MOISHE DOLMAN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney. I am here at the Montreal Jewish Public Library. It's July 10th, 2012. I'm here with Moishe Dolman. We're 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?

MOISHE DOLMAN:You got it.

CW:(laughs) Okay.

MD:And no one can see that I'm at gunpoint. (laughter) It's a shotgun interview.

CW:(laughs) So, to start, can you tell me a little bit about your family background?

MD:Okay. My name is Moishe Volf Dolman. I'm born in Montreal, Quebec. I'm a Canadian. My parents were Canadian. My father actually came as a baby from the 1:00Ukraine at the beginning of the twentieth century. My mother was born here; her parents had just come off the boat maybe a year or so, I don't know, before. My --

CW:From where? Do you know?

MD:My father came from a little village that we pronounced as Yultishkiv, which is near Odessa in the Ukraine -- the seaport. My mother's family came from Betshotsh, which is, as, you know, people know, in Yuri Suhl's book -- I think "The Purim Goat," I think it was in that one -- it takes place in Betshotsh, the town that sounds like a sneeze. But they came here. My father almost didn't -- he came after a pogrom, where supposedly he was hidden as a baby. And overhead, there was a gang of kozakn [Cossacks]. When he was crying, people said, Choke 2:00the kid, because we're all gonna get killed, or something like -- to that effect. But they didn't; he survived. He came here. They came here by ship. They didn't want to let my father in, because I guess as a kid -- he was a little baby -- he would have had -- there's a confusion in our family, because he supposedly came when he was ander halbn yor, which, you know, is a year and a half old, but he was already supposed to be speaking by then, well, which is why they didn't -- which sounds like older than one and a half years. And they didn't want to let him in, because he wouldn't talk at the medical examination that they give when people came off the boat, until it was snowing and the doctor overheard him say in Yiddish to his parents, I guess -- to say, "S'geyt an ey." He wanted to say, "S'geyt a shney," which is, "It's snowing," but he 3:00said it -- "S'geyt a --" it was actually raining, come to -- no, it was -- yeah, it was raining, but instead of saying, "It's raining," he said, "It's snowing." He said "S'geyt an ey" instead of "a shney," but in reality, what that means -- "S'geyt an ey" -- is, "An egg is walking." And so, it remained a standing joke in our family, every time it started to rain, we would say, "S'geyt an ey," "An egg is walking," because my father said that. My mother was -- as I said, she was born here. She was actually brought up in NDG, which at that time was a totally Anglo-Saxon area of the city, not in the Jewish area of the city. She was born in the Jewish area, which is -- you know, in shtut, downtown, but she was brought up in NDG. Her father was a tailor. He couldn't make a living, I 4:00guess, in the center of the city, so he went and opened one of these valet -- as they used to call them -- and I don't know if they still have valet shops, it's like where they do alterations and tailoring -- in NDG. So, my mother was brought up in an absolutely Anglo-Saxon area of the city. My father was brought up more in the Jewish area of the city. So, they were both Canadians. My father was a factor-- my father worked -- when my parents got married, they had a little store downtown, right near Concordia University, right near Guy and De Maisonneuve, which only means something, I guess, to people from Montreal -- what's now -- at that time it was Guy and Western Avenue -- near Concordia University. Upstairs was a brothel. And they had a little store, kind of like a light lunch store with a counter and all this kind of stuff. But when my older brother, who's practically a generation older than me, was born, it was just too hard to keep up the store -- two people with a young baby -- so my father went 5:00to work in the factory. At that time, most of the kids I knew growing up were -- their parents were factory workers. It was the old Jewish -- you know, the old Jewish proletariat, if you want to say. And they made a living that way. My parents -- how I come to Yiddish -- my parents were absolutely fluent in English; my parents were not Yiddishists or ideologues in any way; but in the house, there was a mixture of English and Yiddish, just because it was natural. Like, in a sentence, there could be, like -- my parents spoke maybe five words in English and three words in Yiddish in the same sentence as -- you know, in that kind of mixed English and Yiddish that you used to see often. But it wasn't an ideological thing. I went to the folkshule [Yiddish secular school] as a kid, but not for -- not because my parents were secular Yiddishists or Labor Zionists 6:00or anything. It was the school on the corner. And my older brother, when they were in -- and -- my sister and I went to the folkshule. My brother -- older brother -- went to the talmud-toyre, which was the religious school, just 'cause probably that was closer to them when they were there. And my kid sister went to Bais Rivkah, the Lubavitch school, probably because it was a -- in her case, it was because you could get in at four years old in kindergarten.

