EVA RABY ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney. Today is July 10th, 2012. I'm here at the Montreal Jewish Public Library with Eva Raby and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record this interview?

EVA RABY: Yes, you do.

CW: Thank you. So, why don't you tell me the story of your name?

ER: Oh, okay. My name is Eva and my mother, we always spoke Yiddish at home and we come from a very Yiddishist family. And when I went to Jewish school, to a Jewish's People's School, Yiddish folkshul [Yiddish secular school], first day, they said, What is your daughter's Hebrew name? And my mother said, "Her name is Eva. She has only one name. It's Eva. It's in English and Yiddish and it's Eva." 1:00But the name should be Chava. "She's not Chava. Her name is Eva." And they kept going back and back to my mother and she just kept insisting I was not Chava, I was Eva. And finally, in desperation, she says, "She's named after the YIVO and her name is Eva," which was not actually the strict truth. She just was ornery and she didn't want me to be known by any other name. But fifty years later, when YIVO was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary or one anniversary and they were having a huge exhibition of one kind, they asked me to send them my photo because I was one of the children who was named after the YIVO, and who was I to call my mother a liar? (laughs) But that was the story I was always told, so I sent the YIVO my picture and they actually used it, apparently. Somebody said it was there. So, it's Eva, (laughter) in Yiddish, and it's never been Chava. (laughs)

CW: Wow.

ER: Yeah.

CW: So, I'd like to ask a little bit about your family background. Can you tell me what you know about where your family came from?

ER: Well, I've always been very, very aware of where my family is. My maiden name is Roskies but my mother, who was a great storyteller, was born in Vilna and she was the daughter of Fradl Matz, the only child from her second marriage to Yisroel Welczer. And Fradl Matz owned a publishing company and they published a lot of prayer books and materials such as that. But they also published stories and novels in Yiddish. And my mother grew up surrounded by books and we all grew up surrounded by books and my mother always moved in the crowds of all the writers and the artists in Vilna. And when she came to Canada, my parents were great supporters of Yiddish writers in Montreal and I grew up -- I always 3:00said my mother ran the equivalent of a French salon, a literary salon, because any Yiddish writer that ever came to Montreal always ended up visiting our home. And all my parents' friends would come and there'd be readings and recitals and music and singing. Everybody came and it was a very ordinary thing for me. But I realized pretty soon that it was quite special, because when I went to folkshul, the teachers would announce with great pride that this writer was coming and that writer was going to come to say hello to the children. And I would have met them all before, the night before, at my parents' home, so I realized I was in quite a privileged place.

CW: Did you get a sense from your mother's stories of what the life was like in Vilna before the war?

ER: Oh, her personal life, for sure, and yes, the crowds that she moved in. And 4:00she was very good friends with the actors in the Vilner Trupe. My mother was orphaned quite young. She was fifteen when her mother died and nineteen when her father died. And actually, after her mother died, she spent as much time with friends and her brother as she did with her father. So, she was in university for a couple of years. She moved with the student crowd and then, later on, with the artistic crowd. So, she used to tell stories. And also, I grew up with all her photographs. She had albums and albums of the most amazing photographs of these very exciting and dashing-looking actors and actresses with cigarettes dangling from their mouths and it all looked very dramatic. But, on the other hand, although it was very nice to look at them from the outside, this was not a group that I ever actually really wanted to be part of. It was a nice story, but 5:00they sounded like very difficult people (laughs) and not somebody that I'd be wanting to be bosom pals with, although my mother had a wonderful time. And no, it was quite an experience.

CW: Yeah.

ER: Yeah.

CW: So, growing up, were there any particular visitors of the home that you had a relationship with or remember more than others?

ER: Quite a lot. Quite a few, actually. The great Yiddish actress Chayele Grober actually lived in Montreal for quite a long time, so she was a frequent visitor. And then, when I was a student at McGill, Chayele actually directed two student plays, one year after the other, in the Hillel society. And I actually starred in two of them. One of them, I was Leah in "The Dybbuk" and she was the director. And she was an amazing, amazing director, because I may have a flair, 6:00maybe my mother's flair, but I'm no great actress. But the kind of performance that Chayele managed to drag out of me, I still look back thinking, How was this possible? She often used to do readings and declarations. And there was Dora Kowarski and Hertz Grosbard who used to do recitals. With writers, I remember visits from -- Avrom Reyzen came. He was quite an old man. And my brother remembers the story better because my brother is six years younger than I and he was a very little boy speaking Yiddish, which really amazed Avrom Reyzen, who took him on his lap and David called him zeyde [grandfather] and I do remember that day. And Isaac Bashevis Singer actually was the kohen [Hebrew: officiant] at my sister's eldest son's pidyen-aben [redemption ceremony of a first-born son at the age of 30 days]. He happened to be visiting or, I think -- I'm not sure 7:00the exact circumstances because I was in university at the time. But it was very exciting that he was there. Meylekh Ravitch, he was a guest at our table at every yontev [holiday], most Friday nights. So, we grew up -- and Rokhl Korn was my most beloved -- she was just a wonderful woman. She gives the impression of being -- she had this very husky smoker's voice and she had a very -- almost stern demeanor. But she was a very mothering and warm woman, at least to me. And when I was sick once, I must have been about eight years old, seven or eight years old, she actually brought me nylon stockings for my doll with the seam down the back. And I had never received anything like that. And that's the things I remember about Rokhl Korn. So, I guess I remember them in different 8:00ways. And then, I'll never forget when Avrom Sutzkever came to visit Montreal. I was in high school at the time and he -- very charismatic man. I met him several times later, both here and in Israel. But his visit made a great impression, I suppose, on us -- but because everybody else was so excited, as well. Kaczerginski was actually in Montreal. I think that was one of the last cities he visited before he died in the plane crash. And he had been at our home and then he came to school the next day. I was in elementary school at the time and we would sing his songs. And then, I remember very clearly when he died it was a big shock, somebody that I'd actually met had such a tragic end. So, I'm sure there are many more. But I guess those stand out.

CW: Wow.

ER: Yeah. (laughs)

CW: That must have been --

ER: Yeah.

CW: I mean --

ER: I'm a senior citizen now.

CW: No, I mean --

ER: I remember a long time ago. (laughs)

CW: So, was it -- I mean, you mentioned you didn't quite realize until you went to school that these were people that were really famous. So, you were just a kid and --

ER: Well, I realized it was special that I met these people because my classmates didn't. It made it difficult, too, because sometimes kids are kids and they're not respectful enough when visitors come. And they'll talk when people come or they'll make fun of older people. And it would bother me a great deal because, to me, they weren't names. They were actually wonderful human beings whom I met and whom my parents had entertained. And so, I had -- do I react like my friends do or do I react the way I think I should, I want to? (laughs)

CW: Yeah.

ER: So --

CW: Can you describe a little bit about the home you grew up in? Where would 10:00people sit when they came to visit or where were these conversations happening?

ER: Well, until I was nine, we lived in an upper duplex. So, there was one big living room/dining room. I barely remember the whole place. So, I guess the gatherings must have been a bit smaller at the time. But when I was nine, my parents moved into quite a large home and there was this enormous living room/dining room. So, the living room was quite spacious, with seating -- I mean, twenty people, twenty-five people could comfortably sit in the room. When my mother would -- organized an ovnt [evening] for fundraising purposes, she would often, maybe once a year, host a special event. For example, Hertz Grosbard gave a mini-concert. We also had a basement, which was finished, and there was room to sit, I guess -- I don't know, it seemed like a hundred people. 11:00Maybe it was fifty people (laughs) but whatever. And they would do a whole performance. But mostly, it would be in the living room. At the end of the room, in the front of the hall, there was an alcove with bay windows and my mother would have potted plants in front of it. And so, the speaker, the singer, the diseuse, whoever it was would stand there facing this enormously long living room, and sometimes spilling into the dining room behind. And the point of it is, I would see it all from my perch at the top of the staircase hanging over the banister because I was not invited until I was in university and older, or maybe even late high school -- would my mother let me actually attend some of these evenings if I wanted to. So, much of my childhood, I would sort of peek through the banister to see what was happening and watch as the people came in 12:00and then listen and hear. And it was exciting; I knew it was special.

CW: Yeah. And Yiddish was the language of your --

ER: Yes.

CW: -- home and (UNCLEAR).

