HENRY SAPOZNIK ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is March 20th, 2012. I am here at University of Wisconsin, Madison, with Henry Sapoznik. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Henry, do I have your permission to record this interview?

HENRY SAPOZNIK: Yes, you do.

CW: A sheynem dank [Thank you very much]. Okay, so to start, can you just give me a brief overview of where your family came from?

HS: My parents are from the city of Rovno, which was Volhynia Gubernia. When my father was born, olevasholem [may he rest in peace], it was Russia. That was 1916. When my mother was born in 1920, it was Poland. Today, it's Ukraine. It's 1:00Volhynia, so it's the same area that Sholem Aleichem was from. So, that's the Yiddish that was spoken and they came after the war. They were Holocaust survivors and came to the US in 1950 and I was born in 1953.

CW: What do you know about their lives before the war?

HS: Oh, quite a bit. My mother's father, Isaac, was a painter, housepainter. Was also very politically involved. He was a follower of Trotsky and fought in 1920 in the counterrevolution under Trotsky. And he actually read a first edition of 2:00"Mein Kampf" in the mid-'20s. And of his eight brothers and three sisters, was the only one who took the book seriously and was able to save his family because of that. The others didn't believe that. My father's family, my father's father, was a treger, a porter. And my father had a gift. He was an outstanding singer and became a meshoyrer, a -- apprentice cantor, a chorister, and was kidnapped at a young age to sing with a cantor who took him on tour. And by the time he came back, he was totally in love with the singing. And he eventually went on 3:00tour with a number of cantors -- Gershon Sirota, who's perhaps one of the most famous cantors -- and his voice saved him during the war. When Poland fell in 1939, he was in the Polish army and he was then inducted into the Russian army and he had such a good singing voice that he became a member of the Red Army Chorus and saw out the war as a member of the Red Army Chorus. After the war, my parents came back to Rovno and met, married, spent -- 1945 -- spent five years in a DP camp in Linz, Austria, until they could get the papers to allow them to emigrate to the United States.

CW: So, was music a part of your family before your father and was it a -- how 4:00far back? Was there any music before him?

HS: No. My father, it just came out of nowhere. I don't think there were -- there was a Gershon Sapoznik who was a cantor in Constantinople around the turn of the twentieth century. And depending on which day of the week you spoke to my father about it, he either acknowledged that he was related or he wasn't. My father's family was from Bialystok, so they were from central Poland and there was -- big culture community there. No, there was no music as far as I know.

CW: And are there any specific nigunim [melodies] or khazones [Jewish liturgical music] that you remember from your father that --

HS: Oh, yeah, he had quite a bit. He had a good enough instrument -- he was just 5:00a fine enough khazn [synagogue cantor] that he could pick really great stuff. Cantor Shimon, I think it was Shimon Adler, I think it was, who wrote this piece that was made famous by Moshe Koussevitzky called "Sheyiboneh beys hamikdosh [Hebrew: May the Holy Temple be rebuilt]." And my father sang that a lot. That was a real showpiece. And I just assumed that it was his 'cause he did it so often and so well. And he knew Koussevitzky from Poland. Koussevitzky led the choir. The city of Rovno had, like most cities, had synagogues for each trade. There was a painter's, a malers shil [painter's shul]. There was a boyer shil [construction worker's shul], there were all sorts of different synagogues. And 6:00there was a khazns', a cantors' synagogue. And cantors, when they weren't in synagogues, would be there. And there was an amazing choir made up of all these cantors. I mean, what I wouldn't give to have heard a recording of these things. They were sadly not documented. So, that's something that was a real showpiece for him. When he died, I had it put on his matseyve [tombstone], on his tombstone. So, I felt that represented him. My mother, she's also a really terrific singer. But I didn't realize just how good a singer 'cause she had this very, very nice folk voice. Terrific pitch. But my father could peel paint with his voice, he was such a great singer, and I kind of lose track that there's 7:00other ways of singing. Luckily, I sort of realized before it was too late that I have two parents who can both sing really well.

CW: And can you tell me a little bit about the home you grew up in? Who were the people that were around other than your immediate family?

HS: Well, we moved a lot. My father was a professional khazn. We had to move in order to be within walking distance of any shul that he was a part of. For the first -- well, it was every six years, roughly. We tended to find ourselves in communities with other survivors. There was a bit of -- at that time, it was a stigma about being a survivor. American Jews were ashamed. They didn't know how 8:00to deal with it. So, we were sort of pariahs, and we found comfort with other people who -- what they refer to as "griner," Greenhorns. We were the new generation of Greenhorns. I mean, I was American, but -- so, the communities we lived in tended to be pretty homogenous. For a while, we lived in Crown Heights, just a block away from Lubavitch on Eastern Parkway and Kingston Avenue. So, that's where I went to school, in Lubavitch, and --

CW: Can you tell me a little about that?

HS: Well, it was Lubavitch. It was in the pre-mitzvah tank days. The vast majority of the Hasidim came over after the war. There was a presence of Hasidim prior to the war but nothing like it was afterwards. Growing up going to 9:00Lubavitch at that earlier stage -- I describe it as sort of being trapped in a Roman Vishniac photograph. It was such a transplantation of the old way of doing things. There was no hint -- I mean, again, I started there '53. So, around '56 -- no, '58, I was about six and --- '58, '59, and the people had only been in the country less than five years in some cases. So, Lubavitch at that time was a real throwback. It really felt like an old time -- like it was learning back in the old days. Long, hard days. It was nine to ten after six, Sunday through Thursday. It was mostly what you might imagine. It was mostly Gemara and khumesh 10:00[Five Books of Moses] and Tanakh and davening. And it was pretty austere. It was pretty austere. But it was a gift. I realized at the time, I wanted to be a kid, I wanted to play baseball on Sundays or whatever. But no, I was in yeshiva and I had to learn Gemara and stuff. And even though I felt I was robbed of something -- of course, subsequently, I think it was the greatest thing that could have happened because it really put me in another layer of cultural continuity, Hasidic being one. We weren't Hasidim by -- understand, my family was Orthodox but we weren't Hasidim. So, I got a chance to experience Hasidic life. I got a chance to be part of the cultural continuity in Yiddish-speaking just 11:00folksmentshn, just everyday people who do that. So, it was really a very powerful platform for cultural inculcation that I just grew up -- and, again, in yeshiva, you're reading Gemara or you're reading Tanakh or something. You're reading it in Hebrew. But you're translating and talking about it in Yiddish, the taytsh [meaning] was in Yiddish. They still do that, it's still -- so, Yiddish is still a really powerful tool in this kind of continuity. They don't translate, they don't taytsh into English. That's never gonna change. I don't think that's ever going to change. So, for me, the idea of being able to have an interpersonal Yiddish -- we weren't, God forbid, we weren't reading Sholem Aleichem or Sholem Asch or Mendele Moykher-- you know, you don't read that. 12:00Everything was a taytsh khumesh or a taytsh Gemara and stuff. I didn't even -- I guess I sort of knew about Yiddish writers. They were in the "Tog," the "Day" Jewish journal. They would serialize Yiddish writers. That's how I guess I first knew about it. But we weren't Yiddishists by any means. We didn't make the language this unbelievable top pinnacle. It was just, that's the language you spoke. That was just our lives. No one was making a big deal out of it.

CW: Were there other languages around besides Yiddish and English?

HS: My parents spoke a bunch of other languages. But they never did -- you hear constantly people say, Oh, my parents spoke Yiddish so I wouldn't understand them. I said, "Oh, I didn't have that." My parents could speak Russian and Polish and Ukrainian and stuff. No, they just spoke Yiddish and a "tsebrokhene 13:00eyngelish [broken English]," as we called it. And that was it. That was it. No Hebrew, no Russian. Little Polish when curses had to come out. That was it. But no, Yiddish and English. I didn't know which one was which. You're just talking and the words are just coming out and you said, "Ooh, is that an English word?" I thought pinochle was Yiddish. Everyone said, Ikh gey shpiln [I'm going to play] pinochle! I said, "Oh, who knew?" You could spell it in Yiddish. So, it was English, who knew? Canasta. I didn't know canasta wasn't a Yiddish word. But that's what they were playing.

CW: And so, what was the environment that your parents were in? In the survivor 14:00community, sometimes you hear about playing (laughs) canasta or pinochle. Was that your parents or grandparents, sort of what was your connection with the survivor community, I guess?

HS: Well, their connection was pretty close. There was a Rovno landsmanshaft [association of immigrants originally from the same region], which they were very involved with. So, we would go to the haskore, the memorial services. We'd go to regular meetings. The survivor community was also part and parcel when my parents came in the '50s. The Catskills had gone through a real decline. The post-war airfare had become cheaper. A new generation didn't want to -- they didn't see their place in the kind of leisure culture that had been invented in the interwar years. So, quite unexpectedly, this influx of new émigrés, the 15:00griner who came after the war revitalized the Catskills. And so much of what had been a dynamic part of leisure culture in terms of the Catskills now got a boost for another decade or two. So, when we would go to the hotels, my father was the khazn. We would -- Pesach or shvues or any -- Rosh Hashanah -- no, we didn't really -- we did Rosh Hashanah once. It never -- we stayed home and he had synagogue work. And the vast majority of the people, people who were my parents' age who were at the hotels, tended to be survivors. Older people were mixed between survivors and people who had been coming to hotels as part of their youth. So, again, very fortuitously, a dynamic of Yiddish culture, which had 16:00been a real part of a mid-twentieth century interwar years still had a dynamic presence in the Catskills. And you really -- I felt subsequently once I realized, Hey, this -- I thought everyone did this. I just didn't realize how unique it was. It was, again, like with khazones -- 'cause my father's type of singing quickly -- had he been born a little earlier or perhaps had he been in the United States before World War II, he probably would have been a star. He would have been a star cantor 'cause he just had an astounding instrument. After the war, a decline in how synagogue services -- by the '60s, that had died out. 17:00And it was starting to change what was -- congregational singing had taken over. So, it was a real transition. So, I got a chance to see the last gasp of all of these traditions as part of a vibrant culture and then to see their gradual decline. Again, being in a yeshiva environment, I was part and parcel of a variety of different Jewish communities: religious, Hasidic, and traditional. Lot of people who survived the war or the people we knew wanted to identify as being Jewish. There were quite a few people, I imagine, who survived the war and would speak Polish, only after the war they wouldn't be religious. That wasn't 18:00anyone we knew. Everyone was just -- they weren't running around with yarmulkes all the time. But they were traditional, so they understood the culture.

CW: And what were the markings of traditional versus the -- looking back for someone who wouldn't -- who wasn't living at that time and wouldn't know what that meant, what made people -- what did people do to signify that they were traditional?

