ARON GONSHOR ORAL HISTORY

SARA ISRAEL: This is Sara Israel and today is December 15th, 2011. I'm here at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal with Aron Gonshor and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Aron, do I have your permission to record this interview?

ARON GONSHOR: Yes, you do.

SI:Thank you very much. So, to start out, can you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

AG:Well, I am a product of immigrants who came to Montreal, which is where this is taking place, in the beginning of 1948, in January. And my parents were survivors of the war. And right after the war, they actually survived in Russia 1:00for a number of years. And then, we were in DP camps for a short period of time, leaving the DP camps in Germany to come to Canada. And for those who aren't aware, Canada, very much like many other countries, did not permit Jews to come to Canada during the war. And, in fact, that particular situation continued well after the war. Quite scandalous. And it is to the shame of this country as -- shame of many other countries that they didn't allow the Jews to come in. Be that as it may, it was only in 1947 that there was an order-in-council in Ottawa, our capital, which basically allowed the rules to be changed, which 2:00would allow immigrants to come. It was not specifically just for Jews. For other peoples, as well. But the idea was that you would have a system where people would be allowed to immigrate specific to certain areas and to certain job categories. And so, many Jews, amongst them my father and his family, were able to come in under a quota for tailors -- there were tailors and shusters [shoemakers] and various other groups like that. And my father, who actually was a tailor and was a master tailor, was able to come to Canada. There were many Jews who came at the same time under the quota for tailors who didn't quite know what a needle and thread were. But that was the way in which you'd be able to come in. And so, we basically got here in January of 1948 and we were one of the 3:00first groups to actually come into Canada after the change in the laws. I was the grand old age of about a year, a year-and-a-half, when I came with an older brother and my dad and my mother. Now, I am a product of a Yiddish-speaking home. And I know you're interviewing me in English but, of course, if you would like, you would be able to interview me in Yiddish because that is my mother tongue. And for the purposes of this particular interview, vil ikh aykh zogn az yidish iz d'shprakh vos ikh hob geredt alts a kind, un vos ikh redt biz haynt. It's the language that I spoke as a child and that I speak to this day. Our children -- we have three grown adults now -- are all quite capable in Yiddish 4:00and it is a language which we treasure, of course, and that we will go in this interview to describe how we are living our lives with Yiddish as a very significant component of that life.

SI:Thank you. So, growing up in Montreal, did it feel like you were growing up in a very Jewish home?

AG:We grew up in a very Jewish atmosphere. And this is something you will hear from people who grew up in various neighborhoods in different cities in North America over the years. Montreal, when we got here, was a city that already had a substantial Jewish population. Many of them had, of course, come prior to World War II, and there was an older community, an established community that had been here for quite a long time. So, we were the griner [Greenhorns]. We were the ones who had just arrived and there were many gele [the generation who 5:00immigrated before the Greenhorns, lit. "yellow"]. And the gele were the ones who were already established. And there was a flourishing community and there was already a flourishing Yiddish-speaking community which, of course, was then bolstered by these survivors who came and came with a very great need to be able to live out their lives in a way in which they were used to. And that life revolved around Yiddish as a language but much more than just the language. It was the whole socio-cultural context. And that ethos played itself out in Yiddish. And so, from kindvayz on [since childhood], from being a small child, I was enveloped in a Jewish world in general and a Yiddish-speaking world in particular. And I found nothing strange about that because, for me, it was as 6:00simple as breathing the air. But I breathed it in Yiddish. And so, for me to be a part of evenings where my parents would take me to listen to lectures in Yiddish or to be put on a stage and be singing in Yiddish was quite simply the thing that everybody was doing, no? Of course they were. I found out later, that was not the case. But, in fact, yes, our lives were very full, very animated, very exciting. And we didn't realize that we represented a very, very small percent of what was going on around the city in general. And we also didn't realize, in many cases, how poor we were in terms of actual money, because we never felt poor because our parents never gave us that kind of impression. And so, we lived very exciting lives, and in many ways were very lucky, and lucky to 7:00have been in a city that was welcoming and a city that allowed us -- because of the nature of the way things worked in this city, allowed us to be able to flourish.

SI:So, what neighborhood of Montreal did you grow up in?

