HANNA PALMON ORAL HISTORY

ALLIE BRUDNEY: This is Allie Brudney and today is Thursday, April 26th, 2012. I am here at the -- actually, before -- is it (pronounces with short "A") Hanna or (pronounces with long "A") Hanna?

HANNA PALMON: (pronounces with short "A") Hanna.

AB: Hanna.

HP: (pronounces with "Ch") Hanna, in fact.

AB: Hanna.

HP: With the -- yeah.

AB: Okay. Let me start over, then, so I get your name right. This is Allie Brudney and today is Thursday, April 26th, 2012. I am here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Hanna Palmon and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Hanna, do I have your permission to record an interview?

HP: Yeah.

AB: All right, great, thank you.

HP: Okay.

AB: So, I'd like to begin by asking you to tell me briefly what you know about your family background.

HP: Actually, I didn't know a lot until five years ago. I grew up in a very 1:00small family in Israel. I was born in Haifa. And about five years ago, I started a genealogical research. And I found a lot, lot more -- it wasn't so tough to know more because I really didn't know a lot. Both of my parents are deceased but my mother was a Holocaust survivor. She was born in Galicia, near L'viv, which was the capital of Galicia, of the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But she was born there when it was under the Polish rule. And she was born in 1924. During the war, she was first in the Busk 2:00Ghetto. zBusk was the name of the shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community]. And then, she escaped to the forest. It was winter and she and several friends of hers were found half-frozen by a Ukrainian Subbotnik farmer. His name was Malkevich. And he took them to his family. He had a lot of kids, six kids. And he hid them, there were three girls, under the kitchen of his farmhouse. And there, they lived in a very, very small -- it was not a cellar. It was just a small space under the kitchen. They all were very sick afterwards and he brought somehow all the medications, all the things that they needed. And he kept them alive for almost two years. So, that was -- I knew 3:00about that a lot because my mom told me a lot about it. She came to then British Palestine, 1946. And my father was already there. He was twenty years older than her, from the same Hermalin family. And they were very excited to find each other. They were cousins and they decided to get married. So, yeah, that's about my parents. The Hermalin family was a family from Galicia. At least from 1730, they lived around Brody. And I know, for example, the meaning of the name Hermalin, which was not a common name for a Jewish family. Actually, all the 4:00Hermalins are related to each other and there are not many. Now there are much more than after the Holocaust, of course. And the meaning of the name is a small animal, fur animal. Ermine, it's called in English. And the reason for the name is they -- part of them were fur traders, like many Jews in that time, in Brody, especially, because it was a fur city, fur town. And the name, interestingly, was there -- they had a name, that name before the Jews adopted surnames in Galicia. So, I don't have the answer where they took it from because most of the Jews there adopted surnames only later. But anyway, most of the Hermalins 5:00perished in the Holocaust. And, yeah, that's in short. Well, I know there were several Yiddishists in the family. Of course, all of them spoke Yiddish when they were in Galicia and part of them were maskilim [followers of the Haskalah movement], so they spoke preferably Hebrew, preferred to speak Hebrew at some point or at least to write Hebrew. But there was a translator, Yiddish translator and journalist who came in 19-- sorry, in 1885 to New York, immigrated to New York and he worked as a journalist in the Yiddish press for several years and translated a lot of European literature to Yiddish -- fartaytsht un farbesert un farkirtst [translated and improved and abridged].

AB: So, now that we're on him, can you tell me who he was and --

HP: Yeah.

AB: -- a little bit more --

HP: About --

AB: Yeah.

HP: -- Hermalin. Yeah, he was born in Vaslui, in Moldova. He was a member of the branch of the family that came from what we call now Western Ukraine to Moldova. Vaslui was in Moldova and there was a mass immigration towards that direction. And he got an education in the kheyder [traditional religious school]. But he was kind of rebellious because after age twelve, he started studying veltlekher limudim, yeah, secular studies, especially languages. So, he was studying Romanian and Hebrew and English and German and French and English. And then, all 7:00by himself, he escaped. That's what lexicons of theater, Yiddish theater and Yiddish literature, that's what they write, that he escaped from home and he ran away to Bucharest. He was sixteen and he lived there for four years, started writing for Yiddish press in Bucharest and then came to United States, to New York. Started right away writing for the -- several newspapers that were there, already, that were -- had been founded already. In 1885, he started writing for "Yidishe folks-tsaytung" un [and] "Der yidisher herald" and later for "Der Tog" un "Varhayt" un a sakh andere [and many others]. And what's interesting is that 8:00he was a hunter and a sportsman. It's not that I'm very enthusiastic about him being a hunter. But that, I think, was a part of his trying to embrace American images and ways of life and what he definitely recommended his readers to do -- not necessarily to be hunters, but to be Americanized, to be American citizens. He was also a writer. He wrote several novels. Several people defined them as shund [literature of inferior quality]. There were many, many writers that wrote shund like Bashevis Singer and Zalman Shneour and a sakh [many] others.

AB: So, could you talk about some of his translations?

HP: Yeah, so he was translating, first of all, for newspapers. They serialized his translated works by Émile Zola, by -- a lot by Tolstoy. Not "War and Peace" but "Anna Karenina" and "Kreutzer Sonata" and other -- I think that nine works by Tolstoy were translated. I shouldn't say translated in the modern sense of the word. But I think that in those days, it was a translation. A lot of adaptations to the Jewish culture. So, for instance, when he translated "Hamlet" for the Yiddish theater in New York at that time, Hamlet was a rabbinical student in the beginning of the play, yeah? And then, a lot of things happened 10:00to him. And he did a lot of adjustments that he thought would get the readers, first of all, into that kingdom, let them be familiarized, get familiarized with the themes that European writers and playwrights wrote about. And then again, he wrote for a special publishing house which was called the Hebrew Publishing House. And there were many tiny books that they published, mostly ninety pages long. So, just bear in mind that he took many, many works by many writers and trimmed them and changed them in a kind of a logical way to make them ninety 11:00pages long, each of them, and because they didn't want to invest a lot of money. They didn't know if people would buy it. So, ninety pages. So, he translated, also, Boccaccio, "Decameron." And he translated Émile Zola, I said. Who else? Many others. Ah, yo [yes], Swift, Jonathan Swift, "Gulliver," and "Sherlock Holmes," Conan Doyle, and really much more. He also wrote essays, philosophical essays. That's how he defined it. He wasn't philosoph-- by education. He wasn't a scholar, but he was a very curious person and he was an autodidact. So, he 12:00read a lot and he wrote a lot. And he also had a very thick book of all of Shakespeare's plays for kids, shortened. Just the plot, not as plays. And there, he dealt with Shylock, what to do with Shylock, how to present Shylock from "The Merchant of Venice" to immigrants, to Jewish immigrants. So, he made there also a lot of adjustments.

