DEBRA CAPLAN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney. I'm here with Debra Caplan in DC at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference. Today is December 19th, 2011. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Debra, do I have your permission to record this interview?

DEBRA CAPLAN:Sure.

CW:Thanks. Can you briefly tell me about your family background?

DC:Sure. So, I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, about forty-five minutes outside of the city. My father was a floor covering salesman. That was his official job but not really his identity. His identity was really that he was kind of the community Jewish scholar of our local community. So, people would 1:00come to him with all sorts of questions about Jewish life. Sometimes they would go to the rabbi but sometimes they would go to my dad or sometimes both. And so, that was my father. And then, my mother also -- well, they were both from New Jersey. And both of my parents actually grew up in households that had really rejected Judaism very specifically, very precisely. So, in my father's family, they really wanted their kids to be very American, kind of all-American boys. They named their sons Murray and Wayne, the most American names they could think of, and to the parents' dismay, my uncle changed his name to Mikha legally and my dad changed his name to Zev and they both really embrace Jewishness as part of their kind of core values. And my mother, it wasn't quite as explicit a rejection but they certainly were not very invested in Jewishness. So, my mother grew up very jealous of her best friend whose house she would go to for Shabbat, 2:00that they did all of these things and that they had all of this knowledge that she didn't have access to. So, the home that I grew up in, my parents very consciously decided they wanted to build a Jewish home and a Jewish life for their kids. And they wanted to build that, which that -- they felt like they had not grown up with, that which was missing from their own childhoods. So, they became kosher, they learned the laws of kashrut and they tried to really create for us the environment that they had sort of been jealous of as children.

CW:I want to ask more about that but can you back up for a second?

DC:Sure.

CW:Where did your parents' family come from?

DC:Originally? Oh, sure.

CW:Yeah.

DC:So, on both sides, they were Galicianers [Galician Jews]. On both sides, they came from the region that's now sort of northwestern Ukraine. And on both sides, 3:00they immigrated not super early but relatively early. So, both of my -- all of my grandparents were born in this country. Several of my great-grandparents were born in this country. So, for Ashkenazim from that part of the world, they came a little bit on the early side. And both of my parents grew up in New Jersey. My dad grew up in Camden; my mom grew up in Mount Laurel, which was not too far. And then, I grew up in Philadelphia.

CW:Are there any great family stories that have been passed down from your grandparents' or great-grandparents' (laughter) generation?

DC:Yeah, well, I guess one of my favorite stories is on my father's side. So, my grandfather was one of seven children and he was actually the first to be born in the United States. So, when his mother came to this country, she was pregnant with him and she had him in this country. His father passed away a couple of months after they came to the US. So, his mother, whose name was Sophie Caplan, 4:00she -- actually, she wasn't Caplan yet. She was Sophie Moskovitz. No, no, she was Sophie Caplan, I'm sorry. I'm telling this wrong. So, she had six children, one of whom was a newborn, and she had no husband and no -- she didn't speak the language. She really had no way to provide for her children. So, she was very desperate. She was in a very, very bad situation at that point. And she was also, however, very beautiful. And she bumped into a young man on the street who promptly fell in love with her and pretty much on the spot decided to marry her, six children and all, and support them. And not only did he decide to marry her, six children and all, newborn and all, and support them, but he decided that it would be too traumatic for the children to have everybody change their names to his last name. So, he changed his last name to Caplan so that everybody would have the same last name. So, it's actually really an unusual story of a man, 5:00turn of the century, changing their last name to their wife's last name for the sake of the kids. So, he was, by all accounts, a wonderful, wonderful man. And then they had one more child together, the seventh sibling. (laughs)

CW:Wow! (laughs) And then, so I want to go back to the home you grew up in.

DC:Sure.

CW:When you were a child, were there particular aspects of Jewish culture that were very important to you?

DC:So, I think that one of the more unusual things about the home that I grew up in is that it was very sort of eclectically Jewish. That was really how my father described his approach to Judaism. So, on the one hand, my parents were incredibly invested in the idea of being Jewish and having a Jewish home and passing that along to us. The idea of that was very important to them. On the other hand, my father in particular was very invested in the idea of kind of choosing those aspects of the tradition that meant the most to him. So, in some 6:00ways -- I mean, my father used to joke that everybody in our synagogue thought that he was the most religious man in the synagogue, that he was the most observant man in the synagogue. But he used to say, "Actually, they'd be surprised to know I'm kind of an agnostic, right? They'd be surprised to know. You might even call me an atheist if you look at it the right way. It depends on how you look at the way that I believe in things, right? And what I do isn't really all that observant. It's just that I have a lot of knowledge and I know a lot about things and that's how I am Jewish." That was how he kind of practiced was by knowledge and scholarship and learning. So, I grew up in a home that was full of Yiddish and Hebrew books and music and newspapers. And that was something that was really kind of -- always seemed very inextricable from the culture to me. I also grew up in a home in which everything was sort of subject 7:00to debate. So, in a sense, that was sort of the more agnostic component of my father's kind of eclectic Judaism, was that everything was subject to debate and we very frequently debated big picture theological questions at the dinner table. And that also, to me, always seemed like a really core part of being Jewish. But all of these things were also very steeped in knowledge, too. And like I said, people would come to our house and they'd ask for sort of Jewish advice from my father and he was seen as sort of this community sage, though by day he was selling floors. (laughs)

CW:And you mentioned before that he had a lot of Yiddish books.

DC:Yes.

CW:And where were they in the house and how did they play a role in your memory at that time?

