was in her sixties, in Brooklyn, and a widow. Zalman was a widower. And they hooked up again, and they got married. Well, Zalman was a very religious man. He was a mashgiach. He was the one that koshered the meat in the synagogue, and he was a -- the shammes in the synagogue. And so, when we had the seder, and he was -- led the seder, we went through the hagode [the book of 15:00readings for the Passover seder] from the beginning to the end. We didn't skip a section. It was my only true immersion in that kind of -- and there was a lot of Hebrew. And we would all be really hungry and say, Oh, zeyde [grandfather], can't we eat, can't we eat? "No, no, we're gonna finish the whole seder." But my memories -- to get back to your original question -- of that particular holiday are really strong. So, for me, Passover was the time when the whole family got together. So, that's my favorite holiday.

CW:And one of your few exposures, perhaps, to the religious side of --

MB:Yeah. Yeah.

CW:-- Judaism?

MB:Well, no, Passover's not a religious holiday. But the way my grandfather conducted it was very Orthodox and very conventional. And he was gonna -- we were gonna tell the story like we were commanded to tell the story.

CW:Do you have memories of -- or I guess the question is, that Detroit and 16:00Brooklyn are -- it must have been a big move for you as well.

MB:Big move.

CW:What did you notice that was different as a child between these two worlds or Jewish communities?

MB:Well, some things were similar, some things were different. What was different was -- I mean, we moved into a Jewish neighborhood in Detroit. Most of the people on the block were Jews. Most of the kids that I went to school with were Jews. The concentration and the density of the Jewish life was somewhat less than in New York, which was really dense. But I still had Jewish neighbors. I still heard the Yiddish language. So, that was -- as I say, what was different was sort of the richness and the density of the Jewish life. What was better, actually, was that we actually didn't have to live in an apartment. In Brooklyn 17:00we moved from one apartment to another apartment, had little apartments. Here, we actually had a three-family -- we were in the top floor of a three-family flat. We had a little bit more room. And my father could get a car. We never had a car in New York. So, life actually for my brother and me was better growing up in Detroit because we had more opportunities. We could go places and do things. My parents got very involved in the secular part of Yiddish life as soon as we moved. My mother's sister, older sister, Sarah, was active in something called the Sholem Aleichem Institute, which had a Yiddish school after regular school. So, I started going to the Sholem Aleichem Institute, I think, four afternoons a week, studying the Yiddish language and history and literature and grammar and all that stuff. So, I was always sort of semi-fluent in the Yiddish language. We 18:00then switched for a variety of reasons a couple of years later. My parents became very active in the Workmen's Circle, the Arbeter Ring. And they had a school. So, we switched from the Sholem -- my brother and I switched from the Sholem Aleichem Institute school to the Workmen's Circle school, and I spent the rest of my elementary school, intermediate school, and high school days going to the Workmen's Circle school afterward. And again, the Workmen's Circle school celebrated all the holidays. We had Hanukkah parties. We had Purim parties. We had the seder. The Workmen's Circle had something called a third seder, which was a community seder. The first and second seder, you were supposed to celebrate in your own home. The Workmen's Circle sponsored a community seder that they called it the third seder. It was always on a Sunday. And it was concerned more with sort of the universal themes of Passover: sort of the liberation from bondage and social justice and freedom and all the things that 19:00the socialist movement, which was what the Workmen's Circle was, was sort of concerned with.

CW:Who were your teachers in these schools, the Yiddish schools? Were they from Europe or --

MB:That's a really good question. The teachers -- I remember them very clearly. We called them khaver [comrade] something. "Khaver" is the Hebrew word for "friend," but -- so you'd -- the convention was you called them Khaver Ben Dor, Khaver Kamai, Khaver Har, whatever their last names were. A couple of them I think were in fact career Yiddish teachers; in other words, they made their living teaching in Yiddish schools. But some of them, I think, had other jobs, and they were just sort of part-time work as Yiddish teachers. They were all men in my generation. There were no women. I remember them as sort of intellectual 20:00types, serious types. One of them, a tall man -- Ben Dor was his name. "Ben Dor" -- "Son of a Generation." It was a pen name. It wasn't his real name. I never knew what his real name was. But he went by the name of Ben Dor. I remember him as having sort of a somber mien, and they would -- (laughs) one of my father's favorite expressions in Yiddish that had to do with education in general -- he would say, "Du darftst zey araynhakn in kop -- you have to bang it into their heads." When I was raising my kids, he wanted me to make sure that I was banging into their heads whatever they needed to get for education. He meant it in a nice way. "M'darf zey araynhakn in kop." Well, Ben Dor and all those guys, they -- araynhakt it in my kop, you know? But it was a very important part of my life.

CW:And -- I mean, you mentioned the subjects that you were learning, but did you 21:00have a sense -- or maybe looking back -- of what the -- what it was that they were trying to araynhak in your kop?

MB:I think they were trying to get me to understand the history of the Jews, the richness of the cultural heritage and their literary heritage and the philosophical heritage of the Jews. I mean, we read books -- the history book was written by Dubnow. Shimon Dubnow was one of the famous historians. I don't remember the names of some of the other authors of some of the books. But they -- this was serious stuff. They were trying to instill, I think, without consciously talking about it, a sense of pride in our heritage. Understanding, just -- understanding what the holidays were all about, and then understanding who the great people were in Yiddish literature. We read Sholem Aleichem. We read Peretz, and we read Mendele. So, I think that's really what they were 22:00trying to do. There was never any intention that I would become a rabbi or make a career out of this Yiddish stuff. From a -- even when I was a little kid, I was very -- I knew I wanted to be a doctor. That's a whole other part of my life. So, there wasn't any (UNCLEAR). But it was serious stuff. We were Jews, and we needed to know where we came from and all that stuff.

