CLARE BURSON ORAL HISTORY

PAULINE KATZ: This is Pauline Katz and today is July 10th, 2011. I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Clare Burson and we are here to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History project. Clare, do I have your permission to record this interview?

CLARE BURSON: Yes, you do.

PK:Thank you. To begin with, I'd like to ask you a little about, briefly, your family background, where your grandparents come from.

CB:My father's parents were both born in Memphis, Tennessee. My paternal grandfather's parents, I'm pretty sure from Kiev. I think both of them. We're 1:00just going to go with that. My paternal grandmother's family was from Kovno. Grew up hearing about Kovno Gubernia. Yeah, so, one of them, I think, is from Panevėžys and the other one is from Posvol, and I can talk about that more at some other point. My mother's parents were both from Germany. My grandfather came to the United States in 1937, I think. His family had been in Germany for generations. My maternal grandmother's family was Eastern European and both of her parents came to Leipzig when they were -- well, my great-grandmother when she was very young and my great-grandfather probably when he was a teenager, late, older teenager. And neither one of them made it out of Europe. But my 2:00grandmother immigrated here in 1938 and they both moved to Memphis, so both of my parents are from Memphis.

PK:And did you grow up in Memphis?

CB:I was born in Memphis, lived there till I was thirteen, then moved to Nashville, went to high school there, went to college at Brown, in Providence. Took a year off during college, lived in Germany for a year in Munich, Frankfurt, and Berlin. Went back to college, finished up, went back to Germany. Lived in Cologne for a year. Moved to Boston for a couple years, moved back to Nashville for four years and now I live in Brooklyn.

PK:Whew! (laughter) Can you tell me a little about what it was like in -- did you grow up in a Jewish home?

CB:Yes.

PK:Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like?

CB:Well, we did not keep kosher, and I had an egg and bacon sandwich for 3:00breakfast this morning. I did play around with the idea of keeping kosher for a while and then had various definitions of what that actually meant for me. But most of my time in Memphis, we belonged to a Conservative synagogue and we would go to my father's parents' house for Shabbat dinner every week. And Shabbat dinner consisted of chicken noodle soup, of course, and fried chicken, most often. Sometimes brisket, which -- it was all delicious. And sometimes, this really great rice pudding. It was kind of like noodle kugel but it was rice kugel. And, yeah, then I had my bat mitzvah in Israel, actually. And after my bat mitzvah, it was actually after my mother's father passed away. We joined the Reform synagogue in Memphis, which is where my mother's family belonged. And then, we moved to Nashville, stayed in the Reform congregation. Yeah, so --

PK:You went to a Conservative synagogue but didn't keep kosher?

CB:No. Right. Correct. And it's funny because when we moved to the Reform synagogue, my dad and I would sit in the back and sort of make fun of the Reform services and the guitar-playing by the cantor, the super folky renditions of the prayers. My dad would walk to services on the High Holidays. My mom would not. She grew up in a Reform, very assimilated German Jewish household. My dad grew up Orthodox. Modern Orthodox. And I think they kept kosher in the home but not out. My grandmother, my dad's mother kept two sets of plates. Well, maybe -- I don't know, actually. I know she kept a different set of dishes for Passover. But I don't know if she kept two sets of dishes for meat and milk. I'm not sure. 5:00But anyway, so they came toge-- when they got married, they joined a Conservative synagogue and then -- anyway.

PK:Since moving up North, have you noticed any differences in traditions, Jewish traditions?

CB:Well, most people, when they hear about having fried chicken for Shabbos dinner think that's a little strange. But I remember going to Rosh Hashanah services through Hillel at Brown, I think my freshman year. And I went to the Reform -- I actually may have gone to the Conservative services first thinking that that's where I wanted to be. But it turned out that up north, Conservative was actually very much more Orthodox than what I was used to and the Reform congregation was much more sort of in the Conservative vein that I was used to. But very frustrating because regardless, the melodies were all different and I feel like I've been spending my life trying to find those original melodies that 6:00I grew up with. And interestingly, my husband who grew up in Queens feels the same way.

PK:Can you sing some of those melodies?