AG:Well, when we came to Montreal, we went to a place where most Jews, especially those who were immigrants or those who were still trying to make their way, the place where they came to, and that was a place not far from the Main, which was the area where a lot of Jews had moved and were still living at that point. And it was an area that was affordable. And of course, like many immigrants who came with nothing, literally nothing -- we talk about the clothes on your back, and that was literally what we came with. My parents, to their everlasting benefits, were able to find a place to live in a small -- almost 8:00like a rooming house kind of atmosphere. Very, very soon, we were able to find other accommodations, which led us very quickly, within about three years of the time that we arrived, by the early '50s, we had already moved to an area which was a little removed from where most of the Jews were living, which is in the area of the Bullion and Park Avenue and Saint Lawrence or the Main. And we moved to Outremont. And Outremont, at the time, was an area that was populated by the French-speaking population of Montreal, but there was an area which was not the hoykhe fentster [big windows], meaning the very beautiful mansions, and it was really a more working-class area. And we were lucky enough to find a flat. It 9:00was a walk-up with the outside stairs, which is very typical of Montreal architecture. And that's where we moved. And we stayed there for about ten years. And after that, in the early '60s, we, like many Jews, then leapfrogged and went out to the western part of the city to a place which was just beginning to be populated and it was called Côte Saint-Luc, which at the time was a lot of farmland. But we moved there because it was a place where a Jewish school was opening, the Peretz Shule, which to this day remains part of a school system, a Jewish day school called the Jewish People's Schools and Peretz schools. And the Peretz Shule was opening up a school in that area. And so, it was definitely the place that one would want to be and Jews were beginning to move in. So, we were 10:00actually one of the first groups to move into that area. Today, of course, it's one of the main areas where Jews live. But at that time, it was a lot of farmland and it took an awfully long time to get there. But that's for -- a discussion for another day.

SI:So, did you go to the Peretz Shule?

AG:No, I didn't go to the Peretz Shule. My wife did. I went to an afternoon school. In Montreal, we had a brentsh, or a branch, of the Workmen's Circle, which started, of course, in the United States and to this day still exists as an organization. And there was already a branch of the Workmen's Circle that had been in Montreal for quite a few years prior to that, well before the war. And so, the Workmen's Circle became a natural home for my parents and for many of 11:00their friends, because we came, I should say, with my mother having lost all of her relatives in the war. My father, who was one of six brothers and two sisters, all of them had died apart from his immediately older brother who had moved to Israel as a khaluts [pioneer] in 1929. But apart from that, we were really without direct family. And so, the people that were part of our svive [community], of our group, these friends, these survivors became family. And this is something you hear again and again, being told by many people who found that that became their virtual family. And in many ways, even more than family, because we huddled together to be able to find comfort. And the Workmen's Circle was the place that we found a home. I should also tell you that my parents were 12:00members of the Bund, which was the Jewish democratic socialist movement in Europe, which, of course, was one of the strongest movements for Jews prior to the war. Of course, it was decimated, as were all the Jewish organizations. But the survivors -- also, many of them were Bundists. And so, the Bund came together quite often physically at the Workmen's Circle to have its meetings and so on. So, for all of those reasons, the Workmen's Circle was a home, was a place that I spent a lot of time in. And one of the things that the Workmen's Circle did is it had an afternoon school, the Avrom Reyzen Shule, which, of course, was named after one of the very famous Yiddish writers, Avrom Reyzen, and that's where I went. And that's where I received a part of my formal training, although I'd have to say that a great part of my training came 13:00homeschooled. But the Avrom Reyzen Shule was where I went to school.

SI:And so, your parents were members of the Bund. Were you aware of a particular political atmosphere in your home growing up?

AG:Well, to have been a part of a family that was a part of the Bund, again, to me, was as simple as breathing in and out. So, as a very young person, of course, I didn't understand all the political machinations and where does the Bund stand vis-à-vis the Zionists and the different Zionist organizations. Of course, as I got older, I became more aware of that. But the Bund, for people like me and my wife, who -- of course, her parents were members of the Bund as well. So, for us, it was just a natural thing to be a part of an organization like this, to be a part of all of their cultural activities, to just listen to 14:00all the things that were going on. And it was, again, normal, just like speaking Yiddish was normal. And it was only much later on that we began to understand the tragedy that had occurred during the Holocaust, the tragedy to that organization, let alone to its members who were wiped out. And so, we began to understand the difficulty for an organization like the Bund to try to reconstitute itself and to try to be able to be relevant within a post-war situation where not only was the whole issue of movements changing, but the issue of, what do you do with a movement that has had the heart and the guts pulled out of it, and how does it continue to be relevant? That's a major issue to this day and it was definitely an issue then. But the people who came to Montreal, the vast majority of them were either members of the Bund or they were 15:00members of the Zionist organizations, either the right-wing or left-wing or the many left-wing Zionist organizations that we can have a separate discussion about -- all of that. But definitely, this was an ongoing discussion every day. But what it did give us was a tremendous cultural heritage. And so, we gained from that in a way which to this day, I thank my parents for. And it has really held me in good stead and given me the kind of background which gives me the foundation I can give to my children.