AB: You said he also wrote a lot of shund. Have you read any of it?

HP: Yeah.

AB: Can you describe some of it?

HP: Yeah, yeah. First of all, the title was very shund-like most of the times, very frequently, like "Fraye libe [Free love]" --- or yeah, he also used to change the titles of the works that he translated so that people would buy them. 13:00For example, "Cossacks" by Tolstoy became "Ikh un mayn man [Me and my man]," for example. (laughs) Un azoy vayter [And so on]. Anyway, when you start reading the books that he wrote, the shund books that he wrote, you find, first of all, a very authoritative moral narrator that warns the immigrants from all the crimes and all the bad things that can happen to their moral code once in United States. So, he wrote about the crimes and the sins and the breaking of frames of -- breaking of marriage life and betrayals and things like that. But he always 14:00tried to warn, to teach, to educate, and also to teach veltlekhe batsiung [secular attitudes], to give knowledge to the new immigrants. So, many people said that they learned a lot from his shund novels, novellas, yeah.

AB: Well, he also -- you said he wrote for newspapers.

HP: Yo, a sakh [Yes, a lot], he was first of all a newspaperman.

AB: Was he political? Did he have a political orientation?

HP: Yeah, he was considered a radical. He was a socialist. He was not working -- he never worked for the radical anarchist socialist newspapers in New York. He 15:00always worked for either mild socialist or more than that, liberal. So, "Der Tog" and "Di varhayt," when they merged, they were both liberal. They were both announcing that they didn't have any intention to be an organ, a tool of any radical organization. Socialist, anarchist organization. But, at the same time, he worked, he wrote for "Der Tog" and for other liberal tsaytshriftn [newspapers] with very pluralistic staff of journalists. So, for example, Anna Margolin, Rose Lebensboym, was his colleague in "Der Tog" and he wrote about the 16:00suffrage that -- he strongly believed that women can -- should fight for. But his argumentation why a woman should get the right to vote was totally different than Rose Lebensboym, Anna Margolin's argumentation. So, it was very pluralistic and I guess that he insisted -- writing for pluralistic newspapers, dailies and weeklies.

AB: So, how are you related to him?

HP: He was a cousin of my father. Not first cousin. He was something like third cousin. Third or fourth, I don't know, because I have many riddles there in the family tree that I built. But, yeah, but I know about that branch that came from Brody, then to Czernowitz, then to Vaslui. And he was from that generation that was born already in Vaslui, yeah.

AB: Did you hear about him growing up? Are there any family stories?

HP: Yeah, I heard about him not a lot because my father, who also tried to do a genealogical research, didn't succeed. First of all, my father was born in 1902. And he came to British Palestine in 1936 and there was no way to find out anything like it's very, very possible to find today. Yet he knew about him and he told me about him. But Hermalin, David Moyshe Hermalin, the translator and journalist, passed away in 1921. So, there was no chance for my father to meet him. But he told me that there was such a guy in New York, yeah, such a -- he didn't use the word shund and he didn't say that he was a writer. He said that he was a journalist. Yeah, that's about him.

AB: Great. So, is there anything else about him that you'd like to add right now?

HP: Yeah, I learned about him quite recently, after I took the Yiddish course, the summer Yiddish course in Tel Aviv -- three years ago it was? Yeah. And when I said that my name was Hermalin, we talked about surnames. And one teacher, I'm not going to tell who he was, asked me, "Are you related to that shund writer in New York?" (laughs) I said, "Yeah, well," okay.

AB: So, I'd like to sort of go back to your childhood or your family background a little more. So, are there any famous or infamous family stories that you would like to share?

HP: Well, there were several rabbis, two of them Hasidic rabbis, because part of 19:00the lore of the family is a Hasidic one. Hermalin was not a Hasidic family but the other side of my family, my mother's side, my mother's mother's side was Exler. And the Exlers in Busk were Belz Hasidim. And one of the Hermalins in Brody was a well-known rabbi by that time. His name was Rabbi Moses Arye-Leib Hermalin. And he wrote several books and he had a publishing house, one of the -- it was considered to be one of the more technically progressive publishing houses in Galicia. And he published only khsidishe sforim [Hasidic books]. That 20:00was the admittance test. You had to be a Hasidic writer. And I found in the National Jewish Library in Jerusalem the Zohar, yeah, the full, the thick Zohar book, all kind of perforated and in a very bad condition from his publishing house. And he had kind of a cabalistic tendency, kind of cabalistic orientation. And he himself wrote in Hebrew for newspapers in Galicia, "Machzike Hadath" and "Ivri anochi," several tsaytshriftn there in Hebrew. And, yeah, there were many 21:00Hasidic stories in the family that I heard from my parents. For example, my mother always used to tell me about that balegole, the coachmen, Jewish coachmen who had wagon and horse. And when he saw people sitting backwards in the wagon holding their loads on their back while sitting, he used to tell them, "You can put the load near you and the wagon will carry it. You don't have to carry it on your shoulders," a metaphor for people who don't give enough trust in nature, in God, in their ability to overcome difficulties, so they carry their heavy loads 22:00with them. So, many times in my life, I kind of -- I recalled that I can put my heavy load near me and not carrying it all the time according to this khsidishe mayse [Hasidic tale]. What else?