CW:Was it a religious home?

MD:Our family?

CW:Yeah.

MD:Our family was a mixture of rel-- it wasn't the same, like, degree of Orthodoxy that you saw today, but we had a kosher house. To us, Shabbos meant you didn't work. You didn't do your homework. You know, you did other things -- you can watch TV or, you know -- but you didn't do your homework, you didn't ride a bicycle. My mother loved the Shabbos to her dying day, because it was a 7:00day that you could rest. She could -- didn't have those demands on her. And we had this kind of thing that -- we were probably considered more religious than a lot of the kids that I went to school with, but we certainly wouldn't be considered frim, frum [pious], whatever -- however you want to say it -- by the frime [Orthodox] today. It was a mix, you know? We didn't go to -- there was a style at the time that people used to have a kosher house but eat unkosher outside or something like that; we didn't. Everything was kosher or the best that we knew, you know, to be kosher. And that was it. We fasted on Yom Kippur -- that was the one day of the year that we didn't turn the lights on and off. But that was it. Outside of that, you know, at that time in Montreal, Montreal was a very ethnically segregated city. In the old system, we didn't go -- like, 8:00when I said I went to folkshul, that wasn't the day school; that was the afternoon school. We went to the Protestant school during the day, because in Quebec province, everything was confessional. You were either Catholic or not Catholic, and if you were not Catholic, you were Protestant, by -- to all intents and purposes legally. And so, I went to a Protestant school all day long. The school was ninety-nine-point-nine percent Jewish. I practically did not know non-Jewish people before I went to university -- in our area of the city, that part of Côte-des-Neiges, at the time. But like I say, on the Jewish holidays, the school would be completely empty. And in the morning, we would sing from the Protestant hymn book, and there'd be big Christmas celebrations. The principals were always -- and the head teachers were always Christians, for 9:00the most part. We sang "God Save the Queen" in addition to "O Canada." And we studied British history in grade seven. And I remember the British history book -- it talked about how Cromwell's -- you know, the Protectorate -- Cromwell's first mistake, when he -- I guess in 1666, was it? -- when he took power in England after the monarchy was deposed, was to readmit the Jews. And this was kind of like our upbringing in the general society, you know? Whatever. That's it.

CW:Did you have a -- were there any favorite yontoyvim for you growing up? Or --

MD:You know, for me growing up, I think we appreciated that we didn't have to go to school. And we thought that those few parents who sent their kids to school 10:00on yontev -- and I'm talking about in the Protestant school -- were so unlucky. And it was usually -- those few kids, it was because this was an era before there was really daycare, and when -- these were kids that both parents had to work, so they sent their kids. To us, for the most part, I looked at yontev and Shabbos as restrictions. You can't do things. You can't -- we can't -- you're not supposed to ride a bike. You're not supposed to -- do this, that, and the other thing. So, we really -- for a small kid, I think, a kid like me who wanted to play baseball -- well, I think I played baseball later on on Shabbos, but certain things I wanted to do, I guess, and so yontev was really -- we thought of it as a kind of, like, restriction. I'm speaking for myself here.

CW:Um-hm. And what was the Jewish community like growing up in Montreal?