SI:So, can you describe a sort of programming or lecture, something that you might have seen at the Workmen's Circle?

AG:Well, one of the things that Montreal was noted for -- Montreal was a place, 16:00it was an address that every important author, Yiddish author, every important performer would need to come to. The Yiddish world, after the Second World War, was in many cases doing what it did before the war, and that is that Jews who spoke Yiddish, and definitely Jews who were of a democratic socialist persuasion in places like the Workmen's Circle and the Bund, were geknipt un gebinden [close-knit]. They were absolutely pulled together in a very tight way throughout the world so that we could easily have an author who had come in from Buenos Aires or who had come in from Melbourne or who was coming from Europe or New York as easily as we would have someone coming from across the city in Montreal. It was a very natural thing to recognize that that family had a world 17:00nature to it. And so, every week, you would have authors, performers doing what they do best, mostly in Yiddish, almost exclusively in Yiddish in the early years, coming to do their performance, to do their readings. And we were a very strong part of that. And we felt it completely natural. Now, in retrospect, you say, Wow, I mean, isn't that quite something, that you would have all of these well-known world authors coming. And the answer is yes, because that's what they did. Very early on in our time at the Workmen's Circle and the Jewish Public Library, which was another one of our homes -- and we are having this interview at the Jewish Public Library -- it was our home, from the earliest days of our 18:00lives. And we found it very natural to be here. And so, we would be getting lectures. We had the Workmen's Circle, it would be at the library. Again, mostly in Yiddish. And very early on, there was a woman who became a very important part of our lives because she began to work at the library. And her name was Dora Wasserman. And Dora, who was a wonderful actor, who was trained in the Soviet Union by Mikhoels in Moscow, very prestigious -- and so, she came with quite a pedigree. And like many Jews, after the war, she came as a survivor, and luckily for us, decided to call Montreal her home. And by the early '50s, she 19:00had already begun to give classes in theater art to young people at the library. And so, we had the great pleasure -- not even recognizing at the time how momentous that was going to be in the coming years -- but Dora began to work with the children and the young people at the library. And we began to learn not just about performance, but we began to see that through performance art, we were opening up a door to the wonderful world of Yiddish language and culture. And that was Dora's way. That was Dora's gift, that she recognized that by doing performance art, in this case theater and other types of performance, that you 20:00would really allow young people to really discover, in this case, Yiddish language, which is what she performed in. It was all about Yiddish theater. And so, we were part of her group. I came in a little bit later. My wife, Anna, Anna Fishman, now Gonshor, Anna Fishman Gonshor was -- literally grew up in her home because they lived right near each other. And so, Anna and her sister, Reyzl, became quasi-family to Dora and her daughters, Ella and Bryna, and it was a wonderful thing. We feel very privileged to have been given that opportunity. So, Dora came to the library and that's where we began to live our life out culturally in Yiddish. And what an exciting time it was.

SI:So, that brings me to the next sort of topic that I wanted to ask you about, 21:00which is theater. So, today you're an oral surgeon, but you're also a performer with what's now the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theater Company. So, how did you first decide to get involved with a theater company?