AB: It's a great story.

HP: Yeah.

AB: Well, you wrote that you grew up in a galitsyanishe heym [Galician home]. Can you tell me what you mean by that and what your home was like as a child?

HP: First of all, it was a secular home. My father was a person of yes or no. And he left his house like the journalist Hermalin left his house at a very young age. At some point, he became even a kind of a yogiste in Europe in a kind of yogiste village in Italy. I have several photos of him as a yogiste. And 23:00then, he came to Vienna and he started studying in a Reform rabbinical school there. And he also studied to be an engineer. But when he started feeling the Nazism kind of growing, getting more volume in Europe, he came to British Palestine and he left everything. And he became a mechanic in Israel and then he built a restaurant in Haifa near the theater, the Haifa Municipal Theater. And then, there I grew up, (UNCLEAR). Yeah, the actors and actresses that came to the restaurant after and before their rehearsals -- and he was a Zionist, a 24:00very, very -- kind of ideological Zionist and he stayed a Zionist in Israel, which was not easy, (laughs) to stay a Zionist in Israel. He was especially disappointed by what happened to human relationship in modern Israel. But it happened, I guess, to all that gvardye, that generation who came to Israel with big, big, big dreams. Anyway, that was a secular house. My father always said that he had nothing to do with the synagogues because God is inside him and he doesn't need any external thing. So, he wasn't part of any community. And I think that when he was getting older, he kind of regretted it because he started 25:00benken nokh zayn kindershaft -- kinderhayt yorn [longing for his childhood -- his childhood years]. He started reading Talmud and Mishnah again, and he would open the Talmud and would give me the Talmud, or any other member of the family, and kind of brag that he remembers it by heart because that's what he was really learning in the kheyder for many years. By the way, I have to tell you that one of the things that influenced me very much when I later became a teacher: his father, Tzvi Hersh Hermalin took him away from the kheyder when he heard that the melamed [Jewish teacher in a traditional school] hit him. And the melamed used to hit with a ruler. That was kind of a pedagogical tool. And my 26:00grandfather said, "No, that's not a way to educate." So, my father was, I think, something like eight years old when he kind of left the kheyder. And for many years, he learned with his father, at home. So, it was a home schooling. And my father always said it: his father was a strict teacher. But no rulers. (laughs) No hittings with a ruler. Yeah.

AB: You also said your father translated poems into Yiddish.

HP: Yeah.

AB: Will you talk about that a little?

HP: Yeah, that was funny. First of all, he translated only for the drawer. He never published it, first of all because Yiddish translations were not something that Israel as a young country was much interested in, although he was not a 27:00friend -- he was not in the circles of Yiddish writers. He never met Sutzkever, he never met other Yiddish writers who did write in Yiddish in Israel. But he was a good friend of Dov Sadan, who founded the Yiddish department in Jerusalem. Dov Sadan was from Brody. Anyway, he translated for himself. He was, as I said, a yes or no person, a perfectionist. So, he translated and translated and threw away kind of --- (laughs) threw them away because they were not good enough for his taste, for his kind of standards, what he translated to Yiddish. And what did he translate to Yiddish? First of all, he translated a lot of Hebrew poems 28:00to Yiddish and he translated, also, interestingly, Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore was a famous Indian writer, poet, and writer. And, by the way, one of his plays was staged by Janusz Korczak with his kids, with the orphans before they were sent to the gas chambers. So, Rabindranath Tagore was a very, very impressive writer and my father loved him a lot, loved his writings. So, he translated "The Gardner" and "Stray Birds" from Hebrew. And Hebrew translation -- a very good one was translation from English and Rabindranath Tagore by himself translated from Indian to English. So, it was a chain of 29:00translations, but my father worked a lot on it. And I think that that was his main hobby. He was a hard worker. He didn't have a lot of time. And when he had time, he was sitting on his translations.

AB: So, what languages were spoken in your home?

HP: Hebrew to me and my brother. Only Hebrew. Yiddish when my parents had conversations between themselves. Only Yiddish. So, it was kind of dikhotomye, tsvishn hebreish un yidish [dichotomy, between Hebrew and Yiddish]. I didn't want to understand Yiddish. I was kind of, like many others --- you know, it's the old story. And I learned when I came to the States that it was like that in 30:00the States, as well. And I really didn't understand -- sometimes I wonder. Now I know I've been studying Yiddish for several years and I started teaching Yiddish and I wonder how can a person grow up in a house hearing Yiddish, many hours of Yiddish, and not understand anything akhuts "sheyne meydele" [except "pretty girl"], that's it. I succeeded to filter. And about five years ago, I started -- I love poetry and I started thinking, What about Yiddish poetry? And then, I ask myself right away, What about Yiddish, at all? And I felt the need to, frankly speaking, to reconnect with the memory of my parents. And not only my parents, but all the luggage that they brought with them to my life. They didn't show it 31:00so much, the culture. But I sensed that it was there. So, I wanted to reconnect.

AB: So, I want to come back to that.

HP: Um-hm.

AB: But I want to try to stick --

HP: Yeah.

AB: -- just with your childhood for a little bit longer and then we'll move on to --

HP: Yeah.

AB: All right, thanks. So, I just have a few more questions. Was your home different from other -- your friends' homes at all? Or was this a sort of a typical, whatever that means, Israeli --

HP: Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. First of all, my parents were much older than my friends' parents, especially my father. And he was a European patriarch. He was very, very tolerant but at the same time, he was very authoritative, a very authoritative father. And he was very strict with being true to yourself -- 32:00not so much adjusted to the Israeli mentality. And he had his circle of friends from the shtetl, the ones that survived. So, I grew up in a -- pretty much different house than the houses that I got to know from my friends. But then again, I'm sure that there were many, many houses like that. And I know because many Israeli writers wrote about houses like that. Amos Oz wrote about it in his "Tale of Love and Darkness" and -- nu, a sakh mer [well, and many others], I grew up feeling kind of outsider, European outsider, even though I tried to deny it.

