RON FINEGOLD ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, I am here at the Montreal Jewish Public Library with Ron Finegold to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. And the date is December 13th, 2011. Do I have your permission to record the interview?

RON FINEGOLD: You have my permission. I'll sign any documents that you want. (laughter)

CW:Thanks. So, can you briefly tell me what you know about your family background?

RF:Okay. On my father's side, as well as my mother's side, my background is not the typical Holocaust survivor one, which you find in people my age or maybe slightly younger. My father was born in 1887 in the little town of Eyshishuk. He 1:00probably had a very typical childhood for that shtetl [small Eastern European village with a Jewish community], which you could read in Yaffa Eliach's book, the large tome. At the age of thirteen, he and his older brother, the pkhor [first-born son], the fifteen-year-old, came to Montreal after khaping dem grenets [sneaking across the border], from Eyshishuk to Germany. I forget which port in Germany. And they got onto a ship, which took a twenty-one day journey from Germany to the port of New York. And he always used to tell me, at that point, that he landed in Castle Garden. And I know that Castle Garden was way, way before Ellis Island but it seemed that at that point, in 1900, which was the 2:00end of March, beginning of April -- Castle Garden was being used because Ellis Island was being refurbished 'cause of the volume of immigrants coming in there. They spent three weeks in Castle Garden being interned for various reasons, even though he was destined for Montreal by train. He wasn't destined for America -- so, his bar mitzvah -- he told me he was born on Shushan Purim, but this was either on the Atlantic Ocean or in the three weeks that he spent at Castle Garden with his older brother, Abraham. His name was Eleazer Lazar. The family name at that point was Poritz. Comes to Montreal to two maternal aunts, one of whom was married to a gentleman whose surname was Fineberg. So, they said, Here, 3:00you two boys, you can't use the name Poritz in Canada. It's not a very nice sounding name, even though it has -- nice translation. We're going to change your name to Finegold, 'cause it can't be Fineberg 'cause that's on your mother's side. Doesn't look good on paper. The rest of the family came over six months later, around Rosh Hashanah/Sukkos time to Montreal. They were, I think, three girls and four boys at the time. I think two other children were born here. The first two years of their lives, I don't know too much about. But their mother was widowed and they became orphans in 1902 when their father died at the age of thirty-seven. He's buried in Montreal. And their last child was born six weeks after his passing and she's named, my youngest aunt, was named after her 4:00father: Leiba. His name was Arye Leib and her name was Leiba. They lived on a farm which was mortgaged through the Jewish Colonization Association, which operated in North and South America at the time through the auspices of Baron de Hirsch. They spent about a quarter of a century or more on that farm. It was 180 acres of land, thirty acres cleared, or more. They had thirty heads of cattle, thirty milk cows, several horses, chickens. They even had a few hogs, which they got rid of, I think, in due course, 'cause they bought a working farm at the point. The family also farmed about five to ten acres of tobacco, which was the big cash crop at the time. My father used to -- told me that around World War I time, tobacco was running at sixty-five cents a pound. Now, you produce five 5:00hundred pounds of tobacco at sixty-five cents a pound when a postage stamp was a penny, it was a lot of money. Another income producer for them -- since they were part of a Jewish farm colony of about sixty-odd farmers, was they had the only electric cream separator for making butter. So, all the other farmers would come with their cream to separate to produce butter, which they charged for. Later on, my father operated a little dairy store, getting the milk overnight. It was a thirty-mile ride from the farm to the railway station. He'd pick up the cans of milk, he'd process it into cheese, butter. They would sell eggs on Saint Laurent Boulevard for several years. Now eventually, the farm life broke off because every sibling got married and the spouses would not enjoy farm life. So, 6:00by 1930 or so, I think the farm was just dismantled or sold and everybody lived in Montreal. My father became a ladies' tailor. He operated a little store on Parc Avenue for several years. The year I was born, he sold that store. It was the onset of World War II. There were living quarters in back of that store on Parc Avenue, by the way. We moved to Parc and Laurier, to an apartment building, which we lived in for twenty-five years after that. My brother was born at the Royal Victoria Hospital. He remembers his maternal grandmother; I don't. 'Cause I'm named after her. My mother was pregnant with me when she passed away. I was supposed to be a girl, so her name was Ronya. My name became Ron and then Hebraicized to Reuven. I was brought up in Parc and Laurier for the first twenty-five years of my life. My father passed away about a year or two after we 7:00moved out of that area to the Snowdon area in '64 and I spent the rest of my life so far in this Snowdon area where the Jewish Public Library is. I used to walk to work. Everybody was jealous of me 'cause I lived close to work. I would live close to schools. I was in walking distance within the schools that I went to. Was at Talmud Torah/Herzliah, Beth Israel, like I told you before. You could fill that in afterwards.

CW:Can I back up for a second? (laughter)

RF:Back up, yeah.

CW:Did your father ever talk about the Old Country or did --

RF:Basically. I used to ask him what he did. He said his father was a dealer in bristles, probably hog bristles, and he used to accompany him on his wagon during the winter. That's where he learned how to smoke. And he smoked to the 8:00day he passed away, after two heart attacks, at the age of seventy-nine-and-a-half. So, (laughs) he also ate his cereal, his porridge, with full cream for decades. So, (laughs) they didn't invent cholesterol in those days. So, just goes to show maybe -- yeah, also, one of his brothers, in terms of smoking, died with a pipe in his mouth at the age of eighty-seven 'cause they grew tobacco and they smoked it. I wouldn't say he was a big smoker, but he was like, a carton a week man from my time. So, that was my father's side. The only public school education I had was in kindergarten. That was during the war. Just to backtrack, we used to have -- used to be war bonds. Just like you had in the States, you had in here, too, to raise capital to support the war effort. And I was a kid playing, four-and-a-half years old, outside of my apartment building 9:00when this truck passes by on one November day. People picked me up, put me on the back of the truck with a young girl, (laughs) put a forty millimeter shell in my arm, 'cause it was an armaments truck selling these war bonds, and took my picture. It was in the "Gazette" the next day. And of course, so my father bought eight-by-ten pictures to show to his family. His son had made page three of the "Gazette," four-and-a-half years old. That was my war effort, so to speak. So, it was a very uneventful childhood as far as that was concerned. But I guess the only difference to add that -- I went to Jewish day schools when most of the kids living in my apartment building went to public school.

CW:I want to ask about that, definitely. But I'm just curious about the farm. Did your father's family have it all arranged before they came that they would help on this farm?

RF:I would assume so, because the agents from the ICA, from the Jewish 10:00Colonization, would take a census every year and I have photocopies of the 1911, 1912 censuses, and it shows you what kind of animals they had, whatnot. You couldn't start that from scratch. They probably had that already and they just learned as they went along. The farmhands were the children in the farm. They had the roof over their head. It was much more than subsistence farming, 'cause they had cash crops. And they had support. For instance, they had their own shoykhet [ritual slaughterer] in that colony. They had their own synagogue. In the library, I once discovered that McGill archives had the minute book of the Protestant school board of that area, L'Assomption County. We have a microfilm of it at the library. Those minutes are bilingual, English and Yiddish. Somebody 11:00wants a project from people at Massachusetts, the Center or YIVO or anybody else here, there's at least a master's degree involved. The visiting rabbi at that point was Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg, the maternal grandfather of Mordecai Richler.