MD:At that time in Montreal, you have -- it's the postwar generation. I was born 11:00in the older part of the city, in the sense that's -- now close to -- the area near the mountain -- the area near Duddy Kra-- you know, if you read Mordecai Richler's novel, "St. Urbain Street" [sic] -- I was born on Drolet Street, which is very -- at that point -- which is one street from St. Denis, which is almost like an artificial barrier, at that time, between the Jewish and French sides of the city. The Jews were in the middle of the English and French -- separated the English and French. The Jews were the third-biggest group in Montreal, I think, at that time. And as a matter of fact, there was a -- for a while, there was an argument earlier in the twentieth century as to, if official documents from the city of Montreal are in English and French, why aren't they in Yiddish as well? 12:00You see some -- I've read old articles about this kind of thing. And afterwards, in the postwar generation, the downtown got to be crowded -- too crowded for the Jewish families. There's particular reasons why Côte-des-Neiges, which would probably go beyond the boundaries of what you guys are interested in, but let's say equivalents to the GI Bill made it easier for soldiers to buy houses at very, very low mortgage rates -- for returning soldiers -- and so some of them bought property in Côte-des-Neiges, and they started to build up in Côte-des-Neiges, and we moved from -- at that time I was living on Jeanne-Mance Street near Laurier. We moved -- and it was considered moving up -- to a really lousy, cold, four-room apartment. We moved from eight rooms on Jeanne-Mance to four rooms, cold, on Linton near Darlington. It was considered a step upwards. And because of the -- almost, like, the mass migration of Jews at that time, I 13:00went to school here -- I mean, in Côte-des-Neiges with -- not just with similar Jewish kids, but with the same kids that I knew from downtown that all moved up more or less at the same time. And we all went to school together. Most of the kids that I knew were -- in school -- were working-class Jewish kids like myself. A lot of them did the exact same stuff in the factories -- their parents did -- that my father did. There were some small merchants among them. My own father had always wanted to -- his dream was always to go back and be a storekeeper again, because he didn't like to take orders. But he had to make a living. M'darf makhn a leybn [One must make a living]. And so, he had to -- like, he sacrificed -- you can almost say he sacrificed himself and what he wanted for his four children.

CW:Parnose [livelihood]. (laughs)

MD:Parnose. My mother was a homemaker. I remember -- this was also, like, a -- kind of like an attachment to Yiddish -- she, for more than forty years, was the financial secretary of an organization that was called the Hebrew Ladies' Sick Benefit Association of Montreal, which was -- in Yiddish, on their stationery, it was called the Hebrew Ladies' Sick Benefit Association of Montreal, one of the old societies. She was the youngest member by far. She was drafted to be the secretary, because she could actually transcribe the minutes and stuff like that into English, whereas most of the members could not. Most of them were immigrants; my mother was a Canadian-born woman. And this was the old days, when, you know, there were also, like -- you know, a lot of left-wing Jewish political groups, but there were also these, as we used to call, societies, sick 15:00benefit associations, the mutual aid societies, that bas-- a lot of them primarily existed for a cemetery -- to have a cemetery plot -- and others existed -- like, my mother's organization existed to -- they gave sick benefits, as they were called. But often, after somebody was sick, that was before Medicare. The members all chipped in and they had tag days to give sick benefits or to give -- if somebody lost a job, they got sick benefits, as they were called, you know, help tide you over for a while. That was my mother's one passion, which, until the organization folded in the 1980s after over forty years of her being the secretary, that was her life outside of raising her family. And I got to know -- like, I got to hear Yiddish from hearing her conversations a lot with some of the older members. It used to bug me that even 16:00when she spoke English, she would sometimes imitate their accent, say, (imitating accent) "Thank you very much." "Have a happy Mother's Day." Even though she was a Canadian-born, it used to drive me crazy. But she was accommodating them, as I realized, and stuff like that. But even now, like, sometimes I know by heart various -- like, I can do, for better or worse, various Yiddish monologues and -- to the best of my abilities -- and I think I'm probably repeating the accents that I heard from some of those people at that time. But afterwards, you know, you have already in the -- and we're talking here in the 1960s --- already, you're starting to see Montreal Jewry becoming quite gentrified, at that time moving to Côte-Saint-Luc or Chomedey, which are more -- were considered more -- you know, we used to say "di hoykhe fenster [the 17:00tall fences]," you know? Upper class and stuff like this. And of course, of all the -- all of the -- that generation that I talk about that was mostly working class, and this is something that's been written about. My parents were not ideologues by any means. They were not -- my father was a very good union man, but, you know, that's it. But he wasn't, like, a political activist in any way, but he was a good union man. There was this idea -- they weren't -- people didn't think, Oh, I can hardly wait for my son or daughter to get a job in the shop. They all expected -- or they didn't -- my mother told me when she was married, she didn't think any of her kids would go to university. It was so far-fetched. For my mother, a big job was a job where you could sit all day long in a -- on a -- you know, a Bell Telephone operator, you know? But as it is, her 18:00four children -- and the children of all those people -- went to university. My father, incidentally, was also a member of one of those societies, sick benefit associations. His was the King George -- and as was the custom here, you know, to name something after the reigning British monarch -- the King George Sick Benefit Society. But despite that name, right in the center of the city, near the mountain, in the 1930s, when there was a soup kitchen, a kosher soup kitchen administered by all of the Jewish left-wing organizations in the city, King George was one of them, despite the name. So, for what it's worth, I throw that tidbit in.

