RIVKA AUGENFELD ORAL HISTORY

JORDAN KUTZIK:I'm at the Jewish Public Library of Montreal with Rivka Augenfeld and the date is July 11th, 2012 and we're going to record an oral history interview. Do I have your permission to continue?

RIVKA AUGENFELD: Yes.

JK:Okay, so I wanted to start off with your family history and your grandparents and what they did and what you know about them from growing up.

RA:Well, my parents came from two very different backgrounds. Very Jewish, but very different. My father, who passed away in 2004 at the age of ninety-one, was from Warsaw, which was always Poland, the heart of Poland, and he was from a 1:00Hasidic family, one of four children, the youngest of four. No, the youngest son of four children. Younger than him was a sister. His father was a Radzyminer khosid [Hasid], but not a kind of fanatical kind of khosid, but followed the Radzyminer Rebbe in kind of a mild way. His father was very working class. He did whatever he could to make a living. My favorite of my grandfather's many occupations was that he made and sold flypaper, something that's gone out of the popular culture. But he did a lot of other things and took care of his family. His wife, Rivka, who I'm named for, was at home, and from what my father always told us and what his older brother, Abba Igelfeld, who I think is well-known to the Center, told us they were a very loving couple, very respectful of each 2:00other. My grandfather really respected his wife and very much treated her with love and respect, which I think was very important in how they grew up and in how they saw relationships between men and women, even though they went off in very different directions. The oldest brother, Nathan Mussen, who probably stayed in school the longest, was in the yeshiva but was actually running off somewhere and changing his clothes and going, doing things, but it took him a long time to tell his family that he had broken away from religious life. Abba, who was the next one, also broke away at -- probably late teens, but also took him a while to tell his parents. And my father, at age fourteen, Dovid, wanted to go to a trade school but asked his father if he could go, promised him he 3:00would respect the Sabbath and he would do everything, but his father refused. His father wanted him to go to a yeshiva. And so, my father stopped, quit school, and went off to work. So, he went off to work at age fourteen and became a textile worker and -- as did his two older brothers -- also worked in textile factories. But factories, of course -- it's a relative term. Some of them probably looked like what factory would look like and others were more like sweatshops in somebody's house. And my dad -- the union at that time was a very militant union, the textile workers' union. So, of course, my father got caught up in politics and very left-wing politics and, after a series of things, eventually joined the Bund with a group. And my father was very much influenced at the time by Isaac Deutscher, who was a very well-known theoretician and leader and ended up joining the Bund in a very thought-out way. But in his very 4:00young years, because he had been what was perceived to be a communist, this came back to haunt him later on. Not a communist, but -- he was never really a Trotskyist but the communists branded him a Trotskyist, which was the worst thing you could be in the Soviet Union. So, if I skip forward just for a moment to say that during the Second World War, this label which was attached to my father put him at great risk. It was enough that Bundists were already on a hit list for the lot of -- for communists -- Trotskyists were even more so. So, my father spent the whole war with a pseudonym, which was to protect him not from the Germans but from the Soviets. And he always said, "The Germans, it wasn't personal. They wanted to kill all the Jews. But with the Russians, they had my name on a list." And so, it was very -- well, sad isn't the right word. It was just incredibly ironic and ridiculous. Of course, he wasn't the only one, but it was something that affected him. And that name, Kuzko, which was my father's 5:00pseudonym during the war -- my mother put on his gravestone because it's the name that saved him. So, back to the beginning, my father -- in those days, between the unions and the political parties, there was a huge political and general education that they gave to their members and which is very different than what they found here. It's interesting 'cause immigrants come to America and there's a perception of what do they know, they're hicks, they're grine, m'darfn zey oyslernen [Greenhorns, we have to teach them] but, in fact, they found the unions here woefully behind the unions that they had known in Warsaw, and Warsaw was no Hicksville. Warsaw was a big city and a very sophisticated city. So, he grew up in that context of living at home, bringing his pay home to his mother, but for many years not speaking with his father -- even though his father never threw him out, he never disowned him, he never -- but his father didn't speak to him and years later -- again, this was -- I find this an interesting story about my grandfather -- what he said was -- probably not 6:00directly to my father but to somebody -- that his understanding of when you left religion, when you stopped believing, that you became hefker, that you became amoral, that you became completely a rogue kind of person. And in observing, though, the behavior of his sons and their whole circle, he realized that these were not hefker people. They were people with great morality, with ethics who were really working for -- in their own way for a better world. So, I find this, again, a very interesting, thoughtful person that was this grandfather that I never knew whose name was Khaskl, Khaskl. And my cousin who lives in Toronto is named after him. So, that was the background: very intense, Warsaw Jewish. My father lived on Franciszkańska Street in Warsaw in that very intense Jewish neighborhood and was very involved, as I said. Worked very hard and then did a 7:00lot of union work and a lot of political work and -- along with that whole story of the youth of that time. So, in the '30s, he was working -- he started working -- see, my father was born in 1913, so in the late '20s, he was already working. He lived through the Depression. And, of course, he was born right in the middle of the First World War. And I think that the economic -- and the deprivations of that time and the hunger and everything probably also had an impact on him and his brothers, as many other people, because they were malnourished during those years. And I think that had kind of these consequences which only sort of showed up much, much later. So, yeah, so that was my father during -- at the beginning of the war, and in September '39, along with many other people, they started walking east after the first bombs started falling. They left behind -- I think, 8:00from what I gather -- and unfortunately, my father and his brother, Abba, told many, many stories and we never sat down and recorded them all properly, which I regret 'cause they weren't only of interest to the family. They were of general interest, I think, because they were so reflective and so thoughtful and they had such interesting sort of hindsight and ideas about what had happened. And I think when they left, nobody had any idea what was going to happen. I don't think they thought they were leaving for that long. I don't know if they would have left their parents the way they did if they had known that. But I think the biggest regret that they had was that they left their sister, Sarah, behind, because -- since the three brothers left survived and the sister perished. Hard to know where, but for the Warsaw Jews, if they didn't die in the ghetto, then they died in Treblinka. That seems to be -- I mean, where else? That's where 9:00people were sent. But then, as they moved east, my father's brothers, who were already married by then -- they were older and they had wives, very young and very beautiful wives -- went to Russia, to the Soviet Union, and ended up in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan and all these places. My father couldn't go to the Soviet Union; it was just too dangerous for him. And so, he ended up first in Vilna where many of those very political people went initially. He then went to Kovno in Lithuania because initially in the war, the Soviets gave Vilna and all those -- they gave them to the Lithuanians for a while and then they took it back. But I always had this idea what it's like to wake up one morning and the border has moved. You're in the same place. And to me, Vilna, where my mother was born -- I'm just jumping a bit now because it was -- my mother was born in 1923 and she was born in Poland and the first time I thought of going to Vilna, 10:00to me, Vilna is in Poland, in that mythical place. And then, I thought -- this was in the early '80s and I said, Wait a minute, Vilna is in Lithuania and Lithuania's in the Soviet Union and now I have to get a Soviet visa. But I don't want to go there. I don't want to go to the Soviet Union. I want to go to Vilna. So, it's all those things we live with, things that haunt us when we live with a history that we never -- that it's not our story, but it's somehow the story we carry and the place that we've never been to that is more powerful sometimes than the place that we are. So, my dad ended up there in Vilna, then he went to Kovno. In Kovno, there was a whole group of people from various political persuasions, but including a group, Bundists, who were trying to get visas from the Japanese consul, Sugihara, who did give a lot of visas. And there were a number of people who got out, including some very good friends of my parents who ended up here in Montreal. But they gave precedence to people with children. And 11:00somebody who was very well-known here in Montreal, Arthur Lermer, who was one of the leaders of the Bund here and a professor of economics at Concordia. They got out 'cause they had an infant in their arms, their son Zohelel, George, who was born just before everything started. And so, they gave precedence to people with children. They got out. But in order to use the visa, you needed the Soviet transit visa and in order to get the Soviet transit visa, there was another adventure. You always had to have the end destination and work your way back with all the transit visas. I only understood all this later when I got involved in immigration and refugee matters. So, my father never got that transit visa. So, he ended up, through a series of place -- going back to Vilna. He was in a number of other places. He was in Kovel. He witnessed some of the Einsatzgruppen operations. But he went back to Vilna, and he was in Vilna when the Jews were 12:00forced into the ghetto, which was a very brutal operation. But because he didn't have any family, he wasn't from Vilna, he didn't have any family, I understand from him but from other people, as well, that he was able to help other people because he didn't have a lot of things to liquidate. He didn't have a house to leave. My mother, on the other hand, who is from Vilna and was ten years younger, so was eighteen that day when -- my mother talks about how horrible that was because you were given very little time. You were told you could take whatever you can carry and you cannot go back. Once you stepped out of the door, you can't go back. And, in fact, they did -- there was something that they wanted to get and they were not allowed to go back in. And before they left, what they did was they hid a whole bunch of photographs. And after the war ended, my mother went back to that house. And, of course, people were very suspicious 'cause they thought people wanted their houses back. And she was 13:00trying to tell them, "I just want these pictures," and they wouldn't even talk to her, they wouldn't let her into the house, so she never did get back the pictures. It's a very poignant story. But my mother is -- so, that was my dad, up to the war. And during the war -- and in the ghetto, of course, quickly joined up with his fellow Bundists and then there was -- all the story has been documented and told, so I'm not really going to go into the details of the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye that was formed in Vilna, the partisan organization. And my father became a member through his Bund affiliation. And then, he was in the first group that -- and that story, it's told in the partisan -- well, my father was in the first group of partisans that went out into the forest and there was a last-minute change of orders. They were supposed to have gone to Rudnitsky, which is closer. They ended up in Narach, which is 14:00now in Belarus. And when I went to Vilna, I wanted to go there. They said, You are not going to Belarus. Nobody was gonna let me go there because it's such a creepy place. But I did go to Rudnitsky where everything -- and I have a lot of pictures of what that all looked like. So, that was them up to the war. And then, my mother, who was born in Vilna to parents who were from Vilna, very much -- my mother was, in part, in the middle of that incredible flowering of Yiddish secular culture that was Vilna. And I think it's very much documented in that film "The World Was Ours," I think, Mira Jedwabnik's film. And so, her father was a Yiddish teacher, had gone to the teachers' seminary. And my parents, my grandparents were young people when the war started. They were born in 1895. So, in the early '20s, they were young. They were educated still under the Russian 15:00system 'cause Vilna was in Russia -- and spoke Russian beautifully and then had to requalify. When Poland took over, Vilna had to requalify professionally in Polish. So, it was easier for some people than others. But they lived in Yiddish. They really lived in Yiddish. My grandmother, who had been a teacher -- then my mother was born and it's ironic, when my mother was already -- very small child, my grandmother, her mother, went back to school and went to nursing school and became a nurse. And it's these very modern people, and that's why it always was kind of a point of contention, of pain to come here and be treated like these griner because they were so progressive and so modern. And when one looks at the curriculum of the schools, of the Jewish schools, the modern schools at that time and the educational projet [French: project], if you will, 16:00of what they were trying to do, it was so much more modern than anything that was going on here, where we were -- we had this, what do you call it, confessional public school system where you had Protestant schools and Catholic schools but they were public and not in any way as progressive a curriculum. So, my mother was raised in that school. I think she's told the story, too, and she went to the Realgymnasium, which was like the -- in terms of -- it wasn't rich, they didn't have any money, but they sure were fancy in terms of their educational aspirations and in terms of their ideals and in terms of what they were trying to accomplish. And I think they turned out the most astonishingly well-educated people because later on, when I met a lot of the people who had been her classmates just before or after her -- and you look at the level of education they managed to acquire just from that Realgymnasium without ever having gone on to do any more studies, 'cause for many of them, the war 17:00interrupted it -- others did go on and became -- and professors, the Kahn family and other families. There were all kinds of families that then -- where people did manage to go on and acquire more education. But just at that level of having finished the gymnasium, what they knew, their approach, their capacity to do independent research, to write in a coherent way -- when I look at my mother's writing skills, they're much better than mine. (phone rings) Oh, shit. Can you stop it? Sorry, I thought I had turned it off. I'm very sorry. I thought I had turned it off. Sorry! I was sure I had turned it off. Okay. All right, we back up?

