MARK GERSTEIN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney. Today is July 5th, 2012. I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Mark Gerstein and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Mark, do I have your permission?

MARK GERSTEIN:Yes, you do.

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

MG:Well, my father was born in Zamość, Poland. It's Z-a-m-o-s-c. Now, it wasn't Poland at the time he was born. It was actually czarist Russia. And I always thought that Zamość was some kind of shtetl [small Eastern European 1:00town with a Jewish community] somewhere in the heart of Ukraine, à la Anatevka from "Fiddler on the Roof," whatever. I thought, you know, little silly place. And it wasn't until years later when I was -- I think I was an adult already that I began to do some research and found out that Zamość is a very famous small city in Poland. It was at the heart of the Jewish renaissance, the Haskalah. It had a very significant Jewish population. At the turn of the twentieth century, over sixty percent of the population was Jewish. And on the eve of the Holocaust, I think it went down to about forty-five percent. But it was a predominantly Jewish small city. "The New York Times," I think, in the 1970s listed it as one of the ten or twenty most beautiful small cities in Europe. It's on the UNESCO list of treasured heritage cities, whatever, and so 2:00forth. I got a chance to visit it and I'll talk about that later. Very famous Jews were born there. The most famous probably is I.L. Peretz, who referred to it as the little Paris, and the famous Jewish radical, Rosa Luxemburg, was born there, as well. Including my father. Okay, but he's not famous. My grandfather, whose name was Sheye, was born there around 1880. And my grandmother whom he married, obviously, Beyle Nesha, was about eight years younger and she was born around 1888. And as far as I know, my grandfather was sort of an unskilled worker. I was told that he basically drove a wagon like a taxi service in Zamość. I guess he had a horse or two horses, whatever, to do that. Later on, he wrote, when he came to America for a permanent basis, he wrote that he was, 3:00on a ship's manifest, that he was a tailor. And I think I could explain why. I think he was exaggerating his skills. In 1904, around then, I don't know how this happened, he was in the Russian army. Now, usually, Jews were kidnapped and taken to the Russian army, they were there for years. I don't know the story behind this. He would have been around twenty-five. But the Russo-Japanese War started then and he was -- the story was passed down to me, he was taken prisoner of war by the Japanese. And the story is that he said it was great, much better being a prisoner of war (laughs) than being in the Russian army 'cause they got fish and rice every night, okay, which is totally counterintuitive to what you think of the Japanese, especially during World War II when they systematically starved POWs. But apparently, well, it was much 4:00better to be in the czarist army, which was, of course, deplorable at this time. I don't know what happened. It was a very short-lived war and I don't know why he wasn't in the army afterwards, okay? Maybe they thought he was dead, the Russians had bad records, whatever. I never knew the story. It's something to investigate, perhaps. But he returned to his hometown and at some point during this time period, he had his first child with Beyle Nesha around 1907; my aunt, Anna. And then, I think he -- at this point, he went to America. He had a brother in America named Moyshe who was a shoemaker. And he went by himself and I think the idea was, like a lot of immigrants, to go to America, to make money, and then maybe send for your family later. I don't know how long he was here. Speculation was that he was here maybe two or three years. My guess is that he was in the garment -- what they called then the rags industry.

CW:This is your uncle?

MG:This is my grandfather.

CW:Oh, your grandfather, okay.

MG:My grandfather, yeah. And he didn't like it here. That's what the story -- which meant was probably that the work was horrible. He wasn't making much money. I could understand; you think about the sweatshops during this time period. And after two or three years, maybe it was a little longer, a little shorter, he goes, "I don't like it in America." It wasn't the golden land. He goes back to Europe. Okay, 1914 comes around, my father, whose name was Israel, named after his grandfather, was born. And then, war breaks out in Europe. (laughs) No cause and effect, okay, as far as I know. And what happens is Zamość is located right along the fault line between the warring armies. You had the central powers, the Germans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and you had czarist Russia on the Allies side. And the armies began fighting one another. First, the Austrians invade Zamość. Then, the Russians come back and they take 6:00it over. And what was very typical of this time period: Jews were blamed for the problems here and with being traitors and allied with the opposing army or enemy, okay? So, Russian soldiers accused Jews of Zamość of being in league with the Austrians. And on September, I think it was September 22nd, 1914 -- this is only a few months after the war had started, they executed eleven Jews and some Poles, as well. And there would have been, I think, a worse massacre had a Russian general not intervened. Then what happens next is the Austrians come back in and you get this kind of -- they're literally fighting in the streets, okay? So, what happens, a lot of people, I think, including my father's family -- our lives are at stake here. So, they fled and where they fled was 7:00eastward into the interior of Russia, into what was called then the Pale of Settlement, okay. My father was an infant and I assume they fled in the wagon. And I think other family members went, as well, including my grandfather's mother, who was still alive. And they went to Minsk. I don't know why they went to Minsk, okay? I don't know if they knew anyone there, whatever, or maybe it was just the next major city on a direct line from Zamość. And they lived there for most of the war. And I don't know how they survived. A cousin whom I interviewed many, many years ago told me that -- basically Jewish community, okay, in Minsk helped support people. And Jewish communities were very highly organized in Eastern Europe in terms of social, economic organizations, self-help groups. And this is the way, I think, they more or less survived. 8:00Around 1918, the war is winding down. On the Eastern Front, it's collapsed completely because Russia has its revolution and the Bolsheviks pull Russia out of the war. And I guess it's safe now for my family to return to Zamość, okay. And so, they return in 1918 and then in 1919, with the peace treaty, Poland is recreated as a nation state and now Zamość is no longer part of Russia. It is part of this new nation, Poland, that's a -- well, new nation state -- always had been there. But things get worse now. Civil war has broken out in Russia. The Bolsheviks, the Reds are fighting the Whites and also there's a border war between Poland and Russia. Basically, I think Poland, believe it or not -- it's hard to believe that Poland was ever the aggressor, but I think Poland was actually the aggressor here because they claimed their border was further east. 9:00And once again, Zamość is caught in the middle of all this, okay. This would have been 1920 now. This would be September -- August 29th, 1920. Ukrainian troops who are allied with the White armies invade Zamość and they blame the Jews. They say the Jews of Zamość are allied with the Bolsheviks, with the Russians, not the Poles. And so, there is a major pogrom in 1920. People are terrorized. Women are raped. Beards were cut off of pious men. And you see pictures of the Nazis twenty years later doing this, okay, during the Holocaust. Okay, but this kind of practice apparently was done much earlier. Four Jews were killed, thirty-seven were wounded. My father's older cousin told me personally 10:00what they did, basically, was they -- it was dangerous, I think, to stay in the house because you would be a target. So, they hid in the garden outside the house. She used the expression they buried themselves in the ground. I don't think they literally buried themselves but they were probably hiding behind the shrubbery and so forth. And they could hear the screams and so forth. And in fact, my father's cousin told me, "I remember it like a dream," okay? My father, many years later, I asked him, "What do you remember about Zamość?" And he remembered two things. He was very young. He was about five-and-a-half, six years old at this point. So, he remembers walking in the mud and his boots would get caught in the mud. That was one thing he remembered. And the other thing he remembered, he said: the rabbi's hand was cut off during the pogrom. And I 11:00researched this later. And I had no other history of pogroms prior to this in Zamość that I know of, at least. And I don't think he saw it personally. Maybe it was told to him by his parents what occurred or whatever. Years later, my father, when I was growing up, he would cry out in his sleep. He would have sort of like nightmares periodically. And my mother would wake him and say, "It's okay," whatever. And this was -- and I always wonder now whether something like this was something that was -- I don't know, 'cause I don't think he remembered, haunting his memory or whatever. Could have been a -- who knows what it was. But anyway, my grandfather at this point, grandfather Sheye said, "That's it, we're going to America." Okay, and he had a brother, as I told you, already in America. Also, his father-in-law, my grandmother's father, Berl, was in America with his new family 'cause his wife had died. And they sent money, I think, to 12:00my family to help pay for the journey. My grandfather goes -- he had another brother in Poland who was deceased. He apparently had been -- this is a great story, too. He was killed. He was murdered. And I interviewed his daughter. I said, "Oh, my God, was it pogromchiks who did this," whatever? "No, he got into a brawl with other Jews and he got hit over the head with a bucket." It was sort of --- (laughs) and he died. I didn't know this happened. But any case, I don't know how long he had been dead, but he went to his widowed sister-in-law who I think -- who might have been already remarried and said, "I have enough money --" or enough room, whatever -- "for one of your children. Do you want to send one of your children to America?" And apparently, she said, "Okay." But the oldest son they thought, she thought was not mature enough to go to America. So, 13:00instead, they sent the daughter, Rukhele. Okay, she told me this personally. And she went instead. And I mention this because this was 1920, end of 1920. They had no way of knowing these people: my grandfather, his sister-in-law, what was going to happen historically. And they left Poland just under the wire because the United States was just about to pass -- was passing, actually, in 1921 and then worse in 1924, restrictive immigration laws, which would make it almost impossible -- not impossible but very, very difficult for people from Poland to immigrate to the United States, okay? And I think the quota system for Poland slots was something like five or six thousand slots a year. That's all it was. And they didn't even have to fill them all. Okay, but at this point, it was totally free, open immigration. And there's no way these Jews could have known 14:00that, what was going to happen. And with my father's cousin, the woman who left with my grandparents and so forth, all of her family was wiped out in the Holocaust. There's just no way of knowing these things, why people make those decisions to immigrate when they did. So, it was amazing how fast they did this. I don't know how they did it. I mean, the pogrom was August, I said late August 1920, and they were leaving Poland by the end of 1920, just in a few months, okay? They went to Warsaw and then they went to Danzig, which is on the coast, and then they took a boat from Danzig to England. My father's cousin told me that she got sick on the boat and so did -- my father by now had two more sisters: Merla and my aunt, Yetta, who was just an infant at this point. She also got sick on the boat, apparently. (laughs) And they got to England and again, I think they were supported in England by the HIAS, the Hebrew 15:00Immigration Aid Society, which was one of these organizations that was very, very supportive of Jewish immigrants, both leaving and in arriving in America. And I guess, also, my grandmother had some relatives in London who were, quote-unquote, well-off. I don't know what that meant. I guess they were treated to a good time or at least good dinners while they were in London. But on December 24th, 1920, they left Southampton, England on the S.S. Lapland, okay, to go to America, okay? And they were in steerage, of course. And the trip only took -- it's 1920 now. It took about, I guess, seven to ten days only, 'cause they arrived in New York in early January of 1921. I have here a copy -- this is, of course, a recreation, a reproduction of the -- actually, the ship 16:00manifests of the S.S. Lapland and it gives you all the details and it lists the various names of the family and their ages and what have you and so forth. What's interesting about this or some of the questions that are checked off here: Are you a polygamist? Are you an anarchist? Do you plan to try to overthrow the government of the United States, which of course, you have to wonder if you were indeed planning to do this, why would you say yes, okay? And it makes no sense. What's kind of interesting here, it said -- so what country are you originating in? And then, of course, it says Poland. But then, it says what race and ethnicity -- race or people, okay? There's a whole list of race or people. And obviously, it's kind of obvious. If you're from Poland, you're Polish. If you're from Germany, you're German, et cetera, et cetera. It says Hebrew. It is Hebrew. Not Jewish, but Hebrew, okay? It's very, very interesting. 17:00And also, under language, what language do you speak, it's Hebrew. And of course, it wasn't Hebrew at all. It was Yiddish, obviously, okay, at this point. So, it's kind of very, very interesting to see that, okay? And they ask you, Do you have a certain amount of money, where are you going? And they said, To my brother. They give the address in Philadelphia and it's kind of fascinating. And this was -- the day lists January 3rd, 1921. They get into Ellis Island, and we're not gonna be able to see this very well on the camera, but this is the actual Ellis Island card.

CW:Hold it up a little bit there.

MG:Yeah, let me hold it up a little bit --

CW:There you go.