CW:For you personally, was there a particular experience that was formative for your own Jewish identity?

MB:No. There wasn't any single one. I think it was the cumulative expectation and participation that there was always gonna be room in my English life for a whole other chunk, which was my Yiddish life. So, even when I was in college --- I lived at home, I went to Wayne State University in Detroit, and I lived at 23:00home and took the same bus to college that I took to high school, only I got off a couple of stops earlier. Even then, I went into what was called the mitlshul [high school], after you finished the regular school. And there was always -- that was Sunday morning, from ten o'clock till one o'clock. So, there was always this cumulative exposure. And then, of course, in my own -- watching my mother and father, they were very, very active members of the Workmen's Circle. There was a Branch 56. They were members. They had a bunch of very wonderful friends, people of their own generation that they palled around with, and Yiddish was the language that they all spoke. And my brother and I watched them acting out in their own community involvement what their ideals were. And they were all grounded in this Workmen's Circle culture. So, to get back to your original question, there was no one single thing. It was just a cumulative immersion into 24:00this Yiddishist environment.

CW:And can you articulate the values that you thought your parents were modeling?

MB:Yeah. Again, they didn't sit down with me and have a discussion about values, but what I saw them acting out in their life was making the world a better place. Getting involved in the community, giving back. And it was a mixture of Yiddish-type involvement with the Workmen's Circle and all the other activities, and just generally always espousing the view of the lower middle class, the upper lower class: economic aspiration, freedom from religious persecution, et cetera. I think those were the values that my brother and I both had, you know, araynhakn in kop. That's what they banged into our heads. But they didn't do it 25:00in an overt way; they did it simply by being who they were.

CW:So, was Yiddish the language that you spoke in the home, too?

MB:No, actually, my brother and I spoke mostly English. We understood Yiddish fluently. I didn't get really involved in speaking Yiddish as much as I could have until actually I was about seventeen. And that was another interesting experience. I was a counselor in a camp run by the Workmen's Circle of Cleveland. And I started when I was fifteen by lying about my age. They thought I was seventeen. The third summer, when I truly was seventeen, they got a new camp director. And he had escaped the Holocaust by a variety of ways. But he spoke very little English. He spoke wonderful Yiddish. And his last name was also Wajsman, by the way. W-a-j-s-m-a-n. He kept the original spelling. And I 26:00realized that if I was gonna really communicate with him -- so I was the counselor, and he was the camp director. So -- and I was the head counselor, actually. So, I learned sort of haltingly at first, but more fluency, to speak Yiddish to him. And that's where I really learned the difference between "ar" and "er," the guttural versus, you know, (pronounces with hard "r") "m'darf" rather than (pronounces with soft "r") "m'darf," that kind of stuff. I was a little self-conscious about that at first. It sounded a little funny. Now that's the way I speak.

CW:I'd love to hear a little more about -- this is Camp Vladek?

MB:Vladek.

CW:Vladek?

MB:Camp Vladek. There was a very famous man that I never knew, but I knew him by name, named Baruch Charney Vladeck. B.C. Vladeck. As a matter of fact, his son, I think, or maybe it's his grandson, is a very well-known hospital activist, 27:00Bruce Vladeck, in the New York hospital system. I don't know why I know that, but I know that. Anyway, the Workmen's Circle in Cleveland -- Detroit was four hours by Cleveland by car. The reason they got involved was the man that was the director of the Workmen's Circle school in Detroit, a man named Segal, was asked to be the first camp director when the camp in Cleveland opened. And I was a student at the Workmen's Circle school in Detroit. And Segal took me along as kind of a junior counselor. He told them I was seventeen. I was fifteen. Anyway, that camp was named after Baruch Charney Vladeck. And I remember walking into the camp office, and there was this picture of this man named B.C., Baruch Charney Vladeck. C-h-a-r-n-e-y was his middle name. I don't know what he did; I don't know why he was so well thought of in the Jewish left-wing socialist 28:00movement, but that was -- the camp was named after him.

CW:And you had previously been to -- a camper at a different --

MB:Yeah.

CW:-- camp?

MB:When I was a kid growing up in Detroit, my parents sent my brother and me to the -- a camp in South Haven, Michigan, that was run by the Chicago Workmen's Circle. That was called Camp Kinderland. "Child Land." It was on the shore of Lake Michigan. And they had an eight-week season, July and August. My folks could only afford two weeks, so my brother and I -- they would bundle us in the car, and we'd drive from Detroit to South Haven. It was a lot of fun. And that was my -- and I was a camper there starting at about age eight or nine or something. You'd go out for -- it was overnight camp. It was a big deal. A lot of fun. All the stuff that you do with overnight camps, you know, arts and crafts and sports and swimming and all that sort of stuff. And that's how I got involved with the Yiddish camp sort of stuff.

CW:Well, you mentioned that you had to learn Yiddish to work at the other camp, eventually. But in these two camps, was Yiddish a --

MB:Oh, it was --

CW:-- big component of --

MB:Yeah. Yeah. We gave programs in Yiddish. I didn't have to learn Yiddish. I had to get more fluent in speaking Yiddish. I could always read it and that sort of stuff, but I -- because my parents spoke both Yiddish and English. So, it wasn't necessary for us to -- my brother and me -- to speak to my parents in Yiddish to get them to understand. My father was a businessman, and my mother stayed home -- she was a housewife. In those days, women usually didn't work unless they were widows. But the camp life was always in Yiddish. We would put on programs in Yiddish. The song sheets were in Yiddish. There were -- it was a lot of Yiddish.