CW:Looking back, were there specific values that you thought your parents were trying to pass on to you?

MD:Yeah. I think I can see -- I see things very much -- there's a thing that often people talk about mentshlekhkayt [human decency] and, you know, sometimes 19:00it's an overused word. I think that there's no question that my parents -- my father tried to pass that on.

CW:And what did -- what --

MD:And my mother also.

CW:-- what does that mean for -- what did that mean for you?

MD:To be a good person. To be an upstanding person. As I said, my father's favorite expression -- he used to tell me -- when he thought I was going down the wrong path, you know -- he used to say, "Moishe, zay a mentsh vi mentshn glakh [be a human among humans]." Or he would say, "Moishe" -- or talking about somebody else, he would say, "Abi der mentsh iz a mentsh [As long as the person is a decent person]." My mother also --- she had her work and she really -- my mother was very, very upstanding. Her view of Jewishness -- even her view of Jewish religion was -- she had this assumption -- she would not have understood, 20:00like, the phenomenon that we see today, let's say, often in the news of very right-wing Jewish people. We had a neighbor, a very old lady, that -- she was about a hundred at that time, and many, many years earlier, she had -- my mother told me this story that during a strike of the garment trade workers, she used to make sandwiches for the workers, striking workers, even though her family was not. I think they had a small business. And I said, "Oh, really? I would never have suspected." And my mother would say, "What are you talking about? She was a very religious woman." And there was a story, too, about a family that had a coal business. But they used to distribute to coal to people for free that they felt couldn't afford. And so, she would say the same thing. "What are you talking about?" I would say, "Really? They used to do that?" She said, "Of course! They were very religious people." Her conception of what it meant to be Jewish was that. And she would have been shocked if I were to have -- I remember 21:00when my mother -- I went and spoke to a rabbi. I was saying kaddish for my mother and I was really disgusted by some of, like, the right-wing talk that I had heard in the synagogue. And I told the rabbi at the time that if I were to tell my late mother, for whom I was saying kaddish, this, she would, you know, repeat some of the stuff that I had heard. She wouldn't have believed me. She would have said, "Moishe, you don't want to say kaddish for me. No one's forcing you. Don't. But don't make up these stories." It was completely -- this was something she could not imagine in her life. This was, like -- this was our upbringing, as -- these were our Jewish values, so to speak.

CW:How --

MD:And that attracted me to Yiddish in some ways, too.

CW:Yeah. So, did you learn Yiddish in the folkshul?