MG:-- here, okay. The Ellis Island card. And it's fascinating. It says here, of course, the S.S. Lapland, December 24th, 1920. Okay, the family name here and the age. This is the stamp of the American consulate in Southampton, okay. And 18:00then here, okay, you could see the -- it then says the country of origin. It's stamped near Poland, okay. And on the side here, if I turn it and flip over, it's stamped -- this is from Ellis Island -- January 7th, 1921, okay? And this is actually my aunt's Ellis Island card. Okay, this is the clearest one. My father's is over here and this is faded a little bit, so that's why I showed you the other one. Now, I'm convinced my father, he saved three documents. He passed away almost twenty years ago. He saved his Ellis Island card, he saved his -- what was the equivalent of his Zamość birth certificate. It's actually not a birth certificate, I found out, but it's close to that, it's all in Polish, and the naturalization papers of his father, which naturalized him. And I'm convinced that he saved them all these years just in case the government asked 19:00him, "Are you legal? Do you belong here, why are you here in this country," he would have his documents. Even if he was a citizen, he lived here for virtually his entire life, I'm convinced that the kind of suspicion that was inbred in Jews -- at least this Jew -- who came from Eastern Europe and these oppressive governments, okay, that's what motivated keeping these documents. I can't imagine he was saving it for me. (laughter) "Oh, here's gonna be something you'll be interested in later on" and so forth. But any case, they come into Ellis Island and, of course, they go through this whole process. And there's a -- I haven't told you the family name yet. Our family name was Gerstengrupen. It may have been actually -- it may have been a variation of Gershongrupen. And "gershn," I believe, means "wheat" and "grupen" means "barley" when you translate it. So, of course, Jews didn't have surnames until rather late in the 20:00history and they took on all sorts of strange combinations of names. And I don't know if the family was involved with trading wheat and barley at some point or whatever. But the name was Gerstengrupen at this point. So, you know what happens at Ellis Island. And, well, I'm going to tell you -- it's a quick story if you'd indulge me with this. It was told to me by a ranger many years ago at Ellis Island Park, okay? So, this Jewish man's coming into Ellis Island and he's very nervous about what's going to happen to him. And someone from the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, a landsman [fellow countryman], even, says to him, "Don't worry, you'll be fine, just, when they ask you your name, tell them it's Rockefeller because in America, if your name is Rockefeller, you have it made." So, this little Jewish man saying, "Rockefeller, Rockefeller" to remember this foreign name. He's going through, of course, all these -- the process outside takes a long, long time. Could be more than a day, whatever. Finally, he's 21:00trying to remember this name. He gets to the end of the process, they ask him, What is your name? And he said -- I guess it just left him. He can't remember. He goes, "Oy, ikh hob shoyn fargesn [Oh, I have already forgotten]." And the official goes, "What?" And, of course, "Ikh hob shoyn fargesn, I've forgotten" in Yiddish, all right? So, he goes, "Oy, shoyn fargesn." And the official writes down, "Okay, Sean Ferguson." (laughter) And he gets this beautiful Irish name, okay? I'm sure it's not true, okay? I'm sure the story is apocryphal. You hear these kinds of stories, how names were changed by the officials and stuff. I love that story, the Sean Ferguson story, as I call it, okay? Shoyn fargesn story. But names were shortened, what have you. And in my grandparents' case, the brother who was already here, he had changed the family name to (pronounces with short "I") Gerstein or (pronounces with long "I") Gerstein, okay? So, they just took that name, okay? And then, they move immediately to Philadelphia and 22:00they moved in with my grandfather's brother. I don't know how long they were there 'cause it must have been a very, very, very crowded house. But the name changing actually started almost right away. There was some assimilation going on. My grandfather, who was named Sheye now called himself Sam. My grandmother, whose full name was Beyle Nesha, I think they called her Nesha -- changed her name to Nettie. Nettie? I mean, it was like the only Nettie I ever heard of was in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel." She was a character in "Carousel." My father's younger sister, whose name was Mirele, her name was changed to Mary. I think my aunt Yetta's name was, at least in the ship's manifest was Ita or whatever, and she changed it to Yetta. And also, they had a child, by the way, who was born in America that very year and her name was actually Rose, okay? She was called Rose, okay? She was the only child was actually born in America. My 23:00father's name was Israel. And at some point, he decided to call himself Irv. I never asked him, I've tried to ask people. Everyone called him Irv. My mother called him Irv. I asked his -- my aunt Rose, keynehore [no evil eye], is ninety years old. I asked her the other month, "Do you remember when my dad called himself Irv?" And she doesn't know, she can't remember 'cause she always called him Irv. But he never changed his name officially. So, all official correspondence went to Israel, okay? And at work, at his place of work for all those years, all his fellow employees called him Iz or Izzy, whatever it was, okay? It's very interesting, okay? I don't know when he decided to do that but it was this Anglicization of the -- and fitting into America. I once asked him, "Well, you spoke only Yiddish" -- I don't think he spoke Polish. I wouldn't imagine he would have. They had a child living in a mostly Jewish community. 24:00"How did you learn English? What happened?" He said, "Well, it was not a big thing. You went to school and it was" -- he would probably have been in first grade at that time or second grade, whatever. He's six years old. And you just learned it. There were no -- learning -- ESL programs, English as a second language and whatever, okay? And that's what happened. So, they lived in a -- well, so, I mentioned my grandfather probably was -- he'd say he was a tailor, but I don't think he really was. And they were, I think were a poor family. And then, tragedy hit the family, okay? As my father graduated high school -- I think it was 1931. Of course, the Great Depression -- he had to go to work. He couldn't go to college because you had to go to work, really, to help support the family. His mother died at the age of forty-two of TB, tuberculosis. Now, tuberculosis was a very common disease, especially among immigrant, 25:00poverty-stricken neighborhoods. And then, 1936, I believe it was, his oldest sister, Anna, she died of TB and she was only twenty-nine. Think she had just gotten married. And then, in 1939, just a couple years later, his younger sister, Mary, died of TB and she was just twenty-two, okay. Never even knew about this stuff. My father kept those stories hidden from my sister and I and our family -- well, my mother knew -- for years, okay, and still as an adult -- I think they just didn't want to talk about that, okay?

CW:What was your impulse? I knew you went around at one point to interview your elder relatives. What made you decide to do that?

MG:Well, yeah, I got interested in all this Jewish history later. I think I'll get to that. Maybe if you --

CW:Yeah.

MG:-- later on, we could deal with it more chronologically -- when I was a teacher. And I began teaching Jewish history, basically. And that's what got my 26:00own interest -- it was sort of reawakened. Okay, so that's the first part of it. (laughter) I'll let you ask a question now.

CW:Hey, nice, okay.

MG:Okay.

CW:So, you grew up in Philadelphia?

MG:Yes, okay.

CW:Can you tell me -- describe your neighborhood? What did it look like?

MG:Okay, well, just to back up, my parents met one another. My mother also had some tragedy in her family. Her father died at a very young age from the flu pandemic, by the way, of 1918, 1919. It's incredible, these things that you sort of think don't go on in our modern life. My sister was born -- they got married in 1939, my parents. And my sister was born in 1946, my sister Barbara, and I was born in 1949. So, we're really at the forefront of sort of the Baby Boomer generation. We lived in West Philadelphia when I was a young, young child and 27:00then we moved to the northeast part of the city. This was part of all the demographic changes that were going on during this time period, how neighborhoods were shifting. Minority groups were moving into the city from the South during World War II. Neighborhoods were changing and it was very typical -- white people, a neighborhood that was entirely white moved out. They called it actually blockbusting then. I always hear the word --- you think of Blockbuster; I always think of the historical way it was used, where a real estate agent would come in and sell a home to, in this case, an African American family. And then, the idea was it helped create a -- it was terrible. I mean, they did this, of course. It was the prejudice and racism of the era, a kind of a stampede where people would try to sell their homes. Of course, the fear was not just living with black families but the assumption that your property values 28:00would go down and if you waited you were gonna -- this is a terrible thing, I mean, what happened. So, whole neighborhoods sort of shifted, literally, complexion -- I won't say overnight but in a very, very short period of time. So, West Philadelphia, which was -- I don't know if it was a Jewish area, but it certainly was a white neighborhood or Caucasian neighborhood, was changing into an African American neighborhood. And my parents, among many others, went to a section of the city which was newer and certainly predominantly white and Jewish at that point. So, the question was described?

CW:Yeah.

MG:I forgot the question.

CW:What do you remember about what the neighborhood was like?

MG:Well, first of all, it wasn't exclusively a Jewish neighborhood but it was mostly a Jewish neighborhood, okay? So, almost all my friends, with a few exceptions, would have been Jewish, okay? These were nice, residential -- it was 29:00in the city, but it wasn't like, you think of the crowded little tenement streets. It was split-level homes, okay, which meant sort of -- so two houses that shared a common wall and then there were what they called breezeways. So, they called them -- but spaces -- and they were about fifteen, twenty feet wide between the next home and what have you. And behind the house, there was a long driveway and you had the back of the homes on the other side. And it was the driveway in that area behind the two houses that became sort of the center of your world as a young boy growing up in Philadelphia. That's where all the boys met and we played every kind of game that you could think of. There was wiffle ball, of course, and we had rules. If the ball got past the pitcher, it was a single. If it hit the garage on a fly, it was a double. If it hit the brick on 30:00the house above the garage, it was a triple. If it hit above the telephone wires along the middle of the house, it was a home run. But the exception was if you caught the ball off the wall on a fly, it was an out. So, that was part of the incentive to that. So, there was wiffle ball, there was what we called box ball, where you took a -- it was like a concrete slab in the middle of the driveway and tossed the ball and you had to slap it past the infielders and you ran around the bases. There was stickball, there was half ball where you took a dead ball, you cut in -- rubber ball cut in half and you flung it and you had to hit -- that was very hard to do. There was wall ball where you hit the ball and then you try to throw it back there. There was handball where you punched it and you ran around bases. There was step ball, which was very hard. You hit it on the step. The idea was to catch the ledge of the step and it would fly past the outfield. Most of the time, you missed it and you -- it was a dud. There was wire ball, which was really difficult. These were the high wires that, you know, 31:00that's where you tried to hit the wires. There was touch football, of course, and it goes on and on. And we also played tackle football when there was enough snow on the ground, on the cement, and so forth. And I remember my mother, constant -- such an embarrassment for me, okay? Especially in the summer, getting dark. "Mark, come on in, it's getting dark." Nothing could be more embarrassing than you're playing with your friends and your mother is calling you to come in because it's not right to be playing anymore. "In a few minutes, mom," (laughs) okay, whatever -- so, that was -- I mean, that's my very strong memory of that neighborhood, okay? Just a kind of -- to play and so forth. Very close to our elementary school. It was a great little place, little shops around the corner and so forth.

CW:And can you describe your home, your home life?

MG:Okay. It wasn't a particularly Yiddish home in that sense, Yiddish home. My 32:00parents spoke Yiddish but usually as a -- when we were younger, at least, as a secret language. When they wanted to talk behind our backs, they would speak to each other in Yiddish. I mean, I felt like saying, "Hello, I'm here! Tell me what you're talking about," whatever and so forth. So, they didn't really speak to us, certainly, in Yiddish. Yiddish expressions, we picked up all the time, and phrases and words and what have you, all sorts of things. And of course, sort of like a Yinglish would be created. So, a parent might say to me, "Stop hakn mir a tshaynik [banging me a teakettle]," okay? So, yeah, stop hakn mir -- hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik, okay, stop bothering me, things like that. Or that person, she's a gelemter, the big fool. Or so-and-so's a baleboste [lady of the 33:00house], is a housekeeper, good housekeeper. You picked up a lot of those kinds of expressions, okay? I know this is actually not your question, actually, completely that I'm talking about. One of my favorite was, I think, that I picked up, in my adult life: my father, particularly, would always say, "Oy vey iz mir," which sort of translated means sort of, "Woe is me," I guess. I guess literally it means, "I have pain." But you would always sort of say whenever you felt a little exasperation about something, "Oy vey iz mir," you know. And I find myself doing that almost all the time. My father --

CW:Careful, your hand's on the --

MG:Oops, I'm sorry, yeah, okay.

CW:You're good.

MG:There you go.

CW:Yeah.

MG:I'm sorry.

CW:That's okay.

MG:My father had quite a -- I think a droll sense of humor. I remember once we were at a traffic stop and I was in the car with him. And the light was red and the car light turned green and a typical American would slam on his horn, the 34:00guy wasn't moving, or yell some kind of curse. My father very calmly goes, "What are you doing? Waiting for moshiakh?" I never appreciated how clever that was, insightful, 'cause moshiakh, the messiah, "What are you, waiting for the messiah to come?" And which, of course -- for Jews, it was like, an endless wait, okay? Never happens. I look back at it, I find it very, very, very interesting. Question, what was the house like? Okay, that's what you're --

CW:I mean, was it a religious home? Did you celebrate the holidays?