AG:Well, if one is a believer, you'd say s'iz do a got, that there is a God up there, who said, "You will be performing a Yiddish theater" -- I'm not in any way trying to be facetious. But remember that from my earliest days and from my earliest recollection, performing and performing in Yiddish, both in song and in regular theater, was just a part of my life. And so, when I began with Dora, I was, as I said, quite young. And I was also performing at the Workmen's Circle, not necessarily with Dora, but also performing there in various types of 22:00concerts and so on with a number of our friends who came together with us to the Yiddish theater. And so, from an early age on, we started to perform. And it's very interesting: I would say to you that actually, what I do is I perform, and I make my living as an oral and maxillofacial surgeon. But my vocation is surgery, my avocation, my love is theater. And so, in the most fundamental definition of amateur, you know, amateur meaning "for the love of," that's what we do and that's what we've continued to do. And that's what Dora instilled in us, to do it for the love of it. So, theater, as I said, has been a part of my life and the life of all the people that I have continued to be around. The Dora 23:00Wasserman Yiddish Theater started in the '50s, and by the mid to late '50s, was already a going concern. I'd mentioned to you earlier about the Jewish People's schools, which was another one of the day schools, at that time separated from the Peretz schools, the Peretz Shule. Eventually, they came together, but that was many decades later. But in the '50s, Jewish People's School was a day school, Zionist-based. And they asked Dora to help with some afternoon activities, after school, with some of the graduates of the Jewish People's School. And so, she actually began in their gymnasium. And what was she doing? She was performing with a number of the young graduates of the Jewish People's School and was putting on plays using plays from the Yiddish canon of theater. 24:00And from that, very soon, grew the Yiddish dramatishe grupe, the Yiddish Drama Group, which then became the Yiddish Theatre, and many years later, was turned into the official name, the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre, which today is housed at the Segal Centre for Performing Arts in Montreal. So, it is now the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre at the Segal Centre for the Performing Arts. Say that ten times quickly. So, we began in the late '50s and by the early '60s had already begun to do a lot of very interesting theater, which consisted of trying to do the canon of famous Yiddish theater work, adding to that new work, which 25:00Dora would commission. And she would work with some of the great Yiddish lyricists and composers and dramatists. And, for example, we did a number of plays, one of them with Singer, who, of course, then won the Nobel Prize and we were very, very lucky to have had him here when we did one of his plays after he had won the Nobel Prize. And so, we have really worked and Dora introduced us to the greats. We're very fortunate, really. Looking back, we were very privileged to have been able to do this. But Dora was a force. She was a life force and Dora had a tremendous shrewdness and understood what was possible and understood what you needed to do to be able to motivate people. And so, she brought on cadres of young people and as they got older, brought in their children and now 26:00we're into the third and even fourth generation, now well over fifty years. We actually celebrated our fiftieth two years ago. And so, it gives you an idea that this has been around for awhile. Dora suffered a stroke a few years prior to her death and brought in her daughter, Bryna, who was a trained director and who was working in New York and came to be with us and took over the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre and was the director for about fifteen years, up until a year ago, when she is in New York and is now sort of working between New York and Montreal. And the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre is still a very lively and exciting place, and we still put on at least one play a year. We do a lot of touring. We've toured all over North America. We've toured over Europe. We've 27:00been to Israel a number of times and we'll continue to do so.

SI:So, I think you also traveled to Vienna with the theater back in 2001, is that right?

AG:Well, it was actually before then. We were asked to come to Vienna in the late '90s. And in fact, I believe our first time was in '98. I could be off by a year. Vienna was quite an interesting story, but really gives you an idea, encapsulates what was going on and what continues to go on within the Yiddish world. Vienna, before the war, was, of course, an important center for Jewish life. Like many places, its Jewish population was decimated, but there were survivors. And when they came back, they represented probably no more than up to maybe a thousand Jews who were pre-Viennese Jews. Vienna became a place where 28:00Jews who were moving out of the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, would move to either Israel or go to America or other places. And Vienna became that stop. And for many of them, they stopped and never went any further. So, Vienna started to gain a fairly substantial Jewish population, most of whom were not pre-war Viennese. One of the pre-war Viennese had decided that what he wanted to do, and this is in the late '80s, had already begun to put together a place where Jews living in Vienna could learn about Jewish history. And so, he had started an institute, a historishe institut [historical institute], and his main purpose was not only to teach Jews about Jews but to also teach non-Jews about 29:00the Jewish world, which for him was extremely important. Anti-Semitism was and still is a part of Austrian life, whether they like to admit it or not. And that's another discussion we can have. And so, we received a call from him. His name was Kurt -- he likes to call himself Chaim Rosenkranz. And Chaim said, "I've heard about you and I'd like to have you come and perform," which is what we did. And because of funding that he was able to get from the state and national governments in Austria, he was able to actually bring in our entire group. And you need to understand that when we put on Yiddish theater, we're not talking about one or two people on the stage. We are talking forty or fifty people. It is a very large concern. And we had had our home from the '70s on in a place called the Saidye Bronfman Centre, which is across the street from the 30:00Jewish Public Library. It is now the Segal Centre, but as a physical entity, it was the Saidye Bronfman Centre. And so, we were quite used to putting on plays of a high caliber. I call it amateur in the sense that people weren't being paid to be on the stage. But all of the people who worked with us, from the director, the stage managers, the lighting, the audio, all of these were first-class, professionally trained people doing professional theater, because the Saidye Bronfman Centre and today the Segal has a very active English theater, professional English theater, as well. And so, we came and would go to places like Austria with very high-level theatrical standards. Notwithstanding the fact that it was in Yiddish, the fact is it was at a very high level. And so, we would go to Austria. And we started in '98, and then we were asked to come back 31:00again, which we did two years later, and then asked to come back again. And again. So, we have now been there four times, quite an experience, and have been asked back again, interestingly enough. There was a hiatus of several years, and have now been asked to come again for 2012. So, if all being well, in the fall of 2012, we will be back in Vienna as part of a European tour. We are actually hoping to be in Paris, in Czechoslovakia, which we had been before, to Prague, and hopefully to Amsterdam. And who knows? So, we're gonna do the tour of Europe again. Not the first time. We've done that at least two times before.