JK:Sorry.

RA:Where should I start again?

JK:The [Real-gymnasia] --

RA:Yeah, so anyway, so, yeah. So, my mother, over the years, prepared a lot of texts, prepared a lot of talks. But she wasn't the spontaneous sort. She needed to write everything down. But it was beautifully written. There is nothing extra in any of my mother's texts. There's no fluff. My dad, on the other hand, was much better at the spontaneous intervention. He was much better without a script. He was very good -- and I think I'm probably more like him in meetings -- of sort of thinking, of intervening at just the right time, thinking -- being 18:00quick on his feet in response and in making -- and probably from all those years of political activity and agitation. So, my mother grew up in that atmosphere. Her father, as I said, he was a teacher. He was then a school principal and during the summer, he was also director of a camp for a summer. He worked very hard. I think the director of camp part was -- it was something that was very much within his calling, but it was also very difficult. And so, I think he worked very, very hard. And my understanding is that he suffered from migraines, as well. But he had to earn as much money as he could because being a Jewish -- a Yiddish teacher was not a way to make any money and they were actually very poor. And it took me a while -- it was only when I got older that my mother actually started talking -- she never went on about that when I was younger, but it was later on that I started to realize to what extent -- how tight money was and how every little expense had to be thought through. And it was only once my 19:00grandmother started going to work and was being a nurse and brought in a little extra money that things eased up a bit. But it was very difficult and, of course, it was the Depression. And my mother was born in 1923, so was just a young girl during the Depression. But from what I also understand and from other people, it's not just my mother's story. My grandfather was a really beloved teacher. He was strict but he was kind and he was fair and he was very smart. And he was part of that cohort of people who were trying to build this society. And my grandmother, who -- again, I don't have one single picture of her -- appears, from all accounts, to have been also a very exceptional woman who fought for her education, who, when she was still in high school, when -- fought 20:00to finish her high school because her father thought it was enough for a girl and didn't want to spend the money. My grandmother went off to work, saved her money, went to schoolmates' -- her friends' house every evening to catch up on the day's schooling and then went back, passed her exam, and continued school and finished her high school. So, it's that determination. It's the intelligence, but the determination and the drive as a young woman to continue and to be educated that I think is so admirable. And that's the atmosphere my mother grew up in. I think that whole Vilna thing has been well-documented and there are people who have written about it a lot. So, I don't think I need to tell you that much. But she was really in the heart of it. And when she talks about her school and all the things they did, studying -- and because they studied science and math and geography in Yiddish, and history, they had a complete command of the language. Their Yiddish was so rich because they did 21:00everything in Yiddish, in addition to -- I mean, they did Polish language and literature and history, but their life was in Yiddish. And it was this complete -- and with a great emphasis on excellence and on language so that it wasn't anything went. And if I can be allowed a little (UNCLEAR), it wasn't like the Yeshivish that one hears now. That would not have been tolerated. It wasn't like the kind of Yiddish I hear on the street in Montreal in certain areas where anything goes. It was really that kind of determination to create a language that was gonna be at the height of any other language. And she went to summer camp and she went -- I think the highlight was the Bund camp in 1937 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Bund. There was a three-city camp that was organized: Warsaw, Łódź, and Vilna. But my mother always said -- luckily, 22:00the camp took place -- (coughs) excuse me -- right near Vilna, because if it had been near Warsaw or near Łódź, she might not have been able to go because they wouldn't have been able to afford the expense of just the trip. So, that's how tight things were. But they did in the summer and my mother says the last summer just before the war started when the clouds were already out there, they spent some time at a summer house, in a datshe [summer cottage], and had a little rest. And ironically, in 1939, when the Soviets took over Vilna, they closed some of the Jewish schools but -- and my grandfather was no longer allowed to be a principal but he did start getting paid at a higher rate. Somehow, it became more state controlled, so for the first time he got more money, which is the big irony of that whole thing, is that right before the end, he got more money than he had ever earned before. But Vilna continued, more or 23:00less -- and when the Germans came in briefly and then gave it over to the Soviets, my mother was sixteen, she was still in school. She managed to -- they kept going to school. Her school stayed open, the Realgymnasium stayed open. There were people who came into that school from other schools that had been closed and especially some of the girls that came in at that time became my mother's very, very close friends and remained friends for a very long time. They were more from Hashomer Hatzair and they were from the more -- the Zionist left-wing organizations came in, and they became very close at that time. And there was an infusion of all these -- and so, when -- and, again, the very poignant story is that in June of 1941, they wrote their last exam on Saturday morning. Saturday morning, I want everyone to remember. They went to school and 24:00they wrote exams. And that was the last one and then they were, as any finissant, graduates, about-to-be graduating high school, despite everything that was going on, they were very excited, they ran around, they bought flowers and they got ice cream and were having a party. And the next day, on the Sunday evening, was supposed to be the graduation. And in the morning, my mother was washing her hair and then the bombs started falling and then the Germans attacked. So, my mother never -- I get very choked up when I tell the story because (tears up) think about it, it's like one day you're in your life and the next day -- and this happens over and over again in other stories and in other places. So, I remember when I was around that age, when I was sixteen, eighteen, trying to imagine being there and doing that. And it was very powerful as a kind of -- trying to imagine what would I have done and how would I have been and how would I have reacted to all this stuff? But yeah, she never went to her high school graduation. So, formally, she never got her high school diploma. But to 25:00all intents and purposes, there's nothing, there's no piece of paper that said she graduated from the Realgymnasium. And then, of course, everything went downhill very, very quickly. They went into the ghetto. My mother, she went, she got a job at the kinderheym, at the orphanage, which -- a very brutal place. She tells that story in a publication and it was very complicated with getting the proper -- what were called the "shaynen" -- if you did have a permit, if you didn't have a permit, if you were considered work-worthy or not. So, her father had one. The people got kind of attached to different families, that whole story, it's very complex. But then, her father was sent off to some camp in Estonia. And my mother had, in the meantime, through her Bund connections because my mother had been a member of the SKIF and then Tsukunft as a young 26:00person. I don't even know if she got to the Tsukunft, 'cause she was still SKIF age. I can't remember exactly when you -- this was the Bund youth movement, so you could become a member of the Tsukunft, which was the -- I think from eighteen on or something. And she became a member of the FPO, as well. She always tells the story of how the person who kind of took her oath was crying because he said, Look at these beautiful young women, and this is what we have to do now with them, is make them into fighters. So, it was that kind of poignancy, also, because all these people knew each other and very few of them had any previous kind of fighting experience or military background. So, she became a member of the FPO, but she and my father never really met properly, saw each other. And years and years and years later, I interviewed my parents about 27:00this because I realized that I had never heard the story in a complete chronological sequence from A to the end because I always heard bits of the story. And I had an opportunity at one point to tell their story on a French radio program. So, I went and got their permission and I interviewed them to get the chronology straight. So, I asked them what I had never asked them before, which was, When did you first notice each other, when did you see each other? And for my father, it was much earlier than her because he -- there was some meeting of the Bund part of the FPO. There was somebody's room in the ghetto and he said he was there. My father, because of that whole Soviet business, was trying to look as old as possible. He had a droopy mustache and he was clumping around and he had his hair shaved off and he -- but my mother walked in and she was really a very beautiful young woman with two long black braids. And he just, poof, saw her and she didn't really notice -- she saw him, but she didn't notice 28:00him. But he took note of her in a very powerful way. But then, later on, when they met in the forest, they connected. And they were lucky because people got together during hard times for all kinds of reasons and not all the matches were so made in heaven. But my parents were lucky because it was a real love story. And so, in the middle of all of that stuff that was going on, they met and they connected. And we always celebrated their anniversary as the 1st of January, 1944. And it's not the day they got married. It's the day that they promised each other that if they survived, just sitting in the forest there in the middle of January, promised each other that if they survived, they would stay together. So, that was the date of the anniversary. And then, they were liberated early, in the summer