HS: Well, it wasn't Shabbos, although in my family it was. Shabbos was -- 'cause my father was a khazn, you couldn't bypass that. It came down to identity. It 19:00came down to identity, not just in the easy stuff like going to shul on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, not just that they were active members of Rovno landsmanshaft -- 'cause, of course, at that point, the original landsmanshaftn were established by expatriates who'd come to the United States in order to help their -- the ones who were left behind. Well after World War II, there was just no one left behind in Rovno. So, these landsmanshaftn, they enabled people to sustain the social structure which had existed prior to the war. Certainly part of the thing of traditional is people were -- for whatever else, they weren't eating treyf [not kosher], or at least not at home. They would manifest their identity by really enjoying old-time Jewish music. Those who were religious, 20:00that was unchanged. That was unchanged. In my family, it was kind of mixed because I have a father who was a cantor and I had a grandfather who was a revolutionary. So, it made sort of a -- it was kind of a mixed marriage, and my grandfather, who did not hold with religion at all until his last days, and that was -- I liked having this really fomenting gene pool because I really feel I had the whole kind of panorama of Jewish life in both sides of -- the Sapoznik side of the family and the Steinberg part of the family.

CW: In which pockets of that spectrum were you most comfortable as a young person or, you know, when you were going to yeshiva and the Catskills and hanging out with the Trotskyist zeyde [grandfather], which of these was most 21:00comfortable for you?

HS: Well, we didn't talk about -- still, in the '60s, the red-baiting of the early '50s was still pretty -- the resonance was still there. So, we didn't talk about my grandfather's predilections. I mean, after all, they had moved here. My grandfather had saved my family, my mother and her sister and their mother. One daughter, unfortunately, fell into the Nazis' hands. But even though he was a committed Trotskyist after the war, certainly after Trotsky was murdered and Stalin, you know, the family was encouraged to leave Russia and they came here. So, it's not like he was hanging red flags out on May first. I guess I didn't -- 22:00when I'm in the Hasidic world, I didn't have a Hasidic family. So, on a certain level, I was not -- I was a part of but also apart from the Hasidic world. I had a religious family but it wasn't Hasidic. A lot of my friends weren't necessarily Hasidim, so it was a very kind of -- it was a really kind of multicultural life because I could draw from --- like, my grandfather used to love to read out loud from the great Yiddish writers. And when I was old enough, that's when I really became aware that there was this -- you would have all of these books. And he was actually a zamler [collector] before -- 'cause he would just collect books just to have in the house and would read -- I remember he had 23:00a Yiddish edition of H.G. Wells's "Outline of History." And he used to complain that "Vi zenen di yidn [Where are the Jews]?! There's no Jews in H.G. Wells's 'Outline of History' except in the biblical times." So, he was not happy with Mr. Wells. So, in the Hasidic world, I felt sort of apart from -- in the secular world, I was a part of all of these worlds. It was a big striation. People, of course -- and I used to have to sneak into friends' houses to watch television because we didn't get a TV until much later. So, it was all forbidden. It was great. We had a radio. We listened to Yiddish radio a lot. So, all of these worlds were sort of exotic. I was sort of visiting, I was sort of part of, apart 24:00from. It was a lot for a kid to navigate through these worlds without feeling completely at home.

CW: And then, at a certain point, you left yeshiva and became interested in other things: Bob Dylan, folk music. When did that happen, how did that happen?

HS: Well, it was roughly around the same time. The whole folk music -- the anti-war movement and the folk music scare of the mid-'60s happened around the time that I was bar mitzvah, so that was 1966. And it was an amazing moment because the folk music world was just totally peopled with Yi-- and it was 25:00interesting because on the one hand, you felt a certain amount of pride. We always played Jew/not Jew. We were always playing this game. You're watching TV. Perry Como, is he a Jew? No, no. He's singing "Kol Nidre," but is he a Jew? No, he's not a Jew. Milton Berle. Oh, Milton Berle converted to Christian Science. We don't need him anymore. So, in the folk music world -- I mean, Bob Dylan was Bob Zimmerman. And some people -- you understood that despite this name change that these were -- this was the next place to go. This was how you -- and I'll tell you, to a kid who was growing up feeling that American Jews -- I thought they were Americans 'cause their parents didn't have accents. My parents did. And I felt, in a way, what would make me more of an American is to be engaged on 26:00a cultural level with American grassroots culture on a deeper plane than anyone else. And the folk music thing, which was part of the anti-war movement, which was part of pop culture. It was a moment that you could be sort of nerdy about this music and still be hip. And it still allowed this whole dynamic. But what I didn't realize was that the gateway from processed folk music, from anti-war songs and all this kind of stuff, which was reflecting the moment, was also a gateway into a deeper traditional American music. And for me -- and it wasn't immediate. I got into playing guitar and banjo. I was in high school. So, that would be around 1970 or '71. I guess the thing was around that time I was into 27:00Pete Seeger and then made this transition to his half-brother, Mike Seeger, who played traditional American music. And I never looked back. To me, there was something about real grassroots traditional American music that I really related to. I didn't realize until much later, when I started to sort of process my interest in Yiddish culture, that it fulfilled the same role in my life of giving me a sense of ongoing-ness in cultural literacy in a very unremarkable way. It was just songs handed down from parent to child, tunes that you danced to at your weddings or bar mitzvahs. Even at my own bar mitzvah, I had a really good klezmer band but it was, hands-down, it was the last thing I wanted. I was 28:00thirteen. I did not want what I referred to as round men playing square music. That's what it was. And I was mortified. I was mortified 'cause I wanted someone to play rock and roll and these guys -- the only roll they knew was an onion roll. That was their thing. So, it took a while. Took a while to process this stuff. But each strata of traditional -- and I played pop music. I mean, I had a rock and roll band, of course. You're supposed to annoy your parents with volume. But everyone was -- we're all yids. Everyone was yids.

CW: Can you describe the scene of the Village and Washington Square in the mid-'60s? Sort of what did that look like?

HS: Well, I nearly missed it. By the time I came, the folk music riots were long 29:00over, the police arresting people for playing guitars and autoharps in Washington Square Park were gone. I saw all of the people who were a part of that. And the Village was still --- there was a place called the Folklore Center. It's so funny, I didn't think we'd be talking about it. The guy I was on the phone with when -- worked at the Folklore Center in the '60s. We've stayed friends since then. He was an acolyte of -- Bob Dylan had a guy named -- now, of course, I have to think of -- going to forget his name. Oh, that's embarrassing. Everyone styled themselves after these other singers and this guy was like third from Bob Dylan. He was styling himself after someone who styled himself after 30:00Bob Dylan. And it was a vibrant scene. Acoustic music was still quite popular. There was a parallel -- scenes. The Folklore Center had square dances, had concerts. It was really exciting. There was a place called Allan Block Sandal Shop and Allan Block was a tremendous fiddler. And after he would close the store, after he'd be selling sandals to hippies, he closed the store and people would just show up with guitars and dulcimers and banjos. He played fiddle and they would just sit and play -- and I just thought this was -- I mean, like on a rocket ship 'cause it was so -- I'm in New York but I feel like I'm elsewhere. And again, these were Jews, the vast majority. Art Rosenbaum, a great banjo player at the time. Israel Young, Izzy Young, who ran the Folklore Center was a 31:00Yiddish-speaking Jew. He's living in Sweden now. And these were all -- I said, This is a model. Their parents spoke Yiddish. They, in fact, spoke Yiddish. I said, This makes kind of sense, that this is the progression that we do as the children of immigrants, that we become part of this dynamic American society of the continuity of the real home culture. And I just thought I couldn't ask for anything better. Played guitar -- and someone once said to me, said, "Oh, playing guitar you're not gonna get gigs. Better learn to play the banjo." And if I ever find out who that is, I'm just -- actually worked out quite well. Again, I studied with Jews who went down South to study with non-Jews. And I 32:00thought that was just totally exciting. Said, "Really, you go down South. You do this thing and you hang out with these goyim," and I said, "Oh, my God." I still had a psychic yarmulke on. I still felt I had my yarmulke and my peyes [sidelocks] and they knew. I walk into the room, they said, I'm sorry, the synagogue's next door. Instead, "No, I'm here to play music." And it just felt -- to make my way into the American music scene. And I was just really excited by being part of this scene. And then, once that particular scene played out in New York -- and replaced by more rock-and-roll or other music forms, I didn't keep changing. I knew what I wanted to do and I wanted to play traditional music.

CW: So, the first time you went down South, what did you find? What was that 33:00first impression, I guess, after studying it in New York, which is sort of close enough to home that you could go back if you wanted to but familiar enough, what was it like the first time that you went to North Carolina, I think you said?

HS: Yeah, North -- well, actually, the first Southern trip actually took me down into Alabama. I went with a friend of mine who had to do some sort of business down in Alabama. I don't remember, it was some insurance thing and I said, "Oh, I'll be thrilled to go." And it was just, really, it was like getting in a spaceship and being elsewhere because it was so -- I mean, I grew up in the city. I grew up -- the accents that I was used to. I had a neighbor when I was in my early teens who had a brother-in-law who was living in Brooklyn who was 34:00from Tennessee and played me my first bluegrass records. And that was kind of amazing 'cause it was a sound -- that's when the "Beverly Hillbillies" was on TV and it was not an unusual sound. You heard the banjo and you heard this. And it was pretty compelling. But to actually go down and to be in this culture -- I wasn't an intrepid ethnomusicologist at this point. I remember buying a banjo in some hock shop. I paid, like, five dollars for this beat-up banjo. And I thought that, Quick, let's get out of here, I just robbed the place. I got this banjo. Couldn't play. The instrument was no good. But it was just, Oh, wow, it's a Southern banjo. It wasn't until the mid-'70s that I met a banjo player named Ray Alden who sadly died a couple of years ago. And he had started making field 35:00trips down South. Actual field trips: recording, documenting and stuff. And he invited me to go with him. And that was unbelievable, just to actually go visit with these folks who played this music. It was thrilling because it brought everything to life. I got to see this music in context. I got to overhear this kind of -- it was like a tableau vivant. It was this living theater and it was terrific. It was so exciting because it was so not what I experienced. It wasn't even like "The Andy Griffith Show," which was very sterile and -- even though the town that Andy Griffith -- Mayberry is based after this town, Mount Airy, 36:00which is where I spent a lot of time with this guy Tommy Jarrell, who's a great fiddle player and banjo player. So, it was really -- and again, who else was going down there? Was a bunch of yids. It was all yids and it was all children of immigrants. The Southerners' kids didn't want to play this stuff. They thought it was too creaky, old-fashioned. They didn't want this stuff. And so, we were coming from New York, all the Italians and papists and Christ-killers and all this sort of stuff. And once -- being accepted, part of the thing is you're growing up and you know that you're a minority in many ways. You're a minority within the Jewish community, you're a minority within the dominant community. It's sort of great training to be an anthropologist because you keep your counsel. You come into a new culture, you come into a new environment, you 37:00know that you're a minority. You don't feel that, Okay, I'm here to uplift you culturally. So, I learned an awful lot because I really felt that I was out of my element and I just learned tons about playing music and about repertoire. And then, there was this whole thing about looking at old pictures and listening to old recordings in these people's homes and thinking, This seems familiar. Creaky old records and faded photographs, yeah. We had them. And suddenly, I got to -- it wasn't that. I mean, I was way too focused on country music to suddenly say, Jeez, I wonder if -- but that's what eventually happened.