MG:Yes. It wasn't strictly religious. We didn't keep strict kosher, that's for sure. We didn't have separate dishes or whatever, but certainly we weren't -- we followed sort of basic dietary laws. There were certain things that did not appear in our house, so we didn't have ham or bacon. We didn't have milk with our meat and things like that. All the major holidays were celebrated. High Holy 35:00Days, Pesach, and so forth. Now, I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, you see. And so, there was a like a real con going on here. What happened, especially when I was in elementary school, we would take off from school. Okay, it's take off the first two days of Passover, the last two days of Passover, the first two days of Sukkos, the last two days of Sukkos. And of course, we knew -- and we didn't go to synagogue or anything, although my mother would ask, "Well, you should be going to shul if you're taking off the school." We knew that you could -- we're essentially playing hooky and having religious sanction to do that. And we knew that we weren't gonna miss anything at school 'cause the majority of the students were Jewish and they were out of school. So, it was actually kind of a sweet deal, okay? My parents -- let's see, the household itself, okay. Want to think about what I wanted to say about that. Oh, there was a very, very strong, I think, assimilationist feeling. This is the 1950s, you've got to remember. 36:00Well, my parents probably -- my mother was, I think, more the driving force in the family. And when we were young kids, when Christmas came around, she didn't want us to feel left out that everyone was celebrating Christmas. So, we had Hanukkah. You know, the Hanukkah gifts. Usually Hanukkah preceded Christmas and most of the -- but we celebrated Christmas. Now, we didn't celebrate religiously but we had stockings hanging and then we -- our old home in West Philadelphia actually had a fireplace. Our new home in the northeast part didn't have a fireplace but we had the banister, so we'd hang stockings on the -- so, my sister and I got gifts for Hanuk-- or my birthday, by the way, is in December, too. It was like an incredible month for me growing up. So, got gifts for Hanukkah and for Christmas, so -- which was fine, okay? And then, this is a 37:00great story, my grandmother, my mother's mother lived with us. And she was elderly lady at this point and she had a heart condition. This is like in circa 1956, '57 maybe. And it's Christmas Eve and she's having a problem. So, my mother calls the family doctor. In those days, by the way, you don't go to a hospital necessarily. Family doctor will come right out, Dr. Glaskin, who was Jewish, of course. Okay, and all of a sudden, he's going, "Come to the house." It's like ten o'clock, eleven o'clock at night. All of a sudden, oh, my God, my mother goes, "The stockings are hanging here and here comes a Jew, a Jewish doctor. He's going to ask -- he's going to see that this Jewish family has got Christmas stockings." It's like a shand [shame]. It was like the panic was taking place, that an outsider should see that a Jewish family is celebrating Christmas. I don't even know the end of the story, tell you the truth. I don't know if we got the stockings down in time or if we actually did it or not. Okay, 38:00it's just that I remember the panic that my mother had. I was a kid, what -- didn't bother me one bit. I just find that just a marvelous kind of story. (laughs) I think we stopped -- we might have stopped right after that, what -- (laughs) celebrating Christmas. But we went to -- now, we went to synagogue fairly -- oh, certainly for the High Holy Days, okay? And let me tell you the story about --

CW:Well, what kind of synagogue was that?

MG:Well, apparently, when I was a little child and we're in West Philadelphia, my sister told me that my father actually went to an Orthodox synagogue. I don't know it's because he was -- I don't think he was Orthodox. He was pretty pious, but he didn't practice the Sabbath, for example, and so forth. And he didn't even go to services on the Sabbath, I don't believe, until I started doing that stuff when I went through my religious phase, which I'll tell you about in one moment. But she remembers sitting up in the -- sort of the balcony there, 39:00separate section for girls, females, and looking down through an opening and seeing my father down below. But he was fairly observant. So, when we moved to the northeast part of the city, there were two synagogues to choose between. There was one synagogue which was a little closer. That might have been the main reason why they chose it, 'cause you could probably walk to it during High Holy Days. I think it was also a little more Conservative religiously. And then, there was the big synagogue that was further away, was called OCJCC, the Oxford Circle Jewish Community Center. And that's the one where -- everyone went to and so forth, okay. And it was so big, that synagogue. This is a great story, too. I don't know if you realize this, that during this time period, if you were bar mitzvahed there, this -- I was bar mitzvahed in 1962. They would have four bar 40:00mitzvahs at the same time. (laughs) I mean, it's unbelievable -- because there were so many young boys, thirteen at that time period. Just to pick a date, you had to pick a Saturday, I mean, there was only fifty-two Saturdays in a year. And they would split the haftorah. They had to do it four ways. Anyway, so my parents sort of looked down at that and then went to the more Conservative synagogue. This reminds of this other story I want to tell you about, which you may have heard about. This Jewish man is marooned on a desert island for many, many years, okay? And finally, after many years, a boat comes along, rescues him. And the captain and his crew come ashore and the Jewish guy says, "Thank, you! It's been so long; I'm so glad you're here. But before you rescue me, let me show you around, what I've done here." And he shows them the house he's built for himself. He goes into a clearing and he shows them this incredible, majestic 41:00building which has a Star of David on it and it's clearly a huge, wooden synagogue, okay. And the captain said, "God, I'm so impressed about what you've done for yourself here." And then, the marooned Jewish man goes through another clearing and takes the captain and the crew to another majestic building with a Jewish star. And the captain says, "I don't understand. What's this?" And the Jewish guy goes, "Oh, that. That's the shul I don't go to," okay? That's exactly what it was like. The other guy was the -- "Oh, that? That's the shul we don't go to." Let me tell you some stories about the shul, okay, 'cause I think they're kind of interesting. Some insights into religious life during this timeframe. I was first aware, really aware of social class -- this is kind of interesting -- going to shul on the High Holy Days. I knew there were people who are richer and poorer, of course. But in my neighborhood, everyone was pretty much the same. They all lived in the same homes, wore the same clothes, drove 42:00the same cars. It was pretty much you didn't think about as a kid, social classes. But in the synagogue, of course, you had to buy tickets for the High Holy Days. Now, in this synagogue, which was a relatively small synagogue, the shul itself maybe held three hund-- it was very pretty. Very nice seats and beautiful bimah and so forth. Maybe it held three hundred people. But there were well over a thousand members of the congregation. So, what they did during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, okay, there was a partition behind the end of the synagogue and sort of a kind of curtain that you opened up. And there was huge empty auditorium in the back part there and they used it for plays or for affairs like dances and whatever. And they set up metal chairs in neat rows. I mean, many, many rows with numbers: A1, A2, anything you wanted and so forth. And I remember that my father, mother, we had three tickets and it was like in 43:00the middle of that metal chair section. And I was always very aware of that thing that I couldn't go into the main shul 'cause my parents couldn't afford to buy a ticket in there. It's sort of like the line I'm thinking from "Fiddler on the Roof," "If I Were a Rich Man," where Tevye sings, "If I were rich, I would have the time that I lack to sit in a synagogue and pray and maybe have a seat by the eastern wall." And that's what it was. These were the seats sort of by the eastern wall, okay? And I wasn't aware of that, and I wasn't always angry. I wasn't angry at my parents or -- I wasn't even that envious, really. It was just like a clear observation that you had to have some money to get closer to God, it seemed. The other thing that's interesting about the High Holy Days: on Yom Kippur -- I keep calling -- when I was growing up, it was always called Yom Kippur and it was the Yiddish way of saying it. Now, I think we always -- all 44:00the Jews are saying Yom Kippur the Hebrew way. You can't end the service until the sun goes down. Now, it's really hard, sort of, to do that. It's a twenty-four kind of service day there, obviously. And especially during -- like if it was, say, early in September and we still had a lot of light, you might end the service and all of a sudden you realize you have fifteen minutes before you can blow the shofar, the ram's horn to end the service. So, the rabbi of our congregation -- service would be over. There were no more prayers to say, except it was ten minutes, fifteen minutes, maybe twenty minutes to kill. He would start talking to the congregation in Yiddish and he was telling stories in Yiddish. And the congregation, all of a sudden, would start roaring with laughter. Talking about over a thousand people roaring with laughter. And our parents are -- I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven -- sitting way in the back. We had -- it was a little section or a stage in the back for young people, didn't have to pay tickets, okay? And we started laughing mockingly at the adults. We 45:00had not a clue what they were talking about. Clearly, the vast majority of this congregation were first generation or maybe even second generation immigrants, okay? And he wouldn't be speaking to them in Yiddish if they didn't speak the language. I would give anything to have a time machine now to go back to 1960 or 1961 and go back to that. I mean, it's just -- oh, it was just so wonderful, in retrospect, to see all that. And then, of course, it got serious again and they blew -- and then everyone ran home, okay? The third story I want to tell you about the High Holy Days --- it was just, I don't know, it's interesting. There's a blessing that the kohen, who are supposedly the descendants of Aaron and the priests say on the congregation. And what you're supposed to do, the 46:00congregation, you're supposed to turn around and face them, face the back. It was a little -- when I was a kid, I kept thinking it was sort of like if you turned and looked, maybe the wrath of God was going to -- you read these Bible stories, you turn to a pillar of salt or something like that. And, of course, as a kid, it's the irresistible temptation. And so, I would peek. Okay, and the guys had -- it was men, of course, obviously. They had their prayer shawls on their head and they had their hands up like this and they -- I can't do this because I am not physically capable to -- they had their fingers divided like this. Okay, so I didn't turn into pillar of salt. This is in 1961, '62. About three or four years later, five years later, I'm watching "Star Trek" on TV and Leonard Nimoy, who's Jewish, okay, is playing, of course, Mr. Spock, all right? So, okay, and it was -- I think it was the second season, he does this Vulcan greeting, salute, which I can't do. It's a terrible (UNCLEAR), displaying my 47:00inability to be a Vulcan. And I thought, You know, I've seen that somewhere. It was like, annoying to me. Where do I know that? And of course, what he had done, he had adapted or expropriated, whatever he did, the -- because he also looked when he was a child, obviously, (laughs) and used this. And he changed it. Wasn't above the heads and whatever. And a knowing Jew would know -- understood what it was. Most people thought, Oh, it was a peace sign, it was all this kind of stuff and what have you and so forth. I think that's kind of interesting, okay. I always get a kick out of that. Studying for my bar mitzvah, I should mention -- there's a great movie. I think it's a great movie --- recently, called "A Serious Man" that the Coen Brothers made about -- they're a little younger than me but it's close enough. Maybe it's about five years younger than me -- growing up Jewish -- in this case, it was, like I said, in Minnesota. And 48:00there's a boy in there who's studying for his bar mitzvah. And it's exactly the way it was. You were just taught in a rote fashion what to do, okay? There was no meaning to it, okay? The cantor, the khazn [synagogue cantor] cut a record, a wax record, and he sang the haftorah. And what you did was you played it at home and you basically started imitating -- it was like doing a cover version, actually, when you're talking about what it was, of what the cantor was saying, okay? And you didn't know the words -- I mean, what they meant. I don't think you ever read it in English. You weren't asked as part of your bar mitzvah, "Gee whiz, can you now interp--" -- today, they actually do that with bar mitzvahs, you know, you talk to the congregation and tells the meaning of this section from the Torah, whatev-- none of that. It was just simply -- and I still know today the first line of it by heart. (singing) "Chazon ovadiyo ko-amor adonoy 49:00elohei-- [Hebrew: The vision of Obadiah; So said the Lord G--]" That's it. Then it cuts off. Still implanted in the brain cells, okay? And the rest, you weren't supposed to memorize. You could read it but --- I find it very interesting because it was a very proud moment, being bar mitzvah. It was at this point -- so I went to Hebrew school, okay? I went to what they called Hebrew high school after my regular school. And I went through, now, at this point, a religious -- I call it the religious phase of my life, okay? I was really into Judaism. I was putting tefillin on my arm and head, the phylacteries, as they say in English, okay? And not in synagogue. I did it in my house. In the morning, I would do this. I would have the prayer book. I was practicing holidays, I would -- there was an obscure holiday called the Fast of Esther, which proceeds Purim, I don't 50:00know by how much. Who knows what the Fast of Esther -- but you're supposed to fast. No one does that unless you're really a very, very pious Jew. I think I was in junior high and today's the Fast of Esther. I'm not going to eat. And I remember it was so, well, so embarrassing. There was a delicious meal that was being prepared in the cafeteria, one of my favorite meals at the junior high. And I knew that and I decided that I don't want -- I'm not gonna fast. So, I ate the lunch. (laughs) It overwhelmed my desire to do the Fast of Esther. So, I was really going through this kind of --

CW:But what -- I mean, do you have any idea of what prompted you to be really into --

MG:I think it was studying for my -- I sort of made some fun of the bar mitzvah process. I think it was studying Judaism and, yeah, I don't think it was any kind of great -- I think it was mostly like, just doing the things. It was more ritualistic. I don't think I had some kind of great spiritual awakening or 51:00something like that, okay? It was just like, I was interested in -- I was just fascinated by it. I remember when I was a child, a little earlier on, when I was six years old, the first movie, one of the first movies I can remember seeing, which had a great influence on me, was "The Ten Commandments." And part of it had to do with the fact that it was a Bible school story, it was -- Sunday school story and the story of Moses. And I was just fascinated by it. And also, I didn't realize how much I was going to love movies, either, at a young age. It was this just great -- it's a terrible movie, by the way -- it's the junkiest, campy movie in the world. But it was this great spectacle with the costumes and with the pillar of fire, God, and the Red Sea opened up. And it was like, I was in -- loved it. I saw that movie, and there was -- no VCRs or DVDs back in those days. I saw that movie six or seven times and I don't know how I did that as a kid because -- I must have gone with friends or something. I was kind of young 52:00to being seeing a movie on my own. But I think that started a kind of influence of sort of Bible stories and things like that. Now I'm able to (UNCLEAR) I get a big kick out of it. Yeah, now I sort of -- but back then, it was very, very influential, okay.