DC:They were everywhere. They were everywhere. And my dad also became a bit of a repository, like a mini-Book Center for books that people -- people would give 8:00him their old Yiddish books before they passed away or people whose parents had died, which -- kind of give him books and records and things. We had so many records that we couldn't play because they were all the old records and we had no way to play them. But we would look at them and we would talk about them. But I should say how my father learned Yiddish because it's actually a really interesting story. I said that he grew up in a home that very explicitly rejected kind of Jewish identity and Jewishness in a sense. But at the same time, his parents also had -- my grandparents had a bit of a sense of guilt about that, too. So, while they were proudly eating lobster on Yom Kippur and they were very proud of that fact -- that felt very American to them, I think -- they also at some point decided to -- my dad was in third grade -- to pull their kids out of public school and send them to the Orthodox Jewish day school down the street. So, my father always described it as -- it was almost like he was a social pariah. He didn't know the rules and the kids made fun of him that he 9:00didn't know what was kosher and what was not because to them that was so absurd, that in this Orthodox day school that somebody wouldn't know those rules or wouldn't know the Hebrew alphabet. So, my father was a total social outcast in the school. He had no friends. And his only friend was -- down the street, the shul that they went to, which was also Orthodox -- and, again, the irony of this doesn't escape me (laughs) -- but his only friend was this rabbi from Vilna who really didn't speak very much English at all. And this was the only person who really took an interest in my dad. And he really was a friend to him, a very good friend to him. But he didn't speak very much English at all. So, my dad decided if he was going to -- first of all, if he was ever going to fit in at school, he had to learn things like the Jewish alphabet and kashrut and these various things, very important. But he also realized that to build this friendship, this only person in his life who he had a close bond with -- being 10:00teased by the kids at school all day, going to the rabbi for comfort -- he needed to learn Yiddish. So, my dad, as an eight-year-old, decided that he needed to learn Yiddish. And he did so in a number of ways: one, by spending a lot of time with this rabbi who kind of schooled him, who, I'm sure, was delighted that an eight-year-old was taking such an interest in Jewish questions and theological questions and language and Hebrew and Yiddish. But my dad actually -- he would go -- he had no friends, so what would he do after school? He would go into Philadelphia from Camden. He would take the ferry or take the train over and he would pretend to be a recent immigrant who didn't speak any English and he'd go and try to find people who only spoke Yiddish. And that's how he practiced and that's how he learned. And then, he'd go to the Yiddish theater and he'd go buy a Yiddish newspaper. So, he just kind of tried to pass as something that he wasn't, which was somebody who'd grown up in a very sort of Jewish home and who had these languages. So, that's how my dad learned Yiddish. (laughs)

CW:Wow! And how did you learn Yiddish?

DC:So, there's a couple of versions of that story. Okay, the short version -- I'll tell both versions. The short version and a less complicated version is that I was an undergraduate at Hampshire College and I came onto campus and I needed a work study job. And I went on the work study job website and there were a couple of postings, the cafeteria -- some sort of boring things. I don't remember what else. I remember the cafeteria and thinking, Oh, not that, not that. And then, the only interesting thing, I thought, was a posting that said, "Looking for somebody who knows the Hebrew alphabet and who has experience working with books." And I had worked in a bookstore, a used book store in high school. I thought, Oh, perfect, this sounds great. So much better than the cafeteria. So, really, from that, I went into the Yiddish Book Center and I started working there as a work study student, which I did for the next four 12:00years. And I worked there, as you know, in various capacities. And from the experience of that first year that I was there and just meeting people who were coming in and hearing their stories, I developed this really profound desire to learn -- in my mind, I thought, Just a little bit of Yiddish so I can read a little bit, I can understand a little bit. So, I decided to apply for the internship, which I did, and I thought that'll be enough. This will satisfy this bizarre, I thought, desire that I had to learn some Yiddish. And I had visions of other things! And it just really captivated me and I've been sort of farkhapt [captured] ever since. That's one version of the story. The other version of the story, the more complicated version -- both are true, right, but different ways of looking at things -- the other version of the story is that my father, of course, spoke Yiddish. I heard a lot of Yiddish growing up. My father originally 13:00wanted to raise my sister and I trilingually with Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. And my mother was dead set against it. And this was before bilingualism was trendy, before a lot of the research. And she was so afraid that it would be a problem for us. She thought it would be hard for us academically. She thought our English wouldn't be as good. She was really -- and she was also, to be perfectly honest, she was nervous about the idea of my dad and my sister and I being able to speak in languages that she didn't understand. She admits that now, right? So, she kind of put her foot down and said, "I'm not comfortable with this." So, my dad, instead, he read us a lot of books in Hebrew and Yiddish and he sang to us. Every night, we'd have songs before we went to sleep. So, I grew up on Yiddish and Hebrew lullabies and songs. And we would go visit my grandmother at first her home, then her apartment, then her old age home as she 14:00got older. In each case, kind of in these Jewish communities. They were all -- my grandmother didn't speak any Yiddish. My dad hadn't learned it from his family but there were always people there who spoke Yiddish. And so, my dad had people he'd talk on the phone with in Yiddish. So, I heard a lot of it growing up but it was completely passive. It was never something that I picked up. There were a couple of words that my dad used around the house. He talked to our dog exclusively in Yiddish. So, there were things -- he would always tell the dog, "Zay ruik, zay ruik! Zets zikh avek, zets zikh avek! [Keep calm, keep calm! Sit, sit!]" So, there were things that I learned as a kid just -- I sort of thought of them as dog commands as opposed to another language but they were things I picked up from that. Unfortunately, my father was very sick and he was sick before I was born. He had had cancer before I was born. Long story short, he'd had radiation, it really deteriorated his heart and his lungs. So, by the time I was about eleven, he was very, very ill and he require-- kind of constant 15:00hospice-level care. So, my sister and I, we were -- my mom was also sick, unfortunately, so we were kind of the caretakers, which meant that we spent a lot of time with our parents. And my dad was very lucid throughout his whole illness, so a lot of -- he couldn't always get up, he couldn't always do things, so he spent a lot of time sitting and reading things and talking about things. At one point, he tried to teach me to read Yiddish and we sat down with the "Forverts" and I have this very distinct memory of sitting with the "Forverts" and sounding things out and him trying to teach me a couple of basic things about Yiddish, but didn't go much further than that. But in any case, my dad passed away right before I came to college. So, when I saw the ad for the Yiddish Book Center job, it was also wanting to sort of connect with my dad and this whole world that he had inhabited that I think I feared I had no other way of accessing. And it seemed totally gone, these lullabies that I half remembered that I didn't think I'd ever be able to find the words to, which I have for the -- all of the ones I remember, I know them now and I sing them to my son. So, I 16:00think that there was an aspect of connecting with, yeah, connecting with what my father really cared about, what he loved, and really trying to understand what that was about as an adult as opposed to as a child where you're still distancing yourself from your parents and it's hard to really appreciate who they are as adults and what motivates them and what they love. So, those are the two versions of that story.