CW: Did it feel like a rebellion, getting into old-time American music?

HS: You mean in my family?

CW: Yeah.

HS: Oh, yeah. My parents couldn't figure out -- was I maybe switched at birth? 38:00Maybe the real me was somewhere else. They didn't understand it because it was out of their sphere. At one point, when I mentioned I wanted to play music, my mother said, "Oh, we'll get you an accordion." I said accordion wasn't gonna do. Now, of course, it's way hip but back then, I said, Oh, my God, I have to strap one of those things on? It's not gonna happen. I mean, it's just like real square. So, yeah, it was a rebellion. Rock-and-roll was a rebellion. But for some reason, rock-and-roll didn't take and the banjo did. So, yeah, it was a rebellion until it became clear that I was not going to be dissuaded. It wasn't a stage I was going through like, Oh, he was collecting frogs. He was going through this. He's gonna -- it's just a thing he's going through. No, it's this 39:00-- and my father, my late father could not read music. Not well. He had a great ear. And I sang with him in choirs from when I was six to when I was thirteen, until my voice changed. And I learned everything. I had to learn all my parts by ear. Now, I didn't know, if you had told me, Oh, by the way, that's oral tradition. You're learning stuff in the traditional way. You're not reading music. If someone sings it, you repeat it. You sing together. Well, I didn't realize that I was learning how traditional music has been transmitted for generations. So, when I went down South and someone says, "Here, let me play this for you," I knew immediately how to process music played and to translate it immediately rather than saying, "Well, let me -- hold on, let me write this down," and you have to write the music out and then play it from the music. And 40:00then, you re-learn it. No, I was very fortunate that my father -- sometimes I wish I could read dots. But it was an amazing, fortuitous skill to have learned khazones and all of the modes and scales, the entire repertoire. It was huge and it was all learned by ear. It was all learned by ear and it was a lot.

CW: Was there a specific moment that you sort of made that connection back to, Hey, this is similar to what -- those old photographs, hey, maybe there's something to check out there in terms of the Jewish stuff? Was there sort of a catalyst moment for you where you became interested in Jewish stuff again?

HS: There was a series -- I think the straw that broke the camel's back was in 1977, when I was down -- again, I was staying with Tommy Jarrell in his home in Mount Airy. And Tommy, we had -- this had been -- I visited with him, oh, jeez, I guess about a half dozen times. So, he was very sweet. He was a sweet man. And I was Hank -- I had been, actually -- when I was growing up, someone named me Hank after Hank Greenberg and people called me Hank. But here, it was even better to be Hank. And folks called me Hank. But funny thing is, Tommy could not remember my last name. Sapoznik was very demanding. And there was a country -- very famous country music singer named Hank Snow. So, I became Hank Snow. That was easy. He got some of the important letters, got the first name right, got 42:00the S, got an N. There's an O. Didn't have a W. It was okay. He got most of it. And we were actually -- when he wasn't drinking white lightning, we actually had some really -- actually surprising conversations. And, in fact, he was puzzled. In fact, he told me a Jew joke. He says, "Hank, I'm gonna tell you a Jew joke. Tell you a joke about a local Jew." I said, "Oh, this is not gonna end well. This is not going to end well." And I said, "That's all I" -- said, "Okay, Tommy." He says, "Yeah, we have a Jew in town named Goldberg. And Goldberg's walking down the street and one of the locals come up and has a dog. And he says, 'Hey, Goldberg! This here's my dog. He's part Jew and part son-of-a-bitch.' And Goldberg says, 'Ah, you see, he's a little kin to both of us.'" And I said, "That's your Jew joke? That's a good joke!" (laughs) It's like, yeah, I totally get that. And so, he said, "Hank, what" -- he was puzzled 43:00because he saw all these guys who were coming down. He said, "All these Jews" -- and he says, "Don't Jews have their own music? Don't you have none of your own music?" And he was really -- and I said, "Well, yes, of course we do, Tommy." And I'm thinking, Well, what do we have? I'm trying to think of a corollary to what Tommy is talking about. Now, I didn't know any fiddle players who played Yiddish music. Certainly no one was playing banjo in the Jewish world. And it stuck with me because it was a very dynamic question because it really was getting to an essence of self-identity. You just think if you don't have something, you go look for it elsewhere rather than saying, Hey, I have it but I'm just not interested in it. Well, I didn't even know that. And this was, 44:00again -- this was in the mid-'70s. And it's kind of like the riddle of the sphinx. You have to ask the right question in order to get the right answer. And I had never, ever asked my parents about growing up doing traditional music, what was a wedding like in Rovno, were there batkhonim [wedding entertainers], were there klezmorim [klezmer musicians]? What kind of repertoire? The only thing I really cared about -- and I used to collect 78s of hillbilly records. And I said, Well, maybe there's this other stuff. And I would find these records that would say Abe Schwartz Orchestra and Naftule Brandwein Orchestra. I'd say, "I don't want orchestral music." I want band music. And my parents would say, Oh, yeah. They'd tell me about this and they would tell me about that and they would say, Oh, this guy -- and then, I realized once I had the veil sort of removed, he says, "Well, of course we have dance music. Do you remember at the 45:00hotel?" And they would say, Dave Tarras? Remember him? And I said, "Yeah, what about him?" He says, "He's like the greatest -- and he plays this music." I said, "But it's clarinet." He says, "Yeah, it's clarinet." And I just had to sort of recalibrate my head to -- 'cause I had come to consciousness of traditional music in a very, very finite kind of soundscape: banjo, fiddle, guitar, stacked -- Baptist, shout kind of gospel vocals and stuff. And here I am, trying to parse this stuff out. So, I said -- and I'd been doing fieldwork at this point. I had recorded a bunch of stuff down South and it occurred to me, I said, Well, maybe I could do this -- the essence of being a field -- an ethnographer is you can't assume anything about your subjects. And you have to, 46:00in essence, make yourself a stranger by asking questions that seem -- "Why are you asking me this question? You know." He says, "No, no, I'm asking because I have to know." And the idea of making myself a stranger in my own community was like, I think my head was going to explode because it really required unlearning and making myself transparent. And it was like a gold mine because suddenly, I saw people that I had grown up with. This guy, Appelevitch? This guy Rosenzweig? These guys -- and they're great singers or this guy plays mandolin and stuff, and suddenly these people became not cardboard cutouts but they became three-dimensional people who were infused with traditional Yiddish music, popular music, and I just -- it wasn't an immediate thing. I didn't go out and 47:00burn my banjo. There was a whole series of years where I was in both worlds, thank goodness. But once I understood that Yiddish culture -- and again, I didn't realize a lot of stuff 'cause, again, when I was growing up, it was a stigma about being not only a Yiddish speaker, a survivor. This was the period of pride and focus on Israel. Everything was about Israel, everything was about Hebrew, everything was about the new. Forget about the old, forget about the victims, and it was very easy to feel that you were sort of an outcast. And yet, here was this thing that I didn't feel -- I heard Israeli music and I said, "This stuff doesn't speak to me. I don't understand it. It's a language I don't" -- I understood from davening but not from speaking. And when I heard the music, 48:00I said, "It doesn't -- I don't relate to it." But as soon as I wrapped my head around listening to Dave Tarras play and going to his house and stuff -- and suddenly, I said, "Really?" This is -- I had it all the time. It was there all the time. But I was just too farshtopte kop [block-headed]. My head was just totally filled with other things. And a lot of the people with whom I played bluegrass and old-time music either were first or second generation. There weren't really that many children of survivors. But for them, the Jewish thing was of no interest. Why should they? If they didn't grow up with it, if they didn't feel a sense of mission -- so, I became a stranger again. I was sort of 49:00becoming alienated from this incredible old-time music, traditional American world. And I realized all these lessons that I had learned about fieldwork and about historic recordings and about interviews and about ethnomusicology. I said, Oh -- and it was doing on behalf of traditional American music. Well, maybe there's a way to sort of bring that gift to the Jewish world. And, as it turns out, suddenly my parents said, Ah, er iz a muzikant [he is a musician]. Now suddenly, I was playing music. Before, I was what they called "grimpling." To "grimpl" means to idly strum upon an untuned instrument. That's how it was characterized.

CW: And in terms of the music, were there aspects of old-time American music that affected the way you understood or played Jewish music or Yiddish music or 50:00vice-versa? I mean, during this period, when you were doing both at the same time, was there any cross-fertilization there for you? Or were they two separate things?

HS: Yeah, to a degree. When I -- and for the first couple of years, actually, for the first couple of years when I got into Yiddish music, I actually didn't play a note. I decided that I needed to insert myself into the soundscape. I needed to just listen. I just needed to listen. And even though I knew a lot of this stuff, I only knew it in one context. I needed to listen to this stuff. I needed to hear the modes. I needed to hear the singing style reinvented so that I had a new appreciation, a new understanding of how this music functions. I was 51:00playing banjo at the time and I said, I am not playing banjo in klezmer music. It just didn't make any sense to me. And I decided if I was going to play this music, I wanted to play a traditional Yiddish instrument, which was the fiddle. It wasn't -- it was yidl afn fidl [a Jew playing a fiddle], not yidl afn bandzho [a Jew playing a banjo]. So, I started to teach myself fiddle, which was a seriously, seriously bad mistake. Trying to learn to play an instrument, especially as demanding as the fiddle while you're trying to represent a music form -- it's one thing to know how to play the instrument and then learn how to play the music on that instrument. But learning to play the instrument and learning to play the music was -- well, it's kind of like trying to cross a bridge while you're building it. You're making no progress. You either build the bridge first and then cross it -- and so, I was very aware of -- that there were 52:00certain similarities, the structure of the tunes -- even though they were totally different in terms of modes and scales -- the Yiddish scales are derived from a -- Eastern European, there's modes, which are -- well, there's also modes in hillbilly music. But the tunes were structured identically. They would have eight measures repeated for a first section and a second section. Also it was very strophic and the dances, even though there was a Yiddish square dance called a "sher." And I was amazed the first time that I'd actually seen a sher: that it was like a Virginia reel and it seemed incredibly familiar. What I didn't want to do was I didn't want to play hillbilly Yiddish music. I chose to play a kind of old-time country music that was considered the oldest layer. I 53:00wasn't trying to say, I want to learn how to play this music with stuff I already know. I said, No, I want to play the music as it was played by the people in the community. Well, the same thing was true in Yiddish music. When I formed a band in 1979, called Kapelye, which was one of the -- it was the third -- it was -- Andy Statman was playing at that time and The Klezmorim out in Berkeley. So, we were the third band and Hankus Netsky came along, I think, the next year or the year after. I'm not sure. And I was playing fiddle at that time. And I felt ultimately, No, you know what? I'm giving people the wrong idea about the instrument. And I wasn't a good fiddler. And I didn't want people to think -- boy, anyone -- my dog can play klezmer. And I said, No, I don't want people to come away -- so, I decided I was going to -- I switched to banjo and I 54:00came up with what I felt was a workable system of playing the instrument within the context of this music. Well, lo and behold, a couple years later -- and I started finding -- when I was working at the YIVO, I started there in 1982, and I started building their 78 collection there and I suddenly started finding records from the 1920s with Yiddish dance bands and there's a banjo, and the same way I'm playing it. And I said, This is weird. This is totally weird. I didn't hear this stuff and yet I came to a conclusion about how to play. And I realized I was doing nothing different than my forebears in the 1920s. These émigrés who were coming to the United States, the banjo was a very important instrument in American popular music from the 1840s until World War II. And these guys were dealing with the same issues: how do we continue to play 55:00traditional Yiddish music but incorporate something which says something to our audience about this binary essence of being true to a Yiddish, cultural identity but also incorporating stuff that says, Yes, I'm an American also. And here these guys came up with the solution, I stumble on it decades later, and I'm thinking, This is weird, this is totally weird, and I couldn't be happier.