SI:So, I'm wondering, because Vienna has both such a positive history of 32:00cultural Jewish life and such a negative history with the war, what was it like to perform a Yiddish play there?

AG:Extremely emotional. I think you have to realize that Yiddish was not a main language of the Jews in Vienna. Austria was really unlike Poland, Lithuania, and parts of Russia where Yiddish was really a very large part of life and the language of many, many of the Jews. That was not the case in Austria. But they did speak some Yiddish. There were groups that did. And of course, the German language is such that it is close to Yiddish. So, for all of those reasons, there's no question that Yiddish was an important quantity in Viennese life pre-war and definitely after the war for the reasons I gave you previously. It was an important thing for them to be able to make that something that they 33:00wanted to be able to maintain. Being in Austria, in general, and being in Vienna in particular, which has a very checkered history when it comes to how Jews were treated pre-war, and of course, even after the war, given that Austria to this day has had -- let me put it diplomatically, has had great difficulty in trying to confront its particular role pre- and during the war, to say the least, has been very, very difficult. Austria has seen itself and to this day sees itself as a victim of the Nazi regimes. One can have a real discussion as to whether they were victims or perpetrators. Notwithstanding that kind of a very emotional 34:00discussion, to come to a place which was so seminal to what was happening with Nazism, to come to a place where not far from where we were performing, Hitler came to give his speech about how the Austrians and Germans had their Anschluss is, to say the least, quite an emotional experience. So, for all of us who came, I think even for the younger people, they already understood. We prepared ourselves. We spoke at length to all the members of our theater prior to leaving to make sure that they understood where we were going and what the context of all of that was. Part of our tour, our first tour to Austria, was that we visited Mauthausen. And so, of course, visiting that infamous camp was a way of 35:00grounding us and beginning to understand, Where were we going? But performing in Yiddish in Vienna was quite surreal. The play that we put on the first time we were there -- I could be wrong, it was either the first or second time -- I think it was the first time, was "The Dybbuk," Ansky's magnificent play. And the performance was such -- when you're in theater, you consider yourself lucky if during your whole career -- and I don't care if you're a professional or an amateur -- you consider yourself very lucky if you can think of certain performances that stay with you for the rest of your life. Actors, like any professional, will say, I do it and I come night after night and I do my job and 36:00I do it well and I enjoy what I'm doing. And for many of them, that is sufficient. But they yearn for having something which transcends that day-to-day work. Well, the performance of "The Dybbuk" in Vienna was one of those moments. The first time we actually performed it, and I can see it now, I don't think there was a dry eye in the house. When we finished and the lights went up, there was stunned silence and then the place erupted. But the eruption was not just applause. But it was applause mixed with tears. (pauses) Very emotional.

SI:I'm tearing up. (laughs)

AG:In any case, you feel very privileged. And we have been. I think all our trips to Austria have really given us the ability to understand that we have a responsibility. And the responsibility is that Yiddish transcends the specific needs of an individual, that Yiddish is a legacy of the Jewish people. It's a legacy which becomes very poignant because so many of its speakers were killed. 38:00But the language, the culture, the ethos of Yiddish is much more important than any one of us. And so, for those of us who have become involved in Yiddish theater -- we have recognized the gift that we were given, the gift of the Yiddish language, the gift of people like Dora and her daughter, Bryna, the gift of being able to convey the beauty of that language and all that it contains to the coming generations, let alone the people who are with us. But with that gift comes responsibility. And so, the responsibility is that you don't take what you have and squander it. And when I use the word squander, I'm using it in the 39:00sense of saying, Well, so I speak Yiddish, so what? It's just a language. Wrong. It's not just a language. You have a responsibility -- and this is my opinion, my humble opinion, and those of many around me, that you have a responsibility. And the responsibility is, in whichever way you can, in whichever talent you happen to have, whether it's the knowledge of the language, whether it's your ability to act, to write, to speak, to teach, whatever that is in whichever small way you can do that, that you are obliged to further that so that you don't come to your maker, so to speak, in the future and He says, "What did you not do?" And again, I don't want to be sacrilegious, but I'm thinking that it's important for us to recognize that this is a dynamic issue and that there is an 40:00imperative and that imperative is a time imperative, that those of us who are native speakers are less and less. That's a reality, I don't think anybody denies it, but that we have the responsibility to be able to lay such a strong foundation, that notwithstanding that time has its inexorable move, that we will at least be able to know that it's being left in decently good hands.