CW:That's great. But you didn't know about -- the Book Center wasn't part of your decision to go to Hampshire?

DC:It wasn't. My father knew about it. He didn't know very much about it. And I think that had he been more on the internet and had he been more -- I mean, by the time -- honestly, by the time we got internet in our house, which we did very, very late, my dad was already pretty sick. He wasn't traveling. He was in and out of the hospital a lot, so it wasn't really something that had -- he'd heard about it, I don't know to what extent. He had never been there, for sure. 17:00And by the time I was visiting colleges, he was just too sick to go, which was a shame. We brought him back a t-shirt, I remember that. I was like, Why did I bring him a t-shirt, of all things? But I guess at the time, I didn't really know what else to get him. But, yeah, so, no, it wasn't at all the factor but it ended up being kind of a second home. And I spent significantly more time in the Yiddish Book Center than I did in my classes. Not that I didn't go to my classes but just the amount of time I spent there was a lot. (laughs)

CW:So, what did you discover when at the Book Center through your many roles there?

DC:I guess I -- are you asking kind of what is it that captivated me?

CW:Yeah, what -- yeah, yeah.

DC:It's really hard to put a finger on that and, I think, I certainly think that my own personal history and family history has something to do with that. I also think that just being eighteen, nineteen is a time where you're figuring out so 18:00much about yourself and it's a time when you can really be captivated by something in a way that's harder as you get older. I don't know. I mean, I think that -- so, my work is on Yiddish theater. I've always sort of been involved with theater and I think that discovering -- it wasn't that I didn't know that there was Yiddish theater. My dad had these records and CDs that he would play and he had gone a lot, when he was a young child pretending to be an immigrant, to the Yiddish theater. But I think what I didn't know -- I was really interested in kind of avant-garde experimental theater, black box theater, theater that kind of pushes boundaries, artistically. And when I started to see that there was a huge and incredibly influential tradition of Yiddish theater that did that, that was a real revelation to me because I'd never put those worlds together. And the idea of being able to combine those worlds was just 19:00very exciting. And also, it wasn't exactly surprising but it sort of was in a sense, I think, that there was so much there that nobody knew about. I think I also just really enjoyed the process, which is the same process as what I do in the archives, right, of getting these boxes of material and going through them and unpacking them and hearing people's stories and their life stories and being, in some sense, a repository of that information that people don't always have a place for and kind of finding places for that. So, I guess those are the things that really excite me and I think that's part of why I'm also really interested in doing theatrical productions that draw upon archival material and draw upon Yiddish material, because it gives it a home and an audience and a 20:00place and a voice. And I think that's -- I just find that really powerful and really exciting work. (laughs)

CW:Can you talk a little bit about your first Yiddish play that you put on at --

DC:Sure.

CW:-- Hampshire? How did you come to (laughter) that project and --

DC:Sure.

CW:-- yeah?

DC:So, at Hampshire College, every student does a large capstone project called a Division III, which is supposed to be essentially the whole year's worth of work, that you're not taking other -- you're taking two classes but you're not really taking classes. You're really focusing on this project. So, I had been variously studying Jewish studies, comparative literature, but with Yiddish kind of binding the two throughout my years at Hampshire. In particular, my interest was always drama and the theater and that's really where I was working. So, I 21:00really wanted to try kind of doing what I was just saying, doing a project that would take material and give it voice on the stage. And in some sense, I think it was kind of an experiment to see -- especially in college, I could tell my friends what I was doing. I could tell people what I was doing. But I really didn't know if they would -- to what extent they could actually appreciate these plays that I was reading that I was so fascinated by and to what extent they could really speak to a contemporary audience of twenty-somethings or college students. So, part of it was an experiment, really, to see to what extent I could kind of make that material live. I was also really interested in translation and I wanted to have a translation component. And I felt and actually feel very, very strongly that in translating stage material, you have to put it on a stage, otherwise you don't know if it's a good translation. That's the litmus test. For literature, it's different, right? But you can't 22:00treat a translated play like a novel. Just because it reads well doesn't mean you've actually translated it, because it's a play. So, that's something I really wanted to kind of figure out, was what does it take to make a good -- translate a play? And to do that, I had to direct it. That was the only way to really figure that out. So, the project that I did involved translating two interrelated Yiddish plays, one of which is Goldfaden's "Di kishef-makherin [The sorcerer]" from the 1880s and the other of which is a kind of modernist-slash-with kind of socialist politics infused 1938 version by Itzik Manger called "Hotsmakh-shpil [The joker's trick]." And it's the same story told in two very, very different voices; one very much melodrama, one very much kind of modernist and political. And I wanted to kind of look at that intersection, as well, of versions of text over time, especially in the theater. So, I translated those two plays and then I staged the latter version, which I thought 23:00would appeal more readily to a contemporary audience than the melodrama. But, now I think one could do the melodrama in a particular way -- just require a little bit more finessing. Manipulation, maybe. And it was a student production with student actors, none of whom that time around spoke any Yiddish or really had exposure to Yiddish. And I worked a lot in terms of building -- and this is something I've been working on kind of over time -- building exercises to help actors capture the sense of the language and the culture, even through a translation. And also to capture the gestural language that characterized the Yiddish theater, which is really hard to capture when you don't have many videos and you have kind of these photographs that give you a sense of what people were doing. But it's hard to capture an acting style that you haven't seen. So, 24:00that's something else that was kind of part of the project, was playing with how to communicate that kind of hard to pin down artistic information to people who were not at all steeped in the tradition or the history but really wanted to bring a work to life and put it on its feet, so --

CW:And since then, you've done "Di gantse velt iz a teater [The whole world is theater]" and --

DC:Yes. (laughs)

CW:-- "Shulamis." I'm wondering how are these Yiddish plays that you've put on sort of reading in today's world? How are people reacting and connecting to them?