CW: So, with this sort of -- now, in this period, you're talking about having a sort of new understanding or appreciation for the Jewish music you grew up with. Were there any specific khazones that then took on a new meaning with this new 56:00perspective? Sort of things that you had dismissed earlier that became meaningful to you in a new way at that point?

A: I never got into singing khazones. I never got into it. My father, he was a difficult man. He had very high standards. And he didn't appreciate the fact that he had a gift. He just thought he opened his mouth and these sounds came out. And he didn't realize that not everyone is that lucky. I had to work very hard to learn how to sing this stuff. What I did learn from khazones without actually singing the stuff was, again, a lot of the elemental parts that go to make it up. Again, the scales, the ornamentation, that krekhts, that sound, that catch in the throat, that sigh. That carries over. And when you listen to these historic recordings, so many of the people who made Yiddish popular music in the 57:001920s and '30s like Seymour Rexite or whomever, they studied to be cantors. I mean, the world that they were born into had these two options. You have a great voice, you're gonna sing in a -- you'll be a khazn or you'll sing in a choir or you'll go on the stage. It's either the secular synagogue or the religious synagogue. And so, the same lessons of the underpinning of the music, understanding -- I could hear a tune that I'd never heard before because my understanding of the infrastructure of how the melodies are created -- I said, Oh, I know the tune. I know the architecture. I have an idea. I listen to it, I say, I know where it's going. And a lot of times, I was right because it was based on a general received repertoire. Khazones, klezmer, Yiddish theater, they're all kind of in the pot together. So, I came to really appreciate -- oh, 58:00I came to appreciate -- there's a form in klezmer called "doina," which is sort of an improvisational, very vocal kind of thing. Well, once I understood doina, I'm listening -- doina, I said, Why does this sound like my father? And I realized that so much of the khazones of this improvisational part of this melisma, where a note -- a word has a whole series of notes growing out of it like a fecund tree -- I said, Oh, my God, khazones, the real old-time khazones and doina, they're very vocal. And I came to realize something I knew -- hillbilly music, that traditional music attempts to replicate the voice. The greatest traditional music looks to make the instruments sound like a voice. And this ability to make the voice instrumental and make the instruments sound like a voice is the essence of great traditional music. Doesn't make a difference: it 59:00could be Greek, gypsy music, could be Balkan music, could be Cajun. It's all the same thing. They want that voice to sound like a fiddle and they want that fiddle to sound like a voice.

CW: Can you give an example?

HS: Well, I think it's -- oh, if I had Tom -- I think in vocal singing, especially if you listen, that the -- jeez, let me think about it. But, well, let's see. A song like "Milners trern [The miller's tears]" by Mark Warshawsky, I tend to sing it more like old-time style, as if it's a Southern ballad, and something like, (singing) "Oy, vifl yurn zenen farfuln zayt ikh bin milner ot a 60:00do. Di reder geyen zikh, di yurn drayen zikh. Ikh bin sheyn alt un groys un gro. [Oh, how many years have passed since I was a miller here. The wheels turn, the years go by. I am old, grown up, and grey.]." The original of that is more 61:00metric. It's more in time. "Oy, vifl yurn zenen farfurn zent ikh bin milner ot a do." And it has this kind of lit. But what I really like about opening it up is that you play it with a fiddle and you have the fiddle and the voice playing identical lines. And it sounds ancient. And that little catch in the throat when you go into the falsetto -- my father had a great falsetto. And I didn't realize that I had inherited it from him until years after he died. And I said, Oh, I can do this. I was actually playing with someone who wanted to do '50s doo-wop music. And they were doing '50s -- said, Boy, I wish we had someone who could do that really high falsetto. I said, "Oh, I'll try it." And then, I start doing it, said, "Hey, that's the real thing." So, who knew? I doo-wop, Jew-wop, ver 62:00veyst [who knows], you know? But the idea of reaching back into the music and trying to bring a sense of its provenance -- I didn't want it to sound like hillbilly music. I didn't want it -- it wasn't like I'm trying to use a shuffle bow like they use in Appalachia on playing klezmer. A lot of people -- I play five-string banjo and people say, Hey, have you ever tried to work out klezmer things on the five-string banjo? I said, "Eh, I tried it. I grew up, things are either milchig or they're fleyshig. And if they're not those, they're pareve and usually pareve doesn't taste very good. You want either fleyshig or milchig. And I said, "I don't want to mess with this music. I don't want to make country music sound Yiddish, I don't want Yiddish music to sound" -- and yet, it happens, my best efforts notwithstanding.

CW: I want to move forward in time, but I want to ask one more question about 63:00your father. Was there anything that was uniquely from him that you only heard from him or that was sort of something that he maybe made up? Or were there -- once he started studying, did you realize that he had sort of learned these orally? Or was there anything that was really his own creation?

HS: He did a little bit of composing. Not a lot. He was so influenced by those around him, and this was an age of even third-rate cantors were really good. So, this was an era where if you were copying someone else, you were doing pretty 64:00well. If you could manage to replicate these sounds -- and my father, the only thing I remember him saying is, "Oh, I just worked out a melody for a new brokhe." I said, "Oh, really, what's that?" And he says, (singing to the tune of "La Cucaracha") "Borukh ato, ad v'ashem, elokeynu melekh oylem [Blessed are you, God our Lord, king of the world]." I said, "Wait, wait, you're gonna set a brokhe to 'La Cucaracha'?" I mean, I was a little concerned. But my father loved Westerns. He grew up in Poland watching American Westerns and he would just -- said, "Oh, I love that melody and someday I'm going to set it" -- and I said, "I don't know about 'La Cucaracha.'" But I don't remember if he actually did it in shul. If it's about a cockroach smoking marijuana and yet it's a brokhe over the wine -- and who's to say? Who's to say he was wrong, so --

CW: (laughs) Sounds kind of awesome. So, you were at YIVO at a time sort of 65:00shift, when the Max Weinreich program was sort of starting. What was that shift like to observe, sort of when young people started coming in?