of '44. Came back to Vilna. Had to be very careful because the 29:00Soviets were in control and as soon as they were able to and as soon as the war was sort of over, they exited, went to Poland, and then started looking at where to go, 'cause there was that whole debate that went on at the time about staying, going, what to do? Rebuild, leave? And some people wanted to stay, not just the communists but some of the Bundists, as well, thought -- and I think some people were still talking about staying until the Kielce Pogrom happened. And once that happened, they said, That's it, finished, we're leaving. So, there were people who stayed, but the bulk of people, some of whom had still been hesitating, decided this was time to go. And then, what happened was that they -- my parents had never been Zionists and they didn't want to go to Palestine, but the only people that were organizing anything -- and they had a lot of friends in that group, like really very high-up -- was the Breichah, which were the Zionists who were organizing the movement to Palestine, the illegal movement. So, my parents joined up there. And so, to get out of Poland, they went through Hungary and through, I think, through Czechoslovakia, through 30:00Austria. And then, they were in a convoy which was supposed to cross the mountains into Italy. And then, my understanding of this is that the convoy got stuck. And somehow, several trucks just before them, there was -- it sort of halted. And then, they couldn't -- whatever had been set up for them to pass wasn't working anymore. And so, they went back to Austria. And then, they sort of caught their breath and then they thought about what they wanted to do and then they realized, or rather decided, they didn't actually want to go to Palestine, that there were other alternatives, perhaps. So, they stayed in Austria. They were in Graz, which was in the British zone, and that's where I was born in September '46. And then, there was that whole period of trying to find a place to go. And I think Austria was -- but it was a little kind of a 31:00buffer moment for them because despite the fact that they were homeless and they had lost so much, they had a moment where they could sort of catch their breath. And my mother, of course, being my mother, immediately went and became a member of the library and started reading in German. During the war, she read in Russian. My mother was always a member of a library. And my father started looking around started to try to figure out how to make a living and talking to other people. And I think what's important, I think, are people were very much organized around their previous affiliations, whether it was -- and that's how people vouched for each other, 'cause when I got involved in immigration and refugee stuff and the whole question of ID comes up now. "How do we know you are who you say you are?" Blah blah blah. And so, I asked my father, I said, "How did people establish their identifies? Everything had been destroyed." And he said, "Well, people vouched for each other." There was a system of, let's say, affidavits. I will say that I knew you because -- and I had to provide details. 32:00So, we were together in this and this place or in this and this organization and this is what we did. And so, I would say this is who you are, Jordan, and you would vouch or vice-ver-- so, there was a whole way, because people did not have -- most of them didn't have the kind of documents we expect people to have now. And all that wouldn't work anymore. That would not work anymore. So, they started applying to different countries and then they were -- in Graz, they were officially living in a DP camp and unofficially living in a hotel in the city, which I went to see twice. And this whole process of applying to different places began. And then, there was the unpleasant story of the fact that a lot of the -- that there was a real, shall we say, interference and intimidation that went on from some of the Zionist groups that were discouraging people from applying anywhere else. And people don't like to talk about that now, but it's 33:00been corroborated by many people that they sometimes -- in some of the smaller DP camps, they would just come and, if a delegation came from some country to -- they would say, Nobody here is interested. Nobody even knew that they had come. And then, eventually, when -- Canada was very late and very slow in getting involved, and that's all been documented in an amazing book called "None Is Too Many," which documents Canada's woeful history before, during, and after the war. But eventually, what Canada, through a lot of different efforts -- there were these commissions that came to look for workers. So, they weren't looking for Jews, and "Jew" was never mentioned, but they were looking for workers in trades that were in demand: tailors, furriers, and millinery and cap makers. That was the three main groups. And agricultural workers, of course, were big, 34:00but was -- and so, they started going and looking for people. And, of course, my father was none of the above. He was a textile worker, so you had to become something in demand. So, they all somehow became furriers. And one of -- my closest friend, who -- we came on the same boat together, her dad was a real furrier and a very good furrier. So, he was the one -- so, the fur machine was in my parents' apartment and he was teaching people how -- the rudiments of fur-making or -- not fur-making, but the garment-making so that people could go and pass the test, 'cause you had to pass a test. You had to have a medical -- you had to pass a literacy test and you had to show that you had some knowledge of the trade. Now, my mother insists that at the end, my father came clean with the commission and he said, "Look, I'm not really a furrier but here's what I am and if you let us come to Canada," blah blah blah, and that they somehow gave him points for his honesty and took him. I don't know exactly how that went, 35:00really, I don't. But that's how people were selected. And the families with the children were -- so, my father and my mother and me and my father's older brother, Nathan, who had come -- they had reunited, found each other -- my father's brothers, who had been in the Soviet Union -- long, also, story, how they found each other and they were all together in Austria. So, we were on one of the first boats that came. And then, they, in turn, sponsored the other brother, Abba, who didn't have a child yet, who had lost a child in Russia but that came after us. So, there were all these people that came on boats from -- landed in Halifax at Pier 21, got on a train and came to Montreal, to Toronto, to other cities. But yeah, I think my parents were fortunate in meeting each other because other people didn't do as well. Many people did. Some people were 36:00already together before the war. My uncles both had met their wives before, were married already. And then, here, they very quickly -- I think from day one, they became involved in stuff. They never just sat at home and just did their own thing. On the cultural level, as my mother always loves to tell the story, how before we had an apartment and we were living in this horrible rooming house where the landlady didn't like me, she took me in my little stroller and took me off to the library to become a member of the library. So, I was two. And this was 19-- because we came in October of '48, we came to Canada. So, a few days later, we were members of the library. And then, there was the Workmen's Circle and the Bund. And those, the Workmen's Circle, they were extraordinarily important in helping people settle. There were the service organizations. There 37:00was Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, which was a kind of a -- it wasn't HIAS, but it was like a sister agency, and other family services and clinics. But these fraternal organizations were very, very important. And the landsmanshaftn [associations of immigrants originally from the same region] were very, very important and there were a number of very big landsmanshaft here. There was a Varshava Farband, there was a Vilna organization. And other cities, Łódź and others, they were very, very, very important in helping people. And my dad was very involved in, in the Workmen's Circle, very quickly. I look at -- I don't know if you know, in 19-- I think it was in '57. In 1957, there was a big conference of the Bund here in Montreal because -- international conference because of McCarthy stuff. There were people who'd not have been allowed to come to the US. And so, the conference happened here, so that was -- and they were already very involved in the organization. My father was always more the 38:00organizer. He was the guy who knew how to organize things and who looked at -- and taught me about details are important. And, "Somebody should do something," that there has to be a designated somebody. He always thought of every little detail and it's interesting because my father was very, very short. He was a big guy. I mean, he was short. And so, he thought of things like how tall is this person that's gonna be standing at the microphone and do they need a little step-up thing so that they can be seen over the podium, not like the famous picture of Queen Elizabeth where you can't see her over the top of the podium. But yeah, so he thought of things like that and he always made sure everything was in place and he taught me that. And he became very involved, also, at the library and was involved, also, in an organization that gave loans to people who couldn't get loans in the bank. He was very much someone who said you can't just 39:00live on your past glories, 'cause he felt that for a lot of people, lot of survivors, even though, I mean, they had lived through these horrible things, but in some ways it was the highlight of their life and that's the only story they had to tell. And I was very fortunate that he taught me that if somebody was not a nice person before the war, the war didn't improve them. (laughs) If you were a person who was just not a kind person or a nice person, that you didn't suddenly become a noble person because of the war. Of course, you had to be respected for everything that happened, but it didn't mean that you could be forgiven everything. And not everything was because of the war and you had to be a mensch and behave. And he became very involved in the library. There was an incredible group of people here -- sort of the first -- that generation of -- a number of them who are incredible autodidacts. I don't know, there hasn't been another -- it doesn't exist now, I don't think, as a