ER: Yes, I only ever spoke Yiddish with my mother. And I still, to this day, speak with a pure Canadian accent. My grammar is really not very good. My siblings speak perfect Yiddish. Both of them put the -- with the nice accent -- and I still -- I don't. But I understand it perfectly. I'll read it and write it. And with my mother -- I only ever spoke Yiddish with my mother. But sometimes with my father. My parents spoke Yiddish to each other. They also spoke Russian to each other. That was the language they spoke when they didn't want us to understand. Although later on in university, I learned Russian, so I could. (laughs) But amongst ourselves, we spoke in English. To my father mostly, I spoke in English. But with my mother, always in Yiddish, yeah.

CW: Was it a frum [devout] family?

ER: No, no. On the contrary, my parents were -- my father came from a very frum background. But my father, in university, had leanings very much to the Left and very modern. And my parents, I think, were in -- both full revolt against organized religion, although I always say my mother was one of the most religious people I ever knew. She didn't like going to shul. She rarely went to shul. But rabbis from very Orthodox, from the head of the rabbinical council of Montreal to -- mostly Orthodox rabbis, actually, were all very close friends. She used to have deep discussions with them and they gave her counsel and she listened. But anything that was organized, rules, regulations, she was a rebel. 14:00She did not keep kosher. Sometimes blatantly anti-kosher. She could never understand what happened because almost all her children ended up keeping kosher. Most of her grandchildren. My children are dati [Hebrew: religious] now and she could never figure out -- yes, she did figure it out. She thought about it and she says, "It's revolt! That's what it is; it's revolt!" (laughs) And I guess she understood it because she was in revolt all her life. She learned Yiddish -- was her revolt because she spoke Russian at home. And even though they were publishers of religious materials and Yiddish materials, they had a very Russified home. Certainly, her half-sisters, who were actually old enough to be -- some of them were old enough to be her mother, they were all Russian speakers and very much part of the modern culture of the time. And she grew up in a big city, (laughs) not a shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community]. My father came from an observant family. My father went to shul. He 15:00loved going to shul. What we did have was a very traditional home.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ER: My father always spoke Yiddish at home, and Russian, because when my parents -- although my mother was from Vilna, which is now Lithuania, my father from Bialystok, which is now Poland -- they were born in 1905 and both countries were under Russian rule, so they all spoke Russian and that was their first language. And my parents, as I said, always spoke -- if not Yiddish, then Russian to each other. And my father actually spent the First World War -- they ran from the Germans and they ran to Russia and my father spent the First World War in Russia, in Saratov, which is on the Volga, I think, not far from Moscow. And actually, one of the most riveting stories I will always remember is my father 16:00listened and heard both Trotsky and Lenin speak. He was thirteen years old; it was the year of his bar mitzvah. And I remember, I will never forget, he described that when he heard Trotsky, you wanted to follow him to the ends of the Earth. And in fact, my father did become a very active member of the Left (laughs) in his youth. And he said he was just the most riveting speaker and you could never forget him. Lenin, on the contrast, was very pedantic. And he described it like water dripping on a stone. And he just would go on and on, he says. But in the end, you always remembered what Lenin said, and what Trotsky said was very fleeting. So, I always remember that. And as a thirteen-year-old, he remembered -- it's quite amazing now to think it's 2012 and I have memories of my father from the First World War --

CW: Yeah.

ER: -- from the Russian Revolution. It was a very dramatic time for my grandfather, my father's father. He had a pretty successful textile business and they had to run from the Germans, so they had to leave everything behind. I'm not quite sure what they did when they were in Saratov but after the war, they found themselves going back to Bialystok. And my grandfather was blind. He had glaucoma, and at that time you couldn't treat it, so he was losing his eyesight. I think he'd lost his eyesight by that time. On the way back, he had been attacked and robbed, which was a great trauma. Didn't speak for a long time after that, I remember that story. And then, my father, when he matriculated, then he was in high school. He was about, what, fourteen, fifteen? It was Poland. Poland was an independent state, so they had to learn Polish. My father never had -- my mother had a tremendous gift for languages. My mother spoke 18:00eight languages and wrote eight languages fluently. And she would not speak anything unless she could do it well. My father, on the other hand -- although he spoke quite a few himself because living --- in different ways. But it was hard, and his greatest regret his whole life was that he never could learn French, which is funny because he lived in Romania for six years and I think he did end up speaking a little bit of Romanian. And here, he came to Quebec at the end and French was always difficult for him. So anyway, he had to learn Polish and he had to learn it. And he learned it by memorizing poetry. And then, he went to Vilna to study. He went to get his master's degree -- well, his undergraduate, I think, and graduate degree at Stefan Batory University in Vilna and that's where he met my mother. But my mother, at that time, was interested in somebody else. They were just great friends. They were always best friends, 19:00which, I think, maybe is the best way to have a marriage, is to be really good friends (laughs) first.

CW: Yeah.

ER: And -- yeah.

CW: And how did they end up in Canada, in Montreal?