DC:Well, I will say that all three projects are completely different. So, the first one was a translation of a Yiddish musical into English as a musical. The second one, "Di gantse velt iz a teater," which I did at Harvard a couple of years back, was a series of scenes from six Yiddish plays in the original Yiddish with non-Yiddish-speaking actors. And that, again, in some ways, I also thought of very much as an experiment in terms of actor training, in terms of 25:00how to get people who might be accustomed to dealing with foreign languages but certainly not Yiddish to be able to convincingly portray these characters in the original with supertitles. And that was a tremendous challenge and tremendous joy and I think the students that I was working with got a lot out of that process and also really expanded as actors, because to be able to act in a language that you don't understand requires a lot of kind of work and depth and also skill that they built through the process. So, that was that production. Then, the third one that you mentioned, "Shulamis," was a -- operetta that we staged as a full-scale operetta. And we staged that bilingually. I worked with a co-director who was an undergraduate student at the time, Cecilia Raker. And so, we did these songs in Yiddish and the dialogue in English. But it was a little bit sneaky because there are twenty-eight musical numbers in "Shulamis," so 26:00really it was seventy-five percent in Yiddish. People went in thinking that it was mostly in English because the dialogue was in English. So, that was the sneaky extra Yiddish that we kind of slipped in. And, again, we had to work with the actors in terms of singing. And opera singers are used to singing in a language they don't understand but Yiddish has particular challenges and most opera singers aren't trained in Yiddish. They're trained in German. And so, you have to really work to make it not sound like German opera. The response to all three projects was actually always surprising in terms of how many people came. In each case -- and maybe I just haven't learned my lesson yet. In each case, I expected or feared that not many people would actually want to see these projects and I was doing them because I wanted to do them and because I found other people, like-minded people who wanted to do them, but not thinking in terms of large audiences. And in each case, the audiences exceeded my 27:00expectations. And particularly the Harvard productions, we had people coming from very far away, which was really gratifying but also, I think, speaks to a need that people have, not necessarily for Yiddish theater in particular but for, I think, Jewish theater and to connect to, I don't know, to connect artistically to Jewish material on the stage. And there aren't that many groups that do that. There are, but there aren't that many. So, I think people were just very excited about that. And certainly in the Boston area, there isn't that much going on in that realm. And with "Shulamis" in particular, we had about eleven hundred people come to see the play over the course of five nights, which was astounding. We did not expect to have that many people come to see the play. So, I hope to keep doing similar projects. I think there is a lot of curiosity and interest, particularly among students and young people. I think that people 28:00don't -- they're curious about the Yiddish theater. People hear things about the Yiddish theater but there's few opportunities to see Yiddish theater that is designed for that audience. So, that's something I'm interested in continuing to do.

CW:And are -- I mean, do you, when you're looking for what play to do next (laughter) are there specific themes that you zone in on as being -- that might play well today or things that translate well into the 2000s?

DC:I think it's really just looking for good plays. And I think, honestly, I think that the criteria is material that deserves to be heard. I think that's what excites me and motivates me is when there's material that's sort of been buried over time but was or is incredibly significant, especially with 29:00historical significance. I think there's a tremendous opportunity to teach people about that material through the theater. And that's what I'm sort of interested in doing. So, the next project that's on my docket, which is a long-term project but -- is not in Yiddish at all. But it's a play that I'm writing based on archival material bringing particular voices and a particular story to life. And that's, I think, really what it's about for me, is finding things in the archives that are really compelling and feeling that that material deserves to be heard and not just buried for only a few people to hear or read about.

CW:Yeah. So, I want to shift gears a little bit.

DC:Sure. (laughs)

CW:You've been to and talk about Yiddish programs --

DC:Sure.

CW:-- 'cause you've been to many of the Yiddish programs --

DC:(laughs) Yes.

CW:-- Yiddish-language programs out there in Vilnius and Tel Aviv and 30:00Birobidzhan --

DC:Yes. (laughs)

CW:-- and California and KlezKamp.

DC:Yes. (laughs)

CW:So, I'm wondering sort of what role these Yiddish programs play in connecting people to Yiddish culture and helping transmit Yiddish culture?

DC:I think they play a huge role. And for me, in particular, they were instrumental. All of them, really, both in terms of learning Yiddish and learning the language and learning not just to read the language, which one can do on your own, but learning to speak the language and feeling what it can be as a living language, which is a different thing altogether but also in terms of creating a community of people that are interested in the same thing that you are. And I think that when I first -- well, even to back up, when my father was 31:00still alive and he would talk about the things that he loved about Yiddish culture, I really didn't know anybody else who -- except for the old ladies in my grandma's nursing home, I mean, I knew nobody else who had any remote interest in this material whatsoever. Nobody else I knew could read those books. So, to find a community and a large community of like-minded people interested in the same things has been really exciting for me. And I have to say, I wish that my father could have kind of tapped into that community. I think he was a little too pre-internet and just the time that he came out was just -- he had really bad timing. He also, I mean, to tell another story, it's kind of interesting: my father, in the '70s, he lived in Israel and he lived on a kibbutz for a while. And he ended up having a fight with, after several years, with one of the kibbutz managers over, of all things, cream cheese with lox. They were going to abolish cream cheese with lox and they had voted on it and my dad was -- he really wanted his cream cheese with lox and he decided that the 32:00kibbutz life was just not for him because he couldn't give that up. That was the story he liked to tell. I think there was more to it. But he left the kibbutz and he decided he was going to start a company to basically repair and distribute Yiddish films. And he went bankrupt. He lost all of his money and that's why he came back to the United States. It wasn't the right ti-- nobody in Israel is really interested in that at that precise moment that he was trying to do that. Of course, now there are a number of organizations who do that work and wonderfully so, and my dad was very gratified to see that happen later in life. But his timing was sort of off.