SI:So, Montreal is a very multilingual kind of city. What place do you think Yiddish has in Montreal today?

AG:Look, I'm not one of those who talks about the demise of Yiddish. I'm one of 41:00those who realistically understands that Yiddish is not anymore the language of the gas [street]. It's not the language of the street of Jews. It hasn't been for a long time. A good part of that was destroyed in the Holocaust and for those who understand the history, they will tell you that even in countries where Yiddish was being spoken that in many cases, it wasn't even the language being spoken by many of the Jews in those countries. And for those who think that's not the case, go back to your books. So, even in Poland, even in Warsaw that had 300,000 Jews, there were many people who think all the Jews spoke Yiddish. Well, it's not the case. They also spoke Polish. There were Jews who felt that they wanted to speak the lingua franca, as we say, of that country. Today, in North America, that language is English. In the United States, there's 42:00no question that there is this tremendous pressure of the English language and this obliterates, in many cases, the ability of all other languages to be able to survive and thrive. And Yiddish is definitely in that group that is trying to survive with the particular problems that it has. Montreal has a very interesting aspect to this, which serendipitously turned out to be wonderful. For those people who are going to be listening to this and aren't bored already, they'll know that Montreal sits in a province called Quebec and Quebec is a French-speaking part of this place we call Canada. And the French-speaking population here, which is about six million or seven million, is very concerned about the fact that it sits within a sea of English speakers. And so, for those 43:00who have watched and listened to history of the last forty-odd years will know that there has been an ongoing debate in this province about separating, about becoming sovereign, of somehow trying to, in one way or another, keep that language of French alive and kicking. And so, because of that, when the Jews have come into this part of the world, into Montreal, they have found a friend in the French-speaking population because the French say, Wait a minute. You're suffering the same thing we are. So, we understand each other and so we can, in fact, help each other. And that's exactly what has happened, in fits and starts, but it has. To go back to Dora Wasserman, Dora very early on was able to tap 44:00into that. One of the things you need to understand is that where the Jews grew up on the Main, they called it Saint Lawrence. It's Saint-Laurent in French. That was also a place which contained the real beginnings of French Canadian or Quebecois, that's what they call themselves today, but at the time it was French Canadian culture: theater and art. And in its beginnings in the twentieth century, it actually began very much around the same time that Yiddish was flourishing in Montreal. A lot of French Canadians think that it began much earlier, but it didn't. And so, one of the major cultural institutions in Montreal was Le Monument-National, the National Monument. Actually a large theater. Sounds very, very impressive in French, but it was basically the 45:00theater where French theater and concerts, vaudeville were performed. And that became the place where Yiddish theater was performed and Yiddish vaudeville was performed. And the greats of Yiddish theater: Maurice Schwartz and Ben-Ami and all of these came to the Monument-National to perform the highest levels of Yiddish theater art. And where were they doing it? They were doing it in the foremost center of French Canadian art and theater. And so, very early on, you got this tremendous symbiotic relationship of these two cultures. And so, it became a natural home and Dora Wasserman began to work with the greatest playwrights of French Canadian theatrical art, one of the greats being Gratien 46:00Gélinas, a wonderful, wonderful actor and writer. And he became a very close friend of Dora. And then, after him, the next generation, Michel Tremblay, who, in fact, is today, arguably, the greatest living French Canadian playwright. He wrote a very famous play called "Les Belles-Soeurs [The Sisters-in-Law]," which has been performed in many languages all over the world. It was performed by Dora, in Yiddish, and Michel Tremblay, in fact, said that of all of the translations and of all of the plays that he has seen in the many languages, including Japanese and Hebrew, you name it, that the Yiddish production came closest to what he felt was the real feeling he wanted to convey. And why? 47:00Because the French Canadian felt themselves as almost alien in their own country and trying to find a place for themselves within this place we call Canada and North America. And he said the Jewish experience was very much that and it played itself out in the Yiddish language. So, I hope I'm explaining that to you in a way -- so, does Montreal become special? It sure does, for that reason. And because of people like Dora and others like her, it gave us the ability to be able to do it. There's one other aspect to this that you need to know. Right after the war, Montreal was very lucky to become the home of cadres of the greatest of the surviving Yiddish writers. They came to Montreal. Melech Ravitch, Shaffir, Rokhl Korn. The list is endless. And they all made their home 48:00here and for decades continued to ply their trade, their profession here. And where did they do it? They did it at the Jewish Public Library. So, you begin to see that these organizations become like one global mass. And in this was this tremendous -- like a nuclear bomb that was gonna take off of Yiddish creativeness after the war and continued for decades. And people like Dora -- was able to feed off that homegrown beauty of the Yiddish language and what it was creating. And many of those authors produced works for the Yiddish theater and concerts that we gave at the library, so we were geknipt un gebinden. We were literally together in a knot.