ER: Oh, it's very dramatic. It's a sad thing because my father's love was chemistry. And in the beginning, he worked in the rubber industry, first at a factory in Krasne, in Poland. When they got married, they lived in Krasne, next to Vilna. It was like a little backward backwater and was very difficult for my mother. And they had two children in Krasne. And then, after about -- oh, I can't remember how many years -- they moved to Romania, to Czernowitz, which was then under Romanian rule. Now it's part of Ukraine, Moldova. My mother mostly 20:00spoke German because most of the Yiddish -- there was a big Jewish community, a Yiddishist community there, which -- my parents became part of that circle. They spoke German, mostly. And unfortunately, their younger child, their younger daughter, she was almost three, she died, probably from meningitis, 'cause my mother said she just burned up of a fever. There were no antibiotics or anything at the time. And my sister was born a year later. And then, the war was coming. There's been a famous Roskies family story: in 1938, for Pesach, the entire family -- my father was the youngest of four brothers, and there was a sister as well. And they all went back to Bialystok for Pesach. And my grandfather, my 21:00blind grandfather, said, "There's a war coming. You have to get out of Europe." And he said, "You go to Canada," because they were in the textile business and he said, "It's a cold country. They're gonna need wool, they're gonna need blankets, they're gonna need coats. You go to Canada. And go now." And two of my cousins had already studied in Leeds and in England, textiles. And they went. They came to Montreal. Then, my two eldest uncles went. My second uncle, his wife and daughters did not want to leave. They had the good life in Poland and they wanted to stay, and they actually got trapped in Europe, although they did manage to escape in the end. And my parents were in Czernowitz. And my father and one of his brothers went to the World's Fair in France in 1938 and never 22:00went back. And they just went on to Canada. And then, my father, he knew a lot of people in the government because he was running the first and only rubber plant in Romania. We actually have a medal that was given to my father from the king of Romania for his work. And he had an arrangement that when they knew that the Russians were coming, 'cause they were more worried about the Russians being so-called capitalists -- and that's another thing, my father could never get over the fact that here he had been all for the workers his whole youth, but most of his working life, he was management. But at the end of his life, he went for a walk with my husband one day and he said the thing he was proudest of in his life was he was in charge -- they owned here, the whole family owned a woolen factory -- and he said his proudest achievement was in all the years he 23:00was the labor manager, he was the one in charge of labor, they'd never had a strike. And in fact, I've met people from the labor unions who had known my father and they adored him. So, I guess what he learned listening to Trotsky led whatever there --- (laughs) some things -- the good parts, I think, stuck. Anyway, he was in Bucharest, and he got a call one day from this friend who was on the border saying the Russians are coming. He called my mother and he said, "You pack everything and you get out today." And my mother packed everything. In fact, there's family lore of the things that were left behind by accident. But I don't know if it was accident, but accident. And she packed up -- the nanny, the 24:00two kids, her two kids, who were nine and four, they were nine and four -- and took the last train that left Czernowitz that day for Bucharest. My mother, she said it was an absolutely empty train. There was nobody on that train except for the four of them. And my father was in Bucharest. She met my father in Bucharest. It took my father several weeks still to get papers. And my parents actually left Europe with papers for Paraguay, although his family, at that point, his three brothers and three nephews were at that time already in Montreal. They'd gone in the last year and a half. But they ended up on this Greek ship. My mother, I'm gonna backtrack, 'cause my mother was the great storyteller. Every day of my life, my mother never worked. And we came home for 25:00lunch. We had an hour and a half for lunch in those days and no matter where my school was, we were home for lunch and my mother had us all to herself. And really, she had each of us alone because there's six years between each of us. So, we each had our time, which was great and it was bad. (laughs) But she was a storyteller and she would regale us with stories through all these lunch periods, which is why we know so much. I've forgotten quite a lot. David is the one who really remembers most of these stories. I think he made a conscious effort to write a lot of it down. But although she was the storyteller, my father was not. He was very quiet. But I think I'm more, in terms of the things I'm interested in life and the things that fascinate me, I think in that sense I was probably more like my father. And once my mother was in New York, visiting her brother, her half brother who had actually left -- he'd left his wife and Europe behind in 1912 and had gone to New York. And once they came to North 26:00America, she would see him from time to time. And she was away, just overnight, and I sat one afternoon alone with my father and he told me about the time they left and what happened. And even though they had money and they had their things, they were still escaping in a war zone. They went through Bulgaria and down through the Balkans to Greece. And in Athens, they boarded, I don't know what. They boarded an Italian ship, I think. I'm not sure. They boarded a ship in Athens and he always told us the story that they had to land in Italy. When they landed in Italy, these Italian soldiers came on and they were all armed to the teeth and in crisp uniforms and very officious and they went through 27:00everybody's papers. And they went through everybody, but they never took a single person off the ship. Then, they hit Gibraltar and the British soldiers sauntered on in shorts and not armed, very casual, but they took a lot of people off the ship. They stuck to the rules. But my parents had these papers to Paraguay and they ended up in Portugal, in Lisbon. And while they were in Lisbon, my father spent a lot of time trying to get his papers changed to go to Canada and, in fact, ended up succeeding. He almost didn't succeed 'cause his health was not too great. He had colitis, suffered a lot from colitis. His eyesight wasn't so great and he tells the story that they were at this doctor who was going to either pass them or not pass them. And he was there with the family and the doctor looked at my sister, who was four years old at the time and blue-eyed and cute as a button. And the doctor says, "I have a granddaughter 28:00just like your daughter. For the sake of your daughter, go." And gave them the papers. So, they were on this -- they boarded -- that's when they boarded this Greek ship that was going to Ellis Island, to New York. And then, from New York, my parents would go to Canada. And the ship that they were on was sunk, was torpedoed and sunk on its return voyage to Europe. So, that's how fragile things were. My parents arrived in October 1940. My parents and my siblings were amongst the five thousand, only five thousand Jews -- landed in Canada during the war years. And they were part of it. But my mother was eternally grateful to Canada. We were never allowed to say one bad thing about the country. My mother voted and every time she could vote, she taught us civics. She taught us, You 29:00are so lucky. My father, too. And my father said that he decided he was not going to Paraguay. Had he gone to Paraguay, he probably could have built up a big business and probably would have been happier because my father, as I said, was a chemist. He wanted to be in chemistry. And he ended up back in the textile business like his siblings. This was not what he wanted out of life, but he was in the family business. But he said, I didn't want to live again in a dictatorship and whatever. (laughs) So, that's how we were in Canada. And I was born here. I was born in Canada and my younger brother, as well. And my name is Eva because I was my mother's firstborn child in Canada. I was the start of her new life and she felt that she was renewed. She didn't think she would have any more children at that point. She was in her late thirties when I was born and in her early forties when my brother was born. And so, that's why I'm Eva. 30:00(laughter) 'Cause I could have been Victoria and I could have been Balfouria because I was born on the twenty-fifth anniversary to the day of the Balfour Declaration. And I was also born on the week that Rommel suffered his first defeats at El Alamein. So, that's why it could have been Victoria and it could have been Balfouria, so I'm very grateful that it ended up being Eva. (laughter)

CW: And what was it like -- we talked a little bit about your home, but what was it like growing up in Montreal, such a -- now we see it as such a unique city, Jewishly, compared to New York, having a later immigration and --

ER: Yeah.

CW: -- and that. So, what was it like growing up?

ER: Well, my mother had these three sisters, very formidable. The four ladies 31:00that those four brothers married were each very formidable in their own right and quite competitive and very different, one from the other. And so, my mother made it her business to move as far away as possible from the others and carved out -- so, she moved to a section of the city where the others did not live and she also chose to send us to a Yiddish-speaking school, to a Yiddish folkshul, which was Labor Zionist, which in those days had a meaning. If anything, my parents were Labor Zionist. My father actually had wanted to go to Israel, to move to Palestine, but my mother, (laughs) from a big city, she was not going to be a pioneer. So, we went to the Yiddish folkshul, which was -- I went to the elementary school. And when we did our Jewish studies, we did them in Yiddish 'cause all the teachers spoke to us in Yiddish. That was a gift. I think that's 32:00one of the greatest educational gifts that I ever had because those teachers, in any other life, would have been -- they were university-caliber teachers or they were writers. They were all survivors. Some of them shouldn't have been teachers. They were wonderful writers, wonderful people, but did not know how to be teachers and they suffered for it. But some of them were the most wonderful educators. We were really, really lucky.

CW: Did you have a favorite teacher?

ER: Lerer [teacher] Dunsky, Shimshon Dunsky. He was the vice-principal of the school. I'm the one sibling, actually -- my background is not literature. My field is history and my love of it came from, I'm sure, lerer Dunsky. And he taught me that history is he who writes it. And the same history, you look at it 33:00from this point of view, it reads like this. You look at it from another point of view, it's gonna read like that, and you have to figure out -- how do you figure out what happened, what really happened? Well, two or three things may have happened at the same time. And he was the first one to make me see it that way and it gave me a love and a passion for it. The principal of the school was Shloime Wiseman and he was a much more stern person. And he actually was never my teacher until high school, although I didn't go to high school full-time. I went to the afternoon school for two years in high school and he was our teacher then. And he was a wonderful teacher, as well. But I think the one that really made the biggest impression was lerer Dunsky. And so, we learned Yiddish in school. So, we learned the grammar, we learned to speak properly. And with me, it stuck more because we spoke Yiddish at home. Those of my classmates who no longer spoke Yiddish at home, I think it didn't mean as much or it didn't have 34:00as lasting effect. And I think when David, who's six years younger, went it was still the same. And I think pretty much after that, everything started to change. I think when that generation of teachers left, Leybl Tencer came on and he was -- I never had him as a teacher but I knew him, of course, obviously, as a great friend and a wonderful man. And I think he was also a very great teacher and -- because I think he was at Peretz Shule, so -- the sister school and the two schools later merged.

CW: Can you just --

ER: Yeah, and that's --

CW: -- a little --

ER: -- but that was my father, actually. My father was very, very involved. We talk a lot about my mother, but my father was very actively involved in the school. He was president of the school at one point and he was so beloved that when he died, they actually named the library in the high school which he helped 35:00create -- he fought very long and hard to create the high school. He was very responsible for the merger of the two schools, creation of the high school, so the library was named after him and it's about the only thing that was named in the school not for donations but to honor somebody. So, (laughs) we feel very proud about that.

CW: Wow.

ER: Yeah.

CW: Yeah. Can you explain a little bit of how there ended up being Yiddish schools in Montreal? Not all cities with large Jewish populations at that time --

ER: Yeah.