HS: I was one of those young people. I missed -- I only came to the YIVO because my zeyde said, "Have you been to YIVO?" And I said, "What's that?" And he was an autodidact, my zeyde was. I mean, just read everything he could get his hands on. He says, "Darfst geyn tsum YIVO [You must go to YIVO]." I said, "All right, darf geyn tsum YIVO." And I come there, and again, I wasn't a Yiddishist. I didn't come out of the Sholem Aleichem shules [secular Yiddish schools]. I didn't come out of the Kinderwelt or the Kinderland thing. I was an Orthodox 66:00kid. My Yiddish was homey, it wasn't literary. I didn't speak klal [standard Yiddish] -- khas-vekholile [God forbid]. I didn't know any of this stuff. I show up to the YIVO like some country bumpkin: "Golly, Yiddish-speaking Jews!" And it was just amazing because it was this moment -- in retrospect, it was an astounding time. I came to realize that what I stumbled upon at that point in 1980 -- well, actually, it started -- I first came to work at YIVO in '82 but I started doing my research there in '79. And this was a moment of real -- there was a thing called the SETA program. It was based on the 1930s WPA. It was an arts and culture and civics program. Ramblin' Jack Elliott. That's whose name I 67:00was trying to remember before, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, another yid who copied Woody Guthrie and then Bob Dylan copied Ramblin' Jack Elliott and then this guy, Mark Ross, thank you. I knew I would remember -- and a bunch of yidn. So, I come into YIVO and it's a theme park, it's a Yiddish theme park. And it was like the place was bustling. It was unbelievable. And what was really great is that you got a sense of these two worlds. You see all of the original people from the original YIVO. Dina Abramowicz, may God rest her soul, the most wonderful little tiny woman, a bundle of energy running the library. And the superintendent, the guy who was running the building was this former Bundist, Bolek Ellenbogen. I 68:00loved that man. I would go hang out with him in the basement among all the tools and he would tell me about fighting against the right-wingers in Poland. I said, Oh, my God, you couldn't walk down the hall without being infused with a sense of the dynamic of yerushalayim de lite [Vilna, lit. "Jerusalem of Lithuania"]. And yet, the place was full of young people and we were all rock-and-roll heads, we're all pot smokers, we're all really -- it was like the best of both worlds because we said, This is our world. We know this modern world, we are a part of it, we recognize it, and yet we have a chance; we're being handed a baton. And it was thrilling. It was absolutely thrilling. And everyone had a piece of it. 69:00And I came in, it was almost like it was foreordained because the one thing that wasn't there -- I was on the fifth floor. We called it -- it was the fifth floor autonomous region because no one would come up -- it was the old mansion of the Vanderbilts. This was the servants' quarters. I said, I'm in the right place. I'm in the servants' quarters. And all the way on the top floor, across the hall from me, Josh Waletzky was working on "Image Before My Eyes" and down the hall was -- I mean, just the absolute -- David Rogoff, God rest his soul, who was translating the Yiddish -- the Yedies. And they were just -- everyone was so great. Everyone was -- they were thrilled to have these young people come in. And I didn't know who Max Weinreich was. I knew that the person who had set a lot of this in motion was Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. And I quickly became one of her Hasidim. Everyone became one of BKG's Hasidim because she was a 70:00force, still is, a force of nature. And I came in and some people are doing film and some are doing photography but no one's doing old records. And I said, "I know this stuff." I pick up a record and I said, "Oh, 1923." And they said, How do you know that? I said, "Well, I know about these things." Said, Oh, my God! We got a bunch of these! And suddenly, I became the meshugeneh with the records and it became the soundtrack of the building. I mean, a lot of times, everyone on the first floor, all of the altvarg [old folks], all of the older members of YIVO said, What are they doing up -- it's like, What are the kids doing? They're too quiet. Go upstairs and look and see what they're doing. And it was like in our family's attic. Says, "Look, I found this old film footage!" And we would 71:00just screen film footage for ourselves. Or I would come across the hall. I said, "I found this amazing record about this guy named Levine who flew the Atlantic." And suddenly, history was not history. History was emerging in real time, in our lives at that moment. And this was the greatest -- aside from the founding of YIVO in the '20s, this was its greatest moment because it was a hothouse of, I think, the next generation of great cultural carriers. A lot of the people who were there, the older folks sometimes didn't get it. They were a little concerned. Who are these kids and so forth. But I was just absolutely -- I couldn't wait to get up in the morning. I would have slept in my office if it was bigger than a closet. I mean, it was a closet. But I used to just love to 72:00come to work because the place was -- it was chaotic. It was chaotic. I mean, the subbasement was like a scene out of Dante's "Inferno." You go in there and it's just thousands of things. It was like an endless flea market. And you said, What's this? You pick up this -- I don't know. I put it there when Harry Truman was president. I haven't moved it since. And oh, my God, it's like, This is great. I found a recording of Sholem Aleichem reading some of his works. I said, "Where did this come from?" Itsik Fefer reading "Ikh bin a yid [I am a Jew]" when he came in 1942 with the Anti-Fascist Committee. And I'm finding all of this stuff. And because I liked old records, I was able to value these things because everyone else -- they didn't even have a turntable. I used to have to 73:00come in with my own turntable. I would have to sit there with a pen and headphones to make them give -- they said, We have records but we don't have anything to play 'em on. I said, Eh. And I just made myself -- says, "Oh, meshigene mit di platn [the crazy guy with the records]! He's here again, he's here with the records. Give the guy a job! Just give him a job. Forget about it." The weird thing was that we had just finished -- Josh -- I said we. I had a little tiny piece of it. Josh Waletzky had just finished directing "Image Before My Eyes," which was Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett -- had done an exhibit in the Jewish Museum, it was a photo exhibit and then Josh did this film. It was a great film. And I did a little tiny bit of the music. And someone had come there saying, "Oh, we want to support another film. We want to support another film. And we have sixty thousand dollars." And they said, Look, sixty thousand dollars 74:00isn't going to make a film. Even in 1982, sixty thousand dollars wasn't gonna do it. And they said, However, if you want to support commercial Yiddish recordings, we can set this up. Who were they? They were people from Madison. There are people who help support this place here. So, the weird thing is that right at the beginning of my career, I have this weird Madison connection. The Weinsteins. This is the Mosse/Weinstein Center and there it was the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of Yiddish Sound Recordings. So, it was like this -- I didn't realize it then, though now I look back and see I didn't have a choice. I was going to end up here. But I can't even -- the YIVO at that time was just thrilling. It was just absolutely thrilling. And you didn't feel like -- it was just that you could do anything. You could do anything, partially because that's 75:00the hubris of callow youth. You say, Oh, there's nothing I can't do. And it was also -- we were inventing ourselves. So, I just met the greatest people. I did a reissue in 1981, first klezmer reissue. I did it for Folkways Records, for Moe Asch, whose father, you might know, was Sholem Asch, the great Yiddish writer. And I thought that was incredibly cool. I'm doing a Yiddish record for the guy who wrote some of the great Yiddish books. And it was really exciting because I got to put -- I got to give something back. This was something that people in the hillbilly -- people who were into blues and hillbilly music and early jazz had been putting out reissues for years. And now, I was finally able to do something. It was the first one of its kind. And it put the sound archives and 76:00it put authentic period Yiddish recordings on the map. No one was really interested in these scratchy records. Old technology doesn't speak to a lot of people. But it does speak to me. And that was just totally exciting. I felt I did something at the YIVO that no one had ever done before. And that made me feel like I was walking on air. The YIVO was great. I'm sad. I mean, we had our moment. We had our moment. It's not the same YIVO now, but I was lucky. I just worked with great people. Everyone was great.

CW: Looking back, what were the factors that made it this sort of magical period at that time?

HS: There was a real sea change in American cultural consciousness. There was a book that was published around this time called "Roots," Alex Haley. And it made a big, big splash. And what this book did was it validated historic narrative not from the top down, not like H.G. Wells's "Outline of History" from some well-fed English don but from the narrative of everyday people. And this was in the early -- the middle to late '70s. Things had changed. Suddenly, the whole seamless sheen of Israel and Zionism and stuff was starting to show the effects of being overemphasized. Suddenly, this whole thing about we go from being the 78:00original multicultural people to being a monocultural people. If you're not into Israel, you're not into Hebrew, you're just not -- and suddenly, we were changing that. We were part of a generation that says, We have our own narrative. We have our own history. And we're going to own it. And we're not only going to own it but we're going to share it and we're going to create a wellspring of just getting this stuff out. Well, on a certain level, the people who preceded us at YIVO were kind of tired and were, in some ways, out of touch with what was going on in the Jewish world. They realized that they had a mission and they were just staying -- I remember being told by Bolek, God bless him, that when they first came into the -- this is the Vanderbilt mansion on the corner of Eighty-Sixth and Fifth. It was like this -- and they walked in and 79:00they saw on the second -- you're probably too young. You were probably never there. On the second floor was this big reading room. You can actually go visit it now. It's this museum of German and Austrian art. But on the second floor was this -- what had been a formal dining room. And he told me, says, "Yeah, when we came in, there was carving, mahogany carvings. And everything was gilt, gold gilt painted. And they said, Paint it battleship grey. We don't want to be distracted while we study. And sure enough, they painted everything battleship grey." They had actually gotten Army -- Navy surplus paint. So, there was this almost aesthetic thing that we don't want to be disturbed. We're kind of in our little place. And yet, so all these kids descend on the place and turn it into a Yiddish Woodstock. We're having a blast. We're playing music, we're looking at movies, we're -- and it was just exciting. So, some of the older folks there 80:00really got it. They were young people in, I guess, like --

CW: Like who?

HS: Like me. (laughs) Like young person trapped in an older body. And I was just so -- we were mutually excited. They were saying, Oh, I remember this was like when Mendele came to visit in our town or -- "Oh, my God, really? You remember" -- Oh, yeah! And they'd tell you these stories. And you realize it was -- like I said, the walls permeated. So, on a certain level, the leadership of the YIVO didn't know how to turn us off. We were incredibly lucky. I was incredibly lucky that the associate director of the YIVO was Adrienne Cooper, God rest her soul. And Adrienne had had an epiphany in her life. She had grown up in a Zionist 81:00home, sang Hebrew songs, and somehow snapped out of that coma and became a champion of singing Yiddish stuff and of this sort of dynamic culture. Well, she made a bunch of stuff possible. And again, the place was brimming with partners in crime. And we would just do stuff -- "Hey, so long as they don't charge any money, so long as we don't have to pay for anything, they can do whatever they want." And we did lots of programming stuff and music and lectures. And again, the Max Weinreich Center and the zumer-program [summer program] and eventually KlezKamp, which was -- the original design was that it was supposed to be a practicum after the six-week zumer-program. I wanted to do a program that took 82:00all of the lessons that had been learned in six weeks of classes and create a context for this. And KlezKamp was originally -- it was originally supposed to be in the summer. In fact, we were supposed to have it at the old Camp Boiberik, which had since become some sort of ashrammy kind of thing, yoga thing. And I thought that would have been cool to go back and bring Yiddish back. And it didn't work out. Didn't work out. And Adrienne helped obscure -- I mean, she ran interference so that none of the naysayers got to say nay. We were doing it before they knew we were doing it. And KlezKamp became -- for me, anyway, it 83:00became the raison d'être. I always believed -- here we had this great sound archives and wonderful stuff but I was depending on traffic. I was depending on people somehow ending up in the Upper East Side -- and take the rickety elevator up to the fifth floor and then come into my little -- have to do the, what, have to do yoga positions in order to get into the room because it was so small. There was thousands of records and books and everything. And we have to meet people more than halfway. We can't just expect people to make a pilgrimage. And the 78 reissue for Folkways was one thing 'cause it standardized the repertoire. It picked out stuff that I liked, that I thought, Wouldn't it be great if people played this music? And it worked out. Then, I realized that YIVO was full of amazing resources: people speak the language, know about dance, they know about folklore. Let's have a party. Let's have a party. And that was -- it was a 84:00narcissistic thing. It was mostly for us. Hey, we need an excuse to hang out for a week, pass the slivovitz. And yet, we didn't know what we were -- we were just doing stuff because this was what you did. You had a gift -- there's an expression, "Makhn shabes far zikh aleyn" -- you just make the Sabbath just for yourself. That's terrible. Have a Shabbos tish [gathering, lit. "table"], invite people to take part in it. That's what KlezKamp eventually became.

CW: So, KlezKamp. How did it end up being the week of Christmas?