CW:I'd like to ask specifically about Birobidzhan --

DC:Sure. (laughs)

CW:-- because not many people get to go there.

DC:Sure. (laughs)

CW:Can you describe, first, just what it looks like?

DC:What it looks like? There are parts of it that are beautiful. I guess coming 33:00into the region, it's very beautiful. There's lots of forests and in Birobidzhan proper, there's the famous hill that's kind of one of the symbols of Birobidzhan. But there's a -- in terms of the city itself, it's a bizarre meshing of things. You walk down Sholem Aleichem Street and then you cross over to Sixty Years Anniversary of the Soviet Union Street, right? There's a bizarre meshing of worlds. The summer we were there, the entire kind of center of the city was under construction. But the Sholem Aleichem statue still stood in the middle, right? So, there was all of this construction going on, very heavy construction. It wasn't very beautiful at all. But towering above the construction was the Sholem Aleichem statue, kind of an interesting juxtaposition. There were buildings -- one of the things that I remember very kind of viscerally was that there are buildings that are sort of half-built 34:00because they've run out of money to build them. So, there were buildings that the front was beautiful. Beautiful buildings. And you'd round the corner and the rest of the building wasn't there. It was just a facade. And presumably, they wanted to build those buildings eventually. But the overall effect was that the very center of town looked very, very nice. But sometimes you'd round the corner and then there'd be no building there and that was kind of symbolic just, I think, of some of the aesthetics, I guess, of what it was sort of like to be in Birobidzhan, that there were always kind of two sides to everything and two facades, maybe, (laughs) to everything. There are a lot of fountains in Birobidzhan. They're very invested in their fountains. Someone told me while I was there that they had two tourist attractions in Birobidzhan. And one was the Jewish vodka, that people from the region would come for the Jewish-themed vodka. And they sell, in all of the stores, they sell all of these different vodka bottles with various labels that depict happy dancing Jews. And some of 35:00them are more problematic than others and some of them are perfectly fine. They have names like "Freylekh vodke [Joyful vodka]" and "Shabetnaya vodke [Russian: Comrade vodka]" and various things and -- depicting various Jewish life kind of thing. The people come from all over and they buy these vodkas and they're kind of a tourist attraction. But their other tourist attraction is their fountains. Apparently, they're kind of famous in the region for their fountains and they have these very elaborate fountains with elaborate lighting systems that do kind of exciting things with the water jets and the lights underneath them. So, in any case, that was something I didn't know that Birobidzhan was known for, but they do have beautiful fountains. (laughs)

CW:And what was it like to study Yiddish there?

DC:It was fascinating. It was difficult. (laughs) It's a difficult place to live. I'm probably not the best person to ask because I got very sick while I was there with salmonella, which was not the ideal situation to be in in Birobidzhan. But I met some absolutely fascinating people. I mean, there aren't 36:00that many Jews in Birobidzhan but those who are there, many of them are the last of a particular generation who came to Birobidzhan as children and would tell you in Yiddish about how they laid down the stones in the city center, the ones that were being constructed, but they were still really proud of it, right? And that was really neat. It was very much -- there was a certain access to a part of history there that was really exciting. The other thing that was really exciting about being there was in Birobidzhan, you -- in the high school and in the -- it's not a university but the institute there, it's not officially university, but it's the equivalent, you have to take two foreign languages and one of them can be -- has to be English. That's required by the government, mandated. But one of them can be one of the regional languages. So, in 37:00Birobidzhan's case, it's either Yiddish or Chinese and the students have a choice. So, you have all of these students who are learning Yiddish in Birobidzhan, usually from very old Soviet-era kind of textbooks, often from teachers -- some of their Yiddish is better than others but it's a really interesting setup. They don't have enough people to teach Yiddish in Birobidzhan. That's definitely a problem and they're kind of working on that. In fact, they invited many of us to stay and teach Yiddish and -- who were in the program but I'm not sure anybody stayed. But they -- it was really fascinating talking to these high school students who -- many of whom had never met an American before, many of whom were fascinated with American culture, and many of whom were studying Yiddish. And they had various reasons for studying Yiddish. Some of them had Jewish ancestry and they were interested and curious about it. Some of them were interested in the history of their town, of Birobidzhan, and they studied Yiddish for that reason. And honestly, some of -- a lot of them 38:00said it's easier than Chinese and they didn't want to take Chinese, which is a reason you don't often hear for studying Yiddish. So, it was a really interesting perspective on a whole 'nother world of Yiddish language teaching and kind of culture that's happening there that's relatively new. And one wonders what will -- what the future of that will bring. But it was very interesting.

CW:And now, your dissertation topic is about the Vilna Troupe.

DC:Yes. (laughs)

CW:And I want to -- I'm just curious, studying the Vilna Troupe, I'm not sure exactly when the timing -- you started studying that. But looking back on your time in Vilnius, what was the significance of being in Vilnius for you?