CW: -- were able to have Yiddish schools. Do you know any of how that --

ER: My siblings could probably tell you much more. David, especially. But it is the largest immigration that came, I think, after the First World War was from 36:00Eastern Europe, was Yiddish-speaking. In fact, at one point after English and French, Yiddish was the most widely spoken language in Montreal. And there were huge swathes --- I've met, subsequently, people -- not too many but a few people, French Canadians and non-Jewish people who know a lot of Yiddish because they grew up on streets where everybody was speaking Yiddish. (laughs) So, that was the language they learned. And I think a great deal of it was because of Yehuda Kaufman and Reuben Brainin, who lived in Montreal for a very short period but were very dynamic people. They founded both the Jewish People's Schools and the Jewish Public Library. They came and the people who were here, the Yiddish-speaking people here, many of them, they could have been tailors and cobblers and factory workers. But they loved to read and to write and they 37:00wanted a place to read and to talk about the books that they were reading and to hear these speakers, to hear the writers speak, and to meet them. And so, the library formed. It's almost a hundred years, in 1914, in a small building in the center of the Yiddish-speaking community. And they were determined. Most of them, I think, the culture was their religion, really. They were not observant. My parents, I think, were probably more traditional than others. I mean, all the holidays -- Friday night was sacrosanct. All the holidays, we kept -- (laughs) was gonna say religiously. Maybe not so religiously, but we kept them. But not the laws. The rules and regulations, no. And maybe that's why it stuck with us more than a lot of my other classmates, because a lot of the other ones were not 38:00observant. So, the Yiddish and the culture was their religion. And so, they poured everything they had into it and they built institutions. People who built this library, they -- this was a volunteer library till, I think, the end of the '40s. I think it was Rokhl Eisenberg, who was later married to Ravitch, who was the first paid librarian of the library because it was run all by volunteers. And it was called the People's University, too. It was called the Jewish Public Library and People's -- and Folks Universitet, because at that time, Jews were not allowed into universities and many of them couldn't, even if they were allowed, they just couldn't afford to, they had to work, but they wanted to learn. And they learned in the library and they sent their kids to the folkshul. And the people who taught were their friends and the people who just came and 39:00this was their mission in life and their love and their passion. And also, Montreal was not a melting pot. It was never a melting pot because of the two distinct cultures. The other cultures -- most of the minorities in Montreal have very much retained their own ethnic identity: the Italians, the Greeks, the Portuguese. Everybody, because you don't really merge. Now --

CW: Right, 'cause there's French and English there, yeah.

ER: That's right. And the school system, it was a confessional school system until about fifteen years ago. It was, you went to the Catholic or to the Protestant. At one time, I think the Jews had an opportunity to have a Jewish school board, but they didn't want it. I think they didn't want to stand out. Or the majority didn't. There were people, obviously, who would have liked it. And the Jews, willy-nilly, had to end up in the Protestant system and that's why 40:00they ended up in the English system, because the Protestant system was mostly the English system. The Italians, on the other hand, who were Catholic, ended up in the Catholic schools and were much more integrated into the fabric of the French society. Now, the schools, it's language, by language. It's English and French and if you're an immigrant, you've got to go into the French stream. And my mother always thought it was crazy. My mother spoke beautiful French, fluent French, and my mother didn't speak English. My parents spoke neither language. Did they care? (laughs) That was the way the province ran at the time. It was a lost opportunity for a generation that -- so, willy-nilly, the Jewish community ended up speaking English and more involved -- not that the Protestants were that enamored (laughs) with the Jew-- and they did business -- I think the Jews had an easier time doing business with the French, almost, than the English.

CW: Yeah.

ER: But I think that's why -- that's another reason, probably the chief reason why --

CW: Yeah.

ER: -- not only it was created, but why it lasted so long.

CW: Yeah.

ER: Yeah.

CW: Just keep your hand --

ER: Yeah.

CW: -- away from the mike, please, if you don't mind. (laughs) All right, I want to turn now to the Montreal Jewish Public Library.

ER: Okay.

CW: First, do you remember it as a child? Did you come here --

ER: It's interesting that you say, because we didn't live that far from the library but it wasn't our next door, around the corner library. As a child, I personally, actually used to get on the streetcar. From the time I was nine years old, I'd get on a streetcar every Saturday morning and go with my friend downtown. I mean, I can't imagine sending a kid alone and doing these things, but we used to go to the Montreal Children's Library, which was downtown, and 42:00come home with shopping bags full of books, because those were the books we were interested in. I actually, as a child, did not use the library. But the library has always been part of my life because my parents were so involved in the library. And they were always going to programs run by the library. I probably went to some of the programs there. But unlike a lot of our friends now, like Rivka Augenfeld and Chana Gonshor and the whole crowd whose parents were also so involved, they lived and breathed the library. Maybe they lived a little bit closer but I did not, at the time, use it as a child. I used other libraries. (laughs)

CW: Yeah.

ER: But libraries have always been my passion. I've never lived in a home that wasn't a library. Our house was ceiling to floor -- not every room, but many 43:00rooms full of books. I always say it's in the blood, my grandmother being a publisher. So, some of my siblings ended up writing them and I ended up being a librarian. But books were always very important.

CW: And so, how did you come to work here?