HS: Yeah, well, Omega Institute, which is what used to be Boiberik -- and we were gonna do a summer thing. Well, that did not work out. And it was like April or May. And I said, I really want to do something. I really want to do this but I didn't want to wait until the following year. I was just way too -- I said, How can we do something sooner? And I don't remember how it came up but I realized, Well, I grew up going to the Catskills and it just occurred to me -- I said, I don't think there's much traffic in the Catskills in the winter. And it 86:00occurred to me that no one -- the big joke is, what do Jews do on Christmas? They have Chinese. They go out for Chinese and they go to the movies. And it's like this peak moment of Jewish alienation. I said, You know what? Maybe I'm gonna go to the Catskills and I'm gonna look around. Maybe I can find some hotel. A lot of the hotels closed for the winter. They had no traffic, so why keep the place open? Well, I found one hotel. I went to look at a bunch of places. I found this one hotel called the Paramount in Parksville, New York. Well, as soon as I met the owner, a little guy, four-by-four with a shtik [stub of a] cigar out of his mouth named Freddy Gasthalter. I said, Oh, my God. Gasthalter and he's a hotelier? "Gasthalter" is Yiddish for "hotelier." And I'm thinking Oh, my God, we could just come to this place and it's a Yiddish lesson. And we just decided, you know, let's run this over Christmas week. And now, of 87:00course, running Jewish programming on Christmas week is pretty standard. But then, it was like, Really? You want to do this thing? Well, the first year, which was 1985, we had 120 people. There were thirty staff and ninety registrants. To this day, I don't know where those ninety people came from. I have no idea how they found out about it, how they came. I don't even remember doing advertising. Just remember showing up at the hotel and it was playing music -- you play music at night until you have to teach your first class at nine in the morning. And everyone is just up all night and they're dancing and playing music. And it was phenomenal. So, the winter thing gave us a couple of things. It gave us a chance to ingather so that -- and the context was massive 88:00because we're in the Catskills and it's just brimming with its own history. And then, we're sort of isolated. We're isolated from Christmas. We could celebrate who we are without having to deal with the dominant culture beating us over the head. And it became sort of the thing. And YIVO kept supporting it, to their credit, even though they didn't have a clue. Some of the older folks -- and we would invite them. And they said, Ah, don't want -- and some of them came and they said, Ah, I can't get enough of this. And they just loved seeing young people doing this and they just -- it was a validation. And it eventually -- I would like to be able to say that it was a visionary thing from the beginning, but it wasn't because the first few years were totally narcissistic. It was 89:00like, the people who were coming were basically our age. They were basically dealing with the same set of cultural issues about cultural continuity. So, you're sort of looking at a mirror. Well, as our generation got a little older, people would bring their parents. Suddenly, we had much -- we had the next generation of older people coming. So, we had to create programming for people who weren't crazy about playing klezmer music or singing Yiddish songs. And then, these younger people were getting married and they were having kids, suddenly we had to start developing programming for kids. And suddenly, it started to take on true demographic diversity. It started looking like a shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community]. It started looking like a town because it wasn't just an elder hostel. It wasn't just a youth group. It wasn't just a kids' camp. It reflected true generational diversity. And, even 90:00more so, which is -- again, I wish I could say I knew it all the time, but suddenly we got some people who are secular, we have some real Orthodox people, we have gay people, we have straight people. We've got Jews, we got non-Jews. Suddenly, it wasn't a homogenous community except for the fact that everyone loved Yiddish. But it was this bursting dynamism of multiculturalism, of this incredible diversity. And suddenly, you felt -- if it had just been old folks, if it had just been an elder hostel, I'd be doing something else. I'd be maybe back doing hillbilly music, which I am anyway. But I didn't want to do an elder hostel. I didn't want to speak to people who said, I remember the days and Yiddish is gone and everything. No, that's awful. I love that old people are 91:00part of it because they became -- you couldn't sit in the lobby of KlezKamp without sitting next to someone and they start talking about what it was like living in Brooklyn in the 1930s or what it was like coming over on the ship when they emigrated from Poland. And suddenly, you realized the classes are the least of it. It's the community teaching itself. It's these people just taking -- someone just getting up in the lobby and start reciting a Yiddish poem and everyone just -- microphones coming out, everyone's a fieldworker. Everyone's an anthropologist. And then, suddenly, it started taking its own shape. And most amazingly -- and this took, well, has taken quite a number of years. But perhaps the most astounding thing was seeing the children of faculty or people who were coming as children growing up, coming back year after year, and suddenly a good 92:00example, Sarah Gordon, Adrienne's daughter, went from -- she was two or three when KlezKamp started. She doesn't remember -- there's a generation who do not remember what it's like to have to deal with Christmas. Now, if any reason that I should get the Nobel Prize, it's for creating a generation of people who did not have to deal with Christmas. That's my -- but she grows up in this thing, what happens? She goes from being an attendee and now she runs the kids' program. What better indication of the power of this program that it creates its own continuity? At first, it was a very contrived thing because it was seen as decontextualization. A lot of the things in cultural continuity, especially 93:00traditional stuff -- the whole thing is one of the reasons that a lot of people in traditional music and ethnomusicology -- they look at commercial recordings done in a studio, say this isn't valuable because it's decontextualized. If it's really the real stuff, you've got to go down, record it at a cabin, you hear a dog barking in the background. There's a door slamming. That's context. Well, turns out that's not true. That assumes that the people making the music can't tell how to play music that's really traditional music no matter where they are. Well, at first, KlezKamp seemed like a decontextualization because we're bringing people from their brick and mortar community. But in a very short amount of time, we said, Wait, the decontextualization is a context. And suddenly, this ingathering, this creating, as it has been dubbed, this Yiddish Brigadoon just emerges for a week out of nothing and then it disappears again. 94:00But what happens is nobody leaves this event without internalizing stuff and then going back to their community and raising the general literacy of their community. So, over twenty-eight years, this binary, this real kind of back and forth has not ceased. In fact, it's grown so much that, I don't know, there's five, ten, fifteen, something like that derivative events around the world, the people who have come to KlezKamp and say, I've got to do this in London. I've got to do this in Paris. I've got to do this in St. Petersburg, or whatever. And suddenly, you realize we didn't know how hungry we were. We didn't know how empty -- and we weren't empty, but we were missing something. And now, this has allowed a lot of people to really restore this cultural -- this important 95:00cultural element to their own lives and to the lives of this burgeoning community.

CW: Has there been a particular person or teaching moment that you've been especially proud of at KlezKamp or elsewhere?

HS: Oh, sure. There's a ton of 'em. Gosh, I mean, so many great people have come through there. So many wonderful carriers of the music -- not all of them intentional. I mean, some people just showed up as registrants and emerged as these great carriers. I remember one day coming into the lobby of the hotel and I see my mother there with this wonderful man named German Goldenshteyn who's a 96:00magnificent man, a wonderful man from Moldova who played clarinet --this guy was amazing. He had, over the years, had played all of these weddings in Moldova and had written down every tune that he played and came to the United States with a book that thick with these melodies. Well, no one had ever heard these before. And he came to KlezKamp. And so, he's in the lobby and my mother -- and he says, "Sing some songs." And he's playing clarinet and my mother is singing and my friend Pete Sokolow plays clarinet. He gets down at the piano and there's this old-fashioned jam session -- I mean, the collective age of everyone playing would have taken us back to William Shakespeare's time. That was -- and suddenly it's this thing emerging. This is real. This is organic culture of its own 97:00making. It wasn't contrived. We didn't put them together and say, Oh, it's ten to six. Time to start singing! This was their moment of an emerging sense of feeling that this was their living room. And people were sitting there, they were enthralled. They just couldn't believe how beautiful it was. And that happened a lot. The idea of seeing an intergenerational -- an orchestra made up kids and of seniors and stuff, it's thrilling. And there were just -- we used to have panel discussions -- Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, we used to lead panel discussions talking about what it was like to live -- what Jewish life, everyday Jewish life was in Poland. We did one year, it was on Jews in Poland. And 98:00Barbara and her parents and my parents were on a panel and we were just talking about this stuff and it just felt -- we were there just talking and people were -- it was like a Las Vegas floor show. People were treating it like this is the greatest entertainment I've ever had. The price of admission, just to hear these people talk about beggars who used to go from door to door and the songs they would sing in order to get a kopek or what a terrible thing it was to find out that your sister wanted to marry a klezmer, stuff like this. It was so exciting 'cause this is the stuff that never, ever, ever turns up in the history books. Never. And here we were, it was living history because it was vital and vibrant in the lives of these people and they were just thrilled to share it. And we used to have -- in fact, we had a junior folklorist program. All these little tiny kids would go around -- we'd give them a pad and a pencil -- and to go 99:00interview all of these old people. And they would ask -- we said, Okay, here's the questions you're gonna ask. And it was so sweet. These kids were very serious and they're writing down these -- and the idea of creating a value, an intergenerational value that these old people have something to share was just thrilling. It was just absolutely thrilling. So, it sort of mixed in with all of these things.

CW: When you look at the world of Jewish and klezmer, Yiddish music now, some of whom have been through KlezKamp and some other programs or came to it in other ways, what do you see? What's happened in these fourth and fifth and sixth generation of American klezmers?

HS: It's amazing. Like I said, when I started, first band's in '79, you can 100:00count on one hand -- there were three or four bands. I have no idea how many thousands of bands there are now. I was in the Boy Scouts when I was a teenager. I guess I had a thing about uniforms or whatever. And I remember one of the lessons that we were taught in the Boy Scouts is that if you're lost in the woods, stay where you are. You will be found. And that became a life lesson for me in terms of the work that I do. I am doing my work. I love traditional Yiddish culture. I love the music, I love everything about it. I'm not gonna change. I'm gonna stay and do what I want because I know I will be found and that work will be found and people will come to that work and they will draw from it. Well, there's all sorts of things that you do with this. I don't teach people how to play avant-garde music with klezmer music. I teach them how to 101:00play klezmer. What they choose to do with it when they go out is their contribution. My contribution is to give people a solid foundation of this, of the traditional culture, 'cause that's what I love. What's so interesting is that there have been so many permutations: the radical Jewish movement, the John Zorn thing, I don't get it. I mean, I understand it in an abstract level. God bless those guys. Let 'em do that kind of stuff. But what's so interesting is that the next generation came and the pendulum swings back. And suddenly, the next generation just wants to play old-time music. Someone like Michael Winograd came to KlezKamp at age thirteen -- his parents used to drop him off -- I'm pretty sure they slowed the car down. But his parents used to drop him off at KlezKamp all by himself and he would hang with us. It was years before I said, 102:00Wait, whose kid is he? I just see this fourteen-year-old wandering around playing clarinet, and what happens? This guy ends up being one of the great voices of this music 'cause he plays right in the pocket. He plays the old-fashioned stuff and you just realize that this is a collective gift to all this generation. Jews, non-Jews, Americans, Europeans. I don't even know the klezmer scene anymore. I have no idea. I just know what I'm doing. I'm still doing the same thing I did, hanging out with old 78s. I wish I had my old guys back. I miss 'em. That was great. I loved going to Dave Tarras's house. And I said, "Dave, I want you to listen to this record." I put on this record, he listens, "Not a bad clarinetist. Who is it?" I said, "Dave, that's you." He had never heard most of his records. For him, it was just a gig and I get to go to his house and I get to play him from fifty years before. And just the look on 103:00his face, that was great. I just loved reuniting people with their own music. So, for me, the 78s, there are so many messages in those old records that are still yet to learn, that have not come out. And they're gonna come out the more I get a chance to work with them. It was like the Yiddish radio stuff, the same thing. And there was another field that nobody was interested in and I kind of stumbled across the stuff and I said, This is astounding stuff, and no one was doing it. And I just felt -- you ever have one of those dreams, you're in your house and you suddenly -- in the dream, you see a door that you don't recognize and you open the door and there's a room that you didn't know was in your house and it's full of stuff? That's what this was. And I said there's a room in my house that I didn't know was there. And I open it up and it's full of Yiddish 104:00radio and it's full of old scratchy 78s. And I'm saying this is the gift that keeps giving. These records were here before I got here, yes, they will be here after I'm gone. And I probably won't finish. I will not finish my work. I will go on unfinished, and yet I don't feel like -- I haven't done -- but it's just massive. Someone's gonna come after me and say, "That crazy guy, man, he just did this stuff." And luckily, there is a kind of -- like the Yiddish Johnny Appleseed. Heirloom seeds all over the place. And I'm convinced that what we started, it's never gonna -- there's no going back. We have changed; this generation has claimed ownership of this culture and we never have to apologize, 105:00we never have to give it back. It has become a real touchstone that could have been lost.