CW:So, in the home that you grew up in, I'd like to ask, what felt Jewish about it to you?

RF:Okay, let me get to my mother's end.

CW:Right.

RF:My mother's family, all of her siblings, came here around World War I time or before World War I, actually. She was the baby of the family, last born. She 12:00probably got stuck, from 1914 to 1921, in Proskurov. She was born in 1896, so she was an adolescent during that period. Her mother was widowed when she was probably eight or ten years old. That grandfather is buried in Proskurov, I presume. The war years, I know very little, the war years, but she has memories and she recounted to me more than once about the pogrom, the Petliura pogrom, and the time that Schwartzbard assassinated Petliura in Paris and the trial and whatnot. She recounted that to me. I later on got my hands on a copy of the original yizkor book of that period by the landsmanshaft [association of immigrants originally from the same region] from New York. I don't see any members of her family. She was born a Bronberg, B-r-o-n-b-e-r-g. She came here 13:00in 1921, in September, when the Kerensky regime fell six months before. They escaped, also, to Lvov, Lemberg, where they got Polish passports after seven months. From there, they found their way to Antwerp and from Antwerp took a ship to Quebec City, and coming over here around Labor Day, 1921. She came here with her mother, with a cousin, her oldest cousin, who's only two years younger than her, 'cause her oldest sister -- imagine a mother and a daughter giving birth two years apart. Today, it's very common in Hasidic communities, but I was always (laughs) curious about that. And another cousin of mine who was, I think, about ten or eleven years old at the time, who was an orphan girl, who was 14:00abandoned by her father. She was an only child. And the mother passed away before she came to Canada. So, it was my mother and my grandmother who adopted her. So, these three people came, sponsored by their relatives in Montreal. My parents met in Montreal, probably eight or nine years later. They married in 1930. They weren't young, at least my father. My father was probably forty, forty-one when he married -- my mother about a decade earlier. My brother was born in '31. I was born in '38. My brother -- we both had the same upbringing, more or less. I took to gradually becoming more Orthodox, being the more 15:00Orthodox family, part of my family, on both sides of my family in terms of observance. I attribute that -- that I went to Talmud Torah, which was the Zionist, the Mizrahi-based school in Montreal rather than the folkshul [Yiddish secular school]. My father was very traditional. Although we kept a very kosher home, Shabbat was more or less observed. My father probably had to work on Shabbat during the Depression and during the war years and whatnot, as many of his compatriots did. Very few were Sabbath observers in that period of time, although after he retired -- I was pretty young at that point -- he was becoming more and more observant, more frum [pious]. He would take me to shul when he had yortsayt [anniversary of death] for either one of his parents. And invariably, 16:00he would be the -- daven for the rest of the minyen. He'd be the leader of the services at that point and I took that cue from him. When my bar mitzvah came, I never stopped putting on my tfiln [phylacteries worn by Jews] from my bar mitzvah day onward and I was sort of the quote-unquote rabbi of my family. I just took to it, especially after I got married, took it more and more serious even then. I remember before I got married, it was a habit of guys in my class to keep their kippah or yarmulke in their pockets and take it out when you were eating. (laughs) And other influences, (laughs) my wife, especially, says, "You got a kippah, wear it." She came from a very, very Orthodox family in Morocco. My mother was a seamstress, so that was pretty natural. My clothes were taken 17:00care of (laughs) at all times between having a tailor for a father and a seamstress for a mother. Nobody had to shorten my pants other than them. I was probably the only one of my generation in my family to have a completely Orthodox Jewish education, quote-unquote. Non-yeshivish, but still fairly Orthodox, for eleven years of schooling. We were a very tiny breed at that time. I didn't know six months before graduation whether I'd go to university or not. It wasn't in our milieu, in our system. I was probably the first or second of my generation to go on to Sir George Williams at that point, 'cause my marks didn't qualify for it (UNCLEAR) I didn't have any Latin at that point. Only took a science course. And halfway through my degree, undergraduate degree, I switched 18:00to the evening program 'cause I had to earn a living. And I remember paying my mother a dollar a day, seven dollars a week for my upkeep at home. I was about eighteen years old. I did all voluntar-- it was the thing to do. I mean, you lived under the roof, you had to pay. And I figured my father paid for my education up until that point, so let me contribute to the family's finances. By that point, my brother was already a married man and raising a family. But I was still single until I was thirty-six-and-a-half. (laughter)

CW:So, what were the languages that you were speaking at home?

RF:Basically, I would assume that it was Yiddish until my brother went to school. And then, being seven years apart, he was probably grade one or grade 19:00two at that point, when I was born. By the time I hit kindergarten, he was already graduating elementary school. English was the home language, although I knew a few words of Yiddish at that point. Usually parents have a secret language where the kids -- not supposed to understand. It was Russian or Ukrainian at that point for my parents to keep them from the kids, 'cause my brother understood Yiddish pretty well. He, having a grandmother for the first seven years of his life who only spoke Yiddish -- don't think she spoke a word of English, my maternal grandmother. So, that took care of that part. So, Russian was the language, the secret language of the home. But English was it. Now, when I was at Talmud Torah, my father knew the principal pretty well. You know, everybody was on good terms with the whole staff there and he sort of asked him, says, "I know this is a Hebrew school because it's ivrit b'ivrit 20:00[Hebrew: Hebrew in Hebrew]. Could you please have a few hours, a few minutes of Yiddish?" So, he conceded, in the early years, to have one hour of Yiddish Friday afternoons, just before the class leaving at two, three o'clock in the afternoon. That's what I recall. Until coming to the Jewish Public Library, that was the extent of my Yiddish, except I could read it, of course, having Hebrew. But speaking or understanding, until I came to the Jewish Public Library, that was it. And when I came to the Jewish Public Library, the extension program, McGill offered a Yiddish language course. We were about five or six students one winter. I was the only one to write the exam. I still have the marks from it, (laughs) and passed. So, that was my formal education in Yiddish. (laughs) 21:00Farshtey gants git, ober tsu redn iz a bisl shvakh [I understand a good deal, but to speak is a little difficult], and that's about it.

CW:In the environment that you grew up in, did you have a favorite yontev [holiday]?

RF:Basically, like everybody else, Pesach was the big one as far as my mother was concerned. And I -- Pesach -- and yomim neroim [Hebrew: High Holidays], Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, as far as my father -- 'cause my father always davened at shuls. He was never a member of a congregation, as such, but he often davened in shuls where they had good khazenut [(synagogue) cantors]. There were three or four shuls in the area. There was the B'nai Jacob with the khevre kedishe [Jewish burial society], and where I was bar mitzvah was in Nusach Ha'ari -- it was one built after World War II. The first synagogue built after World War II on Jeanne-Mance and Saint Viateur, that was my bar mitzvah. And I had a member of the staff of the "Keneder Adler," man by the name of Ginsberg who was their 22:00foreign correspondent for so many Yiddish newspapers, as well, he delivered the droshe [sermon], the Shabbos droshe. He was the darshn [preacher] and sort of the kle-koydesh [functionary of religious life] of that little shul. I remember that very well.

CW:Do you remember any of the khazns?