DC:Well, I have to admit that -- I think about it now but I don't think that 39:00studying in Vilna necessarily impacted my choice to gravitate towards the Vilna Troupe. And maybe at some point, I can tell you why I ended up choosing that topic. But the significance of that particular program was tremendous. That program was, in some ways, the most rewarding in terms of the Yiddish language study and practice, mostly because I made friends with a lot of people who didn't really speak English and Yiddish was really kind of the lang-- and nobody spoke Lithuanian, right? So, Yiddish really became kind of the language of currency there in a way that, during my time in Tel Aviv, it really hadn't -- though, I mean, I was also there the first year in Tel Aviv and since then, the program has greatly expanded and I've heard it's really expanded very nicely and people use a lot more Yiddish. When I was there, people were using a lot of Hebrew and English to communicate outside of class. But it was really magical 40:00being in Vilna and living for a month in a world where people pretty much spoke only Yiddish, at least among my classmates and I and that was really unusual and exciting and lovely.

CW:And so, how did you come to make -- I mean, you've explained how you became interested in the Yiddish Book Center and in Yiddish theater but how did you come to Yiddish as an academic focus?

DC:Sure. I guess -- that's a very good question. I guess, in some ways, it was kind of a natural progression in terms of what I was interested in. I think in terms of why I came to graduate school and I'm doing what I'm doing and pursuing the path that I'm pursuing, I think that at some point, it just became very clear to me that the things that I loved doing with Yiddish were all very much 41:00involved with the academy. I think first and foremost, I've always loved teaching and that's been something -- I've been teaching for a long time, in many different settings. I firmly, firmly believe that the teaching experience that I have with kids and second graders is not un-relevant, not irrelevant to what I do now with college students. I think that teaching skills are -- pedagogical skills are a particular set of skills and you have to refine them, obviously, differently for different kind of audiences. But teaching is about communicating with an audience and explaining your ideas and explaining material in a way that people can understand. And so, that's something that I've always just really loved. And then, as -- especially working on my Division III project and working in archival research and writing, I think I just realized that 42:00that's something that I absolutely love and that I want to keep doing. So, I think those two things combined kind of set me in the academic direction. (laughs)

CW:I'd like to ask a question about your research, about this thing that you write about Yiddish art theater being transnational, that you've talked about. I guess what connection, if any, is there in your research of transnational Yiddish art theater and your own personal life or understanding of Jewish culture?

DC:Sure. Would you like me to say a few words about --

CW:Yeah, I wanted --

DC:-- the research and then kind of connect -- okay.

CW:That'd be great.

DC:Right, so basically, the project that I'm working on right now, my 43:00dissertation, is I'm looking, in particular, at the activities of the Vilna Troupe and how they were instrumental in creating a Yiddish art theater movement. And the idea of a Yiddish art theater -- and it's really, in some ways, it's part theater history and part intellectual history of this idea of a Yiddish art theater developing over time as part of intellectual discourse among Jews in Eastern Europe and beyond. But I think what I find so fascinating about the interwar Yiddish theater in general, which is a period which is dominated by these dozens of Yiddish art theaters around the globe, is that it is so global and that you can't really look at -- there are so many companies that you really can't look at by themselves. And that's kind of the genesis of the project is that I realized that if I wanted to look at these companies and directors and actors and figures I was really interested in, that they were all engaged in 44:00these artistic networks across international, across continental borders; that the people who are involved in these troupes and companies are constantly shifting. And sometimes these companies last for a season or less. Sometimes they last for ten, fifteen, twenty years, but that they're very much built on artistic networks, on correspondence that's occurring very dramatically across continental borders. And often, the actors themselves moving incredibly quickly and incredibly frequently between places. So, rather than trying to write about the Yiddish art theater in Eastern Europe, I sort of realized that that's not really possible and that's not an approach that makes sense because there -- it's a moving target. It's constantly moving. And the Vilna Troupe, in some ways, is not only the catalyst for the whole movement and the epicenter of it but it's also the most moving target of them all. It's the most unstable, the most constantly shifting, traveling, in some ways, more than any of these other 45:00companies, mostly because there are actually multiple Vilna Troupes. People get into fights, they form their own rival Vilna Troupes. And so, you have multiple Vilna Troupes traveling with people going back and forth between them across borders in ways that are really exciting and interesting. So, that's kind of the project and looking at these artistic networks and looking at how theatrical ideas travel across space. And part of what I'm interested in it is how it's precisely this instability which -- these theaters had tremendous anxiety about -- they, many of them -- the Vilna Troupe wanted a home. They didn't really have a home. They wanted a home base. They wanted to settle down at many different points. Many of the actors did want to and they felt that it was hampering them as artists. But, in fact, because they were traveling so much and encountering so many different theatrical ideas, it made them incredibly creative and it enabled them to reach huge numbers of people and have a tremendous impact, globally. So, that's sort of the project. In terms of how that relates to my 46:00personal life, I guess -- that's a really great question. I guess I'm really interested in, just -- both personally and academically -- in how culture develops and how it's transmitted. And so, part of it is that. I think part of it is also that I'm very, very interested in how this particular moment, the '20s and '30s -- not just in the Yiddish theater but in the Yiddish world in particular -- is a moment of tremendous idealism and experimentation and excitement about what Yiddish culture can do. And for a very brief period of time, there's a tremendous response to that, both within the Jewish community and outside of that. But I guess, also, I've always -- like I said, I've always 47:00been interested in kind of experimental theater, avant-garde theater, modernist theater and this idea of a Yiddish art theater -- though, interestingly, it doesn't start out as modernist at all. It starts out as very much not modernist and very much in the realist camp. It eventually becomes kind of the catalyst for modernism coming into the Yiddish theater and that's something that I'm very interested in. I'm just very interested in theatrical modernism in general, both as an academic and as a director and as an artist. I'm very excited by people taking experimental approaches to theatrical material. So, that's -- I hope that answers the question.