CW:So, when did that religious phase end for you?

MG:It ended, I think -- I'm trying to think more exactly. I'd say it was thirteen, four-- probably when I went to high school. And my mother always said, "You convinced me to stop going to Hebrew high school 'cause there wouldn't be enough time for you to do your other" -- yeah, I couldn't go to Hebrew high school anymore 'cause I needed to do other activities at high school, my regular high school. And that's when, I think, my religious zeal dissipated. I think the time when I was being religious, okay, my mother started doing the Shabbos candles. She never did that, I think, prior to that. But I said, "Why don't you do that?" So, she always lit the candles Friday nights. It was kind of interesting. Okay, so I can't remem-- well, we could talk -- I mean, I fell away 53:00from religion as I went through high school and then particularly as I went into college, and today, I would call myself a non-practicing Jew. That's a nice way to put it, okay? But I know a lot about Judaism nonetheless. And it's kind of surprising 'cause most of my relatives -- I mean, I read Hebrew, obviously, and I can recite prayers 'cause I remember it all, okay? And most of my relatives, my male relatives, at least, they don't -- and even though they were bar mitzvahed, they don't know Hebrew, they can't recite anything. They just went through the process. I incorporated it, even though I don't do it anymore and so forth.

CW:So, looking back on your childhood and your home, were there particular values that you felt that your parents were passing on?

MG:Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't overt. My parents were Democrats. I mean, my mother, 54:00particularly, adored Franklin Roosevelt. So, there was a liberal leaning, certainly, to the household. But it wasn't overt. They weren't political people. They didn't talk about politics. They weren't active in social or political -- Jewish organizations that I know of, at least, okay. So, it didn't -- it wasn't conveyed that way, certainly. But the idea of -- first, education. That was always stressed, okay? My wife and I joke that I'm considered a Jewish dropout because I didn't get a PhD. (laughs) That's the joke about the expectations you have for Jewish children. But that was a very, very important value, obviously, to do well in school and to study and so forth. But I also think fairness and doing the right thing, ethics, social justice -- not in an overt sort of way but you were expected to be respectful of other people and do the right thing, even 55:00though privately you may say something bad about someone, you would never say it to their face. You would always -- I think those values were conveyed. Not in a -- obvious, overt way, 'cause I've always tried to figure out where I sort of got my worldview. And I think a lot of it comes from, in retrospect, from Judaism and my parents 'cause I don't know what else it came from. And I'm sure I wasn't just born with it and I don't think I picked it up from necessarily my associations with other people, necessarily, although I'm sure that must have been part of it. So, I think it really does come from Jewish values and family values, which I can talk more about later, I guess, when we talk about --

CW:Yeah. I know you were -- I guess I just want to ask specifically, 'cause I know you were involved in -- you mentioned Hebrew school and also a youth group, youth organization.

MG:Yeah.

CW:Did they --

MG:Aleph Zadik Aleph --- Zadik Aleph?

CW:Aleph Zadik Aleph, yeah.

MG:Yeah, AZA, which was a Jewish boys' high school fraternity. Or not high school -- yeah, high school, junior high, high school, which --

CW:So, how did those affect your sense of Jewishness, if at all?

MG:Not really: what it was was that my friends wanted to form a chapter so we could play sports. They wanted to play -- 'cause there was a league. So, you played basketball, you played football against other chapters. And so, the idea was that we had our own chapter and we could be -- play foot-- I was given the job (laughs) of doing the Jewish things that you had to do. So, there was some kind of conference or some kind of, I don't know, debate about the meaning of Jud-- I don't even remember what they were. I was the one who was sent to do that --

CW:The representative.

MG:I was the representative Jew of this Jewish group. But meanwhile, everyone else there was -- they were only Jewish in basically name and they wanted to play sports. So, it really had very little influence on me except it was a pain, probably, that I had to do it for the rest of the group.

CW:So, there some -- we've been mostly talking about the early part of your life and there's a bunch of topics I want to talk about still. But can you just fast forward and give me a snapshot of your life in terms of career and family life and --

MG:Yeah, okay. Well, yeah, I became a teacher, okay, in -- my career was in 1974. I became a teacher at Amherst Regional High School here in Amherst, Massachusetts. And that's what I did for my entire working career. I was there for thirty-four years. Retired in 2000 -- I was the social studies teacher. And I met my wife at University of Massachusetts a couple years before that and we also got married in the year I started teaching, in 1974, okay? If I -- can I back up a little bit, with the story, or do you want to move forward?

CW:Yeah, well, I want --

MG:Yeah.

CW:-- can I ask some specific questions?

MG:Sure.

CW:Okay. So, you mentioned that the '60s, you became a little more politically involved.

MG:Oh, very much so.

CW:So, can you tell me about that and --

MG:Yeah, yeah, 'cause that helps lead into the '70s period, my teaching. I think it's all connected. Let me give you some examples here: 1962, I was still pretty young. That was the year of my bar mitzvah. I was in eighth grade, social studies class. In fact, we had it in the library 'cause I think it was so crowded we couldn't fit in a classroom. Mr. Burak, I'm sure he doesn't mind because I'm sure he's probably deceased now. Mr. Burak took -- this is October 1962. Said, "Well, boys and girls, not going to see you tomorrow." And we're naive kids in 1962 and we already had Columbus Day holiday earlier in the month and we said, What is it, a holiday? It was a holiday, Mr. Burak? "No, no, we're all going to be dead." This was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And this is incredible; this is a social studies teacher telling eighth graders that we're all gonna die and I'm not gonna see you tomorrow. And I remember that so 59:00vividly. My sister even told me the story how she was in high school, she said, "I didn't do my homework," 'cause she figured, what's the point? And what's so amazing about this is that everyone, virtually everyone accepted this --- I mean, they didn't like it that they were all gonna die in a nuclear holocaust. But the values, the myths, really, I would say of the Cold War were so imbued in us so that no one questioned this, that it was better dead than red, as they said back then. And we sort of accepted the idea that a nuclear holocaust was possible, and no one ever even challenged what was going on. And even today, the standard view of what Kennedy, President Kennedy was in office then -- what he did was good and right. We were lucky, as it turns out. We know facts now that we were very, very lucky, that -- and what our gov-- it worked out okay in the 60:00end, but not because of any great genius on the part of the American government. There were a lot of misperceptions there. And that, to me, was the first political event that sort of stood out for me. In the following year, 1963 --

CW:And just keep your --

MG:-- here I go again, sorry --

CW:That's okay, it's okay.

MG:-- 1963, okay, President Kennedy was assassinated. And I'm sure you've heard stories about the incredible impact that that had on the entire nation. You've got to remember back then, there weren't alternative media, really. There were only three TVs, three networks. Wasn't even PBS yet, okay, and all you could do was watch the aftermath on the TV, hour after hour. But what I want to talk about here is that on Sunday of that weekend, this is November 24th, 1963, the accused assassin of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, was being transferred 61:00from a Dallas jail to a county jail. And this was broadcast on live television. And a man by the name of Jack Ruby jumped out of a crowd of reporters with a snub-nose revolver and at point-blank range shot him dead, live on television. Well, my mother's reaction -- this is what I want to talk about -- was, "Gee, I hope he's not Jewish." Well, indeed, he was. His birth name was Jacob Rubenstein and he was actually a -- connected to the mafia, the mob, and he was a nightclub owner and what have you. But at the time, I remember that very vividly. At the time when she said, "I hope he's not Jewish," I thought, Oh, well, yeah, you don't want -- it's embarrassing for a Jew to have done this and what have you. But then, it was years later -- again, when I had this kind of -- my knowledge 62:00of history and what have you, I kind of realize there was more there, that -- I think it was a real fear she had of anti-Semitism, that Jews historically were always blamed for bad things that happened and often became victims because of that. And this is not that long after World War II. Polls during World War II showed that -- in this country -- opinion polls showed that Jews were considered more objectionable than Germans and Japanese, except for the first year of the war, 1942, when it was freshest in American minds. And I think there was a lot of that, and I think it was a real fear of -- now, as a kid, I didn't know from anti-Semitism. I was living in this great "Leave it to Beaver," Jewish "Leave it to Beaver" kind of bubble where anti-Semitism was something that happened in the Old Country, in Europe, in Nazi Germany and so forth. But I think that's what it 63:00was. My mother told me years later she voted for Nixon in 1960. I said, "What, mom? You voted for Nixon?" And I think --- she didn't explain it -- it might have been because -- that John Kennedy was Catholic and she rightfully or wrongfully in this case, I think, associated Catholicism with anti-Semitism. But even more important -- and I don't know if she had the sophistication or not, the knowledge or not: John Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy, was a known anti-Semite. And when he was ambassador to England, he was pro-Hitler, okay? She may have known that and just decided that she would vote for Nixon because the Kennedys were, quote-unquote, anti-Semites. The irony, of course, was that Nixon was a classic anti-Semite. We know that because of his Watergate tapes. He's talking in the Oval Office, talking about the Jews and this and that and what have you. I always found that that was ironic. Okay, so we were in 1963, 1964 -- 64:00I hope you're okay with all this, okay?

CW:Yeah.