CB:Oh, well, the Aleinu [prayer concluding daily services, lit. "it is our duty"] is really great. But I think that that's actually -- I feel like most people are doing, (singing) "Aleinu l'shabeach," (sings wordlessly) that whole thing. Oh, the "Amidah [silent prayer, lit. "standing"]," which now I'm forgetting. Oh, I feel a little put on the spot!

PK:No worries. (laughs) What was the language at home? What kind of languages were you exposed to?

CB:English, with a Southern accent. My father's father on Friday nights at Shabbos dinner, he would recite the prayers. And he had such a thick Southern 7:00accent, but it was so normal to me. And I forget which prayer it is, but the big one and there's this place when it goes, "[Hebrew - 00:07:10]." That's totally wrong, obviously that's not the right Hebrew, but it kind of sounded like that -- his inflection was twangy like that. And I think of him whenever I hear that prayer and I think, Whoever's saying it now is saying it wrong. It's not the way it's supposed to be pronounced or inflected. There was a little Yiddish thrown around but I actually didn't know anything about Yiddish until, actually, probably until I heard about the Book Center. And in terms of klezmer music and sort of Eastern European Jewish music, I grew up playing classical violin and as I became sort of more aware of different musical styles, I started asking my 8:00classical music teacher, "I want to play some Jewish music." And she gave me Bartok -- I think they were Romanian dances. I don't remember what the name of it is, but it's a classical suite of songs. And more modern, but taken from traditional Eastern European melodies. And that was close, but it wasn't quite right. And I was, like, "No, like the music on 'Schindler's List,' that really mournful stuff." And she didn't really have anything to offer. And then, I think it was the very beginning of sophomore year in college, I met this woman who eventually became one of my really close friends. Her name's Andrea Lee, she's also a former intern. And she had interned here the summer after freshman year, I guess, in college. And she told me about the Book Center and I was, like, Wow, this sounds totally up my alley. This is all the stuff that I feel like I've 9:00been missing that I didn't grow up with. And then, it turned out that my father's parents did know quite a bit of Yiddish and I found out over the years that my maternal grandmother's family, they weren't German Jews. They were Eastern European Jews who landed in Germany. And they knew Yiddish, they spoke Yiddish. My grandmother's grandmother spoke Yiddish. And my grandmother actually looks down on it because her parents, in an effort to really assimilate in Germany, became impeccable German speakers, and she was raised to be sort of a quintessential German girl.

PK:What did you think you were missing, or when your friend was telling you about what the Book Center had, what was it that you were interested in?

CB:I knew my Jewishness was very important to me and the idea of a Jewish 10:00identity, but I don't think -- I definitely spent the latter years of high school and into college sort of figuring out what that meant. And I didn't have all the tools I needed in Memphis or Nashville. I started by studying German history and learning German, which actually really helped learning Yiddish. And sort of toyed in college as to whether or not I was going to learn German or Russian. But then, I realized nobody in my family actually ever spoke Russian, so German probably was a better idea. And that, then, inspired me, although I probably knew I was going to do this anyway -- to take a year off and go to Germany. And the first year in Germany happened after the summer I spent at the Yiddish Book Center. So, that kind of gave me the background in sort of the 11:00Eastern European ancestry. And then, I went to Germany and I actually ended up spending some time with a woman in Hamburg who -- I think she might even teach Yiddish classes there, and she's in a klezmer band and sort of got to know the Yiddishkayt culture a little bit in Germany. So, yeah, I felt like I had a sense of what it meant to be Jewish in the South, but I didn't really have a sense of where any of my family was from and the cultures that shaped them, so --

PK:Can you describe what it meant to be Jewish in the South?

CB:Well, I'm sure it means different things to different people. But for me, well, it meant fried chicken for Shabbos dinner. It meant my grandfather, who had a super-thick Southern accent, when he -- well, when he spoke English and when he spoke Hebrew. And then, being surrounded by churches and not -- even 12:00though there was and still is a very strong Jewish community in Memphis -- a little bit less so in Nashville, but I guess I was just less involved 'cause I didn't have family there. Extended family, anyway. Just not feeling like I had a community or a strong sense of belonging where you couldn't -- just being Jewish wasn't the only thing that bound people together. You were Jewish and you were an artist or you were -- so, the Jewish artists could get together or the -- so that there were more people that you could share interests with beyond the fact that you were Jewish. It was a little isolating and a little -- I kind of felt like somewhat of a curiosity.