ER: Well, it's very interesting. Because my parents, this was their whole life -- as my mother said, "Revolt." And my sister was so involved in Yiddish literature and later my brother, history, as I said -- literature is not my field. History is my passion and that's what I studied in university and that's what I did my postgraduate degree in. And then, I didn't want to teach. I wanted to be a librarian and I did not want to be in the family business. I wanted to 44:00go my own way. And in fact, when I came back to Montreal, I worked at McGill University for about fifteen, sixteen years. I worked not even in history. I ended up working in the commerce and business libraries. I ended up being the head of the social work library for many, many years. Then, I stopped working a little bit for a year or two when my children were very, very small. And then, I worked part-time in a college library and the reference desk. And my daughter was going to be going into grade one and I sort of wanted to work a little bit more. And one day, I saw an ad in the paper for the head of the newly-created children's library of the Jewish Public Library. There had always been a children's library but never a professional librarian running it. Actually, my first work in the library was at the boys and girls library of the National 45:00Council of Jewish Women when I was in university. It was my summer job. It was my Sunday job during the winter and my summer job for about two years and that's where I knew I really loved doing that. And it was a children's library. And that library, oddly enough, ended up going to the Y and then becoming part of the Jewish Public Library's collection. And the lady who ran that was the lady, a volunteer whom I worked under when I was a student. So, she was not a professional librarian. She was a wonderful woman and very gifted but when she retired, they decided they were going to make it a full-time library, hire a full-time professional children's librarian to run the library, and really build up the children's library. And there was an ad in the paper and I decided, I'm going to give it a try. It's a full-time job. I think by that time, jobs were not so easy to find. I was not going back to the university; they were cutting 46:00back there. I figured, I'll give it a try, so I called. And the director at that time was Shimshon Dunsky's daughter, Zipporah Dunsky-Shnay, whom I knew. She was older than I, but I had always known her, obviously. And I said, "Look, I'm a good librarian. I have run small libraries," I said, "but I have never been a children's librarian. I don't know anything other than the fact that I'm a mother and I read to my kids. I know nothing, really, about children's literature or anything like that. But here I am. I think I could do a good job." But she hired me, and she just handed me this library. And I had the wonderful opportunity, really, to build it up. And I didn't know anything about programming, I didn't know anything about storytelling, and I realized right away that there was one Sunday morning -- I always tell the story and I told the 47:00story because the lady who did the program for thirty-three years, the Sunday morning program for children, is a woman, Claire Berger. And when I started, she was a very young woman. She had only started a few years before. And when I came into that library, there was nobody ever there. I was there all afternoon, all morning. Nobody ever walked in. It was great for me 'cause I really ended up -- first of all, I had to re-catalogue the whole place. I ended up learning the collection, but nobody ever walked in. We were in the basement and I said, What's going on? I mean, this is ridiculous. And then came the first Sunday. And the first Sunday, there was this program and suddenly the place was flooded with kids taking out books. The place was hopping. And I realized nobody knows we exist and unless you have programs and ways of bringing people in and having a gathering-place and making it an exciting place to come to, they're not going to 48:00come. They'll take out the books if you introduce them to the books, if you get them excited about the books, if you get them excited about story. But they're not gonna come -- and then, I was very lucky because there was a -- they only had it twice. It was a children's literature conference held in New York, two years apart, run by the Children's Book Council of New York, for anybody who had anything to do with children and children's literature. So, you had the writers, you had the illustrators, you had the storytellers. Then, you had the librarians, you had the schoolteachers, anybody. Anybody who had anything to do -- and I heard Sendak and Lobel and [Karmeyer?] and all of these great, great writers. And I knew I had to do storytelling, a story time. The most terrifying thing I have ever done in my whole life was I was doing -- summer bedtime 49:00stories was gonna be my first one. I was just reading the stories with putting up the book and reading. I was so terrified. Everybody, all my colleagues, they sort of kept away from me. My husband and my brother-in-law threatened to come in their pajamas. It was pajama stories. They threatened to come in their pajamas. I was so scared. But then, it happened, and I just found out it really clicked with everything that I ever was. I found out I loved this connection with the story and the kids. But then, what I found is that the book almost became a barrier because you had to look here, you looked there, you look, and I wanted to keep and elicit the reaction. So then, when I went to this conference, I said to Zipporah, "I really would like to learn how to do storytelling." And these were young children. They were three years old and two years old. So, she sent me and it was really revving up the batteries, and I learned storytelling 50:00from the greatest -- like Diane Wolkstein was there the first year and Nina Jaffe and all these people who later on wrote their own books and became very well known. And it really turned me on to storytelling. And I would go to conferences. I was lucky that I was sent to a lot of the -- the American Library Association was starting then all kinds of programs for babies, two-year-olds, later one-year-olds, later infants. And before every conference -- and I think the ALA conference is probably the best for the children's stream. And then, they had pre-conferences where I'd go for a day and learn how to do programs for those age groups. And I started doing that kind of -- I wasn't the first to do for the two-year-olds because the Côte Saint-Luc Public Library, which is one of the municipal libraries, had started doing a program for two-year-olds and 51:00moms. But they only allowed the children to be registered for a six-week period because the demand was so great and then they couldn't repeat because somebody else had to have a chance. So, a whole group of mothers who came and they said, Look, we're a group, we want to do it, can we meet at your library? So, the first semester, actually, they met without me. But then, they wanted to do it again. I said, Wait a second, if they're using my facilities, they're using my room, I'm the one who better do it. So, I better learn how to do it, and that's why I started doing it. And I started doing more programming for that age group and for the babies. And in fact, I started doing workshops for other people in Montreal, to do this, and bringing in the people from whom I had learned. I brought them here to do workshops. So, those were the greatest years as the children's librarian, for seventeen years. And at the end, I, myself was doing 52:00about five programs a week, and the summer -- and going around doing storytelling. During Jewish Book Month, I'd go out to do -- I'd bring in authors. We brought in the greatest authors. Anybody who was anybody came to the library. But then, I would also go and do storytelling and I loved it. But before every single time, I always had butterflies. I'm going to finish the story: that very first time, it was fantastic. The minute it started, no problem, because thing is, if you can engage the kids, it's the best thing. They are the most direct. They give back more than what you give. But if you lose them, oh my gosh, (laughs) you're in big trouble, but I guess I was able to do it. And my husband came to pick me up and he came with my daughter, who was about seven at the time. And they were going down the stairs and there was 53:00actually a father and child. And they were coming up the stairs and the little boy says, "You're too late for story time." He's, "You're too late." And so, my husband said, "But how was story time?" And before the kid could say a word, the father said, "It was wonderful!" And that's always been, because the parents loved it as much as the kids did. And I think that was one of the big -- if I feel I did any contribution to the library, actually, that was it, because it was bringing in the kids but it was bringing in the parents. And those parents are the ones that are now involved in the library. From that, those parents became officers of the library. Some of them became president of the library. They became the fundraisers for the family. And they came because you -- did 54:00program. And then, they came so much, in such numbers, and the library grew -- that we expanded. We expanded first on the basement level. It was really great. And then, when the whole building was renovated, the community actually asked if we could have the children's library upstairs because this is an office building, in essence, and the children's programs is what brings life to the building. And they wanted people to see families coming in and out. They didn't want them disappearing into a basement. So, that's what happened. And when I became the director, I hired the most marvelous children's librarian who has gone even further. And she's not only kept for the younger, but she's continued and developed a lot of programs that we'd started for older kids, too. And now, she's started a lot for teens, so that's what you have to keep doing. So, that's how I started and I started 'cause I wanted a job and I wanted to be a 55:00children's librarian. Not necessarily a Jewish children's librarian, but here I was at the Jewish Public Library and obviously -- and what was interesting is that the collection policy of the library -- simply for economics because we can't buy everything -- so, approximately seventy-five percent of the budget goes towards the purchase of Judaic materials, on the adults, and twenty-five percent is general interest and literature and stuff like that. But in the children's library, it's the reverse. About seventy-five percent is the children -- because the mandate of the children's library was to provide for all the needs of the children: their educational, cultural, recreational, and all their reading needs, in five languages. But the Judaic part, even though it's twenty-five percent, is very comprehensive. And especially at the beginning 56:00because there wasn't that much for kids. And now, that's been a wonderful thing to see, how Judaic publishing, Jewish publishing for children has just flourished. And it's wonderful to see the stuff that's available. I didn't have that till I found -- that's why I started creating things and adapting stories so I could tell it Jewishly. When it would come to Shavuos or something like that, I would take these crazy stories and adapt it to some way that it could be a Shavuos story, it could be a --

CW: Can you give an example?

ER: Oh, I'm not sure. I remember telling the, for the birthday of the almond tree -- is one I did for Tu B'Shevat because -- I couldn't find books on it for Shavuos, for what they used to call the minor --- Sukkot -- they used to call the minor Jewish holidays. Well, maybe it's not like Christmas -- or Hanukkah is 57:00big because it's the same time as Christmas, but it's not one of the major, major Jewish holidays. Things like Sukkot, there was never anything. So, anything about Thanksgiving kind of stories, I'd adapt it. And I'd do a lot of flannel board stories, 'cause for the little ones, I couldn't tell -- when they're one and two-year-olds, you can't just tell the story. You have to have some objects, you have to have something visual for them to focus on. So, I would adapt a whole bunch of stories on flannel board. And that's how I started. Actually, I developed a Yiddish -- there was a demand. Usually, what you do is you evolve according to people's needs. And eventually, we were telling stories to babies. Why? Because here, mothers have one-year maternity leave. So, the mothers wanted to be with their kids and they program those kids from the time they're born. And one of the best programs, I think, is here in the library with 58:00the story time for babies. And it's wonderful. First of all, it's a social activity for them, the mothers, to meet each other and there've been some great friendships formed. It's also informational because libraries are -- information center and there's a lot of counseling and discussion and then we did a lot of parenting programs according to what questions for -- the parents had. And this first year, they wanted to do things -- so, we did baby programming, so to tell stories for a baby and to keep their interest for twenty minutes or a half an hour. And you better have it (claps) like one, two, three. So, I started evolving it and at one point, there was a group of mothers who wanted, for their kids in Yiddish, Chana Gonshor. A lot of the families said -- slightly younger than I, had very young children, and they wanted -- so, I started to adapt Eric 59:00Carle in Yiddish and all these things in Yiddish. And I don't know, do you want me to talk about --

CW: Yeah, sure.