MG:Taking you through the '60s. This is --- I'm the young stuff, about fourteen now, fourteen, maybe fifteen, and the Civil Rights Movement is going full throttle. And in the summer of 1964, three civil rights workers went missing: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. James Chaney was a native black Mississippian. But I knew -- I don't know how I knew that, from my parents maybe, that Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish and from the North. And I was upset about that. I don't know why I was -- yeah, so I'm upset 'cause I knew they were Jewish and they were missing and they were assumed dead. And, of course, what was going on there was that, of course, the white Mississippians objected for a variety of reasons to white civil rights workers but because a lot of them were disproportionately Jewish and from the North. And they mostly 65:00were accused of being communist, Jewish communists and so forth. I remember this very definitely, on August 4th -- I remember this -- and it's just something you remember -- August 4th, 1964. I had just seen the movie "Beckett" with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. I was coming home; I also wasn't feeling good; I had some kind of virus, was sort of -- and on the news, they said they discovered the bodies. They were in an earthen dam, what have you. And I was very upset about that. And I don't know what it was, but I think it was something that was shaping my worldview there. The next year -- I want to tell you this story -- 1965, okay, this would be March 4th, I think, 1965, Sunday night, watching ABC Sunday night at the movies. Was a big show. They put on feature films, recent feature films. And the movie that night was "Judgment at Nuremburg," which was one of the first films to deal with the Holocaust. There was "The Diary of Anne 66:00Frank," but that was Hollywood stuff. This was more realistic and it actually included concentration camp footage in the movie. So, you saw -- the kind of films that became more prevalent years later, all the bodies and all that kind of stuff. So, in the middle of this film, ABC interrupts the movie to show you a news report, film footage -- and remember, back in those days, I don't think they had videotape. They had film. So, they had to develop it before they could actually report a story with film, okay? So, the event had occurred, I think, earlier in the afternoon. This was in Selma, Alabama. It became known as Bloody Sunday. It was at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and a group of non-violent black marchers led by now Congressman John Lewis was trying to cross the Edmund Pettus 67:00Bridge to do a march to Montgomery, Alabama for voting rights. And there were these Alabama state troopers on the other side of the bridge and they had gas masks on. They told them to disperse and they just stopped -- they just went into this crowd with these truncheons. They were clubbing them. There were guys on horses. It looked like the Wild West. It looked like a pogrom, that's what it looked like, really, to me. And they were attacking these people brutally. It was unbelievable. It was unbelievable. And they showed this footage and then they (UNCLEAR) and now we return to our feature film, "Judgment at Nuremburg." Now, what a second, you're watching this movie about Nazis and persecution of minorities. And then, you have this interlude where you see really what was the equivalent of American Nazis beating up on this innocent minority group. Now, I won't tell you that that's what caused the massive national support for that 68:00voting rights movement, but I'm sure it was a factor -- the irony, the juxtaposition of those powerful images together, of seeing the Holocaust and then seeing real life and you couldn't help but equate -- make some kind of equation there on that. Okay, around this time, as I get to high school, whatever, Vietnam becomes the real issue. And I don't remember why I became an opponent of the Vietnam War. Initially, I remember seeing Senate hearings in 1966, I think it was, '65, '66, where some senators were being very critical -- few -- of Johnson administration policies. And at the time, I thought, Gee, that's unpatriotic. You're questioning the president and so forth? Something happened in there and I can't tell you what it was. It was not a eureka moment. I'm sure it wasn't my friends and I don't think it was my parents. But by the 69:00time I was a senior -- junior, actually, in high school, I was against the war. At a certain point -- I was a senior -- and very few people were doing that in high school. This'll be 1966, '67, okay. And I'm not sure why. I mean, I could tell you why I would be against the war in Vietnam, (laughs) but I couldn't tell why I came to that conclusion that -- I remember I was going to college, going to Temple University in Philadelphia. And I'm looking at the catalog: you know, the clubs, the groups, and what have you. And it said -- oh, Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. "We're against racism, we promote civil rights, we're trying to end poverty. We fight against war." Oh! That would be a good club to join, 'cause these are all the things that I believed in. I didn't even realize that SDS was getting a kind of notorious name for itself. Not quite the name it would eventually get as a sort of New Left radical group on college campuses in 70:00196-- I was still very, very innocent. So, I go to college my freshman year and this is going '67 into '68 now. And this is when Senator Eugene McCarthy, okay, challenged President Johnson for the party's nomination in 1968. Now, of course, it's almost impossible to challenge an incumbent president. But McCarthy felt -- and make sure the audience knows it's Eugene McCarthy not Joseph McCarthy, okay? Make sure they know that, okay? But I thought it was -- they say a quixotic kind of campaign and there's no way this guy is gonna do this. And I kept thinking, This is something that I should do. Something I should support, because I was against the war. And I remember I put a "McCarthy for President" bumper sticker on our family car. Oh my God. My father, who was a very low-key person, freaked out. He went berserk. "You get that sticker off this car right away!" Had 71:00nothing to do with politics, strictly speaking. Probably would have supported McCarthy. He worked for the government. I didn't tell you that. I forgot -- I haven't mentioned that. He worked for the Post Office his entire career, his entire working career, okay? He was so afraid, 'cause he worked for the government -- and if you opposed the person who was the head of the government, that somehow you'd lose your job, I guess. I mean, it's as simple as that. And he just -- I remember scraping that thing, trying to -- you know how hard it is to scrape a bumper sticker off a car. (laughs) Somehow, I got most of it off. I don't remember the details. But that started it all that. That was a key year, okay, and we went canvassing for McCarthy and of course, it was -- into '68, it was a tumultuous year, of which I'm sure people who watch this videotape might know. Of course, Martin Luther King was assassinated. You know, horrible. And I 72:00was on a college campus that was located in a black inner-city ghetto, okay, and you didn't know what to do. You felt so inadequate as a white person. You saw a black person, did you -- what do you say, "I'm sorry"? I mean, it was just -- you felt so inadequate. I worked at a summer camp for many --- through that time period. A group of us who were counselors decided in the wake of the King assassination -- 'cause there was tremendous turmoil around -- in inner-city areas. Fires, loot-- I mean, literally, revolution was going on and the cities were burning all across America that, in a small gesture, we would take some inner-city kids -- I forget how many we took. Twenty, thirty kids up to the camp. This was in late April. Think it was spring -- enough to go up to the camp and let them have -- and I don't -- maybe it was a week up there and maybe it was during the spring vacation or something. Or maybe it was a weekend. I don't remember the details -- as a way to sort of diffuse a little bit of the tensions. I mean, looking back, it's kind of a pathetic liberal gesture, I 73:00guess, at the time. But this is the way that we felt. And then, what happens, of course, is '68's a turning point. Lot of disillusionment with the process. I think a lot of people like myself, who had been idealistic, I think, became radicalized by the events of '68 and then the election, very close election of Nixon as president. My mother, by the way, voted for Nixon again in 1968. I said to her years later, "Mom, why did you vote for Nixon in 1968?" She said, "'Cause he said he was going to end the war," and she wanted him to end the war. She believed him. Well, needless to say, the war goes on, although politically, it was impossible, basically, to -- well, it continued but you had to get out of it because by that point, there was a consensus in the American public that the war had to stop. And this is when I got more heavily involved in campus and 74:00off-campus activities. I studied to become a draft counselor and I advised other young men about legally what their options were under the draft -- it was very complicated and very, very unfair, the whole draft system. Okay, one issue was conscientious objector. It said in the rules you had to be -- you have a religious principle that made you against all war. And initially, they interpreted that to be, well, you had to be a Quaker. That was it. If you weren't a Quaker, you know, if you're a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, you didn't qualify. Okay, Supreme Court ruled sometime in the mid-'60s, no, didn't have to be a formal religion. It could be a spiritual belief. Okay. Still a problem, though, especially if you were Jewish. You go in front of a draft board, so you had to be opposed to all war, not just this war. All war. So, they would ask you 75:00a question like -- well, if they wanted to -- "Would you have fought Hitler?" Good question. Okay, if you're Jewish, okay, and not easy to answer. You had to know how to do that. I think one of the ways to get around that was that was a past-tense hypothetical and the law was written where it was present tense. So, that was one way to sort of circumnavigate around that kind of -- using those kinds of things. So, draft counseling, all sorts of demonstrations. I won't go into all the details of those things on campus and off campus. The most memorable one, though -- I mean, I could relate was in November of 1969. November 15th, 1969. Massive demonstration in Washington, DC against the war. I remember this. The Nixon White House had three rows of school buses three deep around the White House so that there's no way anyone can -- he could see out -- 76:00the story goes -- this is apocryphal, too -- Spiro Agnew, who was the vice president, locked his daughter in the bathroom 'cause she wanted to go to the demonstration. I was supposed to be a marshal for this demonstration, 'cause these are the compromises you make. But you had to go down a week earlier and I had midterms. So, what do you do? So, I took the midterms and I decided, I'll just go to the demonstration. My roommate and I took a chartered bus going down from Philadelphia to Washington. It was like, going twenty-five miles an hour. It was sputtering. It was obviously having mechanical difficulties and I said, "We got to get off this bus." So, we get off the bus somewhere, I think, in -- maybe in Maryland. And we put out our thumbs -- 95, I guess, Interstate 95. Immediately, a car comes zooming over, three lanes. A nice couple from New Jersey, they had picnic lunch, they were going to the demonstration, too. They brought us in. It was like this wonderful sense of camaraderie. This 77:00demonstration was huge. It wasn't just young people. It was black, white, old, young. It was incredible. It was a sea of humanity. I remember we were all near the Washington Monument and -- who was it? Oh, Pete Seeger, the great folk singer, still alive, bless him, was leading a huge chant of John Lennon's "All we are saying is give peace a chance." And everyone was -- it was a beautiful -- and then, Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous pediatrician who had become a very noted anti-war radical announced that, "Associated Press has just announced there are a million people here." They were exaggerating. It was maybe five hundred -- still, the biggest that had ever seen at that point, about five hundred thousand, I'm guessing. Okay, it's still -- you could easily confuse that with a million. And at that point, Peter, Paul, and Mary broke into "If I Had a Hammer" -- and this wonderful sense of exhilaration, although I'm not sure 78:00what it did to stop the war as to demonstrate that Nixon certainly had to. Okay, now remember, my bus broke down, so it's the end of the day. So, how do you get back to Philadelphia? Well, the train. So, we're walking down -- I don't know, even today, Washington confuses the hell out of me. Every street looks the same to me. Walking down the street here towards, I think, Pennsylvania Station. And I see this group of people in the street, blocking the street. So, I said, Well, I'll just walk around. The group of people continue. So, I walk around the group of people and all of a sudden, I'm in the middle of the street. Here's this group of protestors behind me. And in front of me, maybe fifty yards away, are all these helmeted policemen with gas masks on and their clubs up like this. I go, Oh, shit! I'm literally right in -- I'm the only person in the middle of the street. I was outside the Justice Department and I got over to the side, 79:00fortunately, at that point. And all of a sudden, I'm looking -- the American flag comes down, the Justice Department, and a Viet Cong flag goes up. Almost as quickly, the Viet Cong flag comes down. The American flag goes up. I think I heard some window breaking. I'm not sure if I heard that. And they were yelling, Free Bobby Seale! Bobby Seale was a Black Panther leader, okay, who -- God, he was arrested so many times, I can't even tell you what he was being charged with, maybe at this point, okay? And this was a radical faction, I think, of SDS that was out there. So, my roommate and I, we got out of that area but all the streets were blocked off. It was like the streets in Washington are kind of -- they all meet in weird ways. I remember going up to a policeman and saying, "Can you tell me how to get to Pennsylvania Station?" And he went, (mumbles) he had the gas mask on. (mumbles) And I said -- I don't know what motivated me to do this. "Excuse me, sir, I cannot understand you with that contraption on your 80:00face." (laughs) I don't know why I was being that brazen, okay? But finally, we were about a block away and this is when the police -- I didn't see it -- began lobbing what they called pepper fog. Today, they have pepper spray, which you've seen, which is like a canister, you know, spray people. They didn't have that. They hadn't perfected that yet. It was pepper fog, which was canisters, which they would lob. And of course, it was a fall day. It was windy. And so, this stuff began to spread way beyond that immediate crowd. And it was a horrible, burning sensation, and terrible -- and then, we got to the train -- and my roommate, who was a nice Jewish boy from Upstate New York, okay, he was studying theater, okay? And he wasn't very political but he was political enough to come to the protest with me. And he would say, "Those fascists!" And he was spouting all the rhetoric, if you will, of the year. We're on the train ride back home. It was all crowded. It was like a scene from, I don't know if you saw the movie, "Dr. Zhivago," where they're all on a crowded train and they were --- we walk on 81:00the train, we looked like war refugees 'cause people had like, their eyebrows -- and their hair was caked with, I guess, the residue. (laughs) Okay, so, I get home -- I remember my mother, bless her, was very supportive of this. She was concerned about my safety, but she didn't say, "You shouldn't do this" or whatever. And I'm just such a devilish guy, I called her up on the phone and I said, "Hello, Mrs. Gerstein. This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation." And right away, she knew, "Is that you, Mark?" And I said, "Yeah." And I told her what had happened and she said, "Go into a shower. Stay in the shower for twenty-four hours." It's a very typical -- I love the (laughter) Jewish mother response to all of this and what have you. So, that was one of the high points of that era. There are other stories, which I'm not going --

CW:Was there any connection for you to your Jewishness during all that?