CW:I know that music is an important part of your life. What was the music 30:00around growing up?

MB:Well, there were two kinds of music in our house: regular classical music of Western civilization, and Yiddish music. My dad loved music. He and his brothers actually had a little amateur band in Brooklyn when they were all living together in Brooklyn. My father and my uncle Jack played the saxophone, and one of them played the drums, and one of them played the piano, and that sort of stuff. And they used to volunteer to play at people's bar mitzvahs and stuff. They never charged. They were a very musical family. There were cantors also, I was remembering this, on my father's side -- on my father's maternal side, there was a tradition of cantorial participation. And so, when I was growing up in Detroit, my father loved classical music, and we had -- he took me to concerts 31:00and symphonies. But also, there was all of the Yiddish songs associated with the holidays. So, there were Hanukkah songs. (sings) "Oy khanike oy khanike, a yontev a sheyne [Oh Hanukkah, oh Hanukkah, a beautiful holiday]," you know, that sort of stuff. And there were Passover songs and Purim songs. And so, that was always a part of it. And my father loved a particular Yiddish singer named Sidor Belarsky. And if you haven't heard anything by Belarsky, you oughta listen to Belarsky. Had this wonderful resonant basso profundo kind of -- he actually sang at the Met, too. I discovered he sang one particular role in Beethoven's "Fidelio." And I think I have a recording somewhere with Belarsky singing -- "Rocco the Jailer"? I don't remember exactly what it is. So, the music in our house was the music of the holidays. And often, the Arbeter Ring school, the Workmen's Circle school, would put out a little sort of pamphlet with all the 32:00Yiddish songs in them. Pesach songs and Purim songs and Hanukkah songs. If I could get my hands on one of those pamphlets, I'd love it because all the words are there. They're all in Yiddish. And we used to sing all those songs when we had the family seder. My brother and I would get out -- we'd break out these booklets, and we'd sing and sing and sing and sing. All in Yiddish. A lot of fun. And when my brother and I -- he lives in Florida now, but when we ever have the opportunity to be together at a holiday, he and I always end up singing the old songs from the Arbeter Ring songbooks.

CW:I'd like to fast-forward a little bit to talking about your adult life. Can you just give me a snapshot of your career and familial situation today?

MB:Sure. Well, my career has been in medicine for my entire life. I always knew 33:00when I -- from the time -- my earliest conscious memory was wanting to be a doctor. I have really no idea why it started that way, but it was. So, as I was growing up in Detroit, it was all aimed toward that career. My parents were not particularly -- had no -- very little formal education. My mother graduated from high school when she was fifty-nine. We all went to her ceremony, and she walked -- got her diploma, and we were all applauding. It was wonderful. My father, when he came over as a young man, everybody went to work, so he never had any formal schooling. So, they were always very interested in educating their children. My brother went into (UNCLEAR) the engineering. He ended up teaching, and now he's in business. I ended up in medicine. So, my entire career has been involved with medicine, mostly in the academic world of medicine. I've never 34:00been in conventional private practice like most of my buddies who grew up with me and also went to medical school. So, I've always ended up teaching or being on medical school faculties and having kind of an institutional and academic life. But that's been my entire career.

CW:So, taking this rich Yiddish background that you grew up in and then sort of setting out on your own with your own family eventually, how did you bring -- how did you connect to that culture into your own family?

MB:With some difficulty. It's not easy. My wife had no real understanding in her own life in Providence, Rhode Island. There was no similar Yiddish background. Her parents were synagogue-goers, and they lived a very good Jewish life, but 35:00the Yiddish language was not part of all this, and I think she learned a lot by getting some of this rubbing off from me. But as we raised our children, we realized that it was gonna be very difficult for us because of my wife's different background from mine to replicate that same Yiddish experience. So, we chose to give our children a Jewish identity by putting them into a synagogue setting. And when we were -- our first child was born in Cleveland -- when she came into school age, we went to Park Synagogue, which is a big synagogue and had a school and that sort of stuff. So, it's been difficult for me to translate everything that I know and everything that influences me into the way my children live their own life. Although they know very clearly the value that I attach to everything that I -- all the Yiddish background. And they respect it, 36:00and they're interested in it. But their lives are going their own ways. But we celebrate all the holidays. And the kids pick up a smattering of Yiddish words here and there. I'm sure you've heard the same kind of story from a lot of other people. From one generation to another, it's really very hard. As I look at the neighborhood that I grew up in in Brooklyn, which is Borough Park, which is now completely Orthodox, really Orthodox -- in some cases ultra-Orthodox -- that's where the Yiddish-speaking people of my generation have been able to pass along the language specifically to their kids, 'cause that's a world unto itself. It's a very different culture. Hard to do that in the outside secular world. So, the best that we can do is the best that we can do.

CW:Do you have a favorite holiday now?