MD:What happened -- how it worked was, as I said, we went to a Protestant 22:00school, an English-language school, till about three thirty every day. I was a rotten kid in this school, like, I was always in trouble, but -- like, not -- I wasn't a juvenile delinquent, but I was always talking and getting kicked out of class and stuff like that. And after four o'clock in the afternoon, we went straight from there by school bus to the -- well, when I started downtown, we went -- it was a walk, but afterwards, it was by school bus -- we went straight to the folkshul, JPS, Jewish People's School. And where the main language was Yiddish. It was primarily, you know, a part of the secular school movement. It was nominally Labor Zionist --- it wasn't, you know. And I learned -- we learned Yiddish there. I hated being there, because I was younger than any of the other kids, because most of the kids -- I was the same age in the English school, as 23:00we called it, than as I was in the Jewish school. And so, it was -- it made me all the more self-conscious because of my young age, and so I had to all the more become the class clown and this kind of thing to fit in or whatever it is. I hated being there. The older I got, the worse it was. Most of the kids had no respect for -- we had great intellectuals. This was unlike in the Protestant system; most of the teachers were refugees from the war, as we used to call them. We didn't say "survivors" at that time; we said "refugees," from "the war," as we said; not "the Holocaust," and certainly not "the Shoah." That was an expression that was only superimposed later. The teachers, many of them were well-known poets, intellectuals. The vice principal -- the principal, Mr. 24:00Wiseman -- as we said, Mr. Wise Guy (laughter) -- was a very well-known pedagogue. The vice principal, Lerer [Teacher] Dunsky -- or as the kids said, Dunce Cap -- not to be disrespectful, but this -- as kids, we had the -- he translated the mishne [first section of the Talmud] into Yiddish. Lerer Husid, or as we said, lerer Horsehide, you know, was a well-known poet. The kids often felt that it was a drag to have to go to school after a whole day of school. To me, in retrospect, it's one of the best things that happened to me in my life. Really, I don't regret for one second -- our books, you know, we had the equivalent of Dick and Jane books, but the characters were -- some of them were -- a tailor and his wife and family. We got a lot of the books from the Arbeter Ring in the States. I don't regret for one second: even though I was a rotten 25:00kid and a poor student, it was fantastic for me that I went there. And at that time, you know, we didn't say we learned Yiddish. People didn't say, for the most part, I speak Yiddish; they'd say, I speak Jewish. It's like in the monologue -- you know, there's a monologue by Arn Zeitlin about -- "Monolog in pleynem yidish [Monologue in plain Yiddish]," if you know that one. It's a mixture of -- it's mostly in Yiddish, but there's a smattering of, like, Americanisms, you know? And there's a -- if I can remember the line exactly, how it goes, he's explaining to the jour-- the person who's -- a guy who's been living in the States for a long time explains to Aaron Zeitlin, who's actually the author of the poem but is here as a journalist -- he's talking about how Yiddish is passé, even then. The poem is, like, 1946, you know? As he says, 26:00"Bot ikh mit mayn mises, mir yuzn a dzhuyishe hinendikn [But my wife and I, we use modern Jewish]" you know, "a pleynem [plain]." People didn't say "Yiddish;" they said "Jewish." "Do you speak Jewish? I speak Jewish. He speaks Jewish." That meant Yiddish. It was only later on that people, I think, in general conversation said Yiddish -- or (pronounces with a different accent) "Yiddish," as they say now. "Yiddish." Like, whatever. I don't know.