AB: So, you said you grew up in a very secular home, but were there any aspects of Jewish culture that were --

HP: Yeah.

AB: -- especially important to you?

HP: Yeah. First of all, it was secular but it was not non-Jewish and it was not non-traditional. It was secular because we didn't observe all the taryag mitzvot [Hebrew: 613 mitzvahs in the Torah]. But holidays were holidays and there was a family tradition of the seder and of the way Hanukkah was celebrated.

AB: Can you describe what the tradition for a seder was or Hanukkah?

HP: Oh, yeah, yeah. People along the years, each person had his or her own seat, 34:00like buying tickets. And I and my brother used to write "otyot kiddush levanah [Hebrew: the letters for sanctifying the new moon]" in big, big letters as fancy as possible the names of the guests. And each guest had the seat, his or her seat. And my father insisted, reading the whole Haggadah. And we sang, lot of -- the songs of the Haggadah in a very Ashkenazic way, in a very -- with a -- Ashkenazic Aramaic. It was really funny when I think about it because Aramaic was not meant to be Ashkenazized or Ashkenized. But it was very galitsyanish 35:00[Galician] way of saying the Haggadah. My mother had her very, very tasty -- and she, well, she didn't brag. She wasn't kind of a bal-eboste [woman of the house] that used to say, "Ah, that's my stuff." But everybody was waiting for the kneydlekh [dumpling] and for the -- she used to prepare these stuffed gerglen [necks], we used to call it. It was a -- well, I'm not sure that I want to get into details, but it was a -- the neck. It was tough neck of a cow or something. (laughs) But it was very good, it was very tasty, and I don't eat it anymore.

AB: Are there any --

HP: I ate it then. Yeah, my father was so authoritative that even young kids in the family, my brother's babies were just sitting with big eyes during the seder and kind of -- with this -- hobn moyre tsu rirn [they were afraid to move], they didn't move. And it's not that he punished anybody. It was in the air that everybody had to listen.

AB: You also mentioned Hanukkah. So, what were your family traditions?

HP: Hanukkah was by far my beloved holiday. Yeah, the colors, the smells, I remember that we used to read. It was a very heymish [cozy] holiday and we used 37:00to read stories that had to do with Hanukkah. I'm trying to remember which stories. Well, my mother used to read me -- it's funny, there was a book that we all grew up in Israel on. It was called "HaLev," "The Heart" by Amicis. He was a -- Italian writer and there are a lot of stories about fighting for freedom. Italian wars, freedom wars. But it was very, very -- it was meant for kids. It was translated, one of the first children books that were translated to Hebrew for Israeli children. And she used to read for me from "HaLev." What's the full 38:00name of the writer? Edmondo De Amicis? Something like that. Anyway, and my father used to ask me to play. I was playing piano and he loved listening to it. He was very subjective about it. I don't think that I was, you know, very --

AB: Well, you mentioned the colors and the smells. Can you describe them?

HP: Oh, yeah. First of all, I remember that we had always the thick candles and we had a big, big chanukiah, which my father brought from Europe, from -- actually from Vienna. Now it's in the Jerusalem Museum in a -- yeah, because it was a very special one with big, big -- how do you call them in Yiddish? In 39:00English? The glezelekh [small glasses], for oil. Yeah, oil cups. And I don't think that they used oil. But we always had very thick candles to fit the radius, to fit the big openings of the oil cups. And each of the candles had different color. So, it was -- and I and my brother used to pick up the colors and they were very tall. And very, very, very quickly, they created an ocean of colors when they melted away. And we were fascinated by it and, yeah, so there 40:00was the smell of the candles, the stories, the smell of the sufganiyot, of the donuts. Yeah, that's what I remember. (laughs)

AB: Are there any other holidays that you have specific memories of?

HP: Yeah, Yom Kippur. My father, at home, no synagogue. And my mother in a synagogue. We had just one synagogue, very Orthodox synagogue, not Reform and not Conservative and not Reconstructionalist [sic] and -- you know, the neighborhood synagogue in Haifa.

AB: And what would you do?

HP: Well, I didn't like so much to wander around. So, I was mostly sitting with 41:00her, with my mom. I loved doing that. I loved looking at her praying. She was, I think, a very -- to some extent, a very pious woman. Not formally very religious but very, very pious and very -- a great believer and also a believer in the human soul because of her -- thanks to her experience with the Ukrainian farmer during the Holocaust. And I loved watching her on Yom Kippur. It was very crowded. The women's section was by far too crowded. It wasn't fair that men had their oxygen and the women didn't have their oxygen there. Yeah, I was sitting 42:00and watching her.

AB: Did your mother go to synagogue on any other times?

HP: No, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, that's it -- and yizkor, every regel [Hebrew: festival], shloshit haregalim [Hebrew: Three Pilgrimage Festivals, lit. "the three festivals"], you know, Sukkot, Pesach and Shavuot.

AB: All right. So, I'm gonna ask you one more question and then sort of move on. So, do you now look back on your childhood -- what values or practices do you think your parents were trying to pass on to you?

HP: Yeah, first of all, unlike the image of galitsyaners [Galicians] -- they were not cynic or even -- they didn't try to be iberkhukhim [overbearing]. They were not fond of trying to make an impression. They were very, very honest, very 43:00true to themselves. I think that their -- this is one of the most strong values that I got from my home, that I remember my father in his last years sitting and reading the Torah in a secular way and also, I guess, in a nostalgic way and thinking, How could our fathers do what they did? For example, how did Abraham send Sarah away to the -- send Hagar away? Sorry. Send Hagar away to the desert with her son? With his son, with Ishmael? Yeah, he asked many moral questions and he coped with it. He looked for midrashim [Jewish biblical commentary] and 44:00he tried to understand how, as a child, and how his parents and his grandparents, how they took it for granted that those people were the moral kadosh --- kadosh, kadosh, kadosh -- the moral key. And I learned, I guess, that one of the values was, Ask yourself. Decide for yourself what -- if it's moral according to your standards. And, of course, they gave me the standards that they believed in. Yeah, I think that maybe one more value was --- (pauses) how 45:00to put it in words? Yeah, the word respect and tolerance sound very self-evident. But I remember my parents -- as I said, they were both very European and they had to cope with many, many social phenomena around them that were tough for them. Nevertheless, I never heard them criticizing without thinking about it first or I never heard them criticizing my teachers, my very Israeli teachers. First of all, we had to make a conference at home and decide, 46:00Who was the one to blame, me or the teachers? (laughs) And we thought a lot about it. And many times, I was the one to blame because teachers were usually right. So, yeah.