SI:So, as a Montrealer, how do you think language can influence a person's sense 49:00of identity?

AG:Identity is not existing in a vacuum. When people talk about having Jewish identity, the question that you begin to ask right after that is, Well, okay, that's fine as a statement. Now, define that identity. How do you define yourself as a Jew? Well, I'm a cultural Jew. Well, okay. What does that mean and what does that cultural identity consist of? So, I think one of the things that we're finding in Jewish life today are several issues. Number one, the move to religion again in its various forms to make religious life as a mainstay of Jewish life and that is typical of what's going on throughout the world today. 50:00And it's playing itself out in a myriad of ways, not just in North America but all over the world. But in a much more subtle way, the question is, How does one define this ephemeral thing called Jewish culture? And that's when it gets interesting. It gets exciting and it can be very frustrating. For many of us, each one of us will define that in a different way. And so, in the case of our upbringing in Montreal, and especially for those who were brought up the way I was, Yiddish -- Yiddish language, Yiddish song, Yiddish literature, Yiddish theater -- is an integral, fundamental part of who I am. And whether or not I am an observant Jew, whether or not I go to a synagogue, whether or not I do any of 51:00that, that is only one part of how I define myself as a Jew. If I am celebrating holidays, how am I celebrating those holidays? Do I celebrate it in English? Do I celebrate it in Yiddish? Do I celebrate it in its many languages? What are the songs that I sing when I'm singing them? What are the songs that I sang to my kids? How did I begin to convey to them the history before? How did they learn about Jewish life before? Well, in our family, they learned it through Yiddish language and song and history, by being in day schools where Yiddish was a fundamental part of the way they grew up. They may tell you a bit of a different story, but I would say that it would probably be very close to that. So, I can only speak for myself. And for me and for many other people in this community, 52:00Yiddish language, Yiddish culture has been a fundamental abutment or a fundamental pillar to our understanding of who we are as Jews.

SI:So, on the subject of your children, what's been most important for you to transmit to them about Jewish identity?

AG:When you talk about being a Jew, I think one has to be very careful. You are a Jew, but you're also a human being. (laughs) In fact, you're a human being first. And so, when you take a look at some of the universal precepts in Jewish life, what does it mean when somebody says "Zay a mentsh [Be a mensch]"? In 53:00Yiddish, the word mentsh means many, many things. And if you wanted to encapsulate that, it would be what? Be a fine human being, be a good person, do good deeds. It's all of those things in that one word, mensch or mentshlekhkeyt [humaneness], to be able to do good in a daily way. Observant Jews will say that that's one of the things they try to do, right, to do mitzvot [good deeds]. Well, that's part of what you do. You don't have to be an observant Jew to recognize that that's what you need to do. The Jews who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the States in the '60s and so on were people who understood that. It was part of the ethos of being a Jew. And so, what do I transmit to my children? What do we do in our family? I hope that what we've 54:00transmitted, whichever language we were transmitting it in -- that being a Jew means all those things.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

SI:How do you think the identity of younger generations of Jews differs from yours?