CW: What is the role of Yiddish language in all this? I mean, some klezmer musicians today learn Yiddish, some, a few happen to know it already before they get into it. What do you see as the role of Yiddish language in this whole thing?

HS: I wish more people would take seriously the literacy of the language. Could crack open a Yiddish book, can translate a Yiddish song. Unfortunately, a lot of people tend to know just enough Yiddish so they can sing stuff so that they make Semitic sounds. They're not -- I think the language is vital. It is at the -- you can't speak Yiddish; you can't play Yiddish music without understanding the 106:00language to understand where the phrases are created. The music reflects the spoken language 'cause they're songs and they have to fit into a rhythmic pattern. And if you don't understand the language, the music will not be understood. We inaugurated a class at KlezKamp, a Yiddish for singers. I just got really tired of hearing people mangle the language and they got away with it because their audiences were not literate and no one was saying, Excuse me, what language are you singing in? I think our job is not finished. I think Yiddish language -- I'm hoping to someday have it so that a native speaker will be teaching here at the university. I want someone whose Yiddish comes from somewhere. I mean, it may not be possible. But to me, the Yiddish language -- 107:00everyone said, Oh, it's never gonna be like it was. When was it ever like it was? This is culture. This is history. Things go through transitions. We're in a moment now of the application of Yiddish where it has reflected its roots. It's a taytsh [interpretation]. It is an everyday language for tens of thousands of Hasidim. And people say, Ah, the Hasidim, they don't care about stuff. I say, Don't get all huffy just because you read a translation of Sholem Aleichem one time. This is a living language. This is a language that has gone through transitions and stuff and it's still here. It's not over yet. The story is not at all finished. But the language has to be at the core. Klezmer music is the ballyhoo. Klezmer music is the come-on. Klezmer music is the bait. Some people 108:00just stop with klezmer music. And you know what? If they do it well, that's just fine. But that's not what KlezKamp and not what my work is. My work is to create a series of gateways that people can feel that every time they get deeper into it, there's a bigger payoff. And way at the core is dos yidish vort [the Jewish word]. And I would be endlessly happy if this resulted in more and more people speaking Yiddish and singing in a language -- like someone -- Adrienne was a perfect example. She didn't grow up with the language. She learned it in order to sing it, but she evoked that upbringing. And because she didn't grow up with it, she had a great sensitivity to other people who feel, Oh, I didn't grow up with it. Am I okay to sing it and stuff? And she gave permission to people -- someone like myself who grew up with it. To me, it was just like another tool. I 109:00didn't feel -- I spoke Yiddish. It was my first language. My mother says that at the age of six, I sounded like a sixty-year-old immigrant. I sounded like I'd always been an old guy. But to me, it's not like a magic -- like I said, I didn't grow up in a family where they said, Oh, switch to Yiddish. The kid's listening. They didn't do that. We all spoke Yiddish. So, to me, it's something that is yours. It's something that is yours. Use it. And if you don't have it, we'll give it to you and if you need more, there's more. And so, I keep hoping that we will invent -- we have invented ourselves as an extended community. We're not done yet. The story is not at all over. And I think dos yidish vort 110:00will be there to greet us at the other end.

CW: And when do you use Yiddish now?

HS: Well, I use Yiddish every day. I speak to my mom. We speak in -- I don't even know anymore. I mean, I'll have to listen to a recording when we talk on the phone. It's Yiddish, it's English. Mostly Yiddish. I spend a couple of hours a day translating recordings from the collection. I spend a bunch of time listening to, working with my Yiddish radio collection. So, I don't have anyone here to talk to. Mark Louden is a terrific Yiddish speaker. I think he's the -- well, Paul speaks some Yiddish but you can't have a conversation. He's got to research Yiddish. He can read stuff. So, I don't speak with anyone here, although the Hasidim at Chabad, I can talk to them 'cause I've got the same -- 111:00well, two of them are baltshuves [non-practicing Jews who have become observant], so they're not really great with Yiddish. But that's really about -- that's about it. I call up Michael Wex and we talk at each other for -- every week, just to complain about things. And we're always talking in Yiddish. But I'm very lucky. I'm incredibly fortunate that I still have it as a daily presence in my life.

CW: I mean, you came back to Jewish music in a way. Did you ever rekindle any relationship to religious Jewish life?

HS: Not in a really accelerated way. I mean, if I go to shul with my mother, we 112:00always go to an Orthodox shul. I couldn't even -- I've gone to other synagogues. I don't know what's going on. If I go into a shul, I'll go into an Orthodox shul. That's the only thing I understand. A lot of my friends -- not a lot, but I have a number of friends who are Orthodox or Hasidic. I know all the moves. I mean, that's what --- Wex and I -- separated at birth. We have very similar upbringing. We're both crazy former yeshiva boys who know too much Gemara and we're constantly coming up with obscure Talmudic references. But I don't -- the religious thing -- well, put it this way: less than ten percent of the people who come to KlezKamp keep kosher. So, out of three hundred people, maybe thirty or forty will keep kosher. The food at KlezKamp is Glatt kosher. I will not 113:00allow -- I mean, I don't see the purpose in running a Jewish event that some Jews can't go to, my mother can't go to. By the same token, I'm not much into churchgoing. We don't go to services. But at KlezKamp, I make sure -- people want a minyan, they can have a minyan. I'll find a Sefer Torah for him, I'll -- whatever. I will help people do that if that's what they want from myself. It's not a -- been there done that, already know what it's like to have peyes and you have to keep hiding them behind your ear. I don't want to go back to that. I'm glad I did it. I can't tell you how glad that I had a religious upbringing because it grounds me in a sense of understanding Jewish ethics on a daily 114:00basis. Do I feel I have to daven four times a day in order to reassess it? No, no. I mean, I don't have to -- so, I can do it. My zeyde, who was a revolutionary, he could still pravet a seyder [lead a seder]. He knew how to daven, he knew everything. But he just happened to have believed that Marx was absolutely right and revolution was the key to Jewish life, so -- but he was -- once he put a yarmulke on and once he started leading the seder, you couldn't tell that this guy wasn't -- didn't have a rabbinical background. That was the level of literacy of our people. They could do it all. They just didn't -- chose to.

CW: And what about now? I mean, a lot of people who study Yiddish don't have a religious background, don't necessarily have that context, might not even be 115:00Jewish. Is there a way to really learn this entire context? Or do you have to, at some point, experience sort of the traditional religious Jewish experience to fully understand?

HS: I don't think it hurts to encounter the myriad Jewish cultures in which Yiddish is the key from going to a Hasidic -- going to a Purim-shpil in the Bobover shtibl [small Hasidic house of prayer] or going to Lubavitch or even -- I think it depends on what the person is searching for. Some people, like I said, some people only want to play klezmer. Some people come, Look, I'm just here -- just tell me where to put my fingers. Just show me how to play the notes, that's all I care about. I'm not gonna tell people, "Hey, that's bogus. 116:00You're just nibbling at an hors d'oeuvres when, here, there's this meal waiting for you." That's what people want. I'm gonna give 'em -- if that's all they want, they just want an hors d'oeuvres, I'll give 'em the best hors d'oeuvres, the best forshpayz, the best Jewish hors d'oeuvres that they have ever had. If they want more, then -- I just think seekers should not set limits. I think you should be a tabula rasa. I think you should be an empty canvas and come to this totally open and experience it if you are lucky enough to feel this culture in its diverse, myriad forms, you will never regret it. And whether you use it all or not --- you know, some people, hey, quite a few people who are not Jewish became so involved with the culture that they converted. Do I think that that's necessary? No. But I'm not gonna say that someone's passion to be part of the 117:00community shouldn't be manifest. As Jews, we have toiled in others' vineyards for so long. Jews are a part of every other world culture: classical music and jazz and rock-and-roll and everything else. It's about time that there's some sort of karmic return, that we now have a culture that others come -- I don't know of a lot of people say, Oh, I just got turned onto Israeli music. I can't wait to play that. I never hear anyone say that. No one says that. I did an interview with -- there's a woman who's doing a film on "Hava Nagilah" and she came to KlezKamp and she just couldn't believe it. I said, "This is where -- KlezKamp is where 'Hava Nagilah' comes and dies and we dance on its grave." And she was -- well, you're a filmmaker, you have a narrative. She was freaked out 118:00and she changed the narrative arc of her film to reflect the fact that we have reclaimed this culture, that "Hava Nagilah," which I call the kudzu of Jewish music, nearly choked out. Well, was kind of thrilling because we own this culture. Everyone who comes in owns this culture and we're caretakers and we need to internalize this so that we have something to hand off to the next generation. It's not a fool's errand. This is real. This is the real thing. And I feel I've been doing for records what Aaron did for books. And we started out about the same time, I remember. He's off doing his thing and we were saying, Hey, the same place you find old books is where you find old records. And it was kind of thrilling, again, to be part of this dynamic generation that did not 119:00accept -- said, Come on, stop living in the past. We're a new generation. Get with it. Get on the Israeli bandwagon. Come sing "Yerushalayim shel zahav [Hebrew: Jerusalem of gold]" and all this sort of stuff. We said, No, sorry. Not interested. Could be the Hittites, could be Macedonian culture, I don't know. It's not mine. This is mine and we're not alone. A lot of people say, Yeah, this is mine, too.

CW: So, we're sitting here in Madison. How'd we get here? How'd you get here?