ER: -- my Kinder Klangen, because I'll tell you what happened. One day, Zipporah, the director, she came, she said, "There's a government grant from Multiculturalism Canada. I think this is good for you." And she plunks it down and it was for programs on multicultural languages and projects to help sustain multicultural communities. And so, I looked at it and I put it on my table and I forgot all about it. And then, one day, I looked at it, I said, Oh, my gosh. And the deadline was about a week away and I had been doing my storytelling and I used to do -- I'd sing a little bit, but mostly I'd do storytelling. But I had a music class with Sandy Kogut. And she used to do all the singing and she had 60:00wanted to do a recording. She did some recordings of her own of children's songs and she wanted to do something. But then I thought, No, I'm gonna to use it for my Yiddish storytelling because I didn't have books, I didn't have materials. So, I wrote up this whole project to develop things for kids, for Yiddish. And I sent it off and I needed support materials. I think my sister, who was chair of the Yiddish department in McGill, wrote me a little thing and somebody else in the school wrote me something that, Yes, it could be very helpful 'cause the -- classes used to come here. And I sent it off. I wrote it in two days or three days, (laughs) not more than a week and I sent it off. And one day, weeks and weeks later, Zipporah comes down with an envelope from the government and she gives it to me and she thinks this is something. I opened it up and I'm looking 61:00and I say, "Oh, it's very nice. It looked like I got fifteen hundred dollars to do the programs." Then, I looked at the ch-- I read the letter first, or I looked at it and I thought it was fifteen hundred dollars and I read the letter and it said fifteen thousand dollars. (gasps) And at that time, this was in the '80s. I mean, fifteen thousand dollars, this was huge, huge. I was running around the place like, Look what I got, look what I got! Well, so I started buying books and translating them into Yiddish and typing it up and putting it over -- and it's very complicated because the book is going one way but the Yiddish is read the other way and how do you do it? Then, I started, so I said, Okay, I'd better develop more tools with flannel boards and storytelling. So, I did that. I did so many things and I couldn't spend the money. So, I spent a few hundred dollars. I didn't even spend a thousand dollars. I couldn't spend the 62:00money. I didn't know what I was gonna do and I figured I have to have a product. And then, I was talking to Sandy, she says, "Let's do a Yiddish holiday songbook," 'cause we had already done a tape together where I told stories and she did songs. It was called "Tunes and Tales," nothing Jewish about it, but it was a great tape. And I said, "Sure." So, we developed this. Janie Respitz helped us with it. She did a lot of research on the songs she found to -- sung, so she found some of the music. And we developed this Kinder Klangen and the fifteen thousand dollars pretty much covered -- and we recorded it in a professional recording studio. All the music is one man on a synthesizer doing all the music on different tracks. He did it on about eight tracks, the whole deal, wearing the big earphones and it was very exciting. I'd never done it. I'm not a singer. Sandy, professional voice, yeah. I did the best I could. And we 63:00did this tape and then we did the whole PR and we got -- this little boy was one of the boys in my class. His father was the musical director of this production. He's probably in university at this point. (laughs) And we did it and it was for children and their families. We said it's for kids from sort of eighteen months to eighty years or whatever. And in fact, that's the way it's been used. My husband just met a teacher from Jewish People's School, JPPS, who said, "Tell your wife thank you again for this tape. I use it all the time in all my classes. It's the best." There was one young teacher in Australia who discovered it and every year, I mailed off ten tapes at a time, twelve tapes at a time to Australia. We had a cult following in Australia for this. And my grandchildren, 64:00bobe [grandmother] Eva's in the back of their car, singing to them, and it's been -- that's the way, actually, I've been able to pass on a little bit of Yiddish, even to the grandchildren, is through this and the songs. But I brought it to my mother, and she was quite older at the time. She really liked the part that we did -- one part was where I'm adapting English nursery rhymes to Yiddish and it's sort of playful, it's the -- more doing an activity and washing clothes and eating and all that kind of stuff. The other tape is holiday tapes. And it is holiday songs and when some of the holiday songs -- my mother, I think it triggered something in her past and her sisters were professional singers. And I don't think I cut the mustard and she got a little bit upset. (laughs) So, I figured, Okay, and -- I had enough positive feedback from others -- it was interesting.

CW: Yeah, yeah.

ER: Yeah, but it did what it was supposed to. Anyway, that's one of the things I think I'm quite pleased about. Yiddish is now -- the people, the community that speaks Yiddish now is the Hasidic community. And the Yiddish books that are published are more the religious texts and most of them are the Hebrew religious texts that are translated into Yiddish, into very bad Yiddish. I didn't even want to buy them 'cause they were poorly illustrated and poorly written, poorly translated. So, in Yiddish -- and the secular stuff, they're not interested in, or many of them are not. Although a few years ago, there was a Yiddish festival, theater festival here, and I was asked to do a Yiddish program for the kids, which I did. It's harder to do, it's very hard to do that, 'cause as I said, to this day, before I ever do anything, I have such butterflies that it's not worth 66:00the -- and I know that the day I don't have butterflies is the day I better stop because it's the adrenaline that gives you that kind of energy that's needed. And people were interested in it, but somebody else is gonna have to do it because I don't have that --

CW: So, when did the Hasidic community start coming to the library? Has it always been --

ER: Oh, it's always --

CW: -- always been?

ER: Always. This is a commun-- first of all, they live around here. There's the Rabbinical College and Beth Rivkah is right down the street and there's huge community that -- and those who use the library most heavily are actually people who live in the area. So, it's the seniors who are here a lot, all the time. Well, the children's library is used a lot by non-Jewish communities. I mean, I've gone through -- depending on what the ethnic community, from Sri Lankan to Pakistani to Greek to -- depends who lives in the area because the children's 67:00library, as I said, was a complete library and a very good one. The collection was really excellent. But the Orthodox community -- and a lot of the Rabbinical College and Beth Rivkah are also -- bal-tshuve [non-practicing Jew who become religiously observant], so they -- and a lot of them are Americans who came here as arranged marriages and they used the public libraries in the States. And they're big readers. They don't watch TV. They read a lot. And the children's library, most of it -- and they love most of the books. And the kids, most of the time, they would ask if they were worried about, Is this a book I should read or shouldn't read? They sometimes come, Should I read this? Should I not? I don't like to -- when I went to library school, we were taught you don't tell people you do this or do this because librarians have a position of authority 68:00and you want people to make their own decisions and have their own choice. So, we'd usually -- sometimes, I would know and I would say, Maybe not this time. But most often, I'd say, You know, mayb-- or if I wasn't sure, I'd say, I'd show it to your mom, and they did. They did. Every once in a while, I used to get a kick out of it 'cause the boys sometimes, I think the boys, the rules on boys, what they read, was much more stringent. A lot of it probably 'cause they didn't want them wasting their time on anything else except religious study. But a lot of the boys would come and they'd do their reading after school. And they'd read the martial arts books on martial arts and I used to feel sad, 'cause I figured, Jeez, they must have a lot of things to deal with on their walks to and from school. And mysteries: the Hardy Boys and stuff like that, they loved stuff like that. Every once in a while, they'd want to know more about, Where did I come from and stuff like that and they'd find those books too. Those books, boys and 69:00sex and girls and sex, those books were always disappearing from the shelf. I learned just to buy paperback copies because they were always disappearing. The only phone call I ever got from an irate mother was her son, who was eleven, had picked up these books. And so, I started speaking. She said, "I'm a nurse," she says, "so I know" -- I said, "Okay, I mean, he doesn't have to read it. But if I take it off the shelf, nobody else can read it either." Then it disappeared. (laughs)

CW: Oh, no!

ER: Yeah.

CW: Oh, no!

ER: People do their own censorship.

CW: Yeah.

ER: Yeah. (laughter)

CW: Right. I just want to check how we're doing. Okay, great.

ER: I talk a lot --

CW: No, no.

ER: -- once you get me revved up, then --

CW: It's great. (laughter) Well, I just want to zoom out for a second. Can you just tell me a little bit about -- you mentioned five languages here at the library.

ER: Yes.

CW: And can you just give a little introduction to the library?

ER: I'd like to --

CW: Yeah.

ER: -- because the official languages, they were actually four, was the English, 70:00French, Yiddish, and Hebrew, which were always -- well, initially, it was Yiddish. And for many years, it was mostly a Yiddish collection. And in fact, one of the most difficult times I had in getting this library to grow and to do fundraising was this perception of the library as just for Yiddish-speaking Montrealers. Much of our community now is Sephardic and they're people who have nothing to do with Yiddish. And to show them that the library has grown, too, and has evolved and Yiddish will always be there at the core -- I mean, if we don't do it and we don't have the programming, who's gonna do it? But we have other things. I'm sorry.

CW: No, it just --

ER: Where am I going on this? (laughs)

CW: Oh, we're just giving a little of a -- introduction about the library in general.

ER: Oh, the languages. The languages. So then, as I said, it was the People's 71:00University, so everybody wanted to learn French. So, there were -- evolution of books in French. And then, the French community grew, and so we buy a lot -- it's still not used as much, also because the French community came mostly from Morocco. It's a different culture. No culture of use of public libraries, because that's not how they grew. They're much more of an oral tradition than a written. And actually, it's a generation later, it's through coming to the programs, it's through going through the system, they've become very much merged, and now they're as big readers as everybody else. The Hebrew, because a big Israeli community, and we always had the religious texts. We're the Jewish Public Library and this forum and stuff, but a lot more literature because of demand. I mean, we're always meeting demand. And then, in the late '70s, when 72:00the big Russian immigration came, the Russian -- it's the same group that came -- Yiddish speaking fifty years earlier, two generations earlier, are still the big readers. And that's when I was in the children's library and my brother had gone to Moscow for six months to teach. And everything had just opened up and my mother donated a few thousand dollars, I think it was two thousand dollars to the library for the purchase of Russian books. So, I gave my brother a mission to order two thousand dollars worth of Russian books. Not Jewish. If he can find Jewish, fine, but didn't have to be. For that two thousand dollars, oh my goodness, we could receive several hundreds of books. And that's how the Russian collection started. We have a librarian, we used to have two, we have now one who is Russian speaking. The Russian community is -- very heavy users and a lot 73:00of them love to be able to speak Russian. The English and French were hard for them. Sometimes, I'd end up speaking Yiddish to them 'cause my Yiddish is still better than my Russian. (laughs) But so, that's how actually Russian became one of the bigger languages. We do have books in many other languages. There's a German Judaica collection. It's actually a very fine collection by German Jewish authors which was built, actually, by a professor in the pharmaceutical department at McGill. That was his passion and he donated it to the library. I don't know if it's all even catalogued yet, but I know that we have one German scholar who needed some books and actually found something that she desperately needed. She says, "You know, the only other copy I ever saw was in Dresden." (laughs)

CW: Wow.