RF:Well, there were two khazonim that I remember very well for another reason -- was khazn Rosensweig and khazn Glynn, I later found out they were both -- one was at the synagogue, the Beth David on Saint Joseph Boulevard. The other one both at the B'nai Jacob on Fairmount -- maybe at khevre kedishe as well, not sure. I found out several decades later that they were initiated into freemasonry in Israel before they came to Canada. They came to Canada in '48 or '49, and in '47, I discovered amongst the ephemeral collection here, the library, a history of the lodge, which where they were initiated in Hebrew. And 23:00I found both their names and I just went wild over it, though they were lodge brothers of mine later. I used to (laughs) converse -- to talk to Rosensweig when he was khevre kedishe here on Clanranald about our Masonic experiences. (laughter) That was really a big thrill for me.

CW:In the home that you grew up in, was there a political atmosphere?

RF:Well, the only political thing -- they were liberals. Both my parents voted liberal all the time. My father, his Yiddish newspaper was "The Forward," "Der Forverts." I'd pick it up or he'd pick it up or I'd pick it up on a daily basis. Of course, the Sunday one, I'd go through the photogravure section, of course, liking all the pictures. I think it was because the news was much more 24:00straightforward and the "Keneder Adler" was always a day late in terms of the worldly news. And I never cared for the "Keneder Adler" much. So, they were particularly small-L and large-L liberals. Weren't socialists at all, and conservative parties weren't a factor in Montreal politics.

CW:And can you describe a little bit about the Jewish community in Montreal that you grew up in?

RF:Well, really, what I remember about Parc and Laurier, of course, I used to play with -- we were a group of kids in this apartment building, twelve apartments. All the other housing in that area were basically duplexes and flats, cold-water flats with iceboxes. We had fridges, for instance, which was a big thing at the time. There was one refrigeration unit for the whole apartment 25:00building with pipes going up to each house with a built-in refrigerator. And my mother was very proud of that, that didn't have to haul ice to live with ice, and it was very modern. There's nothing really outstanding. I mean, we played on the streets, which was a big thing at the time. From the age of four, I remember just playing on the streets with my friends, playing in the hallways of the apartment building, playing ball in parks, doing things on our own. I walked to school from the age of five. I was helped crossing the main thoroughfares. For instance, the main thoroughfare going to Talmud Torah was Parc and Laurier. I befriended or my mother befriended the little news dealer on the corner. He would sort of walk me two steps in front, tell me, It's safe to walk across the 26:00street now with the green light or whatnot and the traffic. But after the age of maybe seven or eight, I'd walk it on my own. Kids today are not brought up this way. They are cloistered. They have play dates; they have all this kind of stuff. That was the big thing which takes me -- even my kids didn't have to go on play dates. They were on their own. They went to school -- from the age of eight on, they took buses to get to their schools. Their mother wasn't very happy about it, but I thought it was a way of growing up, and you have to learn how to be -- to street-proof yourself. So, I was street-proofed automatically. Today, kids are not automatic-- kids even nine or ten years old, you have to be careful of downtown and whatnot. There's all kinds of shenanigans going on. And it's a big contrast for me, the way we were brought up. We were probably the last generation of its kind 'cause everybody moved to the suburbs. We didn't have that much of a problem. We only moved out of that area about a dozen years 27:00after the mainstream or most of the Jewish community left, let's say for Côte Saint-Luc or Chomedey, Laval, or for Snowdon. And we moved to Snowdon, it was in 1964, because a cousin of my mother's was moving to their own house and there was an apartment building with a bit of furniture left. So, my father says, "Okay, I'll finally break down and we'll move out of Parc Avenue." But I was twenty-six at the time, living at home. And my mother was widowed shortly afterwards and I lived with her until she passed away six years later. Then, I got married two years after that. I needed (laughs) another woman in my life. (laughs) Yeah.

CW:I'm curious, did you go to Schwartz's Deli? Were there main sort of --

RF:No, I ate kosher, so I didn't go to any of these places that people went to. The haunts that all these people went to, I didn't go to. I had two or three 28:00Orthodox friends who were in my milieu and we stuck together. Things weren't labeled as kosher but you knew, for instance, that ice cream in those days was kosher, chocolate bars were -- Mazola oil, everybody knew, was kosher. Crisco they knew was kosher, was advertised -- it was only much later -- bakeries, you knew which bakeries were goyish, baking with lard. And the Jewish bakeries, you know, we more or less assumed -- I don't know how kosher they were, but you assumed there was a degree of kashres [kosherness] involved in these things. The butcher shops, of course, were certified as kosher by the Jewish Community Council of Montreal. I'll give you one little incident about a butcher's: it was, I think, just after the war. Could have been '45 or '46. My mother had dealt with this butcher during the war years on Laurier. And she noticed epes iz 29:00nisht geshmak fun fleysh [something is not right with the meat]. There's something a little bit unusual. So, she stopped buying from him. She went across the road to a newly opened butcher called Glatt, which today is one of the big kosher meat packers. It was a regular butcher shop run by two guys named Weinberg and Rabinovich. So, she started shopping at this guy across the road and I remember that. And within a couple of weeks, this other one that she used to go to was decertified 'cause he was selling non-kosher stuff. He was caught actually selling non-kosher stuff. And my mother gave a big sigh of relief, says, "Boy, I knew something was wrong with this. I knew something was wrong." And later on, decades later, the rabbi that we used to daven with, the late 30:00Rabbi Baron, just passed away a few weeks ago. When he came here in '47 to establish the Merkaz Hatorah Yeshiva, or reestablish it, he went to Mr. Rabinovich, that butcher, and investigated the place to see how kosher it was. He didn't believe in kosher certificates. He'd have to see -- be onsite inspection. He says, "From now on, you're my butcher." That was from '47 onward. I mean, I didn't know Rabbi Baron at that point. Only knew him, what, twenty-odd years later or thirty years later. So, I felt sort of self-satisfied that we both chose the same butcher. But that's the state of kashres in what we were eating in Montreal. Basically, meat had to have a hekhsher [rabbinical approval]. In those days, the women salted their own meat. They would get a chicken from Rachel market, have it shekhted [slaughtered] on the spot. It would be plucked by the chicken dealer and shipped -- or either take it home yourself 31:00while it's still warm. And my mother used to eviscerate all the chickens by herself. And now, everything is all value-added by the meat packers, Marvid and Empire and all these places. Of course, all you paid extra in those days for kosher meat was a couple of pennies, a penny or two per pound, which would go to the Vaad Ha'ir to pay the shokhtim [ritual slaughterers] and the mashgiach [inspector of Jewish dietary laws in restaurant kitchens] and whatnot. And a chicken, I think, would be a nickel extra per chicken. And then, it used to go up to a quarter per chicken. Today, it's price per pound now, it's either double -- because it's not only eviscerated and cold-plucked but it's salted, soaked and salted. It's cut up into pieces. It's ready to put into the oven or put into the pot, cut and get any kind of -- you want chicken breast, you'll pay chicken 32:00breast -- so, you have to pay for all of that. So, that's a big difference from that point of view. Of course, friendships were much different, too. You had a small circle of friends that you went to day camp with. You had a small circle of friends, in my case, in the apartment building. I had very few friendships with people even on the same street 'cause we had our own little clique in that apartment. We were all more or less the same age, maybe two, three -- we were about five or six of us, two, three years apart and we'd play in each other's living rooms or in the hallways of that apartment building, a dozen apartments in the whole building. So, that was our growing up. Of course, once you reach high school, things separate and once you move out of the area, you lose touch with a lot of people. Or sometimes, you keep in touch with some classmates, two or three or so who are close, but that's about it. Next?