PK:Who were your friends?

CB:Jewish, primarily. Not all of them but, yeah, primarily, both in Memphis and in Nashville and in college and after college. And the friends that aren't Jewish are honorary Jews 'cause they've got a lot of Jewish friends.

PK:Can you describe to me what, when you came to the Book Center, what the internship was like and what it meant for you?

CB:Well, I mean, the Pioneer Valley is just gorgeous and it was kind of a fairytale just to be in this part of the country. And to be paid to immerse myself in Yiddishkayt and Jewish history and Jewish culture was super exciting. And it was interesting. It wasn't unchallenging, the group of people that was 14:00together that summer. It wasn't unchallenging. So, it was -- negotiating the personal dynamics in the group was definitely part of it. But there was a guy who took Yiddish class with us who was -- I think he was a Lubavitcher and he invited us over to the Chabad house one night when the Springfield rebbe was in town, and that's an experience that I still carry with me. And the rebbe gave a lecture in Yiddish and just sort of experiencing what it was like on the inside, being a woman there. And then, going back to what I was saying before, feeling like I had found a piece of myself here in terms of the melodies and the language, which was so fun to speak and learn, and being around fairly 15:00like-minded people who were excited about exploring the same sorts of things I was exploring. It was great. It was really great. And it was an interesting way, then, to start out my year in Germany: first of all, to arrive in Germany and have a slightly Yiddish accent to my German was a little amusing. Which, of course, then I lost within a couple months, but --

PK:Did people notice it?

CB:I'm not sure. I noticed it. I'm not sure if anybody else did.

PK:What were you studying in Germany?

CB:Well, the first year I was there, I took a year off. And I had taken a year of German in school but I took, I guess, four months of intensive German classes in Munich and then I went to Frankfurt, where I interned with the Fritz Bauer Institut, which is a Holocaust education institute. Well, it's not just -- anyway, it's a Holocaust institute in Frankfurt. And then, I went to Berlin, 16:00where I spent a month at the Haus der Wannseekonferenz and then I went back to Frankfurt for another, I don't remember, couple months. And then, I went to Ireland and fiddled, played fiddle tunes in Ireland for about a month and a half. And then, I came home.

PK:Did you ever get into klezmer?

CB:Oh, yes. Yeah, I did. And I went to KlezKamp -- that following winter, actually, when I came back from my year in Germany, I went to KlezKamp. And -- yeah, and I actually sort of toyed around with the idea -- and now I'm sort of jumping ahead. I had started writing songs, actually, the year, the summer that I lived here. I started writing songs and got more and more into the idea of pursuing a career in songwriting. Oh, no, I went to college first. Scratch that. 17:00(laughter) I still did start writing songs on the ukulele and then the next year, I taught myself how to play the guitar. I was also, when I came back, starting to think about my thesis at Brown and thought about doing something with Yiddish music, like folk songs. And I talked to a number of people and I forgot the guy's name but you guys would know him. And then, I also talked to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who's pretty amazing. Decided against that and ended up looking at a "Journal of Jewish Folklore" that was published in Germany, Austria from 1930 -- no, 1897 until 1933, I think. Anyway, looking at ideas of Jewish identity and looking at people who are focusing on ritual and culture as a way to identify Jewishly as opposed to race or politics or religious observance. And that utilized both my knowledge of German and Yiddish, 18:00which was pretty awesome, to be able to use those skills in that project.

PK:Why was that project interesting to you?