HS: I've been here. (laughs) Like I said, my first job in 1982 was paid for by the Weinstein family, who are big makhers [big shots] here in Madison. The linear thing was I came here, I had met one of the faculty here at a Limmud conference, of all things. I don't know if you're familiar with Limmud. It's 120:00this twenty-something -- it's to get unaffiliated young Jews sort of involved in stuff. And I was giving a lecture on scratchy old records. Oh, man, I was the yawn capital of the world. I mean, I just got barely any notice, 'cause it was just -- come on, this stuff -- and they wanted something about veganism. That wasn't what I was doing. And I was talking to this guy and he says -- he heard my lecture, he says, "Are you affiliated with the university?" I said, "No, I'm a public sector scholar. I run a not-for-profit folk arts organization." And they have an arts residency program here. And he got me here in 2009 to teach for a semester and to run a KlezKamp. And it was huge. I was shocked to find out, as part of just abstract research, 'cause people are saying, (spoken in a 121:00nasally tone, with a Yiddish accent) "Vat? Visconsin? Vat are you doing in Visconsin, vere are the yidn [Jews]?" and the whole thing. And then, I'm doing some research and I said, Hey, guess what I found out? What was the first university in America to offer Yiddish and when was it? It was here in Madison, in 1916. The first university anywhere. So, I'm saying, I'm sorry, my weirdo meter just went off. I mean, really? I'm here, I'm on the edge of a centenary of the first university to teach Yiddish? Well, what happened was the people who had helped underwrite KlezKamp for quite a number of years, Sherry Mayrent and Carol Master, they're fine, fine -- I mean, these are exceptionally wonderful people. Generous and visionary. And said stuff's got to be somewhere. She's got 122:00this collection of records that just cannot be beat. And she said -- what is the expression? "Tokhtoynes hobn nisht keyn keshenes"? Shrouds have no pockets. What are you gonna do with this stuff? We think about this. You collect it a whole lifetime, where's it gonna go? Is it gonna end up on eBay? That's a terrible thing. You spend a whole lifetime trying to develop this literature. Well, turned out this was a place that really wanted it. We live in an era now that -- and I think, in a way, Aaron helped to set a precedent. You don't need to be in that place, in that historic place. Oh, you can only have Yiddish in New York. No, you don't only have to -- Yiddish, because Jews were not just in New York. He set a precedent. He said you could be away from the so-called magnetic north, the so-called center of the concentric circle. I say the same thing here. I can do my work here, and now with new delivery systems, with the internet, with 123:00reissues, with all sorts of stuff, you can reach out to people with this stuff. Madison can and will be one of the centers. If I have my way, if people get out of my way, let me do my work, we will see another aspect of the renewal of Yiddish through one of the major universities in the country. It's a dream come true, 'cause I'm not a scholar. I'm a scholar but I'm not an academic. I don't have an advanced degree. I borrow a friend's if I need it. But I just come here because the resources are great and because I know more than anyone else. So, that doesn't hurt, so -- (laughs) but it's thrilling to be here and to find people -- mostly non-Jews. I have found the greatest affection and the greatest 124:00collegial dynamism has been with -- my goal has always been to break out of the ghetto. I really believe that to bring the culture to the people, for people to have access to the culture, you can't hide it in a Jewish place. You have to reach out. And my goal here, which I'm trying to do, is to be an integral part of the music department and the film department, theater and literature, to bring the Yiddish content that is part and parcel of a much larger American narrative to these other departments so that when they talk -- like two weeks ago, someone in the theater department called me, says, "Hey, we're doing theater history. You think you can come and talk to my class about the Yiddish theater roots of the Group Theatre," one of the great communist -- progressive 125:00theater in the 1930s. And I said, "Absolutely." And here's this woman, she's a terrific theater historian. She said, "I didn't know any of this stuff." Her classes will now never be the same because bringing Yiddish content to a general American cultural narrative is what has been missing. And I can do that here. I can help raise the general literacy, not by saying you can only approach this in a Jewish context. No, you approach this in our incredible dynamic American context. It's one of the reasons my Yiddish radio collection is at the Library of Congress and not at YIVO or the Jewish Museum or something. I really believe that in order to appreciate the incredible value and the incredible gift of Yiddish culture to the American society, you see it within a broader American 126:00context. I'm a diaspora guy. I am. I am totally -- I wake up in the morning and I'm a diaspora guy. And that's what we have here. We thrive in the diaspora.

CW: Do you ever see -- is there a connection for you between the non-Jewish students who get turned on to Yiddish and yourself back with the --

HS: With the hillbillies?

CW: Yeah.

HS: (laughs) Am I the Tommy Jarrell of -- when I taught my class, I taught a class in 2009 here, my students were great. I probably had twenty students, maybe two or three were Jewish. Mostly they weren't. And I gave them the goofiest assignments. I gave them stuff -- I had one student who was a film major. I said, "Want you to go back" -- there were four film versions of "The 127:00Jazz Singer," starting with Al Jolson and ending with Neil Diamond. And I said, "Go back and watch each of these films and tell me about the Jewish community you think these films were reaching out to." And came back with this terrific paper. I wouldn't wish having to watch "The Jazz Singer" once on anyone. But they watched all four versions, including the recently rediscovered Jerry Lewis version, God help us, and it was thrilling. It was thrilling because they brought a freshness, they brought a perspective that was unhindered by -- "Well, I can't talk about this because this isn't Jewish." No, they had none of that. They brought a fresh perspective to this stuff and I then sat back and I just laughed. It was laughing with them, not at them. My students, they put up with a lot of stuff. And I felt even if they didn't go on to play klezmer music or 128:00become a Yiddishist, if I just gave them this one moment, open up a window shade so they could look out in this whole other world -- and they did. They did me proud, every one of them. And I just loved it. I'm way too self-aware -- I'm not like Tommy Jarrell who was saying, "Don't you non-Jews have your own culture?" It's just like, I don't have to ask them that. I think I know they do. But if I can hand off something that they then take and say, This feels right, my work here is done. But I'm not done. So, every time it happens, I said, Oh, I think I'll do that again. That feels pretty good. So, this is a great place and I don't -- is it my last place? Who knows? Like I said, I feel like I've just 129:00started my work. And it's been going on for decades. So, I just feel honored and thrilled and humbled that I can do what I do on my terms at a high level and people are still moved and touched and inspired and feel that this is their work, too.

CW: So, is there anything else you wanted to talk about?

HS: Nah, I don't really like Yiddish but it's a good paycheck. No, that's -- (laughter) no, I'm --

CW: There are two more questions I want to ask --

HS: Yes, go right ahead.

CW: -- if that's okay. One is sort of out of left field, but I wanted to ask you about going back to Rovno. What was precipitated that trip and what did you find there?

HS: My zeyde used to go back to Rovno. This was while the Soviet Union was still the real estate agents. And he would always say, "Oh, you should come back with me." And my mother didn't want to go and she wouldn't let me go, I was too young. And when he died, my mother said, "I should have gone with him. I should have gone with him." Well, that's how kids are. They don't listen to their parents. So, one day, my mother, myself, and my aunt and my cousin, we decided we're gonna go -- this is 1989 and had just -- the Soviet going out of business sale was just about to happen, the dissolution of the Soviet was apparent. And we went and, boy, Thomas Wolfe was never more right. You cannot go home again. 131:00It was sad. It was depressing. It was humbling. We got into Rovno -- we had to do a major trip 'cause it was -- you had to do official -- Intourist was what the Soviet thing was and they forced you -- says, "Now we take you to pencil factory! Now we take you to boot factory!" Said, "I don't want to go to a boot factory. I've come to Rovno, we want to go" -- and what was so sad -- I mean, it was a lot that was depressing and heartbreaking. At its peak, Rovno was seventy thousand people, of which about sixty thousand were Jews. Today, Rovno is a million people, might be a hundred Jews, maybe. I don't really think there's that many. So much of the city was destroyed, it was on -- when the 132:00non-aggression pact was broken in 1941, when the Germans attacked the Russians, that part of Poland was very close to the demarcation point. So, Rovno experienced tremendous damage. That's how my parents -- my mother and her father and mother and sister escaped -- was as the city was being bombed. And that would have been bad enough. But in the post-war world -- there's a famous quote: Bonaparte said, "History is the prerogative of the victor." So much of the evidence of Jewish life in Rovno was eradicated by the Soviets, certainly by the Nazis. So, you come here afterwards and there's tiny -- my mother would say, "Ah, that building, my friend Manya lived in this building." And it's next to some dreadful post-war Soviet architecture. Or the Rovno sports club, which used 133:00to be the khazns' shul -- and you see it and there's no evidence you could see -- say, yeah, there's a window that looks like it might have had a mogn-dovid [Star of David] at some point. And you just see the willful eradication of the true history of this city. We went to the Rovno museum, there was no evidence that Jews ever lived in this city. And it was so funny, 'cause my mother who speaks every language -- and she was talking and she made believe that she didn't understand what people were saying. And they said, Who are these Americans? And my mother starts speaking, says, You speak good Ukrainian for an American. "I'm not an American. I'm from here." And they kind of look at each other, says, you could see. Think she wants the silverware back? There was this sense of, Who asked you back? Why are you here? What do you want? And it was 134:00deeply creepy. I do not make myself popular by being adamantly against all of these Polish klezmer festivals, which I think are horrific. It's just distressing, disgusting that people choose to celebrate a culture that was willfully destroyed by the very people whose -- these are their grandchildren. In Krakow, they had this Yiddish festival on a site where Jews were rounded up and taken to the death camps. How do you turn a place of such vast tragedy into a place of celebration? And unfortunately, a bunch of children of survivors like myself, we feel these things differently. You get farther away and people say, Come on. It's history. I say, "No, it's not history." I'm going to go to my grave being a child of survivors and going back and seeing how the mass graves 135:00of my family -- and I say you can't forgive -- you can't, Oh, here's the mass grave. Let's have a festival here and celebrate life. I said "No, this is" -- the Arch of Titus in Rome. There's still a rabbinic injunction. You can't walk under the Arch of Titus. I mean, who's gonna excommunicate you? What rabbi? But here, this is something that celebrates the destruction of the Jews. And you can't suddenly turn it into a place where we -- let's have a great time and pass the slivovitz. So, going back to Rovno was something we did in order to honor the memory of my mother's father, in order to have closure, in order maybe to have a couple of moments of saying, "I want to show you where I lived, I want to 136:00show you the streets that I walked. I want to show you a place that, had there been no war, I would never have left this city." My family had no interest in coming to America. I mean, they had interest. Everyone wanted to come to America. They had no money. So, the idea that they would come to America was totally out of the question. If there had been no war, I'd be a Rovner. Would I be a klezmer pop star? It wouldn't have been important 'cause the culture would have been doing just fine without me. So, going back was difficult. Glad I went. Would never go back.

CW: Well, to end on a different note -- (laughter)

HS: Oh, what, that's not depressing enough? You want an even more depressing note? I can do that, too.

CW: Well, (laughs) I wonder if you could give a few words of advice for future 137:00generations based -- not that the work is over, but just an opportunity for you to give advice for future generations.

HS: Oh, the time capsule moment. And here's a voice from the past, telling you look under your chair, there's an old record there! Listen to it! I think every generation -- this is not something we are born with. Every generation has to take the task of self-identity and has to take on the lifting for its own -- it's a little easier -- we now have resources that perhaps were not available thirty years ago. But it doesn't change anything. You don't suddenly say, Hey, I'm Jewish, so anything I do is okay in Jewish life because I'm born -- no, 138:00that's not -- cultural literacy is the role of every person, to take on that responsibility, to inculcate themselves with the knowledge. And find it wherever you can and make it an organic part of your life. What you do with it afterwards is less important because once it's a part of your consciousness, your world is changed. And so, the idea is that no matter how you manifest that internalization of the culture, do that thing because it then puts you in really, true, ongoing continuity in terms of the culture. And that's all any of us could ever hope.

CW: Shoyn, a hartsikn dank [Lovely, thank you very much]. (laughs)

HS: Nishto farvos [You're welcome].

CW: (laughs) Thank you so much.

[END OF INTERVIEW]