group. There are 40:00individuals who are autodidacts but that whole group of people who had to go off to work very young but kept learning, kept studying, taught themselves everything. One of the people who is a really amazing man here in the library, Chaim Spielberg, who came to Canada, also, who spent the war in India. He was a Zionist, he was -- but he had -- his Hebrew was impeccable 'cause he went to one of those Hebrew high schools and became a builder. Build homes and he was a construction guy for -- as a living, and then continued studying, got -- was very involved with the library. And then, he wrote a book in Hebrew about Hinduism, which won the J.I. Segal Prize, but which also, years later, we found out, became a bit of a best-seller in Israel because when Israeli youth started going to India, when that became the thing to do after you finished the army, they were looking for books in Hebrew on Hinduism and his was one of them. So, 41:00he had this kind of second life. But who imagined such a thing, that you become proficient enough in a language that's not your daily language to write a book and make it -- it's just astonishing, that whole group of people, and that they all hung out here. And so, my father was very involved, the board of directors, and was the president of the board for two years in the '70s. And again, I would say the legacy that he left was, among other things, insisting that that group of reshaim [Hebrew: rebels, lit. "wicked people"], they were really incredible people, but letting in younger people was not their best strength. And he told them, "Look, you have to -- if you want the future of this library to be assured and if you want this to go on, you have to look at the younger generation, you have to figure out how to pull them in, you have to make it a welcoming place for them and," he said, "and you have to get used to the fact that younger 42:00people will be sitting at the table and they will not agree with you. A condition of their participation is not that they say yes to everything you say." And his condition for becoming the president of the board was that the next person after him would be sort of the next generation, and he accomplished that. So, he broke that -- for the people in his gang, so to speak, that they had to come to terms with allowing people to come into leadership positions. And after him, there were a number of people from my generation who came in and became leaders in the library. It was really something. And I think he deserves a lot of credit for that. And my mother, she didn't really work outside the home and she was very involved also here at the library and she, at some point, started being asked to speak. And any time my father had to speak, my mother helped him write his text. But my parents wrote letters. I remember before, when 43:00they wrote these long letters to all their friends, the picture was my mother is sitting and my father is pacing around and speaking and my mother is writing. He wasn't the one who sat down and actually wrote very much. But if he had to give a talk, they would work on it together. So, there was very much a partnership in that way, but when mother gave a talk, she would write it all out and it was, as I said, very tight and very -- really, really well-written and always ready a week ahead of time, (laughs) contrary to me who was never finished until after the last minute. So, somewhere, I think, I have to start looking at her files because there are a whole bunch of these texts that she wrote that should be compiled. Some of them are variants of each other because when she spoke at Holocaust -- let's say remembrance events, you don't reinvent everything but she would adapt it for the occasion. And a number of times, when I heard her speak, she actually said stuff that I had never even heard before. I remember she told 44:00a story to the Reconstructionist synagogue about how, in Vilna, when they came back in the summer of '44 -- so, there are all these -- all of them, nobody was religious, nobody went to shul, nobody prayed. But on Yom Kippur that year in '44, she said they all ended up going to the ruins of the big synagogue in Vilna and being there on Yom Kippur because it was something that was so overwhelming and how unbearably sad all of that was. So, there are times -- and she also, very early on, she said -- she talked about how -- to one group, to kids, she would say, "Now, when some tragedy happens or there's an incident at a school, the first thing they do is bring in the psychologists and the grief counselors and everybody comes -- and make sure everybody's okay and da-da-da." She said, "When we came, there were no psychologists and no grief counselors," sorry, "and 45:00nobody who thought it was important for us to talk," 'cause that was one of the other things. Now, the Holocaust is everywhere and it's almost, I would say, too much. It become-- overwhelming. But everyone forgets that at the time they came, and that whole generation, whether they came to New York or whether they came to other American cities or wherever they went, even -- and particularly in Israel, nobody wanted to hear their story. And they hung together for a long time. There were these artificial friendships -- not artificial, but people who would not normally have been the people you hung out with but you hung out with because they understood you, at least, and they were the ones who had lived through the same thing and people sort of at least -- without having to tell each other, they knew what the other person had gone through. Whereas in the larger society, just starting with the Jewish community, people didn't really want to hear about it. It was not a convenient story, there was a lot of misunderstanding. There was a lot of guilt, not acknowledge-- and also, it took a long time for this to 46:00become an issue or a commemoration for the whole community. And so, all those early years, before there was a quote-unquote Yom HaShoah, when there was a khurbn [Holocaust] and there were khurbn commemorations, Workmen's Circle and the Bund, the landsmanshaftn -- but there was no community-wide Yom HaShoah commemoration for a long time and we remember -- and so, my parents and their cohorts, they celebrated -- commemorated April nineteenth, which was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising date for them. That was their date. And then, each landsmanshaft had their own date. For Vilna, it was somewhere between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur because that was when the ghetto was liquidated. But April nineteenth, so that was, for me, that was the date. And in early, early days, even when April nineteenth was Pesach the way it was originally they did it, later years, they started saying, No, if it's Pesach, we do it a day before, a day after. But 47:00there were times -- I remember still, living in the '60s, when the community, when the other -- the big organizations were -- had other events on Yom HaShoah. They didn't do anything. And so, all of that came much later, I would say, and in the late '70s became a big community hoo-hah thing. So, there are a lot of people who deserve a lot of credit for having kept that issue going and kept it alive and emphasized the importance of remembering things before it became a community-wide thing. So, that's it. So, they were very much involved here in the community and my father was a very successful businessman. And I think his personality -- it's hard to know what -- had he had -- years later, he would say that, of course, if he had been able to go to school and do -- I don't know, he wouldn't have been in business, I don't think, although his personality made him very good in business because he was very good at connecting with people. And my 48:00father's partner, Joseph Glasrat, who -- when he came after the war -- he was his friend from Warsaw. He sent over a couple of knitting machines from -- because he ended up in Germany after the war. And then, when he got here, they opened this little factory and worked very, very hard and the factory grew and grew and grew. But it got to a certain point and they said, That's it. We're making a living. Everything is fine, we're good. And they didn't go crazy and they didn't try to expand beyond what was wise. But my father was the outside guy. He was the sales guy. And it was because he was so good at sizing up people and establishing individual relationships that even in the early days, when his English was terrible -- but he managed to connect with people and establish relationships with people from very fancy companies. I don't -- they're not gonna mean that much to you, but he was dealing with Dominion Textiles, which was a huge textile firm here or -- with Stanfield's, which was -- made underwear 49:00in Nova Scotia, which -- that family produced a leader of one of the political parties, so -- and he traveled and he talked to all these people and he did very well, 'cause in his factory, they made knitted materials. They didn't make garments. So, they were selling this -- they were buying thread and making material and then selling the material to manufacturers. So, my father would be selling underwear material to Stanfield's to make underwear. So, that kind of stuff. But for him, the business, it was a way to make a living. It wasn't his identity, so to speak. So, that was it. So, that's the kind of house I grew up in. And, of course, I had to do my own thing to rebel and do other things. And they managed to make Yiddish the norm. I don't know how they did -- I really don't know how they -- contrary to what a lot of other people were able to do, they just made it clear that we were not gonna speak English. And even though my 50:00cousin and I, my younger cousin, eighteen months younger than me, we spoke English to each other and then we would do the switching. And I think that's why I became very good at code-switching because, A, I discovered many years later that I was a linguistic anomaly, quote-unquote. It was a good thing nobody told me when I was a kid that I switched all the time back and forth from the more standard Yiddish accent of my mother to the varshever [Warsaw] accent of my father, back and forth when I spoke to them. So, it was like this -- but I don't know and I cannot tell you what I spoke to both of them together. Sometimes, I would try to sort of be conscious of it and then I got sort of paralyzed, so I couldn't do it while I was thinking about it. And my cousin, as well. So, we switched back and forth, back and forth all the time. And I found out that, eight years later, that children don't usually do that. They don't usually