MG:Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that -- both in a positive and a negative way. I think -- and then, again, in retrospect, my Jewishness was part of the root of all this. I wasn't aware of it at the time. In fact, I was rejecting Judaism at this time. Let me give you two examples. Our rabbi -- there's a new rabbi, young rabbi from the congregation, sent a letter out to -- I guess they got a list of all the young people that were at school. And he's saying, "The Maccabees were fighting the military-industrial complex of their time." I was so pissed that he -- I know what he was trying to do. He was trying to relate Judaism to what young people cared about at this point. But by using that language, by co-opting what I thought was our issues, like military-industrial complex, I found it -- I don't know, condescending. I was wrong. I got angry and I got angry and I think 83:00it pushed me further away from the organized religion. I look back and it seems silly in retrospect from all these years. But at the time, I thought it was just like, trying to -- an older generation trying to sort of manipulate younger iss-- well, it wasn't young people's issues completely. But that's how I saw it then, at least, for their own religious --- whatever, gain. The other thing, this is my own stupidity. Philadelphia was a tryout town for theater and I loved musical theater. Still do. Very passionate, even then. And Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick who had written "Fiddler on the Roof" had a new show trying out in Philadelphia called "The Rothschilds," based on, you know, the Rothschild family. And my roommate, who was a theater major, said, "Mark, you should" -- he went down to see -- "you should really see this. You'll really like it." And I said, "Oh, no, I don't want to see any musical about some rich Jewish capitalist 84:00family." And I was so blinded by my youthful ideology that I couldn't see "The Rothschilds," which I regret to this very day. I never got to see the show. It's a very good show, actually. It's a very good show. It has great music and I look back at it, the stupid things of my life -- that's a minor stupid thing but still, it's a stupid thing looking back. But this is what happens when you get -- youthful passions and what have you and so forth. So, anyway, so what happened was I wasn't drafted. I could have been a CO, probably, but I didn't want to go through the whole process of doing that. And I was pretty sure I'd be getting out with the medical deferment, allergies. That's interesting: the 85:00unfairness of all of this, okay? If you were middle class, which we were, and you were connected enough, you could find somebody -- get you out of the military, in some way. You could manipulate the system legally. Everyone knew that, for example, at that time, the National Guard was a dodge, a legal dodge for people who didn't want to go and couldn't -- then, they didn't send the National Guard overseas, unlike the Iraq War, where they sent the National Guard overseas. And so, I had a Jewish doctor who was an allergy -- I mean, it was legit, an allergist. And I remember my mother saying -- she was very concerned, and I remember this doctor -- say Dr. Lex, Harold Lex, very famous allergist in Philadelphia. "Florence," he said, "none of my boys go." I remember him saying that, which was interesting. So, there were plenty of doctors in that time period who were sympathetic; I'll use the word sympathetic. And all he had on my letter was one sentence, that I suffered from asthma, basically, asthmatic 86:00bronchitis, which was true. I don't know if it was severe enough to -- but they had peculiar rules about -- if you had flat feet, if you were too tall, they had all sorts of things that would keep you out of the military. They also had a lottery system at that point (UNCLEAR) as it turns out, my lottery number was high enough where I would not have been taken. But I was right in the middle there. You would not have known that for sure if you didn't have a deferment. But what happened was the war was winding down, although half the casualties -- I don't know if you know this. Half the casualties in the Vietnam War occurred under the Nixon administration, when everyone knew that the war was not gonna be won and it had to be ended. So, yeah, we always blamed Johnson, and rightfully so, for starting this and escalating this war. But so much of the death and horror occurred after it was clear that we were gonna get out of this thing some way, somehow, okay? And that's what happened, basically. The war -- he brought 87:00American troops home and protests dissipated, okay? And 1970, National Guard killed -- these were young people killing other young people -- four students at Kent State, two of whom were Jewish students who were -- only two were protestors. The other two were just on their way to their class after the noon break. They just got shot dead. Others were wounded and paralyzed. We never even think about them. Some friends and I were traveling cross-country and we got involved with some of the protests that were taking place nationally. And we're at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, just when they had some kind of -- and they had sit-ins there. I don't know what it was. Pretty conservative campus, probably, at the time. And I think it was state police. I'm not sure it was National Guard -- they came in and they bayoneted some of the students -- and dragging them off. And on the mall there -- and I have a photo -- I didn't 88:00bring it with me but I have a photograph. I took a photograph of the -- it was blood drops, and someone wrote, "Non-violence, bullshit. Just don't get caught or hurt when you take on the motherfucking war machine," end of quote. And then, you saw the blood drops on the wall, what have you. So, you saw a lot of young people who had become radicalized by that period. But things changed when -- once you removed the war from the equation and the war, at least for America, ended by 1973, at least initially, okay? But the protests ended the war, basically -- it forced the government to end it. I mean, it might not have ended it as soon as it should have, obviously, and so forth.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:So, I thought maybe we could turn now to Yiddish.

MG:Yes.

CW:So, how did you first become interested in Yiddish language and culture?

MG:Well, what happened -- yeah, yeah, it's a good question. I was teaching -- I start teaching, really, at Amherst Regional High School. And, I mean, I knew some Yiddish phrases and things like that, so I wasn't totally unfamiliar with it. I was directing the school musical in 1977, which was, of course, "Fiddler on the Roof." And I decided -- this is the first show I ever directed at the high school -- that in preparation for -- this is very typical of me -- I had to give them backstory for all the historical context. So, the first day, I'm telling them about Eastern Europe, about Jews, about pogroms. I even gave the chorus members who didn't have names, I gave them Yiddish, Jewish names and stuff, which --- so you could have a character. You're this, you're that, and so forth. And I remember some stories my father told me about this. So, I sort of incorporate those. And so, this was sort of a growing awareness -- it wasn't 90:00like it was brand new but just sort of a -- resuscitating, so to speak, I guess, a Jewish identity, okay? And then, so that's '77. In 1979, I guess it would have been, '78, '79, teaching my students a European history course and they were doing projects at the end of the course on the Holocaust. And the Holocaust was not a big academic subject at this point at all. And, "This is really interesting. You should teach a course on this." Ding! Like, exactly what happened. And I should mention one of my mentors over at the University of Massachusetts, Professor David Wyman. Now, I had him for US history there. I studied US history with him. But he's a Holocaust scholar, US and the Holocaust. 91:00I never took Holocaust courses with him but I knew, of course, he was a tremendous source. And we were pretty close at that point. So, I asked him, "Can I study with you, on an independent basis, the subject of the Holocaust?" I didn't really know that much about the Holocaust, believe it or not. I mean, I knew the basics but you know, so did most people, I think, at that point. That was it. And he was so generous. He was writing his -- he was in the middle of writing his very famous book, "America and the Holocaust," at that point, at his house here in Amherst. And I think it was once a week, I would come over on Monday or Tuesday and he would sit down with me. He gave me access to his lecture that -- he was so -- and answer questions. He was so generous. So, the following year, which would have been, I guess, 1979, I think it was, that year -- I had a special course that I developed on the Holocaust. I hand chose fifteen students who volunteered, very bright students for this course. It was 92:00actually an extra course for me. I never should have done this, I mean, from a union point of view. I never should have done this. And I never would again, taking on extra work without any kind of -- it's bad for all the teachers. It was just bad practice without compensa-- it was six course -- I don't know how the hell I even -- took a free period and it was -- it was kind of like college course, the kids bought their own books and this was the beginning of that. And then, what happened was it was a pilot, obviously, and then we began to develop the course as a course for every student. And this is when, of course, I got interested more in Jewish history, the background, 'cause most Holocaust courses then and I think probably even now are taught from the point of view of what the Germans did. That's how it's taught. And I think, of course, there's a lot of validity to that, obviously. But very little, often, is taught about who were the people who were the victims? What was lost? Okay, how did they respond, 93:00even? How did their lives in Europe shape their response, even, to the Holocaust? I think it was very, very important. So, I began to get more interested in Jewish life in Eastern Europe, okay? And then, and so, that was happening and I have to say it was a very slow process, picking up things here and there and what have you. I saw an ad -- more announcement's the right word. I don't think advertising -- announcement in -- I think it was the "Daily Collegian," which is the University of Massachusetts student newspaper -- that a guy named Aaron Lansky -- I think his name was put on it; I don't recall if it was or not -- is going to offer this elementary Yiddish class, starting in the evening of whatever. Gee, that is really interesting. I think I'll sign up for that. And I think it first met in Aaron's -- he was renting a house, I think, or 94:00part of a house. I can remember sitting in the living room doing this and then later it transferred over -- maybe it was the second semester, I don't remember, into an actual classroom at the University of Massachusetts. And we started learning Yiddish, okay? And, of course, I had a tremendous advantage 'cause I could read Hebrew. And so, I knew the whole Yiddish alphabet already. So, I had a tremendous advantage over some of the other people in the class. And we began learning and I really enjoyed it. And it was hysterical. I tried out expressions I learned, what have you. It was kind of funny. I went up to my -- I don't know when I did -- I went up to my mother at one point, and this was years later, I said, "Zay gezunt [Be well]!" And she says to me, "What? What are you?" Some derision in her voice. "Are you a Litvak?" (laughter) And to her, it was "zay gezint". This is the whole, like, what they sometimes refer to as, jokingly, as -- I mean, you've heard it's the gefilte fish line through Eastern Europe, those who grew up in the gefilte fish line would say things like "gezunt [health]" and 95:00those -- I don't know how it worked, say "kugel" versus "kigel," this kind of stuff. It's kind of funny. Okay, my mother -- it was almost like a contempt. "What are you, a Litvak?" Okay, but anyway --

CW:'Cause that was the standard --

MG:Yes.

CW:-- YIVO standard.

MG:Yes, we were learning the king's Yiddish, so to speak, right? The standardized Yiddish at that point, right? Right out of the textbook. And then, Aaron Lansky suggested to me that you should apply for the Uriel Weinreich program at the Columbia University. And this would have been 1981, I guess, '81. And so, I did and I was accepted into that and that was something. I mean, in retrospect, it was very worthwhile. I was so anxious during the whole program 'cause my Yiddish was, at best, elementary and the program was really high intensity. And I was a good student still. I had to work hard and I was working all the time doing my Yiddish homework in this hot New York summer. And especially -- especially literature was very difficult, 'cause we had to read 96:00Yiddish literature and then we had discussions in Yiddish and it was very, very, very difficult for me. I mean, I did it and I worked at it. And it was very nice doing it and, of course, it was very fulfilling from a cultural point of view. The late Adrienne Cooper was there in that program singing folk songs with us. Josh Waletzky, who is famous, I guess, as a documentarian, his great movie, "Image Before My Eyes" -- actually, we saw it, I think, before it was distributed, actually, to the general public in 1981, which is a marvelous film about life before the Holocaust, okay? At the same time, I was getting interested in the family roots and I remember saying to my -- I was thinking of even going to Poland at this point. And that's when I started interviewing some relatives. I interviewed my father's cousin who came with him on the boat to 97:00Ellis Island, the one that -- and she was about nine years older than him. And she was an elderly woman. I wrote that I had -- I didn't even know who she was. I wrote to her and she lived in the Bronx, still. And this was 1980, I think it was. This is thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, we sat down at the kitchen table, had a tape recorder, and I would start asking questions. And she was very lucid, I thought, and started answering all these things. And, "Why don't you ask your father?" she would say all the time. "I don't know, why don't you ask your father?" "He was much younger than you. He doesn't remember." But it was very, very enlightening. In fact, some of the information, of course, that I'm relating today I culled through that, okay? I interviewed another cousin of my father, who was actually -- it was his mother's first cousin, also about the same time. And that was a very extensive interview. And again, I learned a lot of the pieces of the story from her. And this is over, again, about thirty-plus years ago. It's so important. I tell young people who -- I had students -- to 98:00talk to your grandparents, or if you had great-grandparents, and they have stories. 'Cause if you don't, they might be lost forever and really will inform your life -- is to know something about the past, okay? And I'm so glad I did this at this point, 'cause no one else knows the stories. Just recently, the daughter of the cousin, the one who I went to New York -- the Bronx to interview who came with my father to Ellis Island, I met her at a family gathering. In fact, it was my aunt Rose's ninetieth birthday, I believe? And I told her, "You know, I have a tape recording of your mother," she didn't really know this, "from thirty years ago where she talks about her life in Europe." She said, "Oh, my God, can you give me a copy? My son would love this so much." And I made a copy and I had transcribed even, like we do here at the Yiddish Book Center, all 99:00the questions and most of the answers and what have you. And it was just -- so, it was like a mitzvah [good deed], as they say, for them to do that. So, at this point, I was thinking about going to Poland, around 1980, '80s. I mentioned this to my father. He looked at me. "Poland? Why would you want to do that?" He was stunned and was scared. To him, it was the Old Country, things you escape from. Why would you ever want to visit that and so forth? So, I put it off, by the way, at that point because of -- that was with the solidarity of -- and then there was communist -- it was a suppression, so it wasn't a good time to do that. But meanwhile, I was teaching the Holocaust. Aaron Lansky came over from the Yiddish Book Center, which was not as, how shall we say, developed as it is today, okay? And lectured -- or that's the wrong word, lectured -- spoke to the class several times about Yiddish. He was wonderful, it was so wonderful doing 100:00that. And I picked up points from his talks that I began to incorporate myself into discussions about learning Yiddish and what have you. I got more involved in Holocaust studies as this developed more and so forth. And then, in 19-- moving forward, I guess, in 1992, I got the opportunity to be part of a teachers' group, educators' group that was going to Poland and Israel to study basically Jewish resistance. It was set up by groups that were promoting the learning of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. And I thought, Well, we're going to Poland, this would be the opportunity to visit Zamość, okay? My father was still alive at the time, although he was in failing health. And we had one day when we were in Poland. We were stationed in Warsaw at this point. They wouldn't travel on Sabbath, the Shabbos, so I had Saturday free. That's the 101:00day we got to do this. I found a Warsaw taxi driver, someone to take me there, who spoke some English. And I paid him a lot of money. I don't know, it must have been -- probably a couple hundred dollars maybe to do this, okay, at the time, which I'm sure, at that point, was a month's salary easily in Poland, 'cause it had just come from under communism a couple years before. Fortunately for me, another person who was on the tour who was a professor, David Crow, professor at Elon College in North Carolina -- and he is an authority, actually, on gypsies and the Holocaust. And he speaks Russian. So, he wanted to go along with me, which was very nice, 'cause it was like a security to have someone who could speak any East European language at this point -- was great to have with me. So, we drove to Zamość, which is about, I'm guessing, ninety to a hundred miles, maybe, southeast of Warsaw, okay? Maybe it was a little closer but about 102:00that. And it was just -- I can't tell you what an exhilarating, incredible feeling that was. It's a beautiful city. We went in the town square. I should have done more research, I think, before I went. We could have seen more places, perhaps, while we were there. We went to a shopkeeper, young man, who -- we asked him directions to how to get to maybe some Jewish sites and he would point to a map. I didn't even have a picture of this -- where did my pictures go? Oh, here's a picture of this -- you can see in the camera, but --