CW:Yeah. (laughter) I'm wondering -- since you cross over into, as you just said, art and academics and directing and writing, is there a specific term or 48:00title that you like to sort of identify (laughter) with?

DC:That's a good question. I guess I'd like many identities. (laughs) I don't know. That's a really good question. I certainly identify as a scholar. I certainly identify as a director. Yeah, I mean, I also don't -- I mean, to be honest, I don't see those two roles as that necessarily distinct. And I think many theater historians and theater scholars would agree with me on this, that in working on theatrical material, there's also tremendous research value to putting that on stage, that in some ways, it's artificial to -- with certain kinds of material, it's artificial not to do so. And directing is a form of research practice just as much as digging in the archives. And I really do firmly believe that. So, I sort of see the scholarship and the artistry 49:00intermingling (laughs) I suppose.

CW:Yeah. And how has language influenced your own sense of identity?

DC:That's a great question. Very much so. I guess I think when I was growing up, I think I very much -- I was very proud of -- that my dad could speak many languages. And he spoke not just Yiddish and Hebrew. He spoke many, many languages and very well. And it's always really interesting to me now when I meet old friends of his and they say, You wouldn't believe the Yiddish your dad spoke. It was amazing. It was really extraordinary. He really had a gift for languages and it was always very exciting how we could travel places and he could kind of almost assume these different personalities in these different languages. And my dad was somebody who, when he spoke a language, he really took on kind of certain cultural elements that -- it was almost very performative for 50:00him. He was very good at accents, he was very -- he would kind of take on the gestures of the people around him. He was very good at taking those kinds of things in. And for him, that was part of the language, I think. But in terms of Yiddish, in particular, I suppose that identifying as somebody who speaks Yiddish is -- I don't know, it's both something that is very much at the core of my identity, but it's also something that is kind of an anecdote at cocktail parties, right? So, it's sort of both. I don't -- it's hard to say -- to put my finger on what that means. (laughs)

CW:Yeah. Do you consider yourself a Yiddishist?

DC:I would say so. I think -isms are always hard to identify with or define. But 51:00thinking of Yiddishism or a Yiddishist as somebody who believes that Yiddish has a place as a living culture, not just as an archival culture, I would say absolutely. I think that, for me, that I feel most strongly about taking archival material and putting it on stage. And that's something that I think has a big role to play kind of in cultural preservation.

CW:And then, how do you use Yiddish now?

DC:In my life? (laughs)

CW:In your daily life, (laughter) yeah.

DC:A lot. (laughs) Well, I certainly use it daily in my research and in my reading. I speak Yiddish with my son and I sing to him in Yiddish. And that's not something that, for me, was a given that I would do. And it's interesting, 52:00I'm -- other parents constantly -- when you speak another language to your child, these days most of the time people are really excited about it. But when it's a language that they don't hear very often, they're curious and they ask questions. And so, it's often a topic of playground conversation and the like. And for me, I think that I want to pass it along to my child, A, because I want him to have more than one language. I think there's tremendous value in being able to have access to more than one language. Even if what he has is just kind of passive knowledge, it's still -- it expands your mind and it helps you to learn other languages and to have a sense of what languages -- and how it works. And Yiddish is the language that I can do best for him in that, so it wasn't really a choice between Yiddish or something else. The other thing is that if I 53:00don't pass it along to him, who will? There's no other way that he would have access to that culture. And that access may be something that he doesn't care about or it may be something that he wants. But I want to pass that along. And I think there's been a lot of kind of ruptured transmission in my family. And usually, there's, like, one rupture in a family story. In my family, the rupture begins with my grandfather, who rejects the Yiddish of his parents very, very strongly. But then, my father kind of picks up the threads from his Lithuanian rabbi friend when he has no friends at school because he's at an Orthodox day school and doesn't know what he's doing, right? So, there's kind of -- but then, my father wanted to pass languages to me and my sister. My mom put her foot down and said no, so another ruptured transmission. So, in some ways, it feels like correcting a family wrong, right, that this language has been important in my family to various people and it's something that multiple people have wanted to pass down, and a couple of times, it hasn't been passed down. But it's something 54:00that I can pass down, so --

CW:Yeah.

DC:-- that's -- (laughs)

CW:And how do you go about doing that? Or what is the sort of -- yeah, or is there a network that you draw on in that -- (laughs)

DC:Yes and no. (laughs) I think it also depends on what your approach to these sorts of things is. It's not vital to me that my son have an active speaking knowledge of Yiddish. That would be wonderful but that's not -- my husband doesn't speak Yiddish, right? He's only really getting it from me most of the time. He's getting a lot of English in his life. That's not so vital to me. What's vital to me, I think, is that he has a bilingual home. That's vital to me. And that he has the tools to access it, that he has access to the letters 55:00and to the language and to the culture. That he can understand the Yiddish songs that I sing to him. I also, on the side, perform Yiddish songs and I'm a -- amateur musician and a singer. And so, it's important to me that he can understand what those songs mean and what they mean to me. Those songs were transmitted to me largely from my father. It's something I want to transmit to him. But I didn't understand them until I was older and I want him to understand -- have at least a vague sense of what they mean. That's important to me. So, him speaking Yiddish with other people is great when it can happen. But that's not the most vital thing to me. So, when there's opportunities to go to things where people are speaking Yiddish and to bring him along, I certainly do. But, yeah, it doesn't -- it's not a constant thing. But I also don't feel like that's 56:00something that's necessary for why I am speaking Yiddish to him. (laughs)

CW:Yeah. I wanted to ask a question about what people are calling the Yiddish revival.

DC:Okay.

CW:And, first of all, just what do you think about that term?