CW:In terms of your own Jewish identity, is there a specific experience that you 33:00felt was particularly important in that?

RF:No, I wasn't one of these born-again bal-tshuve [non-practicing Jew who has become religiously observant]. Was a very, very gradual, gradual basis. I'm still bal-tshuve every day when it comes to that philosophical point of view. I sent my daughters, for instance, to the Bais Yaakov schools. My son went to Yeshiva Gedola for his entire career. What I did stop is that they did get college and university educations -- sort of the philosophy of Yeshiva University style, Mizrahi-style type of stuff. Modern Orthodox would be how to describe it, or Centrist Orthodox or -- I hate that label. I hate that label. You're either Orthodox or you're not, 'cause basically the other political things are nothing to do with Orthodoxy as far as I'm concerned. It was to do with the life that you lead, the lifestyle that you lead, whether it's a 34:00cloistered life, have no secular influences, or minimal secular influence whatsoever, or you're part of the world, you just -- one of my rabbis that -- I used to belong to his synagogue, the Spanish & Portuguese, the Shearith Israel -- he used to say, "It's good to be of the world between nine and five during the day and between five and nine the following morning, you're a full Jew." You're a Jew at home and you have the outward aspects. You try to be part of the world, but you don't advertise your Judaism that much. Today, it's a much different world. You could advertise everything, your own religion. You're much more open with it. You could wear a kippah and nobody's gonna think twice. Or they'll think one-and-a-half times. (laughs) But it's a much easier proposition 35:00to be a Jew on the outside as well as be a Jew on the inside.

CW:And growing up in the '50s, was there a sense of any limitation of what you could do career-wise, or --

RF:I never felt any limitation. There may have been limitation, but I wasn't aware of them. The limitations are what the outside world brings to you. For instance, when I was at Sir George Williams, I worked for Canadian Pacific Railway for two-and-a-half years. They would allow me, let's say, to leave a little bit earlier in the wintertime for Shabbat and I would make it up coming in earlier in the mornings other days of the week. I'd get the Jewish holidays off, be part of my vacation, deducted from the two weeks or three weeks' vacation. But I would, let's say, try to make it up sometimes if I would come in Christmas, New Year's, let's say to answer being in the transportation -- 36:00whether you have to answer cables or wires for people overseas or open up some mail that came in during the long weekends and stuff like that. So, you'd make it up within that kind of fashion. They took it in stride. There were no hassles in those days as you find today.

CW:Now, earlier, you mentioned that that experience in the railroad was sort of a -- opening up to a non-Jewish world or --

RF:Yes. In retrospect, it was an opening up. When I was there, it was just part of your normal -- part of existence -- you went to work during the day. There was only one Jewish boy who worked in a floor above me. I met him once or twice. He used to give me a lot of hassles 'cause he used to work all the Jewish holidays and I didn't. And they said, Well, you're Jewish, you should take off these holidays. Finegold's taking them off. You should take 'em off, as well. And he says, "Well, you don't want -- it's your business." I made an arrangement 37:00and that was it. Worked out pretty well. Otherwise, I taught school for a couple of years. There were no hassles there because a lot of Jewish teachers and Jewish students -- involved in the schools and Protestant school board. About one-third of their school population and staff were Jewish anyway, so that wasn't too big of a hassle.

CW:And can you tell a little bit about your work with the JIAS, is it?

RF:JIAS? Yeah. After I graduated, I was pretty much aimless, so I took an offer with the Jewish community. Was 1960 to '62, I think it was. I worked for JIAS. I was expected to work towards my master's in social work. I worked for two years. They were still on Esplanade, not the next building where Herzliah used to be. I 38:00wasn't handling social work cases. I took a course doing social work, didn't care for it at all. So, I left them and pursued studies in education. The only thing I got out of JIAS was that I made a lot of friendships there in the Jewish community which helped me working for the library 'cause later on, (laughs) the executive director, Cage, and my future boss at the Jewish Public Library, David Rome, were there at my initiation into freemasonry. Again, I became a freemason through the auspices of my rabbi, Frank, at that point and a cousin of mine. Had many cousins who were freemasons and they sort of drafted me into it. And I came and I see these two gentlemen, my former boss and my current boss. They're also freemasons, so it made me feel good as well. And I had a lot of relatives in 39:00that lodge, so I got along with them. So, that sort of introduced me on a different level to the Jewish community because we shared a lot together.

CW:Can you explain a little bit about the freemason --

RF:Well, freemasonry is sort of a grown-up fraternity for men. A lot of people ask me, How can you be an Orthodox Jew and be a freemason? Well, it's not hard at all because freemasonry just asks two things of you. It asks you to be part of a monotheistic religion. That's a basis. No religion's ever discussed, although you are trusted to be a member of a monotheistic religion and be free by birth. That means you cannot be an emancipated slave. They started that whole business in 1715. It's going to be three hundred years. It arose out of the medieval Masonic unions, you might say, or -- how would you call them?

CW:Trade -- yeah.

RF:Trade unions, that they needed protection when they were working on a site, whether it was a cathedral or a fortress. You're out in the middle of nowhere. You have to trust your fellow worker, trust strangers that come in. And eventually, people who were not in that trade would seek the protection of this fraternity for their own purpose. And let's say somebody who happens to be on a highway for trade or for escaping from somewhere needs some protection. They would make him sort of into an honorary member or a non-voting member, the equivalent of that, and they would take him in, give him protection from bandits, from thieves, from murderers, from all things that could happen to you on the highway or when you're in a strange country or in a strange territory. 41:00Eventually, the trade aspect of it would disappear and everybody would belong to this fraternity just for self-protection. And then, it became a benevolent association and developed into what it is today: a fraternity of men who have no ulterior motives. All they want to -- is initiate new members into their lodge. The outside world says they're secret but they're -- in this day and age, you can't keep a secret with tens of millions of members. The only secret is that we are not allowed to reveal what those secrets are to the general public, although the general public probably knows if they search hard enough online. Encyclopedias know what's going on in our affairs. Basically, it's making new members all the time and trying to make the world a better place from a charitable point of view. For instance, you ever see anonymous donations of huge sums of money, you could more or less attribute those sums of money to Masonic 42:00lodges. For instance, the higher degree, the Shriners, who are a separate group, who only admit Masons into their ranks, have a favorite activity and that's building hospitals for burns, the Shriners Hospital specialize in burns and, I think, in orthopedic stuff. Montreal has a Shriners Hospital which is paid completely by the benevolence of the Shriners, who are drawn from the ranks of freemasons. I'm not a Shriner myself, but this is how it works. So, it's just a purely fraternal organization. All other fraternal organizations use our system, our methods, sort of our framework, but we're the original thing. (laughs)

CW:So, I'd like to transition now to talk about the JPL, and I am curious how 43:00you first came --

RF:Okay. Came here?

CW:-- here, yeah.

RF:Okay, so I came -- teaching for two years, wasn't happy with teaching. I'm single through this point. I'm living at home, have no expenses, have no dependents. I'm on my own. Says, Let me try something else. I says, Well, I was partway -- I knew a little bit of graduate school. Says, Let me register in library school, see what happens. I was always into books through Irving Layton, by the way. He introduced us to second-hand bookshops. Introduced me to reading on a pleasurable basis. Our whole class was oriented that way.