ER: Okay? (laughs) And then, we have the odd memoirs in Hungarian and Polish, 74:00but we don't collect. We just can't, 'cause we don't have the resources. If you get it, you have to catalog. As you can see, we still haven't been able to devote -- you noticed, even though I'm retired, I still say we. (laughter)

CW: Of course! So, I'd like to ask a little bit about how, since it was during your time that the talking books project was going on, what's the back story on that --

ER: Well --

CW: -- project?

ER: -- I can tell the -- very intimately. I was always very intimately connected to the Yiddish talking book project, even when I was the head of the children's library, because we were in the basement and the only public part of the library was the children's library in the basement. And the rest was closed stack, was a closed archive and a small little studio, really miniscule, where Henry Rabin 75:00and all the volunteers used to do the Yiddish recording books because they still were doing it for the first -- I was in the library twenty-eight years and I'd say for the first seventeen years that I was there, they were still recording. And they only stopped because they all got old and then they passed on and nobody really was able to do it. Henry Rabin, he was in the electronics business. So, he was the person who did the recording and the sound and he really knew how to do it professionally and he did a pretty good job considering that he had a tape recorder. He had the rigorous standards because it was a soundproof little studio that the speaker was in and he was on the other side of the glass. There was always a monitor who would spot if there were mistakes so that they knew that they were reading properly and doing a proper job and that 76:00was being -- and I knew them all because they had to pass through the children's library in order to get to the studio. So, it was always close to my heart. And then, when I became the director, I remember one day having a conversation with my sister. And she says, "One of the biggest treasures you have in the library -- are all the lectures and speakers who were at the library through all its history." Certainly in the last thirty, forty years, every single lecture was recorded because one of the members of the library, Mr. Osteger and Mr. Rosenfeld, there's a group of them, they were very interested in tape. And Mr. Osteger was the one, he used to tape every single lecture, both in the library and at the Arbeter Ring, at the Workmen's Circle and actually elsewhere, as well. And we had something like fifteen hundred tapes and it's an amazing 77:00record. And my sister said, "These are real treasures." So, we started -- I said, "Yes, that's something we should do." And then, we had these tapes, they were all reel-to-reel tapes. And then, I was alerted by the Canadian Jewish Congress archivist who had also some speeches and stuff on reel-to-reel that were beginning to disintegrate. And so, she hired this man to put them on, I think, on CD at that time. And so, I realized there's this whole digital technology now that we can sort of go -- and I spoke to the man and I called the man in and he says, "Look, you have to be very careful with the really old -- too old, because sometimes you only get one crack at doing the tape. If you don't do it right the first time, that's it, you don't get it again." And so, I said, "How much does it cost?" So, it was very high. Really, really high. So, I 78:00took six at the time. One of them was a panel discussion with Ruth Wisse, my sister, with Leonard Cohen -- the Leonard Cohen -- with Meylekh Ravitch, and with Adele Wiseman, who was a very well-known Canadian Jewish writer. And I thought, Okay, and we digitized that one. I think there was another one, maybe, I think, something with Saul Bellow. There were four things that we digitized. It cost me fifteen hundred dollars to do four, and I had fifteen hundred tapes. Where was I gonna find this kind of money? We barely had enough to sort of do the library work we were supposed to. So, in the back of my head, this is something, and every time I'd go out to try to raise money and to try to get money, I'd always offer this as an opportunity. But I guess maybe it wasn't sexy enough or maybe I didn't do a good enough job selling it or maybe other things 79:00had priority, I don't know. We had to automate this whole library to begin with and we just didn't have the resources. I could have bought some of the stuff and maybe done it in-house, but we just didn't even have the staff. I couldn't spare the time or -- really, if you're doing it, you have to do it properly. Oh, and then one of the projects I started was something called BiblioVoyages." When I became the director, through Zipporah and the president of the library just before I became the director, with three other independent libraries here in Montreal, we got a huge grant of a few million dollars. The library got half a million dollars to upgrade our technology and for outreach programs. And over a period of five years, four libraries working together -- and that was really, if 80:00I ever was able to do outreach and really build up the library, it was that gift, it was that grant that enabled me to do it. And then, we also had a ninetieth anniversary campaign that was helpful. So, one of the things we did was a program called BiblioVoyages. It had been something that Zipporah had been interested in and I had inherited it and we involved it and we did trips. It was like a little travel program. It was run by volunteers but I had to have a staff person, actually, half-time, devoted to this. And we went four times a year. We went on these little trips that combined arts, literature, books, and -- from the library, twice a year. It would be something in the Montreal area, so it would be just a day thing or an afternoon visit. And twice, it would be to go on a trip. So, for the trips, once was to Ottawa, but twice we went to the National 81:00Yiddish Book Center. And the National Yiddish Book Center was one of the first things we did. And we had about forty people and we organized this absolutely amazing trip. It was an overnight in Amherst, and I contacted Aaron and he has very close ties to Montreal, to the library, to my sister. So, it got transferred to me and he met us and he spoke to us and we had the tour of the place. And I'm talking to him, I mentioned the Yiddish talking books and he had his own priorities. He was building up the National Yiddish Book Center. Second time, I came again about two years later, three years later, and he said, "Eva, when you come, I want to have a meeting with you, and I want you to meet" -- there was a few people in the office. And that's when we really started. He says, "Tell me again about the Yiddish talking" -- because I think he had also realized this was a good way -- so, this is the Yiddish talking books. These 82:00were the books -- this is two hundred books, group of volunteers, and it started because one of the volunteers, his wife could no longer see. She could only listen to tapes and there were no Yiddish tapes. So, they started reading the books on tape for her. And then, more and more people needed it. And that's how it grew, but it was done -- and because of Henry, it was done very professionally and they were read by people who had the authentic accents, who were trained, who understood the literature, who were wonderful. Some of them were actors manqué, too, and did a really, really good job. Technologically, it needed to be cleaned up and sort of spruced up a little bit. And so, we had this discussion. He said, "You know what? I'm looking for a donor and I'm gonna do some of them." So, Sami Rohr, I think, gave the initial money for it because 83:00that was also -- it was a different technology. And we did it as the CDs. We did fifteen of them and we negotiated how it would be. I was so thrilled. I was so thrilled because I knew we'd never be able to do it, certainly not be able to do it the way Aaron was able to do it. And now, I mean, the project now where it's all there and you just download whenever you want to and it's a digital library -- and then the technology changed and it became easier and cheaper. So, the last time -- then, we did the fifteen and there was a few years and then he said, "You mean you have more?" I said, "Aaron, I told you that time, we have about two hundred." "Oh, you have two hundred." I said, "And Aaron," I said, "Ruth has always told me that what's even more valuable are these lectures and, well, these are ninety, I'd love" -- and I told him some of the things we had. 84:00So, that's when he really said, "Okay, send me everything." You came last summer, I think, and they did a whole inventory. I hope they'll all be done 'cause it's perfect because the library, we really couldn't have afforded it, to be able to do it. And why should it be duplicated if -- the goals are the same. What Aaron wants, what we want is the same. So, I was very, very pleased that at least I could see that that project's on its way --

CW: Yeah.

ER: -- before I left, because it was one of the first things I wanted to do and it was always on the back burner, so it was something that could happen.

CW: Yeah.

ER: Yeah.

CW: It's really exciting.

ER: Yeah.

CW: I just want to make sure we still have -- great. Okay, I have a few questions. I'm wondering, how has the role of Yiddish in the library changed during the time that you've been in here?