have 51:00two accents. They pick one or the other, usually the mother's. But I didn't have either. That's not a universal rule and I know many exceptions. But in school, of course, in yidishe folkshule [Yiddish secular school] that I went to here, we spoke -- it was standard Yiddish that was mostly taught, the accent -- that kind of accent. Not deep Litvak, but my mother didn't speak deep Litvak because she had gone to school. So, even some other people I met from Vilna had a much more Litvak accent and the people that came from Kovno had a much more Litvak accent, which I really -- like, the way Sam Kassow speaks when you let him really loose. And there aren't that many people left who speak like that. And I think it's great. But my father also didn't speak deep varshe [Warsaw Yiddish]. He didn't speak what they call "ek shmole mile [very specifically Miła]," which is -- well, Miła Street, right? There's shmole mile [specifically Miła] and then there's ek shmole mile. So, it's like this -- it's an expression that sort of 52:00means the heavy-duty Warsaw, deep Warsaw accent. He didn't speak that either because it had been leavened a little bit by his time that he spent with all these Litvakers in here. So, he spoke -- I mean, he had his Warsaw accent, but it wasn't that heavy "yakh." He never said "yakh," my father. He never said other things. And my uncle, his brother, Abba, who had been, as I said, in Warsaw, had been involved in -- he was a textile worker by day, but he was involved in theater and in literary pursuits by night. And you know him through his readings for the Yiddish Talking Books. He was in a group, a theater group called "Orpheus," "Orfeyush," they used to call it. And it took me years, also, to realize that Orfeyush and Orpheus are the same person. So, he was in a lot of 53:00amateur theatrical groups and they, again, were incredibly modern. They followed everything that was going on in Europe and they did all these modernistic things. My uncle used to do these -- show us these exercises that they used to do, a German neo-whatchamacallit-ism (sic) or whatever it was. They were right on top of everything. And the best theater groups used to come through and the Vilner Trupe, which came from Vilna and was so avant-garde, traveled -- and so, they saw the best of everything. And my uncle, who was -- as I said, spent the war in the Soviet Union when they were in -- when they all joined up. In the DP camps, he and a number of other people started a Yiddish theater, which traveled around the camps. And there are pictures of that and there was a little exhibit that was done two years ago here in the library of that. And so, when he came here, of course, again, there was no money to be made in Yiddish anything. So, he worked, also, in a factory, in a textile factory. He worked for my father 54:00more in the office, but he was very, very involved in the Varshava Farband, very, very involved in all the literary activities, did readings, and taught me and my cousins and others -- he was always our coach. He taught us -- he was our wonderful -- we spent wonderful times with him. So, there were a group of us who would always be preparing ghetto commemorations and other things. Sad material, but we would have the best time with him because he was very funny. So, we would get together with him. We would practice our stuff, but for the rest of the time, we just listened to stories and had really a wonderful time with him. He was -- very, very funny man. And when he retired from his job, he became a full-time volunteer here in the library. And people will still remember him as somebody who was completely autonomous. He did all the Yiddish stuff. He went around with his little cart and he sorted books and collected books and catalogued books and he just loved it. So, he was really here for years, every day, doing his job and being the kind of volunteer you dream about because he 55:00knew so much. He knew an enormous amount. And people would call him with questions about literature and all of this stuff. So, until very late, when he was living in the seniors residence near here. And yeah, my father's -- the other brother, Nathan, was the tragic story because we came to Canada. We were just getting established and then, in 1952, when he was forty-five years old, he went in for an operation, which was supposed to be not such a -- but operations, operation. Everyone was very apprehensive, and he had his operation, which seemed to go okay. And then, I've heard various versions of this but I think what happened is that there was a blood clot and when he sat up, when they sat him up and started to get him walking, this blood clot sort of shot through his body and was almost instant and he died in '52. And it was the huge trauma of 56:00the family, this huge tragedy 'cause, first of all, his son, my cousin, was four-and-a-half. And it took me years to understand how terrible this was. It was a tragedy for our family, but it was -- in the context of everything, it just -- beyond -- all the mourning and all the grieving and all the -- it was just too much. It was just too much. And they had just this feeling here they were safe. The three brothers, no matter what had happened, they had come, they were starting a new life. And then, this brother just dies one day. And it was a very, very -- and for the whole community, it was this huge shocker. There was my uncle and there were one or two other people who died very -- relatively speaking, very young, and it was just devastating. Hugely devastating for that community. And for the family, it was something -- they went on, they did everything they needed to do, of course, for his son and his widow. It was very 57:00terrible but -- for everybody. But my parents, as soon as they had the means, they established a fund here in his name. So, there was a Nathan Igelfeld Foundation, which -- where we sponsor an event, usually during Jewish Book Month. And yeah, so they tried to go on. But, I mean, he did everything, but I think some of the zing went out of it after his brother passed. So, my father was the youngest one, but he was the organizer of the family. And I've always felt that this library was a second home to me. And I have, though, in my mind, though, when I try to remember certain events of the -- especially the early '50s, when I was still a kid, I can't tell you where -- whether certain things happened at the library or at the Workmen's Circle. The library built a beautiful, beautiful building in the old neighborhood in Mile End on the corner of Esplanade and Mount Royal. But they built it just before the beginning of the 58:00movement of the community going west. So, the building, it didn't have that long a life. It was absolutely beautiful. When I try to think of the people that built it and the kind of amkha [Hebrew: common folk], the grassroots fundraising that went on and the kind of -- this was not fancy people that built that building. It was not the uptown crowd. And it was just beautiful. It had beautiful reading rooms with wood paneling and had an auditorium and it had offices and it had stacks -- it was just gorgeous. But even before that, there was -- the library was just a few blocks down and it was just a wonderful place to be. And Dora Wasserman, who used to have her children's group there and there were -- a lot of things went on there. And half a block away was the Y, with the YM-YWHA, the Jewish community center where I went. So, it was that whole area. And, of course, we should have bought up all the real estate instead of leaving 59:00the area because now it's just one of the trendiest areas in town, of course. But who knew? So, yeah, but that was where we lived. So, I went to yidishe folkshule, which was about a block -- which is now -- that building is now owned by a French -- a Collège Français [French-language secondary school] that were -- other Jewish schools in the area, all the institutions, everything was in that area, what's now called Mile End. That's where I grew up. It wasn't called Mile End when we lived there. It was called -- it was an immigrant neighborhood. So, it's very ironic that some of the children or grandchildren of the people who did their very, very best to leave that area went back. But, yeah, then -- so folkshule, I still think, was the only school where I really ever learned anything important. And at the time when I finished elementary school, at the time it was still -- elementary school was seven years and high school four. 60:00There was no middle school. There was no junior high or anything like that. Now, it's six years elementary and five high school here, 'cause we're still the only -- I think we're the only province in Canada that has eleven years before you finish high school. And other places, it was twelve, right? And I think in the States it's twelve. And in Ontario, for a long time, it was -- they had grade thirteen, which was crazy, which they got rid of a few years ago. But so, elementary school, which ended in seventh grade, I went to a yidishe folkshule and then there was no Bialik High School yet, which now exists. So, I went off to a Protestant school board high school, which I hated. But folkshule was great. But I went to mitlshule [high school]. There were -- mitlshule in the afternoons, after -- and then there was something called "hekhere kursn [advanced courses]," which was past mitlshule. But yeah, so -- and then, I went 61:00to Camp Hemshekh, which was another salvation, which I think you've probably heard about, which was the Yiddish -- the camp that the Bund started in the Catskills in 1959. And again, it's remarkable. Here were these people who'd barely come to America ten years before, most of them, making a camp for their children because they wanted them to have this experience. And I think they were trying to recreate something they couldn't recreate anymore, which was those Bund camps of the '30s. But still, we went, it was a great, great experience for a lot of us and a lot of people went there and made friendships that continued forever. But it also allowed us to be in a Jewish secular environment, not Zionist, but a lot of the kids were, of course, children of survivors before that was a term, before anyone knew what it meant. It wasn't an issue, a topic yet. But just to be with each other in a way without having to talk about it, to 62:00just know that somehow we were connected in a lot of different ways -- and it was very, very good. It was funny, it was fun. We didn't sit around with long faces, but it was this very, very strong connection. So, yeah. I don't know what else you want to know. About the library?