CW:What were your favorites?

RF:Nothing, it's just the subject of reading for reading's sake. Not so much fiction. I mean, I would read all the Jewish novelists, basically. I was into politics, through Layton. He was a political science major. Had his master's in 44:00English in poli-sci. So, that's what I took up in my bachelor's degree as well. So, I said, Let me see what I could do in library science. I more or less succeeded in that. And I'd worked one summer, the year my mother passed away, that summer, I worked in Ottawa for the National Science Library. I was destined to really have my career with them, after I graduated. My mother passed away. My father passed away, excuse me, in '66 and I just said, Well, I have to live with my mother. She was not a young woman at that age. So, I cancelled plans working for the government. Comes the following year, I'm graduating, following spring or fall. Yeah, spring and fall. And get a job. So, I had two offers: Jewish Public Library and Loyola College before it merged with Concordia to become -- or did it already? Maybe it did -- to become Concordia University. Loyola and 45:00Sir George Williams. The difference was a hundred dollars a year. One paid 6,200 and one paid 6,300. My mother in her wisdom says, "If you work for the Jewish community, you're gonna get all the Jewish holidays off and the salary's the same." So, and I didn't have to take any public transportation. I was a ten-minute walk away from the library in their temporary quarters. I lived in the area, so I took that job. Little did I know that I'd probably get paid one-third less over the career -- instead of working for a government job, quasi-government job. But that's what turned out. Rome was my boss. It was six months before I was initiated into freemasonry. (laughs) I didn't know that at the time. And all the rest is history. So, I worked for the library and I stayed there. It's funny, 'cause when I started working for the library, the first few 46:00years we didn't have a pension plan, then became part of the Federation system, I joined the pension plan. By that time, I was ready, I was booked to be married, to get married. And I asked them, I had some savings, and could I back into the pension plan? Pay back wages from the time I was working, 'cause it was a five-year difference. Said, No, we don't accept that. Yeah, so my pension is like ten percent lower than it should be because the pension plan came in later. So, that sort of kept you being loyal to the Jewish community at that point. And having a current boss at that point and a previous boss -- were in the Jewish community and getting to know all the other makhers [big shots] in the Jewish community at -- it sort of helped me along.

CW:I'd like to ask just a little back story about the recorded lectures first, 47:00and then we'll talk about the talking books, too.

RF:When I came into the library, Willie Ostrager was already -- I came in in '67, he had fifteen years of recording the programs of Jewish interest to the Jewish community. It was a given that any event the library sponsored or any other organization that would admit him with his Wollensak recorder, forty-pound Wollensak recorder and array of microphones and microphone stands, would admit him to that thing, we would tape record it. And when cassettes became available, we would make copies available for the library and to borrow from the library. I took a cue from that, to that point, and say, Why just limit yourself to the stuff -- to the live recordings that he's doing? I've heard a lot of stuff on the CBC of Jewish interest, whether politically or musically or culturally. I 48:00used to tape those, as well, before even hooking up but even just putting a mike in front of a loudspeaker. I had pretty good equipment at that time and I started taping those things, as well. Then, I forget which year, a man by the name of Rosenfeld came to the library. It's the era of cassettes and talking books were starting to become popular. And this man, Rosenfeld, had a homebound wife. She had some kind of chronic illness and she wanted to have these programs taped for her and Yiddish literature taped for her. Ostrager was out of the 49:00picture at that point but we had -- man name of Rabin who had a background in sales and service in the audio industry. I had bought equipment from him before he even came to the library. I asked him. Rosenfeld had the financial backing. We had a little studio here or studio facilities, quasi-studio facilities. We had Yiddish speakers, native Yiddish speakers here. "Let's do our own little cottage industry of taping all the Yiddish classics." And we did that. And Rosenfeld was the first customer. We made copies and that was it. It just took off and all the rest is history. I remember I was reluctant because I didn't 50:00know -- "Rosenfeld, you want to have a few tapes here and there and for your wife. What's going to happen to the rest of it?" "Don't worry, I'm going to fund the whole thing. No special budget for the library. Won't cost you a nickel." "Well," I said, "if you want to go around with that" -- my bosses went along with that, too. Trepman was the executive director at the time and it just -- when Henry Rabin retired, he went full blast recording every opportunity of every classic. And now, it's part of the big, large, worldwide collection.

CW:Who'd you get to do the recordings?

RF:Henry Rabin did that all single-handedly. He'd be behind the glass and the readers, the three or four readers would come in two, three times a week, just read for hours at a time. Mrs. Serlin -- what's her name? The other one. Ozier.

CW:There was -- Malca Hubner who did some.

RF:Was what? Hubner. There's another one. One used to be a secretary in the library. Her maiden name was Ozier.

CW:Augenfeld. Liba Augenfeld.

RF:Augenfeld, yeah. What's the other one? Another one, come on. Sara Dresher. Let me tell you about Sara Dresher. Sara Dresher's son is an accomplished linguistics professor at University of Toronto. His mother came here as a child in the 1930s from Poland. She was a secretary to the principal of Talmud Torah, [Melef Magged?], when I was at Talmud Torah in the mid-'40s. I used to be the office boy; she was the secretary. We met again when Trepman hired his own 52:00secretary, executive secretary for himself. Who does he hire? Sara Dresher. We become colleagues after me being her office boy at Talmud Torah. That's the kind of things that the Jewish community was -- at the time.

CW:Yeah. Was there any moment in recording these events that you said, Wow, someone's gonna see this in forty years and --

RF:Yeah, basically, there were some sort of quote-unquote hit recordings. When we moved into this building here the first time, we'd set up an automatic tape system attached to the PA system in the auditorium, that no matter who was running a program, that program would be taped no matter what. We'd keep most of them. Started a reel-to-reel, then became -- recorded on cassettes. And one of them was the day before the election in 1976, when the PQ came to power in 53:00Quebec and there was an epoch-making election, the day before, Charles Bronfman spoke in that auditorium and was taped automatically. His remarks weren't very felicitous towards the Parti Québécois and it was captured for all time by our beautiful tape-recording system. Another one was when I took our portable recorder to, reel recorder to the Beth TB/DJ Synagogue on Baily to record Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was brought in by David Hartman, Rabbi Hartman, who was the resident rabbi at that time. And we recorded "The Sabbath," which he read from. I was disappointed in that I thought he had -- later on, I thought, He's probably in his least productive period, towards the end of his life. He 54:00didn't know what -- we were expecting something new, of course, or something topical. But it wasn't to be. And we recorded, also, Saul Bellow during his visits here. Irving Layton, who was my teacher for two years at Herzliah. Richler was recorded here. We tried, one person, to record who was teaching in Bennington College in Vermont, not far from Montreal. And I saw correspondence with him from the library from decades ago. And he wouldn't come. He says, "I teach. I write," and that was it. And that was Bernard Malamud. He would never come up, and I don't know if anybody ever recorded him. Would you know?

CW:I haven't heard of anything.