MB:Still Passover. It's my favorite. That's the one where we all basically have gotten together, and everybody tries to come. Recently, it's been interesting. We sometimes look around the table -- there are more non-Jews than Jews at our tables because some of my kids have married non-Jews -- wonderful, wonderful people. Their families come; we invite everybody. And of course, there's a universality to the story that makes sense to both Christians and Jews. So, Passover's still my favorite holiday. And of course, there's all the traditional foods that you associate with our holidays. You know, the latkes for Hanukkah and the homentashn [triangular Purim pastry] for Purim, and for Passover there seems to be this unending supply of chicken soup and gefilte fish and matzah and all that stuff. My mother was a really good cook. My wife is in some ways even better than her, although my mother would not be offended if I said that 'cause 38:00she always loved my wife, but -- so Passover still.

CW:And you have been involved in music also, in choral groups. I heard tell of a story that you once auditioned with Yiddish folk songs?

MB:Oh yeah, that's a great story. I'm glad you heard about it already. I was a first-year resident at the University of Chicago. And in college, I had sung at Wayne State University in the chorus, the Wayne State University Chorus. As far as I could tell, the only prerequisite for getting into that chorus is that you had to have a beating heart. There was no real musical talent, but if you tried out for it and you could sort of sing anything, they got you in the chorus. A 39:00big chorus. And I loved singing with other people. Well, when I was an intern in Cleveland, life was so hectic there was no time for music. I got to be -- then I moved to Chicago for my first year of residency, and I missed music. A friend of mine one night at a party encouraged me to try out for the Chicago Symphony Chorus. And I said, "Nah, I'm not that good; I can't get in." But my friend was persistent and sort of almost shamed me into doing this. He had a very good voice. So, I called up and I made an appointment for an audition to the Chicago Symphony Chorus, and they said that I should bring some music and sing something for them. I didn't know what to do. I had no music. So, I decided I would sing one of the choral parts from the Bach B Minor Mass. And I had a recording of it, 40:00I put it on my phonograph, and I rehearsed it, and then I decided, This is nuts. I can't -- this is totally presumptuous on my part. So, I figured, What the hell. I'll sing what I know. So, I didn't have any music. So, I showed up at the audition. The choral director was a brilliant, talented woman named Margaret Hillis, who herself had been trained by Robert Shaw. And she had a pianist, an accompanist. It was some big building out on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. And I showed up, and I said, "You know, I don't have any music, I don't know what to do, but I know Yiddish folk songs, and I will sing you a Yiddish folk--" And I'm thinking to myself, Boy, this is really (laughs) -- but what the hell? Well, she seemed quite interested. So, I sang "Tumbalalaika [Play the balalaika]." (sings) "Shteyt a bokher, shteyt un trakht/Trakht un trakht a 41:00gantse nakht [A young man stands, stands and thinks/Thinks and thinks the whole night long]." Anyway, I sang the song. I knew all the verses. The pianist didn't have any -- I had no music, so she sat there and listened. Margaret Hillis sat there and listened. And to my utter astonishment, she accepted me into the chorus. Well, I was overwhelmed. There were no cell phones at the time. I was single; I didn't have any wife to tell, so I wanted to go and call my parents to tell them. So, I had to go find a payphone somewhere in Chica-- on Michigan Avenue somewhere to call my mother and father in Detroit, and I said, "Do you know what just happened? I just sang 'Tumbalalaika' for the Chi-- and I got into the Chicago Symphony Chorus." That was probably one of the best things I ever did, 'cause it got me involved in more music-making. I ended up in the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus when I moved back to Cleveland, and it was -- was and is a wonderful part of my life. But I've never forgotten that experience. I think to 42:00myself, What chutzpah. God, Broder, that was real nerve. The interesting thing is many, many years later after I moved away from Chicago -- I was in the Chicago Symphony Chorus for one year. Many, many years later, Margaret Hillis came to Western Massachusetts to do something with a chorus at one of the summer festivals. And after the performance, my wife and I went back to see her. She looked at me, and she said, "Hi, Marty, how are you?" She remembered me after all those years. I was just one of two hundred people in the Chicago Symphony Chorus, but maybe -- I guess maybe the fact that I had the temerity to sing an unaccompanied Yiddish folk song to this woman maybe must have stuck in her mind. It was a wonderful experience. You sing what you know.

CW:I also heard that you had a Yiddish bar mitzvah?

MB:Yes. That was --

CW:Can you explain that?

MB:-- that was very interesting. My mother and father, as I said, were not religious. I did not belong to a synagogue. We did not pay dues or go to services. But I got to be thirteen. So, that's a transition from being a kid to being a grownup. And this was 1948 -- '49. So, my parents working with the Arbeter Ring school devised a kind of the celebration of the fact that I was thirteen. And we put on a program. We invited all of our friends. We were in -- we used the Workmen's Circle building, rent for a Sunday morning or something. And we didn't have a lot of money, so this was not -- you know, we weren't gonna spend thousands of dollars on a typical bar mitzvah. And we gave a program of 44:00Yiddish reading and history, and I got up and gave a speech in Yiddish about the importance of all this sort of stuff and what it meant to me in my life, and my aunt Sarah stood up and gave some sort of reminiscences of me growing up, all in Yiddish. And from a religious point of view, it was totally meaningless. From a character, transitional point of view, it was a very important part of my -- it actually got written up in the "Forverts." I'm sorry I never saved that issue. But somewhere in the "Forwards," Yiddish "Forwards," in 1949, in June, there was a story about this unusual occurrence in Detroit of a boy who had a Yiddish bar mitzvah. I mean, whenever I tell it to rabbis, of course, they laugh, you know, This is nuts. But it was a very interesting experience for me. All my friends, my classmates in the Yiddish school, were there. And it was -- marked the occasion of my transitioning from being a kid to being an adult. I don't think 45:00anybody's ever done it since. (laughs) I didn't think I was creating a precedent at that point. But it was meaningful to my mother and father; it was meaningful to me. We served coffee and cake or something. There was no band. There was no -- none of that sort of stuff. It was done totally homegrown, heymish [familiar] kind of a thing, and it meant a great deal to my parents and to me. And I think that's probably gonna be the only bar mitzvah I'm ever gonna have in my life. 'Cause I'm not gonna go through the whole business now. My son did; my kids had -- my daughters had bat mitzvahs -- that's fine. That was their life; this was my life.