JK:Do you remember any Yiddish writers as a child or a young adult?

RA:Well, yeah, I can't even tell -- some of them are stories I heard -- I mean, I remember there were people who were friends of my parents. I remember Shmerke Kaczerginski who came here, who I think is one of your areas of interest, but he was a friend of my parents. He was a really lively guy. He was a lot of fun. I don't think his talk that he gave was so fun, but he was a wonderful guy. He sang, he -- a poet. And so, I remember him vaguely, but I remember he was very 63:00-- yeah, because when he died -- he died in 1952, right? I was six years old. How much can I -- some people have these vivid memories of stuff, but I don't. And then, all these writers who came and -- Grade was here, Bashevis Singer. Before he was Bashevis Singer, he was Itskhok Bashevis. And he came and talked -- but I remember him coming to the Workmen's Circle, the Arbeter Ring. The Arbeter Ring also had a building on Saint Laurent Boulevard, now called The Main, which is now -- that building is now a very popular concert venue called the Sala Rosa, which does all kinds of concerts. And downstairs, there's a Spanish restaurant and upstairs is the Sala Rosa. But the Sala Rosa was where I spent -- that whole building, spent many, many years of my child-- days and evenings there of my childhood. And that auditorium is where we heard a lot of different speakers. Again, one of my father's stories about Bashevis is when he 64:00came and he gave this big talk, world politics and da-da-da. And then, in those days, they had a lot of stamina, so they would sit there for two hours or three -- and apparently, at a quarter to midnight or something, when he was winding up, in the question period, one guy says to him, "Khaver bashevis, khaver bashevis, hob nokh ayn klayne frage: Vos iz di tsukunft fun yidishe folk? [Mr. Bashevis, Mr. Bashevis, I have one more little question: What is the future of the Jewish people?]" "What's the future of the Jewish people," that was his little question. So, that was -- (laughs) I love that story. (laughter) So, that was the atmosphere, right? And I don't know what he said in answer, but it's a great question. And Manger came and -- a lot of these authors had feuds with each other. Avrom Reyzen came. Grade came until his wife no longer allowed him to come because she was jealous. There were people here that she thought were -- she was a very -- I mean, it's all been documented now. So, here's Montreal, one 65:00of the premiere cities for a Yiddish writer to come to and after a certain period, she was jealous of Chava Rosenfarb and she was jealous of Irene Kupferschmidt, who's Rokhl Korn's daughter. And who else was she jealous of? I don't know. Well, she once famously slapped Chava Rosenfarb in New York, so the story goes. I wasn't there. But so, who else came in? And there were just a lot of -- Karpinowitz came, and then you can read about -- what's his name? Sholem Shtern, in his memoirs, is always complaining that the library didn't invite his authors 'cause they were communists. The library was really neutral ground for a lot of people because you had such -- the very, I would say, really very pitched 66:00battles, also, between communists and socialists and Zionists. The library was neutral territory. The library was where people had to park their politics. I mean, they knew who each other were but it was not a political place, it wasn't a political party, and they tried to avoid events that were too political. Not that they -- but Shtern is always complaining in his memoir that his authors don't get invited because there's prejudice, blah blah blah. Maybe, I don't know. But then, you had, really, a remarkable group of Yiddish writers who lived here: Meylekh Ravitch, who came here, and Rokhl Korn, who, I think still, one of the best poets and who didn't get her due. She didn't get translated the way she should have been early enough. She's a wonderful poet. And Chava Rosenfarb and Yud Yud Segal, of course, and some lesser -- and Ida Maze, who I think is -- 67:00whose children's poetry needs to be resurrected, I think. And her adult poetry is -- it's okay. It's fine. But she was like the mother of all the writers. And again, one of the famous stories about her, which I don't know if it's true or not, but was told to me by somebody who claims to have been there -- was talking about some writer. She said, "Oy, der yid hot dokh nisht kayn brekl talent. Mir muzn helfn aroysgevn zayn bukh," meaning "This man has no talent. We have to help him publish his book," right? So, (laughs) now, if it's not true, it could have been true. That's the kind of thing -- it was like her. But she really took care of a lot of people (UNCLEAR), but her children's poetry is wonderful and I think it needs to be kind of picked -- and Yud Yud Segal's children's poetry is wonderful. Much more interesting than a lot of his -- I mean, he has some really good, potent stuff but I think some people, once they started to be able to publish and because there were no publishers, they published whatever they 68:00wanted in those -- they published too much at some point. And I've always felt, and it's not an original idea of mine, that one of the tragedies of the post-war period for Yiddish is that there were no more editors, right? And that every writer, even the best Nobel Prize-winning writer needs an editor. They need somebody they have to listen to. Now, not every editor's always right but I think many editors are. And editors are there to rein in kind of your ego and to rein in people once they've put something on paper, they can't -- now, some writers are very rigorous and they will be their own best editors. But others can't. So, if you have no editors and no real publishing houses, you publish -- you have a komitet [committee], and the komitet's job is not to give you any literary criticism. It's to raise money so you can publish your book, and that's what all these bikher-komitetn [literary committees] were about. They published books and they did -- and some of the people who were on these komitetn had 69:00taste, but they couldn't tell the writer what to write, so they helped them put out these books. And ironically, a lot of the books have beautiful illustrations. Some of the best illustrators illustrated them, these books, and some of the books are not the world's greatest poetry. And some of them published a lot of books. But Ida Maze, I think, did some beautiful children's stuff. She has her adult stuff, too. And Segal, if you go look at the children's stuff, it's such a different tone than the other stuff. And then, there was -- and then what's his name? Mordkhe Hosid, who was one of my teachers, who was a very interesting poet but very dense, very difficult to penetrate, and very dark. And he didn't start publishing his stuff for a very long time 'cause he kept everything in a drawer. But he was very, very -- what's the word? Worked on his stuff. He didn't publish that much. Peretz Miransky, who was in Toronto, was here originally and then went off to Toronto. So, there was a whole group of 70:00these writers and some of it stands up and some of it less so. But it was a very interesting place to be. And there was a lot of activity. Yeah, I remember one year, I was very -- in the J.I. Segal Prize world, 'cause every --- it used to be every year and for the last while, it's been every two years. When it came to Yiddish literature, there was a year where there were -- it was very difficult to get a jury together that was gonna do an objective appraisal of several people's works -- were all up for a prize in the same year. Who do you find that can be objective? And there were some years where they had to ship it to a komitet somewhere else because -- and then people got offended and if they didn't get the prize, "Why me? Why not him or her" -- sorry, "Why him, why not me?" But because also they didn't have a wider outlet, I think it all got very 71:00intense. Some writers got discovered much later, got translated much later on. But for all of those years, they were sort of in that world. Some of them were really very fine writers and might have been better with good editors. There was this one guy, Chaim Leib Fuks, who actually -- yeah, the poet -- but he published this lexicon. I mean, he did an incredible amount of work. He came up from New York at one point. He was originally -- and his sons were in camp with me. But he came up from New York and ended up living here. And he did a thing of -- a leksikon af kanade yidishe shrayber [lexicon of Canadian Jewish writers], so he has -- it's a compendium just of all Canadian Yiddish writers in all different fields. And then, Pierre Anctil, who's a very fine translator of Yiddish to French here in Montreal, he's done a lot of translations from Yiddish to French. He compiled that. But I remember Chaim Leib, who was a character, who 72:00was like one of these larger than life characters. And he, I remember, he accosted me one day and he said, "Rivkele [little Rebecca]" -- he was from Łódź, can you tell? "Efsher vestu iberzetst a mol a pur lider [Maybe you could translate a couple of poems sometime]?" He said, "Kane shrabt dokh azelkhe lider [No one writes these kinds of poems]." Yeah, and if you looked at his stuff, you'll see it's very wide across the page. If the page had been wider, his lines would have been longer. But he just thought -- he said, "Yeydes vort iz dokh gold, gold [Every word is gold, gold]." And he said that to me. So, that's what he thought. So, that's not -- maybe it could be true but you're not the most objective judge of your own work. You need somebody else to say, "Yeydes vort iz gold." But you get your komitet and then you publish your book. But he was a real character. But that book that he put together of the compendium of all these writers was a real contribution to -- because I don't 73:00think it would be so easy now to do it. So, they were fun, but -- and that's it. So, I've been involved in this library ever since I can remember. I've been doing Yiddish poetry readings ever since I can remember and I have to thank my mother, my uncle for being the coaches. I think the first thing I can remember doing is standing on a chair, and it must have been about four or five, and reciting Kadia Molodowsky's -- that poem, which I love -- I still think she's one of the best ever children's poetry writers -- "Olke mit a bloye parasolke [Olga and her little blue parasol]." So, I'm standing on a chair going, "Hinter varshe, ek okhote, a hoyf mit blote [Outside of Warsaw, hidden away, there was a muddy courtyard]," which is -- and stuff like that. And then, far too many Holocaust remembrance things of far too many landsmanshaftn at some point. At one point, there was the Fishman sisters, Raizel and Anna, or now Raizel Candib 74:00and Anna Gonshor. And there was somebody else -- myself, and we -- there was one year -- I can't remember how many different events we did. The Vilna, the Varsheve, the Kovno, the Bund one. And we made a terrible joke and we decided to call ourselves the "klog sisters," the wailing sisters. But my uncle and my mother were very, very instrumental in helping us. And then, I've been involved here, either as a member of the board or the Yiddish Committee and now I'm very involved with the library in a number of different areas. I'm a vice president of the library -- of the board. We're going through a big transition now because we have a new director who's great. And so, it's like a new era and we're coming up on the hundredth. And now, we've got you guys from the National Yiddish Book Center who are coming to give a new life to all our material.