CW:Just lift it up a little bit, yeah.

MG:-- yeah, pointing on the map, "Here's a Jew place, there's a Jew place." And he didn't mean to be -- it was his English. But it was like talking about Jews in Poland, in Zamość, like we in the United States would talk about maybe 103:00ancient Indian sites. Oh, look, there are cliff dwellings up there, if you go down the road over here near Mesa Verde, there are more -- in other words, it was like you were talking about an extinct species. And it was only, of course, some fifty years before. And on the wall, here, I don't know -- you can see this on the camera, you see a Jewish star, okay? And now, what that is showing is that there is a Jewish site nearby. And what's so incredible about --

CW:Here, can you hold it up like -- yeah, great.

MG:-- yeah, about --

CW:Perfect.

MG:-- about Zamość is that it's one of the few cities in Poland where the Nazis did not destroy the synagogues. This is one of the few standing synagogues in Poland. It is incredible structure and it dates back to the early 1600s. And it was built -- it's Sephardic, actually. It's kind of interesting. Who would have thought Sephardic Jews were in Poland? But apparently, they had migrated up that far north. Eventually it became Ashkenazic and has a Sephardic design. Of 104:00course, I think the Nazis used it as a carpentry shop or a barn during -- I mean, they gutted much of the interior but they didn't destroy the building. After the war, it became -- there were no Jews left. You know, they were all killed or they left. And it became a public library. And I went inside. Oh, here's a historical picture, okay, a historical picture of what it looked like in the 1930s. And you can see the bimah here and you can see --- it had beautiful vaulted ceilings and so forth. Absolutely impressive. And then, here it looks the way it looked in 1992. And you can see the library stacks there. And I never understood how they could fit all the Jews of Zamość in this one synagogue. And there were other prayer houses. But this was the only main synagogue and you look at the work on the ceiling and it was falling into 105:00disrepair. And what happened just recently, okay, is that money was raised and in 2011, they restored -- here's the restored synagogue. And they redid all the masonry on the outside. Money was given from international groups. And here's the old synagogue and here's the new -- the same shot, the new one. Breathtaking. And in the inside, look what they did to the inside. It's no longer a library and it's no longer a synagogue, either, because there are no Jews. Although apparently, I read online, Jews who are going to visit some of the camps can stop there to pray. So, they will let it be used as a synagogue. And here's another shot of the interior. It's absolutely beautiful. And there's -- you see? There's sculpture. I don't know if you can see on camera, there's sculptures there. I think that what they're doing there, the community is using it as a community place, not just for Jews, obviously. We can't use this for Jews, so the community has a vested interest in it, so they may have a concert 106:00there. Or, in this case, they have -- it looks like it's museum pieces that maybe people from the community had created. But it was so thrilling, getting back to the story of going into the city, I'm realizing that this is where my grandfather and grandmother, perhaps, were married. This is where my grandfather was bar mitzvahed, perhaps, or maybe even his father was bar mitzvahed and so forth. And you were sort of walking in this area, it was -- the emotions were intense. And then, we went to what was called the Jewish cemetery. Well, there wasn't really a cemetery anymore. This is very typical of Poland. What it was -- again, maybe we can show it on the camera, we'll talk about more later, it was a fenced-in area. It was an area not very big, as you probably can imagine from 107:00this picture. And in the center was a monument made out of actual gravestones. Actual gravestones, okay? And on the monument, there's a -- and by the way, there's a statue, if you will, sculpture, I should say, of the Ten Commandments on the top. And then, here's the close-up of the top, taken here -- you can see the Hebraic writing here. It gets a little better in this next picture, I think, okay? And the plaque, these are all gravestones, and the plaque is in Yiddish on top and Polish on the bottom. And it says, basically -- the year is 1950 and it says to honor the -- or memory of, I should say, the Zamość Jews who were martyred during the Hitler times. That's what it says in Yiddish. And I assume it says the same thing in Polish. And then, and here's another close-up of that, I guess. And these are all gravestones. And then, on the ground around it were 108:00just broken pieces of gravestones. I photographed, I videotaped, actually, every single one thinking that -- needle in a haystack, maybe I could find a family name. Of course, that was ridiculous, okay? There were, at one point, ten thousand people living in this community. The graveyard must have been fairly vast at one point. And here's another example of these broken -- and I used this in class and I have it on home video and it is an incredible metaphor for what happened to Polish Jewry. And I would show it in the beginning of my -- what's this? Okay, in the beginning of my Holocaust course. I had students actually crying at that point in the course. It's a sort of pretty hard part of the course because, you know, it really was a very, very moving experience. So, for 109:00me, it was an incredible experience. And I remember returning that day to Warsaw. I was flying so high -- I mean, it must have felt like I was on some kind of drug high 'cause I was so exhilarated by just -- and I should have looked for an address. I should have gotten a street address somewhere and I should have tracked it down. I could have. I didn't do that. I regret that in retrospect, okay. But that was enough. That was enough to connect to the -- and I still remember that. I mean, I feel bad -- like, what were the greatest moments of your life and where you feel these incredible experiences -- that has to rank, certainly, up there, at least in my adult life, that I can think of, okay? And I tell my father about it. I don't think he -- yeah, that's interesting. But he was now aging at that point and he was near his death. He died, I think, in the following year, 1993, right? And I don't remember if I showed him pictures or not that I took that -- so, that's that. And I used that 110:00for -- and of course, here at the Yiddish Book Center, from the very beginning, I was a sort of a charter member, actually, of the -- you call it a charter member? On the ground floor, as a --

CW:Well, what was your first impression of Aaron when you met him, as a teacher, I guess, as your first --

MG:Oh, he was wonderful. He was dynamic and, yeah, I liked him very much. I thought he was enthusiastic, a very good teacher, okay? And I think he made me, like, conveyed in me a real love for Yiddish. And I learned a lot -- I don't mean just Yiddish language. I learned a lot about history just from his talks, the few talks that he gave, 'cause he became such a makher [big shot] eventually that he didn't have time to give talks to my measly high school class. So, I had to sort of fill in for him. But I learned enough from him at that point to, you know, start doing that, an imitation, if you will, my best impression of Aaron Lansky, talking about Jewish life in Eastern Europe. I was giving -- I used to 111:00do the Yiddish lesson. I used to give them Yiddish with the -- for a while, he would do a Yiddish lesson where he would sit -- tell one half of the class to say "hello -- sholem-aleykhem," the other class would answer "aleykhem-sholem." And then, how do you answer? And you never say you're good, so you go -- and he taught them to go "Eh, nu," things like that. It was very, very delightful. And I had the -- yeah, the thing you have here at the Yiddish Book Center, the A-B-C -- alef-beys -- for children. And so, I would show the kids how similar Yiddish was to English. I would pick certain words out and they enjoyed that and they learned things. And then, I would say something like, "Well, what do you think bagel is in Yiddish?" And then, some wise guy would finally get the idea, "Bagel." Yeah, exactly, because it's part of our language today. So many Yiddish words are used -- it's kind of interesting, I taught a film course -- and we're sort of digressing here -- in the high school, and one of the films I showed was 112:00Billy Wilder's film, "The Apartment," which was made in 1960, okay? And he has characters in there who are talking like, "Well, the weather, oh, it's all from all that meshugas down at Cape Canaveral." And it's kind of interesting. I explained to the students what meshugas, craziness means. But I asked them, "Well, why -- there's no subtitle, there's no explanation in the film to the audience what meshugas is. And what conclusion could you maybe draw from that?" And, of course, the conclusion to draw basically -- or I hope they would get was that at that point, 1960, certain words that were Yiddish words were somewhat mainstream, had been incorporated into English, like schmoozing, we're going to schmooze or whatever, and so forth. And they wouldn't necessarily even recognize its -- maybe its Yiddish origins. And so, here's, in a mainstream American movie, which won the best picture of the year, and Yiddishisms are creeping into 113:00the dialogue with no subtitles or explanations, (laughs) although they do explain later what a mensch is. The doctor, a Jewish doctor says to a guy, "You should be a mensch. Do you know what a mensch is?" And the guy says, "I'm not" -- Jack Lemmon played the main guy. "I'm not sure." So, the guy gives a definition of a mensch, which is not the best definition, but a grown-up, an adult. That was his definition of a mensch. But it's kind of interesting to see how the culture changes over time. I think I've run out of stories.

CW:No, not quite yet. I have a couple of questions.

MG:Okay.

CW:So, you mentioned also before that you incorporated some Yiddish into your classes. You mentioned teaching some Yiddish short stories. Can you tell me about that?