CW:So, for you personally after joining a synagogue and having maybe less regular contact with the Yiddish culture, how have you balanced the religious aspects and cultural aspects in your own Jewish identity?

MB:It's been a challenge for me. You know, I have no organized belief in God. But I decided that we would join a synagogue. And what I discovered in the prayer book was not any revelation about my relationship to God, but I discovered a lot of very wise thoughts about how one lives one's life. So, when I go to the synagogue, I sort of put aside all the business about thanking God and praying to God and praising God, 'cause to me, I can't make any internal emotional connection with that. But in the prayer stuff, in the Psalms, in everything that's in the prayer book, there's some pretty smart stuff. I remember once being asked by my synagogue in Longmeadow, in Springfield, the Temple Beth El, to talk about sort of my journey, the journey that I made from 47:00being a nonbeliever to at least being a synagogue member. And I remember saying to the group, "You know, whoever wrote that stuff had a yidishe kop [Jewish mind]." I don't know -- you've heard the expression, a "yidishe kop"? You know, it's kind of a chauvinistic expression, but, Jewish head. Some pretty smart stuff in that book. So, as a guide to living, there's a lot in the prayer book: how one treats other people, how one -- the values one has, what's important in life and what's not important in life. It's not important to me to praise God. I've often wondered why God is so insecure that He needs all this constant reassurance about how important He is in our lives. Although I understand there's another reason for doing that. But in the prayer book and in the other peripheral parts of life in a synagogue, there is the binding to a community. There is the sense of a lot of important stuff about how one lives a decent, 48:00valuable, honorable life, how one treats other people, what is the legacy one leaves behind. There's some important insights in there. So, I put up with all the other religious part of it, which, as I say, I have trouble relating to because there's all this other stuff in there that is important. My favorite, actually, although it's not part of the religious body of what's in the prayer book, is "Pirkei Avot." I don't know if you know -- "The Sayings of the Fathers." "Pirkei Avot." I commend that to you to read because it's -- there are some wonderful, wonderful sort of guides to living (UNCLEAR). And so, I even went through a phase in my life when I said, Every day, I'm gonna read one of those bits in there. It's a very interesting, thoughtful, outwardly directed set of comments. It's not part of the prayer service, but sections from "Pirkei 49:00Avot" are often put in the prayer book.

CW:How have you kept up your Yiddish over the years?

MB:Well, it's not been easy. It's not been easy. I still listen to a lot of Yiddish music. The long-playing records are long since gone, so I buy CDs. You can get Sidor Bela-- I have a huge collection of CDs of everything from klezmer to -- you know, whatever. And that's basically the way -- one of the ways in which I sort of -- I connect back through music. The other thing is that every week I get the English "Forward," and every week I get the Yiddish "Forward." And the English "Forward" is quite a wonderful newspaper, from my point of view, with some stuff in it that doesn't appear anywhere else. But every week, I do a little bit of reading in the Yiddish "Forward," just to keep my visual skills up 50:00and that sort of stuff. And the other thing is that I find as I grow older, every once in a while, I find myself thinking in Yiddish. Now, I don't know whether you can relate to that, because I know Yiddish was not your first language. But in a sense, Yiddish wasn't really my first language; English was, although I was always immersed with -- but I still find myself occasionally thinking in Yiddish in some kind of funny way. Little phrases or -- for example, I was just thinking -- I read something that started off, "What can be bad about --" whatever. And I realized that sometimes when I'm confronted with something, I'll say to myself, Vos keyn zayn shlekht? Which is the Yiddish, exactly: "What could be bad?" But I don't think about it in English; I think about it in 51:00Yiddish. So, obviously there's some primitive stuff in my head that keeps coming out. Sometimes I even have dreamt in Yiddish, which I find totally bizarre. But I do. But I think right now, of all the things that keep linking me to Yiddish, it's probably more the music than it is anything else.

CW:Do you still listen to Sidor Belarsky sometimes?

MB:Oh, I love Belarsky. Oh. And some of those songs -- mm. They are so -- I can remember my father's funeral. I mean, we played one of his favorite Sidor Belarsky Yiddish songs. The rabbi asked me -- we were preparing for the funeral and all that sort of stuff -- what we wanted, and I pointed out this "Di velt nemt mikh -- the world takes me around -- mit shtekhike hent" -- with shtekhike -- with talons, with sharp-clawed hands. "Ikh heyb zikh oyf vider, un shpanevet 52:00[I start again, and walk] --" In other words, to me, it was the story of my parents' lives. Life was tough for them. And they would have hardships. But in this song, "Ikh heyb zikh oyf vider, un shpanevet vayter [I start again, and walk again]." Pick up. Keep going. Terrific. Terrific.

CW:Do you have other -- is there a particular Yiddish song that is very meaningful to you and perhaps attached to a specific memory or person in your life?