JK:I was wondering about your work with refugees and --

RA:Yeah.

JK:-- immigrants.

RA:Yeah.

JK:Do you think that your own background being a refugee as a child played a role in --

RA:I think it played a role in my sticking with it. It didn't consciously play a role in my starting. Maybe it was there because the way it all happened was that when I was in my early -- I'm very -- I always tell students that I'm a very bad example 'cause I never finished anything. I quit school. I never got my BA at McGill, and then I went off and did this and that and the other thing. And then, I eventually -- I guess I was -- in 1974, so I was twenty-six or something like that. I had met the then director of Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, Joseph Cage, 76:00in another way 'cause he also was very involved in all things in the community. He was very involved in Congress. He was one of the instigators of what was the first national -- the Yiddish Conference in '69 and he had -- and he was involved in Labor Zionist stuff and he was one of the people who got the J.I. Seg-- he was involved in a million things. He was Mr. Network and Mr. -- and so, I knew him and, in fact, at one point, I had taught his sons Yiddish a little bit at home, much to their chagrin, 'cause even though he was such a Yiddishist, he sent his children off to Adath Israel. He was a Labor Zionist and he was a Yiddishist and he sent them to Adath Israel, which was very Hebrew and very religious. So, he decided they needed to learn some Yiddish. So, the poor kids -- four boys who -- pent up in school had to endure having Yiddish lessons with me. So, I knew him from these Yiddish things, right? And I knew him because 77:00before I started working with refugees, I had briefly worked -- in '71, I guess it was, there was a national -- after this big Yiddish Conference, they created the National Committee on Yiddish at Canadian Jewish Congress. And it was very funny because they hired what was called the national secretary, was a part-time position, which they gave to a man, a very lovely man called Abraham Shurim -- but who had just retired as being the executive director of Histadrut. So, this was his retirement job. And me, his assistant, worked full time. (laughs) So, my boss was there half the day and I was there the whole day in the Canadian Jewish Congress Building, which -- of course, the Canadian Jewish Congress no longer exists but at the time, the building had just, just opened, that beautiful building, the -- where the Congress archives are now on the corner of Wilder Penfield and Côte-des-Neiges. Anyway, so there we were, and it was all new, we 78:00were all being created, and my Yiddish was actually better than his. So, I worked at that job and Dr. Cage, Dr. Joseph Cage, along with a whole bunch of people who also were involved here at the library were my board, my komitet, so to speak. So, I had to deal with all of them. And so, I got to know Dr. Cage during that time in a different way. And so, then fast forward a little while later, when I decided I needed to get a serious job -- I left that job for all kinds of reasons. And I went to see him, not to ask him for a job but to ask him if he knew if there were any jobs in the community. It was more like a -- it wasn't a job interview. And I guess he liked me. I mean, I'm not -- it's hard to say, but he really liked me. I was very fortunate or unfortunate as the case may 79:00be because I never had a proper job interview. I never had to establish that I had any knowledge or credentials. I sort of -- so, he hired me initially because he had a grant -- so, this was in the spring of '74. He had a grant to do language courses for immigrants, so he hires me to do this. I have zero competence in this. I have no piece of -- so, I invented it all. I made it up. I figured out how to make the -- I did what the classes -- but what I had a chance to do was meet the clients of the agency. I went to see all the workers, the social workers, new immigrants, and figured it out and ran these mostly English classes, at the time, before French became de rigueur. And for one group, French, and then for -- anyway, so I had elderly and I had Russians, I had Moroccans, I had all these things. But I got to know a lot of people in a nice way because I was the teacher and they were the students. And so, later on, he 80:00rehired me after that summer to do housing because there was a big housing crunch in Montreal and we had a lot of big families coming. And then, in the -- sorry, the winter of '75, when one of the social workers went on maternity leave, I took over her caseload with five minutes, literally five minutes preparation. But by then, I had already been wandering around the agency. I knew people. I had a sense of what was going on. So, I practiced on my clients. I made a lot of mistakes. I had no social work background and he used to -- Dr. Cage used to alternately say, "Thank God you're not a social worker," and the rest of the time was trying to persuade me to go back to school to get a piece of paper. And it was more like to protect me, 'cause I had no degree in anything. And to his credit, he was mostly hiring people with degrees. We were way ahead of the game there. Everyone had either a bachelor in social work or 81:00anthropology or something. Everyone had a degree except me. So, eventually, a couple years later, he moved me over into -- more on the immigration side. And so, I really learned -- and it was right around that time that the law had changed, also, and there was -- and immigration at the time, who was still our friend, was -- put on a lot of workshops for people, for -- and they had, at the time, decided that they wanted people in the non-governmental organization, what you would call the voluntary sector, to really understand all this stuff. And they put on all these training workshops for us. And very early, I became involved -- again, Dr. Cage, he was really a network guy. He was way ahead of his time. So, he was one of the founders in the '70s, for all kinds of reasons, of what then became what's now the Canadian Council for Refugees. At the time, 82:00it had another name. And he was involved with the Ethnic Press Federation. He was involved with the Citizenship Council and he was involved with all kinds of stuff outside the community when it came to immigration and refugees. And he was a very respected voice in the outside world. And everyone envied us. Everyone in the non-Jewish world envied us our Jewish Immigrant Aid Services. The only people who didn't understand too much what we were doing were people in the community. So, I used to tell my coworkers if you want to talk to people who know what you're doing, you have to go outside the community. And here, we'd get people saying, There are still Jewish immigrants coming to Canada? And outside, they'd say, Oh, JIAS! We want a JIAS! We want this, we want that. And, of course, there was always the tension between where should people be going -- so, people who were sitting here, who had come to Canada, were -- always had ideas for other people -- should go. I'm being very -- and kind of very -- 'cause I lived through this period where it was very difficult because people would sit 83:00and say, Why don't they go to Israel? But they weren't in Israel. They were here. I have no problem with people going to Israel, but if people who are sitting in Canada and who chose to come to Canada -- because a lot of these people who were saying this had come here from countries that were much closer to Israel than to Canada. And from here, they're sitting and really criticizing other people who are not going to Israel. It was a very rough period, especially in the -- with a lot of the Moroccans who came. And there was an attitude about them and why were they coming here and not there. And then, with the Russians, of course, it was huge in the '80s. There was huge, huge, huge pressure for people to -- but so I lived through all that and through -- during the '80s, there was a very big development of the whole sector of immigration and refugee protection groups and immigration groups. And so, I've