AG:We live in a totally different world today than I was living in when I grew up. I'm a young guy. We lived in a much more insular world in many ways, in many ways a much more secure world. It was much more truncated. Today, with the internet, with the World Wide Web, with all of those things, we are absolutely inundated with all kinds of information in ways which we never experienced. And so, it's very difficult for young people today. How do you find your place? How do you find your foundation, recognizing that there are all of these vectors, 55:00these forces that are constantly impacting on you? Well, what that means, I think -- it is vitally important, then, perhaps even more vital than it was in our generation to ground people, to really be able to give them the wherewithal, the ability to be able to know who they are because you can get lost with all of that information and forget to ask yourself the question, Who am I? What do I believe? And that can only come from an understanding of where you came from. It's the old story, right? To know where you're going, you need to know where you came from. And so, it becomes vitally important -- not just for people our age, we're already past it, I have grown children who are adults now with their own children -- but we recognize that if we've done a decent job, it's to have given our children the wherewithal, to have given them what they need to be able 56:00to make their way in the world. That's nothing new as a concept. But it remains an extremely important essence of how you look at upbringing. To the extent that we were able to do it, I'd like to think that we did a pretty decent job. But is it gonna be easy for our children and their whole generation? Not at all. I have no illusions. It's exciting to see what's out there. It's also -- it can be a very dangerous place. And as I mentioned earlier, the ability of minority languages, minority cultures to be able to survive let alone thrive in this juggernaut of, in this case, English language and all that it is and all that it can conveys, is not an easy job. There's no question about that. And so, it is something that we need to not just treasure but -- and I mentioned before the issue of responsibility. I think each one of us has to look at oneself in the 57:00mirror and say, What am I doing? Am I doing enough? Is it important to me? I mean, clearly, if it's not important, then there's no discussion. I would like to think that it is and the people who are watching this would think that it is. And if it is important, then how do you convey that? And my attitude is that Jewish life is not a unidimensional issue. It's multifaceted. And the more multifaceted it is, the more exciting it becomes. And so, that's why when somebody says to me, "Ah, Yiddish, who cares?" Well, the answer is you should care, whether or not you speak it or not, because if you are a Jew who cares and if you care in that future, then that future will depend on what happened before. And Yiddish was such an important part of what happened before that 58:00someone, some groups and Jews in general need to make that as an important part. You'll notice that in Israel today -- they have come belatedly back to that reality, and recognizing that even though they had to build the country and build it with a language of Hebrew -- there were culture wars in the '30s. There was a decision: would it be Yiddish or Hebrew? Hebrew won out. Not gonna get into a discussion whether that was right or wrong. That's what it is. However, today, if you speak to thinking Israelis, they will say to you, We made a mistake here. Not that we chose Hebrew, not at all, but that we tried to bury Yiddish. Because that is a mistake. That's a mistake. And so, what do we need to do? By the bootstraps, we all need to pull ourselves along and pull with us our 59:00heritage. And if we don't, it's to our peril.

SI:So, we're nearing the end of our time here. I just have two last things I want to ask you. One is, do you have a favorite Yiddish song?

AG:Do I have a favorite Yiddish song? I have many favorite Yiddish songs. One of them is a beautiful, quiet song which says "zing shtil," "sing quietly," and it goes like this: "S'hot mir mayn tate noykh kindvayz gezogt, gut iz tsum oyfshteyn baginen. Zing shtil, gor shtil, az keyner huts indz vet nisht hern, un 60:00zol undz farvign der hartsiker nign biz ayndrimlen veln di shtern. [My father told me in my childhood, it's good to get up at dawn. Sing quietly, very softly, so that no one except us can hear, and so that the heartfelt melody will rock us until the stars fall asleep]." And it basically says, "Sing softly. Your father taught you the song, so sing quietly until the stars come into the sky and they go to sleep." Thank you for giving me the opportunity.

SI:It's beautiful.

AG:Yeah.

SI:And so, my last quick question, if you have a moment, is do you have any advice to Jewish artists and performers?

AG:To Jewish artists and performers? Well, that's a general question. The 61:00general question, if you're a Jewish artist and performer who's performing in a language other than the Jewish languages, then you happen to be an artist who happens also to be Jewish. But I don't think that's what you're asking, because there are many artists who are Jews who are performing in traditional, conventional theater and movies and so on and, of course, have a wonderful history. If you have an artist who's Jewish and wants to perform in the Jewish arts, they're taking on (laughs) a very difficult task. It's difficult to be an artist in general. It's particularly difficult to be an artist in any of the Jewish areas because, of course, your audience is that much smaller. Anybody who goes into the arts needs to be passionate. If you're passionate about the arts, then it doesn't matter how difficult it's going to be. You're going to do it because that's what you're passionate about. If you want to do it in Yiddish, 62:00now you've got quite a high mountain to be able to climb. But at the top of that mountain, you are gonna find a treasure. And so, I would say, follow your dream. If you're passionate about it and if you feel that that is your way of being able to convey the history, the glorious history of our people, then do it and find every way that you can. Because by the doing of it, you will find fulfillment. And you know what they say: You want to play? You gotta buy a ticket. So, if you want it to happen, you can't have it happen by sitting on your hands. And most of us spend our lives sitting on our hands. And I have tremendous admiration, I can't tell you how great an admiration I have for Yiddish -- and Jewish artists in general and Yiddish artists in particular. It 63:00is a tremendous statement that they're making, quite often to their personal, economic, and financial benefit, but they're doing it for the love of it. And at the end of the day, when you've lived your life, you need to be able to look back and say, Did I have fun? Did I enjoy doing what I was doing? Oh, yes, I did. And did I, at the same time, build more of a foundation on which others can come up? Did I put another rung on that ladder? And if you've done that, then what more can you ask of yourself?

SI:Well, thank you very much for speaking with me today. It's --

AG:Okay.

SI:-- been a real pleasure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]