MB:Well, the one that I just sang you a bit of. I don't even know if I remember the title of the song, but it starts, "Di velt nemt mikh arum mit shtekhike hent." I don't even know the name of the song, but I'm sure Belarsky -- it was one of Belarsky's songs. And that one was always very meaningful for me because 53:00it has a sense of -- even though it talks about all the bad things that can happen in life, it ends up, "Ikh heyb zikh oyf vider, un shpanevet vayter." So, one of my father's favorite expressions was, "Let's hope." My father was always talking about, Let's hope. Let's think forward. Let's hope for the best. And so, to me, I remember that song as encapsulating the difficult early part of my parents' lives in the Old Country with no money and no food and being chased by the Germans over to Russia and then going back and all that sort of stuff. But they ended up picking themselves up and moving forward and making a life for themselves and meeting and marrying and having kids and living a good life and dying at a decent age, with seeing their kids and their grandchildren. So, to 54:00me, that's a very powerful song. Of course, (laughs) the "Tumbalalaika" song always has this memory of my khutspedik [bold] entrée into the world of singing in a decent symphony chorus. That's a terrific song. I'll never forget that one. Yeah. So, maybe those. And then, all the songs relating to the holidays. Especially, again, Passover. (sings) "Shvimt dos kestl oyfn taykh [The little basket floats down the river]." It's Moses in the bulrushes kind of stuff. (sings) "Oyfn groysn [On the big] --" You can't even find those songs anymore anywhere. I think that's why I was hoping I could find one of these old Workmen's Circle songbooks. My God, they were wonderful. And then, the typical Hanukkah songs. So, those are the songs that still mean a lot to me. Holiday songs. And it was very interesting; my father died in his mid-eighties. And at 55:00the end of his life, he was seriously demented with Alzheimer's disease. It was sort of typical sad, sad story. Combination of Parkinson's disease complicated later by Alzheimer's disease. It's a very common combination. And at the very end of his life, he was totally incommunicado, like a lot of patients who are seriously demented. You just don't know where they are anymore. They don't connect with the real world. He didn't know who I was, didn't know anything. But I remember getting a Sony Walkman with a cassette tape of Yiddish songs when my father was in the nursing home, putting the headphones around his head, plugging it in, turning on these Yiddish songs of all the holidays. And it was as if a little film lifted over his eyes -- from his eyes. He got an expression -- and 56:00people with Parkinson's disease have almost no facial expression. The typical word in the medical books is "mask-like." And that was my dad. But when he heard those songs, the film lifted from his eyes; he bobbed his head a little bit. 'Cause he could remember those songs. That got back to a very primitive part of his head. So, the music is a very, very powerful thing. It takes you way back to when you were a kid. And that's apparently what it did. I was so glad I did that, because that was his only connection with life, was the music from when he was a little kid. And I never forgot that. So, when I had patients who were in that kind of situation, I would always remember my father's experience and try to connect them with music, some kind of music that they would remember. They were Catholic; it could be the Catholic Mass. Didn't make any difference. It's what they remembered when they were kids.

CW:Wow. So, people have been talking about sort of this Yiddish cultural revival in the last few decades. What is your take on that or experience of that, if any?

MB:Well, it's a very interesting phenomenon. My father and mother toward the ends of their li-- even though they were passionately committed to the Workmen's Circle, very involved with everything Yiddish, they were sort of gloomy about the -- what was the prognosis? What was the future of the Yiddish language? "A teyter shprakh -- it's a dead language." 'Cause my father was a very practical, realistic guy. He said, "If nobody's gonna talk it, speak it, then it's just gonna go away." And of course, that's not happening, at least in the -- to the degree that anybody ever thought. 'Cause Lansky came along, and a lot of -- he 58:00must have tapped into something. And so, there are a lot of people now that are studying the language, looking at the language. It's never gonna be like it was. I mean, you don't kill six million speakers of a language and expect everything else to go on the way it was. So, I think that elevating it to -- elevating the discourse so it's now academically acceptable -- there are courses, there are people who study it, people who speak it, people who sing it -- instead of the slide being like this, maybe it'll be like this, or maybe even stabilize at some steady state. In the ultra-Orthodox community of Yiddish-speaking people -- it's concentrated mostly in New York, but there're probably other communities -- 59:00that's a different story. And that will be another way to make sure that the language continues in some fashion. So, I've been enormously pleased with the fact that people like you are now studying a language that meant a huge amount to me and speaking it and -- but I'm not kidding myself. You can ask yourself, when you all have children, what will their connection be? And that's an individual challenge for any of us to sort of do. I'm enormously -- I think it's an enormously expressive language. There are things that you can say in Yiddish that you can't say in any other language -- maybe. But I think the systematization of it, the salvaging the literature, making it digital so it's not gonna disappear, that kind of stuff -- enormously important. And if my father were alive -- my father passed away in 1989. And Lansky had just started 60:00his work. My mother and father's names are here someplace, 'cause my brother and I gave some money, and we always give money. Lansky writes these long letters, and he always -- we always give him money. It's amazing. So, I think my father would be somewhat pleasantly surprised to see that his gloomy prognosis maybe ain't quite so bad.

CW:Since you mentioned the Holocaust, I'm wondering -- being in these Yiddish schools during the war period, did that have an effect on your education? How much were you aware of what was going on in Europe?