MG:Oh, yeah! So, one of the things we did in the -- this would be, again, the opening unit, if you will, of the course on the Holocaust. We would learn about Jewish life in Eastern Europe and what I did -- I took, in English, of course, 114:00from Irving Howe and was it Eliezer Greenberg? I don't know who the authors were, the editors of a treasury of Yiddish folk tales or stories, short stories -- some short stories, printed up in English, and asked them to do an exercise, basically. I thought it was going to be very difficult to do this. What do you learn about the values of the society, of the culture at the time from this? And the four stories that I use -- one was Sholem Aleichem's "The Search," which is about a synagogue in a small shtetl on Yom Kippur and apparently there's been a robbery, okay? They want to search everywhere. And then, they find out that one guy's protesting the search and they find out that he's been clandestinely eating on a fast day on the side. And they find plum pits, I believe, and chicken bones in his pocket when -- and a great embarrassment to the community. Of course, the irony of the story is -- the story's supposed to be about a 115:00robbery, what happened to the money. But at the end of the story, the real crime against the community is not the robbery, it is that someone who's supposedly this wonderful person has offended the mores of the community. It's a wonderful story which has a lot of nuances in it. The best story, though, I think the students like the most was I.L. Peretz's "If Not Higher" about a Litvak -- and they don't know what a Litvak -- some students figured it out. And most of my students were not Jewish, so they really were coming at it -- and the Jewish students were coming at a tremendous disadvantage 'cause they didn't have much background in Jewish life. And it's the story about a rebbe who disappears during the High Holy Days and the community believes that he goes up to heaven. And, of course, there's a Litvak who -- from Lithuania who's very scholarly and is very skeptical of these Hasidic Jews who are superstitious, obviously, and so 116:00forth. So, he decides he's going to follow the rebbe and he finds out that what the rebbe's really doing during this time period is he's dressing up as a common worker. He's going out, he's chopping wood, he's disguising himself as a Russian, actually, not a Jew and he's helping poor people by giving them free wood and helping them set their fires and what have you, and he's doing all these Jewish values for -- of charity, of helping others. And the important part of the story, which the students -- most of them get that -- is that he's not doing it for his own self gain. He's not promoting himself, obviously, in doing it. No one knows it's the rebbe who's doing this. And at the end of the story, which is the great, great last line, the Litvak becomes a disciple now of the rebbe and he says -- when they say he goes to heaven during these High Holy Days, the last line is the Litvak says, "If not higher." I ask the students, "What does that mean if not higher? What could be higher?" And they get it. Most of them get it. And there's the -- real quickly, the other story was Mordkhe 117:00Spector's "A Meal for the Poor," which is really funny and about a Jewish wedding and the custom that the father has to feed all the poor for one meal as part of a custom. But it so happens that this particular day, there had been another wedding down the road, all the poor have eaten, okay. And so, the poor say, Wait a second, we don't want to eat now. We'll come to your wedding and give us a couple kopeks or whatever it is. And they're negotiating but the guy said, "Well, you can't negotiate. You're poor," and so forth. And what happens, of course, eventually, the father breaks down. All the poor -- they get paid their kopek, whatever it is, they all come to the wedding and they're all dancing together. And what you see, of course -- the part of the story which my students will often not see, some of them, at first, is that here are poor people who, ironically, have some power for the first time in their lives, and this view of the powerless, but also social equity and the idea that at the end, the rich Jews and the poorer Jews are all dancing together and eating together. 118:00And I think the last line of the story is, "This is how a real Jewish wedding should be." And I think that's the closing line of the translation. And the final story was Sholem Asch's "Sanctification of the Name" about the religious custom of Kiddush Hashem, okay, of sacrificing, martyring oneself in the name of God. And it's set in medieval times where Jews are compelled to convert. So, tell you the story -- or they'll die. And there's one Jew among them who is not religious and there's a real fear that he's going to break, he's going to inform on the community, he's going to convert and so forth. And at the end, they find out in the synag-- that all of the Jews are dead -- the ones who were taken prisoner -- they deliver four heads or five heads to the synagogue and it's pretty gruesome. Okay, but they discover that all of them have stuck to their 119:00faith, even the one who they suspected would give in. And this was a wonderful thing and the mother was so proud -- that's at the end of the story -- of her son who did this. And, of course, this was to introduce the students to this concept of sanctification of God's name, 'cause in the Holocaust, this will play a significant role for some Jews in terms of their response to the anti-Semitism of the era and why some of them will not resist in the traditional sense of resistance. So, it was very important for them, I thought, to learn that through literature, at least, that concept and see how it might play out later on, at least for some Jews, in the twentieth century.

CW:How did your students -- I mean, having students from various backgrounds, some Jewish, some not, react and connect to your Holocaust course?

MG:Very well. I mean, it became very, very popular over the years, okay? Very, 120:00very popular. In fact, I had to make conditions that -- to the administration to -- at one point, I would not teach more than a certain number of sections of it during the year 'cause I didn't want it, for me, as a teacher -- to get myself inured to some of the horror of a course like that. I mean, it's not all horror, but desensitized by teaching it two, three, four times a semester. It would be terrible. But, yeah, they got a lot of out of it. And I designed the course where it doesn't just end with the Holocaust ending or the State of Israel being created -- that they had a significant period of time to, what I call, decompress the process. What have you learned from this? What is the meaning of all this, not just what happened in a certain time period? So, we start talking about the meaning of justice and the Holocaust and the philosophical issues, the moral issues, religious issues, how they relate to our own times, the 121:00difficulties -- civil liberties issues, freedom of speech issues. And this was, I think, the most meaningful part of the course. And I always said to -- I got some other people to help teach the course eventually. I said, "You have to get to this part of the course. You just can't" -- even if you're falling behind" -- and you always do fall behind, as a teacher -- "you can't not do the end part of the course because it's so important for them to come out of the course with a better understanding in what this all means." And that's the part of the course where they all said how meaningful it was. They had a journal they could write different topics. I think I gave them twelve options and they picked like three or four to write on as their final exam. And, yeah, and you had students always come back, talking about how meaningful -- and we're talking about non-Jews here in many cases, the course, how it changed their lives and so forth. In fact, 122:00ooh, I should brag a little bit. Nakhes [Joy] for me here. My first Holocaust course, which was in 1979, okay, spring semester, 1979, one of the students from that class is now -- has been for a while already -- the head librarian at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, okay? And he's been the librarian down there for -- I assume he still is, I haven't -- for quite a few years. It's funny, I was part of a program there. It was called the Mandel Fellowship Program then. Now it's just called the Holocaust Museum Fellowship, but around 2000, I think it was, or 2001. And I applied for it and when he heard, "Oh, that's my high school teacher. He's coming down to" -- all the people down there expected to find someone who was going to be old and decrepit coming in like -- because he is middle-aged now, okay? So, they expect that his teacher to be barely ambulatory. I was glad to say that I was more vital in the 123:00year 2000. (laughs) I didn't really set up -- their expectations were not in that sense. So, anyway.

CW:And what was the impact for you personally on teaching this course and also discovering your own family --

MG:Well, it was very, very --

CW:-- story?

MG:-- meaningful. I think it got me in touch with my roots, my Judaism more. I think it -- teaching the Holocaust, for me, confirmed my movement away from religion, you know, from atheism -- towards atheism, I should say. I mean, I was already. But I could never reconcile the idea of an all-powerful, benevolent God in the Holocaust, okay? Others -- we used to discuss that. But it was part of that last part of the course, okay? But on a very, very personal level, in terms 124:00of learning about Jewish life and Yiddishkayt and all that, oh, it was wonderful doing that. And I always taught -- told my students, the Holocaust, it sounds like it's a very negative course. And it is. But it's also a very, very positive course, too, because I used to do an exercise on the very first day of the course. The Holocaust is about blank. Fill in the blank. And we'd go around the room. And of course, the students would come up with racism, oppression, death, genocide, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. And I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Come on, so give me some more things." And sometimes they would get it; sometimes they wouldn't. "Think outside of the box." And someone maybe would say, "The Holocaust is about family. The Holocaust is about love. The Holocaust is about solidarity. The Holocaust was about" -- and my point was -- we just would 125:00generate this huge list of negative and very, very positive things to see it, the whole spectrum of the human experience is expressed during that time period, from the very worst to the very best and everything in between. And one of the themes I stressed with them was the Holocaust is about choice and that everyone involved made choices. Perpetrators made choices, bystanders made choices, and, of course, sometimes they had limited options. Rescuers made choices. And even, of course, victims made choices. Not about being a victim, but as victims, they had to make choices all the time, what we call choiceless choices, okay? And this was a great way to understand why people would do the things they did and so forth. So, what you see -- I mean, and so I began -- more I took out positive things -- for example, one was cynical stories you'd take out of the Holocaust 126:00-- is about the United States and the Holocaust and how the State Department -- I'll simplify this very quickly. It wasn't just indifference. They covered up, they suppressed information about the Holocaust and they tried to obstruct efforts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. This is not just indifference. This was active opposition. And there were people who weren't Jews who were in the Treasury Department, who were Christians, who uncovered this. Josiah DuBois, for example, was the main one. And decided they cannot let this stand. They had to do something about this. And they documented it. In fact, Josiah DuBois, on Christmas Day, I believe it was, 1944, '43, I'm sorry, '43, okay, wrote this tremendous piece about this government's acquiescence in the murder of the Jews. 127:00And he took it to his boss who was Jewish, Henry Morgenthau, who was Roosevelt's treasury secretary and Morgenthau took it to the president -- this was January of '44 -- and basically said, "You've got to do something about this." And finally, the United States government very belatedly, January of 1944, set up the War Refugee Board, which was designed to -- they didn't use the word Jew, by the way, but it was designed, supposed to do what it could -- it was very late, of course, in the Holocaust but they had some great successes, including -- it was the War Refugee Board that sent Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat, to Hungary, who saved, almost single-handedly, tens of thousands of Jews. But the point I wanted to make there was that here were these Christian men who were safe, they had no vested interest, and they chose to speak up, they chose to maybe even risk their -- not their lives, of course, but their occupations, 128:00'cause DuBois said that he would have gone public had Roosevelt not done something about it, and they made a choice. And it shows you how individual choices can affect change. And this was a very positive story because these guys -- I told -- and as my students were -- they're real heroes. They're real heroes. And if they had not chosen to do what they did -- I mean, we're talking about, still, millions of people die, but -- so, there's a lot of positive things that can be told in a very, very sad and overall negative kind of story. I like that --

CW:Yeah.

MG:-- (UNCLEAR) and I didn't get to it right away. It took me some years to be able to develop that, teaching it for many years to develop that approach. But you learn as a teacher, you learn all the time. In fact, you learn more as a teacher than you did as a student, absolutely. Oh, yeah. Unbelievable. I mean, you learned a lot in school. But as a teacher, you're compelled sometimes to learn. Depends what you're teaching. Often you're teaching stuff that you're not that, initially, familiar with. So, you have to learn.

CW:Yeah.

MG:And then, you learn more.

CW:(laughs) Have you been able to keep up your Yiddish at all?

MG:No, not really. And that's a great regret. I can read it. I mean, I could -- we're here at the National Yiddish Book Center. So, oh, you announced that. And I could certainly read all the signs outside. And most of the cases, I could translate it into English, which is not a great thing to be able to do. But in terms of conversational Yiddish, unfortunately not. I was never good at conversational Yiddish and any formal classes I had ended about thirty years ago. (laughter)

CW:Do you have a favorite Yiddish word or expression?

MG:Well, I mentioned my --- "vey iz mir." I use that a lot. But I'm trying to think, that -- I'll stay with that one, 'cause the others -- we would've had to 130:00have a R, X-rated kind of an interview here. (laughter) I have two dogs, they're named Simcha and Shayna. They have yidishe [Yiddish] names, okay? Out here, also, I should mention -- I don't know why I'm -- how relevant it is, but -- in the Yiddish Writers Garden, when they were setting that up, some years ago now, I guess, I thought about doing something in memory of my father. And all the famous Yiddish writers were taken almost instantly by people. (laughs) So, we did Hirsh Glik, and Hirsh Glik was a Yiddish poet who wrote lyrics -- well, they became lyrics, basically, to songs that became part of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. The most famous one is "Never Forget," I guess is -- "We're still here"? That's the chorus line. "Never Forget," I guess, is the title. And it was so appropriate, I thought, given my adult life, to honor Hirsh 131:00Glik who died at the age of twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-five, whatever. Very young man who was killed, obviously, in the war. And in memory of my father, it was very nice, and they have, actually, on the sort of plaque -- what is it out there? Plaques, I guess they are. Okay, in Yiddish and in English, an excerpt for that particular -- it was called a partisan song, that's the way it's normally --

CW:Partisan hymn, yeah.

MG:Yeah, partisan hymn, yeah, yeah. And that's not the official title. So, that's very nice. And whenever I have friends or relatives who come up here, I usually bring them over here, say, "Hey, let's go the Yiddish Writers Garden." (laughs)

CW:Yeah.

MG:"Oh, look at that!" (laughs) Kind of fun. It's kind of nice. Yeah, so --

CW:Well, I just want to ask one more question.

MG:Okay.

CW:What has been most -- well, if you want to just leave us with a message of 132:00advice, something that you'd like to transmit to future generations?

MG:I would say, at least in terms of Yiddish, okay, that I would love for young Jews -- you know, realistically, they're not necessarily going to learn the language. I understand that, obviously. But to get in touch with that world. I think many Jewish values were part of -- came out of that Yiddishkayt in Eastern Europe. And it's important for them, I think, to know a little bit about that world there and the values of that world, their great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents -- whatever may be and how that knowledge -- those values and experiences might inform -- their own lives here in the United States today even. It might not seem directly relevant. I think it is in terms of fighting for fairness and social equality and things that I consider to be sort of Jewish values, really, in many ways, in identifying with the oppressed and so 133:00forth. And I think that that -- I mean, they might have that anyway, those values, a lot of those people. But I think understanding how that is a continuum, even though it was greatly interrupted, clearly, by the Holocaust, there's a continuum from that past into the present and that you should try to make -- to know something about that.

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

MG:Nishto farvos [You're welcome]. Is that the very proper response?

CW:Yes, perfect.

MG:There you go. See, I remembered something.

CW:Thank you so much --

MG:Good, you're welcome.

CW:-- for sharing.

[END OF INTERVIEW]