been part of that whole network. And in 1979, also working at JIAS, when the Southeast Asian -- when the 84:00Vietnamese boat people movement started, which I think the US was also very, very involved in that and a very political atmosphere of -- at the time, here are all these people in boats but we -- it was clear why we should help them. It was a very Cold War kind of atmosphere. And I'm not saying they should've been helped. But today, we have boat people, and everyone thinks we should send them anywhere except here. So, it's all context. So, in '79, when the boat people movement really started, in Montreal we started also a coalition of organizations that were working on that issue and then branched out to work on immigration and refugees more generally. And I was, again, as a JIAS delegate, I was one of the founders of that and then became, a few years later, the chair of the board of that organization. I was the chair for about twenty years. It was 85:00far too long. But now I'm still very involved with the Canadian Council of Refugees and I do -- haven't done very much lately, but what I was doing as a freelancer -- when I left JIAS -- I left in 1991 after seventeen years and the joke is that when I started, I started in 1974, I told myself that to prove that I'm a serious person, I had to stay for two years unless they fired -- I said to myself, Unless they fire you, you have to stay. Whether you hate it or you love it, you have to stay. So, seventeen years later and a whole lifetime later, I left and became a freelancer doing training, freelance training for people working in the field. And so, I've stayed very involved in this whole thing. So, in Montreal, I was -- that's what I do. But back to your question, I think when I started, I didn't think of it like that. I was just looking for a job. But I think that I found my calling. And yes, and then I made the links. So, I didn't 86:00get involved in this because of my background but I think my background gave me an appreciation of why these issues were important and how to take them forward. But I also met so many people from so many different backgrounds that were very involved in this and very passionate about it from totally other backgrounds. And I looked and I sort of looked at how different people come to the same thing and what it means. And the way I grew up, very not religious, very secular, and I didn't know any Catholics when I grew up. They were like these strange people and the Catholic Church here in Quebec was not, at the time, the most progressive institution. However, when I started doing immigration and refugee work and met the real social justice church crowd who are so committed and so progressive and so everything, I said, Wow, this is a whole other -- the churches were very, very involved in the refugee sponsorship and refugee resettlement and fighting for refugee rights. And so, it was a revelation. I 87:00made some wonderful, wonderful colleagues and friends from -- out of that whole network. Not the very conservative evangelical crowd, but the people who were really the small C social justice Christians in that sense. So, I have this huge network of people that I know and it's great. So, I come to it with that and I tried to bring in that sensibility and the things I learned from watching my parents and their circle and seeing what's relevant and what's not and kind of seeing how people forget. People forget and if you look at that -- the group of people, I think that you would say some of the people like my parents and their crowd who, at the time, had to fight -- who had to be allowed into Canada because they were Jews and that that was -- it took a while for Canada to admit Jews. But right now, my parents, as former partisans, would be very suspect and 88:00it has nothing to do with being Jewish. But it would be because they were what is now called irregular combatants. Irregular combatants are not very welcome in most Western countries. And there's a great difficulty that people have making a distinction between people who, in very abnormal circumstances, do things that are outside their (makes air quotes) normal -- right? And, it's like the poem, "Roms drukeray [The Rom printing press]," Sutzkever's poem, which sums it up. You take people who were people who were reading books and took the lead from the typeset and made bullets. But that wasn't their idea of a good time. So, how do you distinguish between people like that and people who are quote-unquote terrorists because that's what they do in their life. It's very hard for a lot of governments to make that distinction now. So, when I look at the way some people are judged now, I say, Oh, gee, my parents wouldn't have been admitted 89:00into Canada because they were irregular combatants. They weren't in an army, they weren't wearing a uniform. And people like my parents are now being accused of war crimes in Lithuania. So, what do you do with that? My mother's close friend is on a list. But when you look at that -- and people say, Oh, it's not the same thing. I said, "Well, yeah, it is the same thing. It's the same thing." So, I guess I pull my inspiration from that and then I tried to look at what's going on now. It's foreign -- people will say, Oh, it's much more complicated now. Yeah, it is. It is and it isn't. It's complicated for a lot of different reasons but it's also not in the sense that some people are the ones who are being hit on the head and other people are the ones who are letting it happen.

JK:Yeah.

RA:Anyway, so, yeah, it's -- I do pull it from there. But I think it's become much more than that, yeah. On the other hand, there were times -- I remember 90:00once being in a situation where I realized you can also be dismissed because of that background, because I remember going years ago on -- forget which piece of legislation, going to a Senate committee hearing on a particular piece of legislation. Now, I was there with three other colleagues. We were all there with our organizational hats, I don't -- and we presented our presentations on this legislation and then, as we were leaving and the senators had already left, there was a piece of paper lying on one of the desks. And I was taught by one of my journalist friends that anything that somebody leaves on top of the desk at the end of the day and walks away, you -- is fair game. But the trick is you don't pick it up and start reading it there. You just pick it up and keep going like you're supposed to have it. So, I take this paper and off I go and then I looked at it. And what it was was short notes about each of the presenters, 91:00right? So, with the others, there were notes about what organizations they had been involved in and this -- and then some of it was very political 'cause it was so-and-so who used to belong to this party or the other party. Had nothing to do with the organization they represented, right? And "Rivka Augenfeld is a child of Holocaust survivors." That's what it said. So, even though I was not there for -- I was there for a very big coalition of organizations. But it was like to say -- how I read it, and I think I'm right, is, "Oh, she's sincere but she's very emotional on this issue." It's not like, "I have nothing" -- it's just my background. But there's nothing that one needs to really take account of. So, it works both ways. But you also have to be careful. You have to think through what you're doing and you have to know what you're talking about and you have to have a rational position. And despite that, right now we're living 92:00through tough times because the present minister of immigration decides to respond by just every time somebody criticizes him, he throws out another insult. So, that's where I am right now, trying to remain calm. But I think it's all connected. It's all connected and I think that the Jewish community has to remember where it comes from and whose side it needs to be on. And there isn't that -- the "St. Louis," which was the boat that got turned away at the East Coast in 1939 and other boats that are coming today, there are more similarities than people want to think about.

[END OF INTERVIEW]