CW:Do you know when -- do you remember about when that changed? Or --

MD:Oh, I don't know. In the 1980s or something? But certainly, growing up as a kid, we spoke of people speaking Jewish instead of Yiddish. I still remember, as a matter of fact, 'cause I'm old enough -- you didn't hear this often, but I can still remember when I could be standing in a corner with a friend of mine and my friend telling me a story and saying -- so, like, I was on -- and I don't know; this could be just Jewish Montreal or whatever it is, but I also -- somebody else told me the exact same thing just a couple of weeks ago. I could be 27:00standing in the street and saying, "So yesterday, I was here -- right here -- and a couple of white guys passed by" -- meaning, like, Anglo-Saxons -- and you would never hear this anymore. Probably in the 1980s, I guess, maybe people started to say Yiddish and -- you know, it's another generation or something like this. But certainly, I heard a lot of Yiddish growing up. And don't forget, there was a lot of survivors, as we now call them, from the Holocaust afterwards. Growing up, there was a lot of -- you'd see a lot of numbers on arms -- right where we are now, at that time. I grew up in a different part of the district, but where the library is now, all the apartment buildings surrounding here were mostly -- or there was, like, a very, very high percentage of Holocaust survivors of Polish origin. Where we were living in -- farther down, they were of Hungarian origin, but certainly growing up, it was just common, it 28:00was just very commonplace to see people, you know, with numbers on their arms who spoke Yiddish as their first -- Jewish as their first language, kids my age who spoke Jewish as their first language. But that was it.

CW:So, how did you come back to Yiddish later?

MD:I don't think I ever went away, really. But certainly, as I became -- more and more -- I think growing up, there's -- you know, there's always a tension in Jewish life between maintaining a certain kind of Jewish particularism and Jewish -- and trying to show that we're just like anybody else, you know? Today there's, like, Jewish hipsterism, too, you know? And it's to try and show that we're just as hip as anybody. And I think for myself, I was -- at a very, very young age, I wasn't attracted -- because there -- that was still an era when -- 29:00especially for boys, I think -- boys and girls -- there was this idea that there was somehow something negative about being kind of like an Ashkenazi Jew from a particular kind of background or whatever. And for a lot of people in the old days, the solution to that was assimilationism or conversion -- as -- and conversion at that time, you know, was -- the idea was -- for that reason, when I used to -- when we used to hear stories of conversion in the house, my mother would get very upset. She would say, like, "I'm a shimed, shmadelnikes [convert, rascals]." And my father would shrug his shoulders and he would just say -- I'd say a story -- "So did you hear?" Like, "So-and-so converted." And my father would just shrug his shoulders and say, "M'vil zikh ariparbetn." You know, you want to work your way up; you want to have a higher status. That's it. People do 30:00this kind of thing. But for another group of kids, especially young kids, Zionism represented this kind of thing. With Zionism, you could be just as tough, you could be just as -- no one would pick on you; no one could make fun of you. I had a friend who went to Israel and he used to, like -- when he would come back here to visit, he used to say, "You know, in Israel, you have rock music in Hebrew." You know, the idea was to show you could be just like anybody else. To me, I was always -- I always had this -- even though I was -- played sports all the time, I used to get into fights a lot when I was a kid, I still was not attracted to that kind of, like, super macho culture, and I wasn't ashamed of being Jewish. I thought my -- it was great. My father was, like, a Jewish proletarian and all this kind of stuff. I was really attracted to their values. So, more and more, I saw my Jewishness as being represented, for -- correctly or incorrectly, because in Yiddish, there's everything, you know? We shouldn't stereotype. But I saw it -- involved in Yiddish and in the world 31:00around Yiddish. And so, more and more, I became attracted to Yiddish. For many years, I put it away. I wouldn't say I put it away, but I was so involved with, like, political activism and stuff like that that it was always in the background. But psychologically, it was always in the foreground for me. I should have said this at the beginning, that why I'm wearing this is because this is, like, a symbol of an ongoing strike against higher student fees in Quebec, but it's gone beyond that; it's become a symbol of opposition to increased government repression of freedom of assembly here in the province of Quebec, and you could say something similar to what you might have -- the Occupy 32:00Movement in the United States. But so, like, this old, eccentric guy is wearing this to an interview so that people could say, Hey, did you see that old, eccentric guy with the red square (laughs) talking about Yiddish? But like I say, more and more, I became attracted -- pulled to Yiddish. I remember I started, at a given point, going to the -- and to me, it was natural. Like I said, I thought of Yiddish as being, like, the ess-- I can't say how. It was just a natural thing -- as being the essence of Jewishness. And at a given point, the Jewish Library moved -- where it is now, where we are now. And we were living on the next corner, on Bourret, in an apartment building which was, like, ninety-nine-point-nine percent Jewish, as all the apartment buildings were on our block at that time. And I started coming to the library, and all of a sudden, this world opened up to me -- like, completely opened up to me. There 33:00were actually books in Yiddish. And I was blown away by this whole thing.