CB:Well, I feel like my interest in Yiddishkayt and my interest in German history and Jewish history all comes from this desire to understand my identity as a Jewish woman. And I found, I was finding at that time, that what attached me most to Jewishness was the ritual and the culture, the language, the music, and the heritage and it excited me that -- I guess at that point, it was only one century behind me -- there were people who were looking at Jewishness in a similar way. And after having been to KlezKamp and seeing that I wasn't the only person who was identifying Jewishly through culture, I definitely saw some parallels between what was going on in the nineteenth, early twentieth century and what's going on today, or the today of the 1990s. So, that was exciting. And 19:00so, I spent my senior year working on that. And it was actually -- kind of important decision for me to look at something that was about creating an idea of identity because I'd been focused for so long on the Nazi period and the Holocaust, about destruction. And I came out of that very much wanting to look at something that was positive and creative. Of course, most of the people involved in that project were victims of the Holocaust. But then, I went back to Germany on a Fulbright after I graduated and after that year, I said, Enough with the ghosts, I want to go make music. So, I decided to become a songwriter and move to Boston for a couple years to be a liberal coffee-shop-working barista folksinger and then moved to Nashville. And I think during my first year 20:00there, I was somewhat interested in maybe getting a publishing deal and writing for other people. And there was one publisher who was very interested in working with me and he sent me home one day after a meeting with a CD of the top twelve country songs of the preceding six months. And they all either directly or indirectly referenced Jesus or Christianity or some understanding of what it means to be an American that was so different than mine. And I started thinking about whether or not that was reflected in my music, what that meant about the kind of music I was making. Was I making Jewish music based on just my perspective and my worldview? Maybe I should go into Jew-pop. Maybe I should be a klezmer singer. But I'd spent some time at this point developing an artistic voice that wasn't that. But I started thinking about sort of the relationship between my interest in my Jewish culture and my Jewish identity and the music 21:00that I was creating, which ended up leading me to applying for the Six Points Fellowship in 2006, I guess, after I'd moved to Brooklyn. And I got the fellowship and I then ended up creating this project that I'm performing here.

PK:Can you tell me about that project?

CB:I can tell you about the project. So, the seeds were sown when I was still living in Nashville. But when I heard about this project I thought, Oh my gosh, this is the perfect project to me and it totally reminds me of this crazy family heirloom. I don't know if you've read about my crazy family heirloom. It's gotten some press recently. But I think it was the second -- yeah, it was the second year I was living in Germany. My grandfather, my father's father, passed away. And I came home for Passover -- maybe it was actually that summer. Anyway, sometime within six months after he passed away, I went back down to Memphis to visit my grandmother and apropos of nothing, she asked me, "Well, have you seen 22:00papa's cheese?" I was, like, "No, I don't exactly know what you're talking about." So, she goes off and she brings back this envelope that says, "Papa's cheese." And in it is an object about the size of my hand wrapped in crumpled-up aluminum foil. And she unwraps it and she shows me this thing that looks like a pumice stone. And it's actually kind of the color of the walls in here -- and she said, "Well, this is papa's cheese." And it turns out this is a wedge of cheese that originated in Lithuania and sometime around 1893, when my great-grandfather was around fourteen years old, his parents sent him away from the shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community] to avoid conscription in the czar's army as they had sent away other children. And they sent him to live with uncles in South Africa. And they sent him away with a trunk of his belongings and this wedge of cheese that his mother had made for him. He did not eat this cheese on the journey from Lithuania to Johannesburg. 23:00He didn't throw it away. He stayed in Johannesburg, I think, for about ten years. He fought in the Boer wars on the side of the Dutch. The Dutch lost. He left, and as my aunt proudly states, he left with a first-class ticket to Leeds, England and then came to the United States and wound up in Memphis, Tennessee, still with the cheese in his possession. Got married to a woman named Clare. They had four daughters, one of whom was my grandmother. When my great-grandfather passed away, he gave the cheese to my grandmother. And my dad didn't know about the cheese until 1970 or 1971, after he and my mom got married. And my mom was talking about wanting an old trunk to refurbish. And my grandmother said, "Oh, Bunny, you can take my trunk. Go up in the attic and check it out." And she opened it up and the top tray in the trunk -- there was a 24:00tooth in it and this strange object wrapped in falling-apart cheesecloth. And she brings it down and she's like, "Josie, you probably want this, right? I mean, I don't know what it is." She said, "Oh, yes, absolutely. Papa's cheese. You can take the trunk but leave me with the cheese." Anyway, and I found out about it and was transfixed by the cheese, by the idea of the cheese. It's this incredible artifact just on its own -- it's, at this point, I think 118 years old -- that it survived this long, that my great-grandfather decided to keep it, that my grandmother decided to keep it. And so, it's this -- again, just on its own, standalone, it's this crazy artifact. It's 118-year-old wedge of cheese and it's clearly Jewish cheese. So, when I heard about this fellowship, I thought, I want to make an album like the cheese that can stand on its own as a piece of 25:00art that people can appreciate regardless of their heritage. But it is clearly, at its foundation, Jewish.