RF:He wrote this very nice response saying, "Thanks, but no thanks. This is the 55:00way I do things and that's it." He was one of my favorite authors of the American Jewish school. He was the most gentle of Jewish authors, I suppose, besides Klein. Klein was a tragic figure, of course. I'd seen him as a child. I was eight, nine, ten years old. And, of course, I learned what is tragedy through Ruth Wisse's interviews on film, et cetera. But, of course, Layton probably lead me to appreciate books and literature in general. I still have Layton's autograph in an early thesaurus from the 1920s or '30s, which he 56:00allowed me to buy from a second-hand book dealer and he dedicated it to me. 'Cause he always took us for a spring trip to the second-hand bookshops on Saint Catherine Street. I still keep that as a souvenir. (laughs)

CW:For some people in the States where Klein is not as given the due that he should be --

RF:Oh, right, yeah.

CW:-- can you describe a little bit more about him?

RF:Well, I never spoke to the man, of course. I just saw him on film, and I saw him in person as a larger-than-life figure. He'd be the only man walking on Parc Avenue, let's say, during the Jewish holidays, dressed in a three-piece suit in the middle of the summer, in a lawyerly uniform that he was -- I knew him sitting in the audiences at little concerts we used to give at school during the 57:00holidays, sitting in the audience. He'd stand out because he was that kind of a figure. And I grew to like his work. And a bit through Layton. They were both graduates of Baron Byng High School, Layton being the younger one, maybe four or five years younger, but a generation apart in terms of writing. And he would tell us how Klein was denigrated in the academic world in that he was never accepted as a teacher, which -- he should have been a great professor of English. And he hated the law. And this is why he accepted a job as a ghost writer and a bit of a publicist for the Seagram empire owned by Bronfman. And he was the personal speechwriter for Bronfman himself. And in those days, that kind 58:00of life was very, very demeaning for a lawyer and for a man who was a great, great intellect, a man who specialized in modern English lit. It was just an impossible kind of a life that is described to me by other people, but I could imagine what kind of torment he went through writing little notes and little, very minor things. For instance, I had a book that was sponsored by the Bronfman family and the Seagram empire during World War II, a history of Canada by Stephen Leacock. And the dedications were commissioned by Bronfman or ordered by Bronfman to be written by Klein. It was later I saw Klein's manuscript in his archives being matched with the same word for word dedication done in Bronfman's 59:00hand in some of these books that he autographed. Two versions: one a very poetic version and one is a prosaic version. One that Klein would have written for himself and one that he thought maybe, This is what Bronfman should be -- in Bronfman's voice, so to speak. And [Osher Kaplan?] showed both versions to me and I was just broken by a thing like that. But those were those days. Today -- he was two generations behind his time. Two generations behind his time. But I still enjoy his work.

CW:And there were some Yiddish writers involved in Seagram's, as well. You were mentioning earlier about the tour guide.

RF:Oh, (laughter) basically, (UNCLEAR) basically Klein -- these are Jewish 60:00communal workers, Klein being a quasi-Jewish communal worker at the time. Well, he was, basically, working for Bronfman. And Saul Hayes, who was the executive director of Congress for a generation -- Congress was basically a vehicle for Samuel Bronfman at the time. He revived it in '33, when Hitler came to power. Although it was established in 1918, it was moribund. It was just a paper organization between 1918 and '33 when Bronfman came here and revived it under Saul Hayes' leadership, and Caiserman, who was the executive direction, as well. The previous one. They and Klein and David Rome were the leadership of the Jewish community at that point, the national Jewish leadership, which was headquartered in Montreal. I heard many of these things secondhand, but Rome 61:00told me enough about the workings behind the scenes, which I don't want to talk about. I think it's enough that I know about it. (laughs) And one thing I can say that was captured on tape at the introduction of the Klein film by Kaufman -- that he introduced Klein, says, "I and Abraham Klein spent a summer or two working for Seagram's as spilers [marketing people], as" -- well, not hookers -- "as guys trying to hook tourists from the Metro Hotel, Seagram's being strategically located across the road, their headquarters." On purpose, by the way. He bought that piece of land to build his little castle across from the Metro Hotel 'cause the tourists would come seeking liquid refreshment to take 62:00back home during the Prohibition years. They'd get a tour of Montreal, sponsored by Seagram's, I suppose, and a tour of the LaSalle Distillery, which they'd be introduced to nice, clean, healthy distilled liquor, not the adulterated stuff that you'd find in the USA. And somehow, the people would get across the border with a couple of bottles of it. And that's how, he said, how the summer jobs -- how they got through university in those days. If you really want to capture that, capture the original words of Saul Hayes that got into the thing, too. By the way, what got me into the interest of the LaSalle plant was that I had a friend of mine, we were both fourteen years old at the time and we had a hobby of visiting different industrial plants during the summers. He'd phone up and 63:00say, "Could we take a tour of your plant?" And we phoned up Seagram's. At that point, it was a three-streetcar ride, an extra streetcar ride from Parc and Laurier, and he was Fairmount and Parc, a block away from me. We took that trip to the LaSalle plant, they showed us how the products were distilled and bottled and whatnot. It took practically a whole day because it was almost a two-hour ride there and back. Of course, we didn't get samples. And I had that image in my mind of Klein trekking out to Ville LaSalle, probably, or at least going to the headquarters on Peel Street on a daily basis, doing work for Bronfman as a 64:00sideline and then probably as a full-time job at one point, and coming home and doing his serious work, which only was published posthumously, most of the stuff with people like [Osher Kaplan?] and Seymour Mayne and other ones who had a Klein project, an academic Klein project going decades later. So, that was another introduction that I had to Klein and to Bronfman. I've seen Bronfman at a distance, but that's the kind of circles that I made impressions in in my mind.

CW:Coming from the States where so many people are monolingual, I'd like to ask a question about sort of the multilinguality of the Jewish community and the Jewish Public Library.

RF:Yeah. Basically, originally, the library was a Yiddish institution. The 65:00Hebrew aspects came in through Rome. He had a sponsor to sponsor a rabbinic collection of Talmud and codes, probably in the 1950s when they moved to Mount Royal and Esplanade. Before that, I don't think there was much of that. The languages for books of general interest at that point were English, some French, mostly Yiddish, bit of Hebrew later on. Then, after the war, there were a lot of Polish and Russian books. The early part was Polish, a bit of Magyar Hungarian. 66:00A few French -- Romanian books coming in. Another friend of Rome's sponsored a multilingual collection of Judaica for a short period of time. An existing collection. This man dealt in second-hand collections, state collections of various kinds. This was one of them, so he donated it to the library. That added more of a multilingual aspect. Then, when the Russian immigrants came in, we had a Russian collection for about a decade or two. There's still remnants of it at the library. So, we bring in different languages that were used by Jews, Jewish immigrant groups coming in. I suppose if we would have a sizable Spanish (laughs) influence, we'd have a Spanish collection of that type. But public 67:00libraries generally did that. For instance, we have one of the branches of the City of Montreal library in Côte-des-Neiges, which is called the multilingual branch.

CW:In terms of the people that you dealt with, you mentioned that you learned Yiddish sort of as part of --

RF:Yeah.

CW:-- the job. How have you seen Yiddish sort of change its role in the library over the years?