CW:How old were you when you started coming here maybe?

MD:I don't know. My early twenties. It was just -- I remember once -- the old library downtown -- once, my big brother took me there as a kid. I was maybe, you know, a four-year-old kid. I don't know what -- I can't remember, 'cause he was studying. And when the library had a temporary space on Decarie, I once went with my sister. She took me because she had to study. And I could use the encyclopedia for, like, a high school term paper, but outside of that, it was nothing. But then I started to come here, and it became almost like a second home. Librarians can laugh about that, 'cause I'm -- (laughs) you know, they could say this. And I remember, I saw all these Yiddish books; I was, like, thunderstruck by it. Somebody gave me a present -- a friend of mine went out of 34:00town and came back with a present: a real, live Yiddish book. It was "Di geshikhte fun mayne leydn" -- "The Story of My Suffering" -- by Beilis, you know, the blood libel accusee about whom they made movie "The Fixer." I couldn't believe this kind of thing. I was deeply moved by a -- I opened the book -- a history book -- by the great historian Raphael Mahler, who wrote in Yiddish and Hebrew, and the introduction to one of his books read, "Tsim likhtikn ondenk fun mayne tayere eltern, vi men hot alts in leybn tsu fardenkn" -- you know, to the memory of his beloved parents, for whom he has everything to be thankful for. I was -- I got totally choked up. You know, this kind of thing -- I had wished 35:00that I could write a book and dedicate it to my parents while they were alive. I never did, but -- it was -- I knew of the "Adler" even as a -- like, the daily Yiddish newspaper when I was a kid. I looked over there because I've actually got a -- brought with -- by chance, pure chance, I was looking at some junk having nothing to do with this and I said, What's this scrap of paper doing on the -- what is this piece of junk here? And I noticed it was a paper demanding that we -- I'll show it to you afterwards -- demanding -- We need a new-- we 36:00must have a Yiddish newspaper in Montreal, a daily Yiddish newspaper. I'll show it to you after. But -- or now. "Montreal miz hubn a yidishe tsayting af yidish [Montreal must have a Yiddish-language newspaper]" -- this is after the "Adler" folded. For what it's worth, I found it.

CW:Wow.

MD:Just literally on my way here. Now I distracted myself.

CW:You were talking about when you --

MD:Yeah.

CW:-- when you first started coming here.

MD:Yeah, I came here, and I told you, I saw that thing by Mahler. I was totally moved. I picked up Yiddish music -- or Yiddish-oriented music -- that made me cry when I heard it -- Dave Tarras. This was way before you had, like, ten thousand bands called -- each one called Klez this and Klez that and, you know, the Klezmer this, you know, the Klezmer Jewish Librarians, the Klezzies, the -- (laughs) whatever it is, Klezzy Lezzies or you know, (laughs) whatever. Like, you know, there's -- the Klezmer Al Qaeda (laughs) or something like that. (laughs) You know, now you can't -- it's everywhere. And for a lot of people, incidentally -- even here, I know musicians who are not -- who love klezmer and are not aware that there's any Jewish connection, and I've gotten into arguments about it with people. It's a form of music, as people say -- some people. I 38:00heard Dave Tarras. I heard Abe Ellstein. I heard Prince Nazaroff. Which was very funny -- "Oy bin ikh a mazeldiker yid [Oh, am I a lucky Jewish man]." It was unbelievable for me to hear this stuff. I picked up an old kind of like, LP -- does that mean anything anymore? Like, vinyl -- from B'nei Yiddish, which was some organization that existed -- for all I know, it was the one guy on the record. One side was in Yiddish and the other side the same thing in English. I took it home and I listened on my sister -- I must have been twenty, twenty-one -- maybe I was about twenty years old at the time -- on my sister's -- that she had from high school, like, a kids' record player -- maybe a thousand times or something. (laughter) I'm sure I wore it out, the record, as he's saying why we need Yiddish, why the younger generation should be taught Yiddish. I flipped out, like, totally. It was wild for me. And for the rest of my life -- like, since then -- in greater or lesser degrees, there's been times -- like, I've gone years without even touching a Yiddish word, but there's other times that it's been very, very central. And emotionally, it's always very, very central. There's no question. It's always central.