AB: All right. So, I'd like to jump forward. Could you give me just a brief snapshot of your life today?

HP: Yeah, the last month that we are here in the States -- we are going July first to return to Israel. And I return to Israel with a backpack filled with Yiddish because it was here that I started studying Yiddish, which I'm still doing. I take lessons with a very, very dear friend of mine, Joseph Lakhman, who 47:00is a Yiddishist in Boston. He was born in Moscow. And he was a professor in Moscow University, economist. And here in Boston, he's one of the most beloved Yiddishists. And I learned in the Arbeter Ring, the Workmen's Circle, and then went on studying as an auditor in Brandeis with Professor Kellman, with whom I'm -- I have to thank her a lot because thanks to her, I came later to the Yiddish summer course in Tel Aviv, knowing more or less Yiddish. So, I didn't go to the beginner's class but to the mitndike fir [intermediate level four], which was a 48:00bisl shver for mir [a bit difficult for me], ober [but] thanks to Professor Kellman and Joseph Lakhman and Rokhl [Sayhaus?] who taught me.

AB: So, how did you and why did you decide to begin learning Yiddish?

HP: Yeah, as I said, it was -- first of all, it was out of benkshaft, out of yearning to remember my parents. Both passed away when I was very young. And also, will, a strong need, urge, to read Yiddish poetry, Yiddish literature. I remembered my father sitting and translating into Yiddish. And I thought that he must have been pretty fluent with Yiddish poetry himself. And he wrote Yiddish 49:00poetry as I found in -- lately. So, yeah, I wanted to read the original, not the translation. And then, I just fell in love. Then it kind of -- it was inertia. Whenever I opened the dictionary, several dictionaries, I thought to myself, What -- a normal person love to open dictionaries and look in dictionaries. But I kind of -- I felt at home in the Yiddish dictionaries, not to mention Yiddish books, Yiddish literature, Yiddish poetry. So many images changed; I never knew that were Yiddish anarchists. Mainly in New York but not only, back in Europe 50:00also. I never knew that so many secular people wrote in Yiddish and it was Yiddish that served them -- and as a literary tool, yeah, and an ideological tool. And also, now I can read postcards that my grandmother wrote to -- and she wrote a lot, to my father, from Galicia when he was in British Palestine. And yeah.

AB: So, what was the Tel Aviv program like?

HP: (laughs) Yeah, it was a delight, first of all. I kind of raised the average age there because there were so many young people there. Twenty -- I could be 51:00their mother. But, on the other hand, there were many people who were older than me. So, I was kind of in the sandwich. There were many, many people from Europe, many people from Hungary, yeah, Romania, Poland. Many, many. So, it was kind of cosmopolitan atmosphere. Many, many good teachers. My teachers were -- the son of Yitskhok Niborski, Eliezer Niborski, and his wife, Miriam Trinh. So, it was very romantic to see them kind of cooperating in raising the next Yiddish generation. I wanted at some point to escape the mitndike fir and to go to mitndike dray, mitndike tsvey [intermediate level three, intermediate level 52:00two]. And they looked at me with this kind of -- well, you don't want to fight, you don't want to cope with it. So, I coped with it. I didn't sleep, I didn't eat, I didn't breathe. But I coped with it.

AB: Yeah.

HP: It was interesting.

AB: What was it like to be learning Yiddish in Israel?

HP: Normative. Many, many people nowadays -- well, many, when I say many, it's not most of the people of Israel. It's still -- still, when I say that I study Yiddish, especially people that know me from previous occupations, previous professions -- because I came from totally different background, not a literary and not a linguistic background. And I said -- and they ask me, Yiddish? Yeah, 53:00you were studying mathematics, you were studying -- you were a biomedical engineer. What are you doing with Yiddish? There is a kind of -- still, that image doesn't disappear in a generation and not in two generations. But many people -- and it's not only Yiddish. Many people in Israel study Ladino and many people study other Jewish languages. And there were not only Ladino and Yiddish. There were Jewish Persian and Jewish Moroccan and so it goes on and on. Israel, I think, is beginning to shed the strong urge to be totally brand new, to kind of deny the connection to der alter heym [the Old Country, lit. "the old home"]. 54:00And I think that it's much healthier because we -- when I grew up as a child in Israel -- not I, when we grew up, all the post-Holocaust generation, we knew exactly what we were not supposed to be. We were not supposed to be pale, weak, Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox. And on and on. But we didn't know so much what to be. So, yeah, we were supposed to be tan, to have a brown skin or something like that. Yeah, we were supposed to be very machoistic. I think that it's no longer, thank God, and I'm happy that I'm returning to a different Israel than the Israel that I grew up in. To what extent I'm going to find there a big audience 55:00or a big -- yeah, I want to teach Yiddish there and I want to study Yiddish there. And it's possible to study very good Yiddish there.

AB: So, you mentioned that you've been teaching.

HP: Um-hm.

AB: So, where have you been teaching and what do you enjoy about it?

HP: Teaching Yiddish?

AB: Yeah, teaching Yiddish.