MB:Oh, that's a really good question. In the late '40s and '50s, which is what we're talking about now, there was much less known or talked about about the 61:00Holocaust. So, in the either formal or hidden or informal curriculum of the schools, we never -- the Holocaust was a very peripheral issue. People knew it existed, but the true extent of everything that happened from 1933 to 1945, that wasn't known. So, that was not a -- in my upbringing, there was not a whole lot of -- there were no Holocaust studies. Most of the major books about the Holocaust had yet to be written. They came later, in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Back then, the Holocaust was not a major, formative influence, except that we knew that terrible things had happened in Europe. The extent of it was not clear. I was vaguely aware of -- I mean, my father could -- told me, to the day 62:00-- I think it was August 17th, 1942, when the Germans came into his town, Zambrów, and killed everybody. We have a book -- I have two books in my library, both in Yiddish, one the history of Biała Podlaska, written in Yiddish, the other the history of Zambrów. So, there has been enormous study. But all of that happened later, not right after the war, but maybe a decade or so later.

CW:Were there social movements or historical events that had a big impact on you, that stand out as you look back?

MB:No, I remember the founding of the State of Israel. I remember the day that we all celebrated in Detroit. Like a lot of people of their generation, my parents were not ardent Zionists. They supported Israel, but not to the extent, 63:00perhaps, that others, more religious people, did. So, I remember that as an event. And my parents visited Israel several times. So did I. But other than that, I can't think of anything else. I was totally immersed in my studies. I was always sort of goal-directed to get to pre-med and medical school and all that other stuff. And a lot of my interest in the Holocaust happened much later. I've read now an enormous amount about the history of World War II in general. I'm still reading about the history of World War I, which I'll -- and you can make the case that World War II was just a continuation of World War I, for a variety of historical reasons. So, I've been very interested in finding out more about what really happened. But all of that is an adult interest. This was not something that I thought about a lot when I was a kid.

CW:I'm curious if in the '50s and early '60s, as you were getting into medicine, 64:00what did you feel were your options? Was there any sense of limitation?

MB:No. It was a matter of common knowledge in the '50s that Jews found it hard to get into medical school. Everybody knew, in quotes, that a lot of medical schools had quotas, would not take more than a token number of Jewish students, especially the northeastern Ivy League schools. So, there was always this lingering concern when I was thinking about a career in medicine about whether or not any doors were gonna be closed to me because I was Jewish. It turned out in my own life to be a non-issue. The medical school that I ultimately got into 65:00apparently had a history in the past of that kind of attitude, but by the time I arrived, there was a completely different administration, completely different mindset, and there was -- I was never personally aware of any anti-Semitism directed toward me as far as getting into medicine, either getting into medical school or subsequently. The fact that I'm overtly Jewish and sprinkle my language with Yiddish words all the time basically has -- it hasn't been an issue for me.

CW:I have just a few more questions. Having lived in several different locations in the Midwest and in the Northeast and also some time abroad, what have you noticed about the Jewish networks or communities in these different geographical regions? Any differences?

MB:No. The Jewish community in London -- I lived in England for a year when I was studying cardiology. You knew where the Jews congregated. It was Finchley Road and the sections. Jews sort of had a tendency to sort of sniff each other out and -- even if you weren't religious, if you wanted to -- if you moved into an area, you found a synagogue and you went there. I didn't go to synagogues in England, but, I mean, I could have. The Yiddish language has been interesting. When I -- a couple of trips to Israel -- I only know a little bit of Hebrew -- I got along perfectly well with Yiddish, especially in the large cities. People were just astounded: Who's this American kid who speaks Yiddish? But that got me somewhere. I didn't see too much difference -- I mean, the richness of Jewish life in New York and that greater area, that's in a class by itself. And one of 67:00the things that's been nice about when we moved from Cleveland to my current -- to our current location here is that I was closer to New York, and I could get to New York more often and visit my uncle Jack and all those sorts of folks and have the best pastrami sandwich in the world that you couldn't get anywhere else. But apart from that specialness about the greater New York community -- for all I know now, by the way, same thing might be true in Miami. I mean, there are huge numbers of Jews in Miami and that area, and so maybe the same thing would be true. The Workmen's Circle was one of the leveling influences. In other words, there was a Workmen's Circle in Detroit, so I could get involved there; when I was a kid there was a Workmen's Circle in Chicago that had the camp, so I could get involved there; when I was a teenager there was a Workmen's Circle in Cleveland, so I was a counselor there. So, that was kind of an anchoring kind of 68:00a thing. If I were religious, probably the anchor would have been going to any synagogue in any of those cities and praying and finding out which was different about the service in one synagogue or -- but that was not for me at that time.

CW:Going back for just a moment to Detroit: how did the different Yiddish organizations sort of configure themselves? The Workmen's Circle is a socialist organization, but was there any conflict or tension between the (UNCLEAR)?

MB:Yeah, there was. I mean, the -- of course, Jews are notorious for fighting with each other about the link [Left], the -- and that sort of stuff. I think in Lansky's book there's even a chapter or something about that. In Detroit, there were not -- there was not that many different organizations. The Sholem Aleichem 69:00Institute had its group of Jews involved with secular Jewish education. They were considered by some of us to be sort of the wealthier, maybe even a little bit snootier. The Workmen's Circle had its sort of group of people, maybe a little more working class and that sort of stuff. And so, there was this little bit of jousting. Nothing major. No character assassination going on, no impugning of people's motives. In New York, there may have been many, many more organizations, and if you were really on the far left of the political spec-- you were a communist or a Bundist or whatever else -- there may have been a whole lot more "I'm not talking to him," and "I'm not talking to her." To me, that was always nuts. I mean, it was just nuts. And I'm glad I didn't sense -- there was a little bit of that in Detroit growing up, a little bit of te-- when my family pulled me from the Sholem Aleichem schools to go into the Workmen's 70:00Circle schools, there was a bit of a discussion in the family about that because my aunt Sarah and her husband were Sholem Aleichem people, and now my mother and father were gonna be Arbeter Ring people. So, who knows. My brother and I didn't pay too much attention to that stuff.