PK:Can you talk about what the Six Point project is?

CB:Yeah, the Six Points Fellowship, they're now on their second cohort. But it's a fellowship based in New York and now they actually have a -- they're going to start with a cohort in LA Sometime soon, I think within the next six months, they're going to announce their new fellows. But the first year, I received a fellowship and there were twelve artists, four musicians, four performing artists, and four visual artists. And the idea was to encourage emerging artists to work with projects with a Jewish theme or with Jewish content. So, we had monthly meetings that were either about career development or Jewish learning. And I think we had three retreats that both incorporated Jewish learning and 26:00critiques of each other's work and it was great. It was really wonderful to be able to work in a community with other artists who are interested in very similar themes and issues. And it definitely encouraged me, as an artist, to think outside of the box in terms of what I could do with my music and what I can express and how to create a life that brings together multiple interests and -- without going broke.

PK:So, what project did you, your cheese --

CB:So, I think that the cheese was definitely a selling point in getting me the grant. But originally, it was just sort of a vague -- I thought it was fairly vague -- notion that I would sort of take my experiences as a Jewish woman that grew up in the South that moved to the North and write songs that sort of expressed that journey and that identity. But I did find that the bulk of the 27:00songs that I was -- oh, I should stop. I used a chunk of the money within a couple of months of receiving it to go to Eastern Europe. I'd spent two years living in Germany and I didn't feel like I'd really explored the Eastern European side. Of course, I'd spent this time at the Yiddish Book Center, which definitely gave me a great foundation. But I felt like, I need to go to Eastern Europe and do the same sort of experiential research that I'd done when I was in Germany. So, I planned a trip that was two weeks long, starting out in Kiev, and I planned to take a side trip to Berdychiv, which is where my maternal grandmother's mother was from. And then, I went to Lithuania, went to Vilna, which, apparently, people call Vilnius now, which I think is ridiculous. Anyway, went to Vilna and really wanted to find the home of the cheese. My grandmother 28:00had told me in an interview that I did with her -- I also did one of my other grandmother -- that her father was from Pushville, which does not sound very Lithuania and also, does not sound very Yiddish. I Googled Pushville. I think there's a Pushville in Indiana. So, I was like, Ugh, all I know is that it's in Kovno Gubernia. I'll go to Kovno. But, while I was in Vilna, I went to a museum there and they had a map of all of the, I think, all of the shtetls in Lithuania and their Yiddish names. And I asked somebody, an older woman who works there, if she'd ever heard of anything called "Pushville" or "Posville" or anything, "Posovil"? She's, like, "Oh, Posvol." So, I took a bus to Posvol and it turns out that the main industry of Posvol is cheese. And "The New Yorker," actually, published an article about my cheese and -- last September. But I have since 29:00found out that, in fact, my great-grandfather was not from Posvol. My great-grandmother was from Posvol and he was from Panevėžys, I think. Anyway, oral history. Not always reliable! So, I went to Ukraine, I went to Lithuania, and my last stop was Riga, in Latvia, which is where my maternal grandmother's parents went after they could no longer go west to the United States from Germany. And I actually have never talked about this publicly before 'cause my grandmother's still living and she doesn't want to know exactly what happened to her parents. But I went to Riga thinking after all the research that I'd done, after all the time I'd spent living in Germany, that I was prepared to be in Riga and go to the place where I was pretty certain my great-grandparents were 30:00killed, that I could do that on my own. And it turned out that I couldn't. And that was actually really surprising to me. And I think that's where the project really took off. The bulk of these songs ended up being about my grandmother's life before she came to the United States and about my relationship with her and my struggles in trying to decide who I was doing this digging for. Was I doing it purely for me? Was this an entirely selfish endeavor? Was I also doing it 'cause I felt like uncovering lost memories and trajectories was important for my grandmother's healing? And so, it became less about the cheese. The cheese is sort of still the overarching idea, that I was creating this body of work that 31:00was intensely personal and very specific but that could still resonate with people regardless of what they knew and what their connections to this were and are. Yeah, so that's what happened.