RF:Well, not so much the library but in the community generally. Yiddish speakers in Montreal were basically members of the library. They sent their kids to the folkshuln rather than Talmud Torah. Eventually, Hebrew Academy took the Hebrew elements as well as Talmud Torah. In the late '40s, '50s, and early '60s, a lot of immigration of people with Hasidic roots reestablished their Hasidic 68:00culture in Montreal, sort of in the shadow of what was going on in Brooklyn, what was going on in the greater New York area -- to a certain degree in Boston, but basically in the New York area. Other centers in Western Europe, a bit probably in Belgium, a bit in France, as well. And as they got established, they had nothing that much to do with the library at the beginning. The secular parts of the library didn't interest them. They had their own literatures. They were basically into yeshivish kind of stuff. Some of their members would come in occasionally to consult with our rabbinic collection 'cause it was a pretty good 69:00collection which people didn't own on their own or have in their own homes at that point. Printing was still a pretty expensive proposition. It's only the last, let's say, twenty or thirty years that getting stuff in print is financially feasible for many, many works which otherwise would have remained in manuscript form. So, the library wasn't involved that much in the Hasidic community. So, Yiddish was basically less and less used as far as the library's concerned. The Yiddish studies program at McGill did help a bit, although many non-Yiddish speakers became part of that program and learned Yiddish just as a language where they learned any other academic language. There was a Yiddish 70:00culture -- became more emphasized rather than Yiddish language itself -- and the English language literature became a political movement rather than a cultural and a more natural movement from my point of view as it was in the '30s and '40s, let's say, when "The Forward" and the "Morgen-zhurnal" were read and the "Keneder Adler." And you could just see the downhill of the "Keneder Adler" from a daily to three times a week to two times a week to a weekly to a bi-weekly and that was it.

CW:And now, there are more Hasidim that come here?

RF:There are a few -- Chabad people use the library very extensively, both for secular and for borrowing more traditional works. The rabbinic collection and the biblical collection is more heavily used because we are in the midst of a Chabad community. Chabad community lives only several blocks away from here and 71:00they're one of the few Hasidic groups who are not cloistered, so to speak. They're outward looking. They always do kirov [Hebrew: outreach] work in the rest of the Jewish community, so that helps them a lot and they bring a lot -- and their attitude towards secular studies is not as restrictive as the other Hasidic groups or yeshiva groups. The people who have a yeshivish background, Lithuanian kind of background, do come here for their general studies, projects and stuff like that.

CW:For you, personally, how do you keep up your Yiddish?

RF:Basically, conversationally it's still on the -- I wouldn't say the beginner level, but I'm not a hundred percent conversant with Yiddish. I like to listen once a week to a Yiddish shier [Talmudic lesson] on the parshah d'shevuah, on 72:00the weekly portion that's given at the Baily synagogue by two Hasidic rabonim and I enjoy it very much because I combine both hearing the good Yiddish word and the good Jewish word.

CW:Good Yiddish word and the good Yiddish word. (laughter)

RF:Right.

CW:And I'd like to sort of open it up, if there are -- do you have any great family stories or anything that you want to include in this?

RF:I don't know how much -- for general interest for that to -- that's another audience. (laughter) I'd rather keep that private --

CW:Sure, sure.

RF:-- in the family --

CW:Sure.

RF:-- as far as my (laughs) own family's concerned.

CW:Yeah. Well, I'm wondering just in terms of your point of view, sort of where you see the place of Yiddish in the Montreal Jewish community right now?

RF:Well, Montreal or North America or even world -- like Singer was saying, Yiddish is always dying. It's always there in one way or another. It's becoming more and more academic, as I see YIVO and National Yiddish Book Center-centered and other sort of Dovid Katz type of operations, this kind of an element. The spoken language will be kept up for some time to come in the Hasidic communities, although it's not a very literary Yiddish. It wasn't meant to be. It's a means of communication. The literary parts, even in Europe, I suspect, was only the veneer of the Yiddishist element, the maskilim [followers of the Haskalah] element, which was transferred here. It lasted a couple of generations 74:00when it hit that peak, probably in the 1950s. And Yiddish will be remembered in translation. Unfortunately, from a literary point of view, I can't see it as a lingua franca anymore. I mean, the only expression that I know that is still in use are in the diamond bursars. (laughs) Two Hebrew source words in Yiddish. It's unfortunate, but that's the nature of the thing. I remember there was a broadcaster who used to work for the CBC and now he's a freelancer. He wanted to do a program on how Yiddish gets itself transferred. All the Yiddish terminology and expressions get transferred into the Anglo world, even the Franco world. In 75:00the time I got ready for him, it was already so widespread you just couldn't do into one program at all. I keep following "The Forward" -- the Philologos column. I follow it assiduously. Whoever he is is just a genius when it comes -- his stuff should be put into hardcover, anyway, although it's probably all online now in TheForward.com. But that's the kind of stuff that I think Yiddish and probably -- and certain amount Hebrew will find that niche. There will always be a niche market, but it won't be mainstream anymore, and not what the Yiddishist and the maskilim thought would be transferred here.

CW:Do you have a favorite Yiddish oysdruk [expression] or word that --

RF:Not really. I don't have any of that kind of -- not really. Just comes up in 76:00speech. My wife doesn't enjoy when I use Yiddish expressions on my kids. (laughs) But as part of my speech pattern and certain elements when I'm within a certain element of people.

CW:Yeah.

RF:But that's the way it is probably with people who are not Yiddish speakers who mistranslate a lot of terms.

CW:Chutzpah.

RF:Chutzpah, (laughter) exactly.

CW:Well, I'm at the end of my questions. I have just one more but if there's anything --

RF:No.

CW:-- you'd like to add? Okay.

RF:You added it all up for me. (laughter)

CW:Well, I'd just like to end with any advice that you have for future generations.

RF:In terms of?