DC:I think it's an all right term. I think -- I don't know what else you could call it. There is something happening and I guess it's hard to come up with a very precise term to describe that. But I'm not sure that anybody really knows what it is. But there is interest. There is a tremendous amount of interest in Yiddish and Yiddish culture and in Jewish culture more broadly. And I think calling it a revival is fair. Even if it's small numbers of people, I think there are small numbers of people that are speaking to a broader interest. Yeah. (laughs)

CW:Yeah, I guess what implications do you see of resurging interest in Yiddish having on the broader culture, Jewish community?

DC:That's hard to say. I'm not a fortune teller. I don't know. I'm excited to see, frankly. I'm excited to see where this interest goes. I think that certainly people are more conscious of Yiddish and Yiddish culture as something of interest and as something that they're curious about. And that, I think, in itself is significant, that people have a curiosity. Anecdotally, when I'm working on plays and I'm auditioning people for Yiddish plays, it's really astounding how many people come out of the woodwork and they say, I've just been waiting (laughs) to be in a Yiddish play, because I've always wanted to know 58:00more about Yiddish culture. And that's been really exciting to see. But I also think that's a product of the activities that people are doing and that organizations are doing. And I think it's also very much a product of the academy and the fact that Yiddish is coming into not just Yiddish/Jewish studies classes but also into literature classes, in my case into theater history classes. I think that also just gives people more expansive sense of what that means. (laughs)

CW:What role do you see academics playing in cultural transmission?

DC:Well, a tremendous role, I think. I mean, I think that one of the great privileges of teaching students who are eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one -- like I said, for myself, it's a time of tremendous change and possibility and 59:00it's a time period where many people are really trying to figure out who they are and what that means and what they want and what they want their lives to be. And it's a privilege, really, to be able to work with people who are at that kind of on the cusp stage of their lives because it enables you to have a tremendous impact. And there are so many moments from my college years that had tremendous impacts on me, far more so than I think the teachers, professors, mentors at the time realized they were having. And I think it's important to be conscious of that as a teacher teaching people in that particular age range. So, yeah, I think it does have a broad impact on how people define themselves, think of themselves; particularly for Jewish students who are encountering this material for the first time in a college classroom, but also for the broader 60:00public just kind of to know that Yiddish culture doesn't just mean kitsch and doesn't just mean the funny words that they think they know (laughs) but that there's a broader sense to it and that there's a much broader cultural history to it. I think that is transmission in itself, just having that idea become more broadly accepted.

CW:Looking back on your journey with Yiddish, (laughter) your budding career so far, are there particular moments or experiences that were catalysts or particularly meaningful for you?

DC:That's a great question. Many. (laughs) It's hard to sort of name a few. And I think more than specific moments or experiences, I think larger experiences 61:00have been sort of more profoundly impacting. Certainly, the Yiddish programs that I have participated in were tremendously fruitful and productive for me in terms of not just my development as a scholar but also my own identity, my own language knowledge, cultural knowledge, my own sense of what it means for me to be a Jew and what kind of Jewish life I want to lead. So, yeah, there are have been many impactful moments. I think for me, I guess some of the most profound moments have happened in the classroom and in rehearsals. (laughs) Those have been the kind of sites, the laboratories where I think the most exciting moments have happened. And in the classroom, I think it's the moments where my students encounter -- in terms of Yiddish, specifically -- where my students encounter 62:00Yiddish culture for the first time as a fully-fledged cultural experience. And that's a very exciting moment to be a part of and to witness. And to watch that unfold, that's been very profound for me. And similarly, in rehearsing artistic material, similarly, those moments of discovery where somebody -- the most exciting moments in rehearsal, as a director, are those where -- especially when -- for some reason, especially when it's a student. 'Cause I've worked with actors who are not students, as well, but especially when it's a student. It's really exciting when they understand the play or they understand the material in a new way, as an actor, where they have a moment of discovery about the character that they're playing, because those are the moments and those are the insights about plays and about dramatic works that you can't get from reading 63:00them. You can't get those in the archive. You can only get them by having an actor work through the part and try to figure out what does this character want, how do I perform this character? What does it mean to be this character in this world that we're creating? And those conversations have been tremendously exciting for me, so -- (laughs)

CW:Are there any particular mentors that have been influential on that, I guess particularly relating to your academic work?

DC:So many. (laughs) So many I'd be afraid to leave somebody out. All of the professors and teachers that I've worked with have all been mentors. And I think there's something about working in a small field, particularly the Yiddish theater scholars have been tremendous mentors, the established Yiddish theater scholars. I think working in a small field, people are honestly excited to see 64:00what you're doing, and honestly excited that you're doing what you're doing, rather than in some other fields where you have to be careful about stepping on toes. There's so much to be done. There's so much to be done and I think it makes for amazing mentorship relationships because, I don't know, I mean I think I've also had incredibly generous mentors and teachers and friends. But their genuine excitement about people doing this work has been phenomenal and exciting and made for wonderful mentorship relationships. (laughs)

CW:Are there any -- I have one other question, but are there any --

DC:Sure.

CW:-- other topics that you wanted to get in in this interview?

DC:I can't think of anything, no. (laughs)

CW:Okay. I'd just like to close by asking you if you have any advice for (laughter) people learning Yiddish today?

DC:Advice in terms of what? Can I ask for clarification?

CW:Yeah, sure. Advice in terms of -- I guess where to go for cultural resources and sort of if there's anyone aspiring to become a Yiddish scholar, what from your experience would you want to pass on to them?

DC:Sure. I think I would highly recommend the summer programs as both a place for learning the language and connecting with people. I think that -- I guess one of the most amazing things about being in this field really is the people and the people working within it. And I think any opportunity that people have 66:00to reach out to others who are working in the field, just to not hesitate to do that because that's one of the real joys (laughs) about working in this field, this small field of scholars working on Yiddish material is, again, that genuine excitement that you find when you find somebody else working on Yiddish. Does that answer your question?

CW:Yeah.

DC:Okay. (laughter)

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

DC:Nishto farvos [You're welcome]. (laughter)

[END OF INTERVIEW]