PK:Have you continued with Yiddish?

CB:I have not continued with Yiddish, although I love seeing Yiddish and being able to parse out the words. But I can understand it. And actually, it was very helpful. When I was in Eastern Europe, I did not speak Ukrainian. I did not speak Lithuanian or Russian. But the older men and women that I met over there who were Jewish, they spoke Yiddish and I understood them because I speak German, largely. But I felt very, very uncomfortable speaking German with them. 32:00I don't think they minded, but I definitely felt that my German was very halting in a way that it isn't, normally, because I felt like I needed to put a Yiddish accent on it or I had to somehow disguise the fact that I was speaking German and they were speaking Yiddish.

PK:Why did you think you had to do that?

CB:Well, you know, the Germans wiped out most of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and yeah, there I was, a nice Jewish girl speaking German. Felt a little weird.

PK:What do you think of the Yiddish revival? Do you think it's going? What's happening?

CB:I'm not in touch with it in the way that I was when I was here that summer. And I actually came back and worked at the Book Center, I think, yeah, the same winter I went to KlezKamp. So, yeah, I'm not as connected as I once was. So, 33:00you're probably more of an expert than I am on whether the revival is -- what's happening. But I just arrived here at the Book Center and you guys have a new wing. So, that has to say something pretty important about the interest in Yiddish. And we actually -- I work two days a week at the Tenement Museum, Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan, and we talk a lot about Yiddish. And, I mean, on a very sort of personal and somewhat self -- well, whatever. On a personal level, we've had scholars come in and talk about the importance of Yiddish and the different roles it played within the immigrant community here in the United States and especially in New York. And I definitely felt like I was clued in in a way that my other educators were not. This is not answering your 34:00question at all, but --

PK:I'm interested.

CB:-- also, when tour groups come in and we talk about Yiddish and explain it, I always feel like I'm opening up a can of worms when I'm explaining what Yiddish is, because I basically have to just make it very simple. And I said, "This was the vernacular, this was the basic language of Eastern European Jews. It's basically a mixture of Hebrew and German." And from my experience in the Yiddish world, I think, Oh my gosh, people would be so upset with me. And I remember also thinking when I was in Germany going through the southwestern part, in the Schwarzwald, the dialect of German that's spoken over there is so similar to Yiddish. And I remember just really being hard on myself for even thinking that. But I read a lot of -- I'm not reading a lot of Yiddish literature in Yiddish, 35:00but I have been reading a lot of fictional work by contemporaries of mine, and I definitely see how this culture in the Yiddish world has influenced a lot of the storylines in the ethos behind the characters and the struggles. I actually am friends with Peter Manso, who wrote this fabulous book inspired in part by his time here, and love that he's not Jewish, writing this stuff. And I'm working on a project now, actually, with a friend of mine whose first novel is coming out in September. And it's about a nineteenth century Russian Jewish male order bride who immigrates from Odessa to South Dakota. So, I feel a lot of kinship on a number of different levels, just with the plotline. But she did a lot of research to make sure that the characters were sprinkling in the right amount of 36:00Yiddish in their conversations and there's also a relationship between a Jewish, Eastern European Jewish family out on the prairie and a German immigrant family on the prairie and sort of interesting dynamics in terms of their relationships and their communication skills and things like that. So, it's been fun to sort of be a part of -- in that world.

PK:Why do you think these stories are being written today?

CB:I mean, my first instinct is to say that I'm not alone in trying to connect with my past and that a lot of people my age, maybe in part because of relationships with our grandparents, in part because we've grown up in a very -- I mean, I feel like probably most of the people creating this work -- and I'm probably wrong, but coming from fairly privileged, sheltered, safe upbringings, 37:00assimilated households, looking for something that helps define them. But I'm making broad statements just based on my experience and that's definitely what I feel. We grew up in a world that, at least in some pockets of the world that value multiculturalism and a sense of maybe a micro-identity within a larger sort of American modern identity.