HP: Well, I was teaching Hebrew for several years since I came here to Boston, in the Hebrew college. But about two years ago, one-and-a-half years ago, I started teaching Yiddish in the Arbeter Ring. And many times, it was really agonizing. I came to Iosif Lakhman, my teacher and I said, "Do I have the right 56:00to teach Yiddish to beginners? It doesn't matter to whom. It's important to know very well Yiddish, and not only very well klal [standard] Yiddish, but to know a bisl yidish fun der heym [a little Yiddish from home], Yiddish as it was in Europe. And how can I teach Yiddish? I didn't want to listen to the European Yiddish. And I know only klal Yiddish and I even don't know so well klal Yiddish. I can know it much, much deeper, much better. And he said, "If you and your -- the people of your generation, the new Yiddishists are not going to teach, you are going to be the last Yiddishists. And people who are going to teach Yiddish will more and more not be the Yiddishists that you grew up with. So, start teaching." And he taught me, "By teaching, you will learn." And 57:00actually, it happened. I have a lot that my students, most of them, were very patient with me. Very tolerant. And many times, we checked in the dictionary, kind of I didn't want to make a mistake, so we opened the dictionaries. So, they learned to use the dictionary, which was good. And I prepared the lessons like you prepare your role in a play. I felt that I had to know it by heart. And slowly, slowly, it became a little bit less tense, much more relaxed. Still, I think that I have to ask myself before every lesson: What is my right to teach Yiddish?

AB: Are there any -- do you have any specifically memorable class moments or 58:00teaching moments?

HP: Yeah, first of all, in the last semester, I had a very big class. Three students. (laughs) And they were the students that fell between the chairs because they were not beginners in the Arbeter Ring. And they were not advanced, even not intermediate. But they didn't want to go to the beginners' class because they felt that they can make a faster progress. And one of them was very, very -- a big fan of Anna Margolin. And he brought poems of Anna Margolin to the class and that made me very enthusiastic because I love Anna Margolin, too. And I brought -- on my part, Rokhl Zhikhlinski and Rokhl Korn -- sorry, 59:00Reyzl Zhikhlinski and Rokhl Korn and several other poets that wrote wonderful, wonderful poetry in Yiddish. And I could see, even those that were not so interested in poetry in the beginning, kind of fall in love with poetry. It's a wonderful poetry. And these moments were wonderful. Yeah, there were many moments that people said -- not said, kind of yelled, Now I understand what my grandmother said to me! Or, Oh, no, no, that's not what she said. She said it differently. No, she didn't say "kum [come (in a standard Yiddish accent)]." She said "kim aher [come here (in a Galician Yiddish accent)]." She didn't say "kum aher." Or, yeah, people brought many, many family lores into the lessons. And, 60:00yeah, but you know, I have to say that what I -- one of the things that I learned and I appreciated a lot in the summer course, from my teachers Niborski and Trinh, is that the dogesh, the emphasis shouldn't be put on kloles un brokhes [rules and regulations, lit. "rules and prayers"]. Many people, they come because this is part of their family lore. They heard lot of shprikhverterlekh [little proverbs] at home. They want to learn the juicy part. But learning a language is mainly not learning the juicy part, even though -- and I have to say that my teachers in the summer course didn't teach us any 61:00shprikhverter [proverbs]. You know, we were sitting and reading Sholem Aleichem and Bashevis and a sakh andere [many others] with a very, very serious approach. Nothing folkloristic. I think there is a place for folklore and for Yiddish culture in the classroom. But it should be serious. It shouldn't be -- it should be with high standards, it should be with a very thorough approach to how you write and how you read. And it's a language, it's not just waving your hands. It should be serious.

AB: Who are the students that you're teaching? Or do you have different populations of students?

HP: It's a very interesting question. First of all, I must say that people that 62:00come to study Yiddish -- first of all, in the class that I was a student in and then in the classes that I was teaching in -- are very, very charming and unique people. It was a very big skhut for mir [privilege for me] to share -- to be in the same class with them and to teach them. They are very curious. They want to know where this -- if it came from daytsh [German] or from slavishe shprakhn [Slavic languages] or -- they want so much to understand the roots of everything. And they are also very emotional about it. Many of them are very young. I had a student in the first class that I was teaching who was -- I think 63:00he was ten years old by then and he came with his mom. So, they were sitting, the mom and dos yingl [the boy] and they were studying very seriously and he was wonderful. He was so amazing. Yeah, his memory was the best memory in the class, of course. And he asked a lot of tough questions, which I liked. Many of the people are from different professions. I recently taught one mathematician: there was a biologist, mathematician, an epidemiologist, a young girl from the university of Boston. A psychologist. Before that, I was teaching teachers and 64:00lawyers and students and so on and so on.

AB: What's it like to teach sort of this very wide age range?

HP: Wonderful. Wonderful because generally it's hard. Generally, it's very hard to teach in a non-homogenous class. But it's hard when the class is not highly motivated. And when people -- the non-homogenous class, when it doesn't share a passion to study what you want to teach, then it's a disaster, usually, and you have to know what to do with it. But when you teach a class that is kind of unified by that passion of different people from different backgrounds and different age groups, it makes it so lebedik [alive] and so interesant [interesting].

AB: So, how, if at all, do you use Yiddish in your daily life apart from teaching?

HP: I try to speak with my daughter, twelve-years-old daughter in Yiddish. What is she doing? What's her response? Of course, my response when my parents were talking not to me but between themselves in Yiddish. I'm not speaking Yiddish to her. In order to communicate with her, just in order to let her taste it so that it won't sound fremd [foreign], very, very strange for her. But I think that Yiddish has become a part -- kind of an integral part of my life. I listen to "Dos yidishe kol." I read Yiddish books, Yiddish novels, and I enjoy it so much. 66:00I hear Yiddish music. Lately, there are several Israeli singers that sing Yiddish. And sometimes it sounds very funny because they have such a -- Israeli accent and they don't try even to change it because they can't and they accept themselves and everybody accept them. And I hear them a lot, yeah.

AB: How do you think that your connection to Yiddish and Yiddishkayt fits into your broader identity?