ER: Well, the people who speak Yiddish, who are interested in Yiddish literature, those who are interested in Yiddish literature on that very high level that the library always maintained are fewer and fewer. The population has aged. What we work very hard for -- and, I mean, I think I enabled it because I sort of pushed it forward. I set it as a priority and if we needed money for the programs, I found the money to do the programs. But the actual work and the planning and the creating was done by the members of the Yiddish committee. And Rivka Augenfeld's been the long-time chair and Eugene Orenstein, they've been co-chair for many, many years and doing an amazing job. I think they'd love to pass the baton on Janie Respitz's work. A lot of it evolved when she was 86:00president. And one of the things, actually, that -- she became re-involved in the library. The committee understood and we understood that to bring in a new generation and to recreate a love for Yiddish -- and because people didn't understand the language as well, we had to do Yiddish in a different way. So, one of the first things that happened was this Yiddish café that we have. It's now, I don't know, about ten years old, twelve years old. It started about a year or two after I became the director. And Janie and then Rivka and the whole group evolved it. And so, it's more music and at the beginning, it was almost like the audience would come up -- there's always a program where the audience would come up and people would sing -- would be hilarious. The first one I had, I ran that program and we had it upstairs in a little café. So, I had room 87:00there for about fifty people. Well, about eighty-five to a hundred showed up. Then, we had to take bigger venues. I think now about a hundred, 125 come pretty much every time. Another kind of program, there'd be Yiddish films and Yiddish film festival with introduction in Yiddish and in English. Anything with subtitles -- we would do subtitles just so that those who don't understand Yiddish would also be able to benefit from it. And then, two, three times a year, we have scholars that come and present really interesting lectures. And they try to do it in as engaging a way -- it's on a very high level. So, the audience, it's usually -- and it has to be on a Sunday afternoon because the older generation, they can't come in the evening. It's just very hard. The café we do in the evening and we actually arrange for buses to come and they bring 88:00from the residences and from areas where it's harder for the older people to come at night. So, they bring audiences that way. And Sunday afternoons, whoever comes. So, we used to have -- usually for the lectures, whereas we used to have three hundred people -- the biggest lectures, the biggest turnout the library used to have was for Yiddish lectures. It wasn't for the English and for anything else. It was always the Yiddish. Now, you'll get for the lectures fifty people, sixty -- depending on who comes and what the talk is. Movies, more and the Yiddish café, more. And people like Chana who teach Yiddish in the universities, part of the credits for her course, the kids -- that're her students -- come. So, it's a fun thing for them to do and hopefully, they enjoy it and they'll become future audiences. So, they really, really work hard to keep Yiddish alive and to keep it active. But on the whole, the membership that 89:00speaks Yiddish is slowly, slowly dying. And really, the biggest readership is English, French behind it, Hebrew quite a lot and Russian, and not so much Yiddish. And there's not that much new published in Yiddish, also. One of the things we're happiest about that the National Yiddish Book Center -- the project is, just as it is everywhere, North America, our community, they're moving, they're dying, and there are collections. And it used to be they bring it to the library. Well, the library had its collections. It had duplicates of its collections and what else do you do? So, now, we call the National Yiddish Book Center and once or twice a year, a van comes up and takes it. We refer to our -- the Montreal zamler [collector], who's a very active member of the library. So, 90:00that's good. So, we're very happy to know that the books are taken care of, 'cause it was a big responsibility and we didn't know what to do with it, either.

CW: Yeah.

ER: And we bless Aaron every (laughter) single day. (laughs)

CW: Yeah.

ER: Yeah.

CW: For you, personally, when do you speak Yiddish now?

ER: It's interesting. To my husband, a little bit, because he grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home, as well. Not as much -- more the odd phrase here and there. With older people or people I normally spoke -- there still are people from that generation that I will speak to. But there used to be -- one of our librarians, Sulamif Zhabinskaya, she came from Vilna. Actually in the '80s, she 91:00came here and she started working in the library. She was not a librarian, but she was like our Russian librarian and she became our Yiddish librarian as well. I used to speak Yiddish with her. I used to speak a lot more here because there were so many users of the library who spoke Yiddish. But now, not so much. To my siblings, not really. We might throw the odd phrase around. But we never spoke Yiddish to each other anyway, so yeah.

CW: Yeah.

ER: My kids, my children went -- we sent our children to Jewish People's School, so they learned Yiddish. They have a great love for it, but they don't have as much opportunity. My son went through medical school here at McGill and several of his rotations were at the Jewish general hospital. And everybody knew he knew some Yiddish, so he would always be taken to the older people and these sweet 92:00little old ladies and he'd speak a few words. And he could understand them better than he could speak to them. And they'd look at him and they'd say, Oh, I have a granddaughter for you. Are you married? (laughs) So, he used to get a great kick out of his knowledge of Yiddish. And my grandchildren, they used to sing the Kinder Klangen. I think that was about it, so they have -- it's a happy thing but it's not something that's -- unfortunately.

CW: Yeah.

ER: Yeah.

CW: Yeah. Great. We just have a few more minutes. I just want to close by asking you if you have any -- well, is there anything we missed that you wanted to talk about? I can put in another card if we want to --

ER: No, I think it's --

CW: Yeah.

ER: I think I'm okay.

CW: It was great. (laughs)

ER: I think I'm okay.

CW: Yeah.

ER: Yeah. I didn't realize I had such, I guess, a Yiddish experience. Several 93:00years ago, Pierre Anctil asked if I'd be part of this -- he had a conference on Yiddish in Montreal and he published a book about it. And he said, "Would you speak at lunchtime?" Like the lunchtime entertainment about my memories of Yiddish Montreal. And so, I looked at him and I thought -- I said, "Okay. Think people are" -- he says, "Yes, yes." And then, Rivka, also, Augenfeld spoke. And I spoke a lot about what it was like to be at school and a lot of what I spoke to earlier. And I didn't realize until I started thinking about it that, yeah, I guess this is something nobody else has, and certainly not in this generation. And it was very interesting because our parents were sort of interested in the 94:00same things culturally and yet she told a totally different story from the one I told because we grew up in different households.

CW: Yeah.

ER: So, it's interesting.

CW: Well, do you have a piece of advice that you'd like to (laughter) give?

ER: To whom? (laughs)

CW: Well, just speaking to the topics of Yiddish that we've been talking about for future generations, something related to Yiddish or Jewish identity that you'd like to pass along?

ER: Well, it's one of the most -- when it's spoken well and written well, it's as rich and as beautiful and as wonderful a language and as great a language as all the major languages. And I'm very proud to be the sister of Ruth and David, who've taught generations and hopefully -- I mean, they have people -- Ruth has 95:00students coming from Japan and China to study Yiddish literature and learn Yiddish, to read it in the original so they understand it. Certainly, so much of our culture, the Jewish culture in North America is based on Yiddish. And all the music and all the songs. But unfortunately, a lot of it is nostalgia and a lot of it is kitsch. I have mixed feelings about it because my mother didn't like kitsch and nostalgia. And so, the stuff she sang, it came out of the fabric of society. Each song had a mission or it evoked a person or it evoked a setting and it wasn't maudlin. And I guess she passed a little bit of that on to us, as well. But yet, when we have a family celebration, we'll trot out certain family 96:00songs that are -- you sing the song and we hear mom, we hear my parents. We hear them singing and I guess that's the memories. But we have the memories. I don't know how you --

CW: Yeah.

ER: -- pass it on. You have to have a lot of committed people. I think maybe even the Hasidic communities who do speak Yiddish, to learn to speak it well, look -- the whole of the Yiddish culture came from -- that's where they came from, from the people who grew up -- the shtetlekh who had a love of language and were -- read literature and sang the songs. Maybe there'll be a comeback, but they -- 'cause that's the language, that's the secular language that they actually live in. Who knows? Maybe it'll come from there? (laughter) Through 97:00there? I don't know, I'm not -- I feel sad because it was once -- as I said, this was the third major language spoken in Montreal.

CW: Wow.

ER: Not anymore and not in North America. We were always proud here in Montreal because we still had Yiddish speaking. My parents were so proud. We were the young generation and their children spoke Yiddish, but -- (laughs)

CW: Yeah.

ER: -- we weren't able to pass on the goldene keyt [golden chain], the chain, so --

CW: In other ways.

ER: Maybe. (laughs)

CW: Well, a sheynem dank -- thank you very much for --

ER: Yes.

CW: -- speaking with me today.

ER: Yeah, yeah.

CW: And I'm --

ER: It was my pleasure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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