CW:So, I'm curious about sort of thinking about Yiddish now. How -- you mentioned the music. Are there other ways that you connect to Yiddish language -- the newspapers and --

MB:No. To the language itself, it's music and it's looking at the "Forwards." I could -- and maybe after I stop working and have a little bit more time, I think I may want to actually start reading Yiddish books in Yiddish again. Slowly, the -- I have a lot of tapes, and I listen in the car. That's one thing I forgot to 71:00mention. I have a whole lot of CDs of people reading Yiddish stories. To me, it's enormously comforting to hear spoken Yiddish. I miss that almost more than anything. There's a kind of an elementalness. Again, it takes me back to my roots. So, when I hear some trained reader reading "Oyb nisht nokh hekher [If not higher]," Peretz's, or whatever, it's really wonderful. And I miss that a lot. So, I get it in music, and I get it on CDs that I play in my car, 'cause I work and I'm driving a lot, so I have some time to listen. And sometimes when I can't concentrate on anything else on music, I'll pop in a Yiddish something, and the words kind of wash over me like kind of warm soup, and it's wonderful. It's really, really wonderful to hear it. And again, I tell myself, "What a 72:00wonderfully rich, evoca--" I've been -- it's interesting. One of my favorite books is "The Brothers Ashkenazi." If you haven't read it, I commend it to you. I've read it in English. Well, I put on a CD of "The Brothers Ashkenazi" being read by somebody Yiddish, and I realized, Holy smokes! There're a whole lot of words I don't really understand. I'm gonna have to be reading the English story while I'm listening to the Yiddish. Because the richness of Singer's language is extraordinary! But you're not aware of that until you hear it in the original Yiddish. Because it's already been translated into English, so you're reading the English. So, I guess I really miss the -- and one of the interesting things is in my practice, which I stopped seeing patients about a year ago, I would occasionally run into elderly Jews, mostly from New York, who would come up to Massachusetts. And I would look for every single opportunity to speak to them in Yiddish, and they would to me. And sometimes I'd end up running behind with my 73:00patients 'cause I'd be trading jokes with somebody in Yiddish, you know. And it was just a wonderfully -- it took me back to my childhood to hear the language and to share all that sort of stuff. That's good.

CW:Looking at the next generation and your own children, what do you notice as different in that generation's Jewishness?

MB:Well, they're not -- in my family, because we're not overtly religious, because the ki-- they're not as tightly connected as I was. My kids do go to services. And my married -- the one with two children in Boston, they're members of a Reform congregation, and they go, and they celebrate the holidays. And my granddaughter Rayna is getting that education. But because my daughter and her 74:00husband don't speak Yiddish or anything else, of course it's not gonna be quite as tight. My kids went to Camp Ramah. So, they had that summer experience. I don't know whether my granddaughter will ever go to a Camp Ramah. So, there is this continual challenge to figure out how can we transmit to our kids and then to their kids the values -- not -- the importance about how we live? Because to me, what was wonderful about watching my parents wasn't just that they spoke Yiddish. They could have been bad people speaking Yiddish. I could have not been proud of them. But they were wonderful people about the way they lived. And I connected in my own -- and still do -- the heritage that they got, maybe from the Old Country, about how one lives with each other and the kehile [Jewish community], the community, the support that was so common in the shtetl [small 75:00Eastern European town with a Jewish community]. And so, that's what you end up passing on. Whether the language itself will get passed on -- it's gonna get diluted, changed, whatever. Who knows?

CW:We're nearing the end of our time, but I'd like to ask if there are any specific stories that you wanted to tell.

MB:Well -- specific stories. I think I've told you a lot of the important ones. Specific stories that I would want to tell. No, I don't think so, except that I -- I think that the thing that I'm just trying to pass along to my kids is always to remember their heritage. 'Cause if you don't know where you come from, it's sometimes hard to know where you're going. And so, the stories that I tell my kids are about the holidays, growing up, my mother and father, my father said 76:00this, my mother did that. It's all an effort to get them to think about their heritage, how they act toward each other, how they act toward their children, that there's sort of continuity, that we're all links in a chain, you know? Who knows where it's gonna go? Just do the best you can every day.

CW:I'm wondering if you have a favorite Yiddish word or phrase.

MB:A favorite Yiddish word or phrase. No, there's so many that I like. Favorite Yiddish word or phrase. I'd have to think about that one, but I'm afraid I -- nothing immediately pops into mind. As I say, I always sort of think in Yiddish. All kinds of words. "Vos keyn zayn shlekht." "What could be bad about this?" 77:00Yeah, that's all I can think of.

CW:And you've touched on it a little bit, but what advice do you have for future generations, relating to Jewish identity?

MB:Well, my advice would be to keep reading about it and studying about it, because it's a beacon. It's a beacon, and it's kind of a compass. A few words come to mind. "Beacon," "compass," and "anchor." Those three words just popped into my head. 'Cause the totality of the experience of previous generations can be a guide, a beacon light and a sort of a compass that tells you where you want to go, and it gives you an anchor. It gives you sort of roots. And as you deal with the daily stuff of life, it's nice to have a beacon and a compass and an anchor. That's all I can say.

CW:Well, a hartsikn dank -- thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]