HP: It's interesting because I don't think that many things have changed in my 67:00sense of the way I am Jewish. I think that I still go to the same minyan that I used to go in Cambridge before I started studying Yiddish, and I still love the approach of trying to find your way to connect to many parts of the Bible or the Torah. I found it very tough to connect before. So, it kind of -- finding your voice there or the lack of your voice there because I cannot feel Jewish unless I question and research and try to find answers to questions. But at the same 68:00time, many, many times it happens to me that when I teach Yiddish or when I read Yiddish, especially when I teach Yiddish, that I say to myself, Wow, if my grandparents whom I never met because they all perished, if they could have seen me now, could have heard me, if my father who was familiar with my anti-Yiddish could have seen me now -- and I started feeling a part of a family, a big family that I -- again, I never met. So, yeah, I think that in a general way, it broadened my identity because now I'm a part of a bigger family.

AB: That's a great answer. (laughs)

HP: Thank you.

AB: So, you speak at least three languages: English, Yiddish, Hebrew.

HP: A bisl arabish [A little bit of Arabic].

AB: So, more. How do you think the language influences your sense of identity?

HP: Knowing several languages?

AB: Yeah.

HP: It's very interesting, yesterday I heard an interview with -- what's his name? Talal -- yeah, I don't remember the surname but there was a person, a Jew from Galicia, I think, from L'vov, that became -- that converted to Islam. And his son, his only son, Talal, is -- I'm trying to recall the name of the father. 70:00It will come to me. Anyway, his son is -- at some point -- yeah, he grew up in a very Muslim house in Saudi Arabia. And there was a lot of criticism there in the house, criticism against the Zionist project. And he grew up later in India. So, he studied Indian. And he grew up in a Christian community in India because he went to school with Christians in India. So, he had a Jewish father who converted to Islam, a very pious Muslim mother, and he grew up in India with Christians. And at some point, he left all of it. He became very secular. He lost any divine belief, any religious belief, and he came to the United States. 71:00And now, I think he teaches in New York University and he's an Egyptologue, an Egyptologist, right? And he spoke in the interview about the complexity, that he started as a very young child to be familiar with the complexity of people that grew up in multicultural societies. I didn't grow up in a multicultural society and -- no, I grew up in a very, very homogeneous society, not -- homogeneous that tried to impose homogeneity on the kids to be so-called Israelis, brand-new Israelis. But deep inside me, I was aware of that complexity of my parents' 72:00lives when they were in Europe. And Galicia was a very, very multicultural place, being a place where Ukrainians, Polish people, German people, Austrian people -- because it was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Joseph Roth wrote about this multicultural atmosphere in Galicia a lot in his wonderful, wonderful books. So, I think that speaking languages -- and languages are not just languages. Languages are the way to feel. Not only to understand but to feel what kind of communication people had between themselves, what kind of 73:00manners of dialogues between different approaches people had in those languages, what kind of struggles they had, when you read the original and you hear the original. Yeah, you start understanding that every approach, every approach to life, to politics, to art has depth and there are so many charming but also very problematic ways that you have to try to understand of speaking about those traditions and those attitudes and those things that you thought always that were only destructive -- that they were not only destructive. They started 74:00somewhere. Yeah.

AB: As a parent, what has been the most important for you to pass on to and transmit to generations after you, to future generations about --

HP: Yeah.

AB: -- values, rituals, traditions about Jewish identity?

HP: Wow, that's a question that requires reflection because I'm, in the daily life, I'm trying to do that and I -- most of the time feeling that I don't succeed very well, that I'm not such a -- I'm very far from being a perfect -- yeah, a parent that succeeds to -- yeah, I think that I would like, first of 75:00all, I'm speaking from my boykh, from my stomach now. I think that I would like very much my kids to -- my daughters, I have three daughters -- to be, first of all, familiar with the family that I came from, even though many, many times, they show, in many ways, that they are not interested in -- okay, they are not yet fifty, the age that I started researching my roots because I think that you have to have a sense of continuity under your sense of rebel, under your need to destroy in order to build. And I also think that it was a very interesting 76:00family. I want them to be able to enjoy the richness of the Yiddish culture even though, frankly speaking, I don't think that they will study Yiddish unless they will want to reconnect with me at some advanced age because they hear me speaking Yiddish here and there. I want them to be Jewish in a way that -- yeah, I will be more -- I'm trying to be more on the ground. If one of my daughters or all of them are going to be married to non-Jewish people, first of all, it's not 77:00going to bother me as long as their partners are ready to enjoy the richness of Judaism, of being Jewish, of this deep interest in presenting many aspects and understanding them in a broad way of thinking because that was the Talmud and that was all this European heritage -- and not only European heritage -- of questioning and wanting to -- really to understand why the other person thinks the way he or she thinks. So, once a person is ready to embrace it, and not 78:00artificially and not superficially, but really to go deep into it, I will not mind having interfaith marriage among my daughters. Not at all. I want my daughters to be mainly patient, open-minded, to have a very strong sense of self, humor, laughing at themselves, which the Yiddish is champion in. Yeah, I would like them to take several mayses [tales] with them just like I took mayses with me that would help them pass through the tougher stages of life, yeah.

AB: Great. So, we're nearing the end, so kind of move onto the last sort of section. What does Yiddish mean to you today?

HP: A taynug, hanoe [A delight, pleasure]. A bit of escapism because when I read Yiddish books and I'm so much involved, so much engaged, first of all in understanding the language and I look for words and I am trying to understand the idioms, I'm so far away from my daily kind of kleynikaytn [insignificant matters], the daily problems, many, many things that all of us know -- so, it gives me a kind of a daily paradise because the Yiddish literature is so diverse 80:00and so -- and the poetry is so farkhapndik [captivating], it kind of vacuums you into it, it's so wonderful.

AB: I'm sure you've heard many people say that Yiddish is dead or dying. What do you think about that statement?

HP: Yeah, I think that there's a lot to be done. I think that it should still lie in the emergency room. It's not yet free to go home. But I think that now, there is a very good chance to preserve not only really the Yinglish, the folkloristic side or the just kind of spicy side, the pikanterye, but also to 81:00preserve the charms, the many charms, the many depths, the many ways to cope with reality that this culture offers, yeah.

AB: Do you think there's a Yiddish revival right now?