CW:In terms of Jewish identity and --

RF:Identity is a word that means a lot of different things to a lot of different Jews. And currently in our world today, they say, Well, I'm Jewish in this way. I'm Jewish in that way. I'm Jewish in a lot of other ways. I just want to put a 77:00little contrasting word. I followed the Jewish -- how should I say it? The Jewish view of the New Age, the Jewish view of humanistic Judaism, the Jewish view of -- how do they call it? (UNCLEAR) the term. Reform Jews? They're taking all kind of byproducts of Judaism that have nothing to do with Judaism as a faith, as a way of life. They're taking all of the peripheral aspects and saying 78:00we're gonna take all these peripheral aspects of Judaism and form a new Jewish view. We're going to take Yiddishkayt, not the Yiddish view of Yiddishkayt but the Hasidic view or definition of Yiddishkayt out of the Jewish factors and try to fashion a new Judaism of it, whether it's Reform, whether it's Mordecai Kaplan's Reconstructionist, whether it's Sherwin's -- Sherwin, what was name? The guy from Detroit. He formed Humanistic Judaism. Abraham Arnold's view, the same wing, Humanistic. We're going to de-Judaize Judaism and come up with all these peripherals and make a Judaism of it. That's not gonna work. There have been Jewish communists who tried to make communism into a Jewish version. Jewish socialists, democratic socialists. The Bund tried to do it. Never worked. The 79:00kibbutz movement never worked. The only thing that has had a lasting effect on the survival of Judaism is Yiddishkayt, is what is called by the world today -- I hate that term -- Orthodox in its various manifestations. Yesterday, I attended a little program. Was a short little lecture by a recent convert to Judaism by the name of Richard Marceau. Not related to Marcel. (laughs) He's a former member of Parliament of the Bloc Québécois. He'd married a Jewish girl, I guess, what, fifteen years ago and he gradually moved to the position that for him to live a life, a meaningful life, he'd have to convert to Judaism. He first converted to Reform Judaism, he told us, and he said he moved to -- he was 80:00living in Quebec City. He wanted to be part of the small community there. He comes one Shabbat morning. There's a very tiny Orthodox community in Quebec, now it's run by Chabad. And he sees there are nine Jews there, he's the tenth one, and they're waiting for a minyen. So, he asked the rabbi -- "I'm here. Let's start davening." "You're Jewish?" "Well, I was converted by Rabbi X." "But Rabbi X is Reform. We don't accept him." And the guy went, "What do you mean you don't accept him? I'm Jewish. I went to the mikve [pool for ritual immersion]." I don't know if he was circumcised at that point, he had a brit milah [Hebrew: Jewish circumcision ceremony], I'm not sure. They consulted Rabbi (UNCLEAR) consulted with other rabbis in the community, says, "You know what?" And he says, "I have to become a real Jew." And shortly afterwards, he was reconverted (laughs) to Orthodox Judaism and he celebrated his twin sons' bar mitzvah at the 81:00Kotel [Hebrew: Western Wall], I presume. And he told about his remarkable journey to Orthodox Judaism. He's not alone in that. He's now part of a long line of converts that I have met through the library who have come here seeking Yiddishkayt, non-Jews I know. Won't mention their names, of course. And that's the kind of Judaism that I think that has a future, both of those who were born -- I hate that term frum from birth, 'cause nobody's frum from birth. (laughs) You might have a chance of being -- it's like being a citizen of the United States 'cause you're born in the USA, right? But you have to become an American citizen. Or those who are called bal-tshuve. I'm a bal-tshuve hopefully every day of my life. And Richard Marceau's book came out in French, his little story of his journey to Judaism and the story of his life up until now. It's just been 82:00translated into English. It's available, I think, next week if you want to pick up a copy in English and you'll see the kind of Judaism that I mean. There are other books written by converts to Judaism, both in English and French. And these are the ones that I'm proud of. I just read of one in an Orthodox little magazine in Toronto of a young man in his twenties who, after his conversion, because a Bobover Hasid and a protégé of the Bobover rebbe, (laughs) both in Brooklyn and in Toronto. And I think he already married a Bobover girl. (laughs) And these are the kinds that please me personally, although I'm fond for the Yiddishists that they're trying something. Maybe some of their future generations might discover the real Yiddishkayt. But you never know. I've met 83:00those kind of people, as well.

CW:Well, a sheynem dank [thank you very much]. (laughs)

RF:A sheynem dank.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

RF:On more than one occasion, my mother described to me the famous Petliura pogrom in Proskurov in 1919, I think it was, right?

CW:Yeah.

RF:It happened one Saturday afternoon, the way she describes it to me, when the massacres took place in the Jewish part of town. Now, you have to understand, I think Proskurov at that time was about one-third Jewish and two-thirds non-Jewish. Most of the Jewish community lived in their own little part of town and that's where the pogrom took place. As my mother described it, there were about five or six families, including my mother's, that lived in the non-Jewish part of town who were not affected whatsoever as far as she knew by that pogrom, 84:00although they were traumatized just as much by it. And she often told me, because this pogrom took place twenty years before World War II broke out, in many ways, she considers that her mini-Holocaust. And I, on my own, gathered both secondary materials, basically, on the history of that period, history of that pogrom. "Pogromchik" was one book, I think, that summarized it, basically. I have some newspaper clippings about Schwartzbard, when he passed away and when he was reburied in Har Herzl. He lived in South Africa, I think, and my mother used to recount to me -- I don't think she ever knew him. He was a little more 85:00left-wing than my mother's circle, but she was very proud when he shot Petliura in Paris. And she followed the trial the same way that people followed the trial of the -- what's his name now?

CW:Eichmann?

RF:No, no, no, I'm talking -- in 1912, the --

CW:Oh, Dreyfus?

RF:No, the --

CW:Sorry, I don't know --

RF:-- the trial of -- the pogrom, the guy who shot -- oy, what's -- I get these name-- (laughs) Beilis, Mendel Beilis.

CW:Yes, of course. (laughter)

RF:Get all these names -- well, my father followed the Mendel Beilis -- here. He was here in Montreal. Lot of people kept clippings of all -- the whole Beilis affair. But my mother followed Petliura's trial the same way that the previous 86:00generation followed the Beilis trial. I think even have a photograph of the Petliura trial, the picture of him in court, which I'm saving for my kids and grandchildren. I also have a copy of the yizkor book, 1926, I think it was, done in New York by the landsmanshaft from Proskurov. I pored through it both in the original Yiddish -- couldn't find anybody remotely related to my family, although I'll tell you about another thing, just another post-postscript about Yaffa Eliach's book. My kids bought it for me, (laughs) but before it was remaindered, I bought copies for them, as well. I looked in the index of all the names of my father's family. Nothing. There's the Mundt family, there's the 87:00Poritz family, all kind of spellings, all kinds of things I could think of. Nothing even close. She was born ten years before me and I suspect that basically, the book covers her period from time of her birth till the Holocaust. Before, during, and after the Holocaust. And very cursorily, nothing of a family or of a personal biographical nature for people who left Proskurov -- left Eyshishuk on that famous bridge, certainly in the time of 1900 -- I don't know how many people left at that point. Maybe my father's family were a very tiny handful. But there's nothing I could find in either that yortsayt book, that yizkor book or that -- Yaffa Eliach's book on Eyshishuk. Nothing at all. A lot of people today are into Jewish genealogy as a form of Yiddishkayt for them. I 88:00remember Henry Rabin, olev-asholem [may he rest in peace], was going through all the rabbis, all the people in their past, says, "What's the use getting all this in the past if you're not doing anything yourself this time? What's the use of having the yikhes [ancestry] all in the past and all this type of thing? I can't fathom that." And one little library anecdote: about twenty-odd years ago, a fellow comes in. This is about five or six years after the "Judaica" came out. He goes, "I have an ancestor who was a very, very famous rabbi," and he gave me his name. And says, "I want to find out about him because I want to get a genealogy." Says, "Okay, let's go to 'Judaica,' see if he's in there." There was a paragraph with eight or ten lines on this fellow. What is he known for in "Judaica"? As a forger and a plagiarizer. (laughs) I didn't tell the guy that. I says, "You can look him up. Now, here's how to spell his name." (laughs) And that was my extent of Jewish genealogy. I go back to my father's parents, my 89:00mother's mother. I know my mother's father's name, obviously, but I never researched where he's buried or anything, his past. I know that he died in his sleep before my mother -- coming into this country. Three of my grandparents are buried here in Montreal. My father's parents: 1902, 1926. My mother's mother in 1937 and my parents are buried in that same cemetery with some uncles and aunts, cousins, whatnot. But that's about it. There was one picture I have of my father's grandmother who came here in the same -- I think a few months -- in the spring of 1901 or something and got her picture taken in Montreal and went back to her husband and the rest of the family, just to make sure that her children, her daughters -- no, no, her sons' children are taken care of here and well 90:00settled. That was it. She had to spent a few months here because no ships came in during the winter. So, she probably took the first ship back in the spring and they took a picture of her here and that was it.

CW:Wow.

RF:The end! (laughter) So far, as far as that chapter's concerned.

CW:Great. Well, thanks again. (laughs)

RF:You're welcome.

[END OF INTERVIEW]