PK:For you, what is Yiddish?

CB:Well, it's funny. It's fun to speak. It's the Old Country, it's the new 38:00country, but it's also transition. It's also sort of this eternal struggle of -- I remember actually thinking about this a lot, in part because of what Aaron Lansky said when we were here, this idea of constantly having one foot in the world of tradition and one foot in the world of modernity. And that's sort of what Yiddish is, this way to sort of reconcile two different loyalties, two different identities -- and not just two, I mean, there are many -- but this idea of just constantly straddling. Yiddish is one eye laughing, one eye weeping. At the museum, I was like, "Have you had a bagel before? Well, then you 39:00know some Yiddish!" Actually, it's a really great microcosm to explore issues of immigration today through just the language and the culture around the language and the impact that language has then had on our language, yeah.

PK:Great?. Just wanting to go back to childhood, you said you went to a summer camp.

CB:Yes, Beber in Mukwonago, Wisconsin, I think it was.

PK:Can you tell me -- it was a Jewish summer camp?

CB:Mm-hm.

PK:Can you tell me what kind of --

CB:I mean, it was sort of a generic summer camp. There was swimming, I think there was sailing, there was macramé, there was pottery. And everybody there was Jewish. I mean, the only real Jewish influences I felt -- I think there was 40:00an Israeli flag on the flagpole along with the American flag. And at meals, we would say prayers and sing songs. And there was that one that you did hand things on the table during, and anyway -- there were certain Hebrew words that sounded like American phrases and we would substitute those in and -- kind of like Yiddish.

PK:Can you tell me about your Jewish life today?

CB:Well, again, most of my friends are Jewish or non-Jews who have lots of Jewish friends. I married a nice Jewish boy. He's a lawyer. Lawyer. (pronounces with accent) And we talk a lot about Jewishness and Jewish identity and we've been talking more about it since I have a bun in the oven. And we're now, 41:00theoretically, anyway, synagogue shopping. And I think we both always felt that when we have children, we want to be able to create a Jewish home and then let the child sort of explore his or her own attachment to Judaism within that framework.

PK:So, right now, can you describe what that home will be?

CB:Well, we just moved, so right now, there are lots of boxes in it. We just bought a new mezuzah to put up on the door. I think we'd both like to have Friday night dinner at home, perhaps with fried chicken because we both really love fried chicken every week. I currently work on Fridays and Saturdays at the museum. I don't know if I'll be doing that when the baby comes. But establish a 42:00tradition in our home of tzedakah and Shabbos and -- I mean, for me, it's just important to talk about ancestors and the sort of Jewish cultural and ritual experiences that we grew up with and try to pass those down.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

PK:Why do you think the Memphis family had such a rich story?

CB:Well, in part because they didn't have the trauma. I mean, I feel like my grandmother's way of moving forward and creating a life for herself and her family that was positive was to repress. Her husband, my grandfather, also from Germany, didn't have that same tr-- I mean, he obviously experienced an 43:00incredible trauma. But his father died before -- I think in 1932. He got out, his sister got out, his sister's family got out, his mother got out, friends of his got out. So, although I know he lost people in the Holocaust and the idea that this country that he loved so much had turned on him and the people that he loved was traumatic, it wasn't the same as what my grandmother went through. And he still did tell stories. He did still speak German. Not around her. But he even waxed poetic about Bismarck, who was an anti-Semite, so -- but he died when I was thirteen and I wasn't engaged in all this kind of thinking when he passed away, which was a shame because it would have been great to have talked about all this with him. But my father's parents, I was in college when my -- I was actually in Germany when my grandfather passed away. So, he told stories and my 44:00grandmother told stories and she adored her father and he would tell stories to her. And so, she was able to pass the stories of his experience down to her. And I actually -- and this is probably quite typical -- was much more interested in the story she had received from her father than the story she actually had lived through herself. But, yeah.

PK:Why do you think that's typical?