HP: Yeah, I think so. I'm afraid that it's a fashion. In my fifty years in Israel, I've seen many fashions. There were people -- stayed away from everything, I would say, everything sentimental or everything personal. And then, we're over-sentimental and over-personal and, yeah, and thought mainly 82:00about themselves. It's a matter of personality, of course. But I think that we have to understand that part of it is a fashion. And we shouldn't be kind of over-optimistic about it. But with sensitivity and a lot of thinking how to pull this thread and to do good things with it, to know how to welcome people and to know how to get them into this rich treasure, good things can come out of it but I guess that it won't be as fashionable as it is today because it's kind of a climax, kind of an overshoot.

AB: What do you see as the future of Yiddish?

HP: Rivka Miriam, who is a very, very good poet in Israel -- her father was a very good Yiddishist and a writer, and she also -- she wrote poetry and she knows perfect Yiddish. She grew up in a Yiddish-speaking house and she said in an interview, I don't remember to which newspaper, that she is afraid of Yiddish being revived in Israel in such a way that it will become a street language. And really, she doesn't think that that's what's going to be but she says, "And yet, I'm quite happy that it's a depth language. It's a language that flows there, 84:00under the surface." And it makes me shiver when I think about what she says, because you know, it's always risky because if it's under the surface, it can get lost. But if it's under the surface in such a way that -- or not -- under the surface is may be not what I want. But I would like, like Ahad Ha'am thought about tziyon [Hebrew: Zion] like a cultural kind of -- even an elitistic [sic] cultural center, not for most of the Jewish people but kind of a lighthouse. I would like to see Yiddish part of that lighthouse. And, no, I don't think that Israel should become what Ahad Ha'am thought. I think that Israel should be a 85:00good place, a pluralistic and not machoistic place to live in. But I think that Yiddish should be a part of that lighthouse.

AB: All right, so I have three more questions. But before that, I'd like to ask if there's anything else that you'd like to touch on?

HP: Oh, actually, it was such an interesting interview for me, I kind of rethought so many things that I -- (laughs) yeah, but I thank you very, very much for giving me the chance to be interviewed because it's a big skhut.

AB: It's my pleasure. So, we don't have that much time. I'll just ask you these last three -- this one's -- okay, so, to go back to sort of what's been 86:00important for you to transmit, what decisions did you make about the type of Jewish environment you wanted to create for your children, both in Israel and in the US?

HP: Yeah, first of all, our chapter of life in the US is probably over because all my family is in Israel, is going to be in Israel. But I think that what I found here in United States, in the Jewish environment, is something that I learned a lot from and I would like to take back home with me and pass it on to my children. That's something that I really didn't mention, again that -- in the beginning, I remember when we were here, I thought, People go from temple to temple, which for me is a synagogue, not a temple. And they kind of -- it's like we're searching the market, kind of does it or is it good, will it be according 87:00to my personality and so forth? But then, I understood that people want to make a meaningful life, a meaning for part of their life out of their Jewish experience and they want to choose the -- maybe not nature. The warm place for them. The place that they would be able to speak and to say what they think and to explore and to object what other people say and et cetera. So, I would like -- I hope that in Israel, we will find such a place. The Hebrew College was a wonderful place for me to be because I was -- suddenly I wasn't in a library -- 88:00but it was so -- I wanted to read every book there. It was so engaging, it was so wonderful. So, I would like my kids to know, my daughters -- two of them are grown-ups. But one of them is still, to a certain extent, kind of -- she can be influenced. Yeah, I would like to give them example, to give them a model of a person that wants, strives to find a meaning in what he or she explores, generally, and also to -- not to think about being Jewish in stigmas or in labels. Or, yeah, people think like that or like that or -- I like them to dive 89:00into it, into what they find interesting in it. And frankly, I don't think that you can be interested in something until you start doing it. So, yeah.

AB: All right. This is sort of a fun, silly question, but what is your favorite Yiddish word?

HP: (laughs) Well, now all the Yiddish words that I love, they stand in line. Gegangen [to have gone], (laughs) first of all because that's -- my father always said "gegangen" because he was on the move all the time. He was a very dynamic person. So, when I hear in my mind "gegangen," I think about the next thing I want to do or the next thing I have to do or -- "gegangen," (laughs) we 90:00can't stay here any longer.

AB: All right, and what advice do you have for future generations?

HP: In what aspect? In what aspect?

AB: What advice do you have for other Yiddish --

HP: Yiddish --

AB: -- students --

HP: -- students --

AB: -- or teachers?

HP: Go to a summer course. And it's very, very important. It can succeed or not succeed because it's -- yeah, there was a physician in our summer course in Tel Aviv and he said, "It's like you start a medication, you don't know if it's going to work or not." But most of the time, it's going to work. You are going to be much -- it gives a push to all the things that you want to achieve, and it makes you aware of the fact that you are not the only Yiddishist in the world. 91:00You are not so unique, not such a moyshe groys [big shot, lit. "big Moses"]. And there are other people that are very wise and very -- not that you are so wise, but there are very many people that are very wise and you have to accept the fact that there are going to be maybe better Yiddishists than you. Yeah, also, read, read, read. Read poetry because poetry is easier to read than maybe a Bashevis Singer novel. Yeah, it takes less time and it gives you the music and it gives you the rhythm and it gives you the smell. Yeah, it gives you the senses of the Yiddish. And speak as much as you can, what I -- maybe sometimes I 92:00didn't do that because I didn't have the opportunity to do that. Find many, many Yiddish-speaking friends who know to cook good, (laughs) and to cook well, and yeah, mir muzn hobn hanoe fun der khalyastre [we must have fun with the gang], in Yiddish. And other advice: enjoy. Enjoy and be ready to work hard, very hard, because learning a language is difficult. I know when I started teaching Hebrew, I thought, They will never learn it. No, it's so difficult to study a language, not only to -- tsukhapn [dabble], to study.

AB: All right, thank you so much.

HP: You're welcome. Thank you, it was so, so -- a delight! It was a delight for me.

AB: It was my pleasure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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