CB:For me, anyway, there's something much more compelling about the stories that took place involving characters that you'll never know, that died long before you were around and in places that you'll never know and in eras that you'll never know, whereas my grandmother and my grandfather, they grew up in Memphis. I grew up in Memphis. What's interesting about that? Of course, there's tons, 45:00given the times that they lived in and experienced, but anyway.

PK:I think we're gonna try wrapping it up soon. So, just one thing. You talked earlier about what life was like in the '90s. I'm just interested in trends or changes in attitudes, Jewish attitudes or Yiddish attitudes over your lifetime.

CB:In society or in my life?

PK:Let's do society first and then your life.

CB:I don't feel like I can really speak of society's attitudes, certainly not before I got to college and probably not before I was at the Yiddish Book Center, 'cause I didn't have any sense of this world before then. I don't know. 46:00I mean, I guess I don't know where the Yiddish world is going. I definitely feel that it's lodged in the academy, and whether cultural creators and programmers are being able to reach beyond the academy -- I think they are, and there is definitely activity there. But I think without the foundation of academics mining the language on an intellectual level, all the rest probably falls away and it becomes more of a curiosity. Yeah.

PK:Do you still feel a connection to Yiddish?

CB:I do, I do. And again, I feel like my work at the Tenement Museum is really responsible for that because I'm telling the stories of people who spoke Yiddish. And, I mean, I value my work at the Tenement Museum for many reasons but that's one of them. And I definitely feel like, even though the "Silver and Ash" project ended up focusing more on my maternal grandmother than the Yiddish side of the family, the project in itself really has enabled me to bring together my musical self with my historically Jewish culturally-minded persona, so --

PK:Do you see Yiddish being a part of this Jewish home you're creating?

CB:Yeah, I have Yiddish flashcards. I think I have "How to Speak Yiddish with 48:00Dick and Jane." Yeah, I have a couple books of Yiddish folk songs and I -- "Oyfn veg shteyt a boym [By the road, there stands a tree]," that one I play. I've sort of worked up my own kind of strange rendition of that one. "Di mashke [The whiskey]," really like that one. Maybe not appropriate for an infant. But I like the idea of being able to sing those songs to my bean.

PK:Were those songs that you were exposed to before the Book Center?

CB:No, no. I didn't know anything about it. Jordan did, though. My husband did.

PK:Does he want to bring any Yiddish into the house or what's his --

CB:We haven't actually talked specifically about Yiddish. But, oh yeah, he'd be into it.

PK:All right, one last or two last questions. Do you have a favorite Yiddish 49:00word or song or phrase?

CB:Well, "Oyfn veg shteyt a boym" is my favorite Yiddish song. Oh, so, I guess my favorite Yiddish phrase would be the one that Jojo always said. That's my dad's mom, and now they say, but they say it wrong and I forget, when I came here, I learned how to say it correctly but I've totally forgotten it. But they say, "gey gezuntaheyt [go in good health]." That's pretty close, right?

PK:That's pretty fine.

CB:But with a Southern -- gey gezuntaheyt! No, I don't know. Anyway, they just said it to me the other day, 'cause my husband and I moved and -- oh, and then we were also coming up here and so they were wishing me a good trip, so --

PK:So, what does it mean?

CB:Go healthy and smoothly and -- gey is go, gezunt is healthy, and I don't know exactly what the last word is, do you?

PK:It's just part of gezunterheyt.

CB:Okay.

PK:It's a thing. But why is it your favorite phrase?

CB:Because I grew up hearing it.

PK:Did you know it was Yiddish when you heard it?

CB:I did. No, I didn't. I didn't know it was Yiddish. I just thought it was some weird thing. And I actually might not have even been aware I was hearing it until after I came here. It's funny how experiences will focus things for you. And "shlep," I think, is my favorite Yiddish word. I use it all the time.

PK:It's a good one.

CB:Mm-hm.

PK:And last question: what advice do you have for future generations? Could be specific.

CB:(laughs) Tell stories and ask questions and do what you have to do to figure out who you are.

PK:Zeyer fayn, a sheynem dank [Very nice, thank you].

[END OF INTERVIEW]