CW:So, what kind of programs did you come to see at the -- here at the library?

MD:At the library, when I first started to go, they had a lot more Yiddish lectures. As time wore on, it became less and less, and it became more of kind of like an in-group thing where most of the people who come are a group of -- are, like, people from the survivor generation and their families. Less and less 39:00people over the years. In the old days -- there's a story I used to tell -- there used to be a guy, a volunteer, that used to sit at the door. And -- Chaim -- Chaim Fogelgaren. And he was a volunteer. From what I was told, he spoke neither English nor French. He had been living in Montreal for forty years. We used to converse in Yiddish all the time. He used to have these wild stories. And the lectures in the library were always free, and I went for free. And then, one day, all of a sudden, they announced that for budgetary reasons, they were gonna charge a dollar for members, two dollars for non-members. I was outraged. But what could you do? I went to some Yiddish lecture here. He was sitting at the door taking the tickets and the dollars and stuff like that, and -- or two dollars, if any outsiders came. And as I was gonna hand him my one-dollar bill -- as we used to have one-dollar bills in Canada; we don't have anymore. As I was gonna hand him my one-dollar bill, he put his hand over the till and he said, "They don't mean you." You know? (laughs) So, this is the thing -- and a 40:00lot of these lectures were really packed. I used to go sometimes when -- they used to have every year the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising here. There were hundreds upon hundreds of people here -- like, being -- you'd see less -- now, like I say, it's more like an in-crowd.

CW:Well, back when there were hundreds of people, what were the great -- you know, what are some great programs you remember?

MD:You know what, I remember that. I don't remember being moved by that many lectures and stuff. Sometimes maybe my Yiddish wasn't good enough to really get it. I actually remember once hearing a Montreal rabbi give a lecture on -- an Orthodox rabbi -- and I wasn't even aware that he spoke Yiddish. It was Rabbi Shmidman. And he was giving a particular lecture about the old pinkes [registers] -- you know, the minute books that they used to keep in synagogues, 41:00and in his particular synagogue, which was in Yiddish. And, like, this guy had people rolling in the aisles. I mean, in Yiddish, he would tell -- it's like -- and I couldn't understand a lot of it. Really, it was something to behold. And I felt like -- I don't know if you've ever heard the routine that Robert Klein, the comedian in the States -- the American Jewish comedian -- he said that when he was starting out, they told him, Go to the Borscht Belt and you'll hear these old Jewish comedians, and you learn from them, from the masters. And he went there and they used to tell these jokes in English, but the punchline would be in Yiddish. He didn't speak any Yiddish at all. The whole audience would burst into enormous laughter, and he was going, "What did he say? What did he say?" (laughs) You know? But (laughs) -- but that was it. And I was missing some of it too, you know? But really, I can't pretend -- but it was the idea, I think, of 42:00hearing Yiddish, hearing Yiddish around me, that, like, made me really -- but as, you know, the years went by, you'd see less and less of the Yiddish.

CW:How did you -- I mean, how did you decide it was important to you, or, you know, why was it important to you?

MD:It was just, like, a thing that -- I think I always had a particular Jewish identity -- for whatever reason it -- there is. And also, I think the -- first of all, it represented the -- I think the warmth of my home life growing up, which was something very important to me. With all the arguing and yelling and stuff like that, it was very intense growing -- we grew up in an intense household. I was always fighting with my siblings. There was always a lot of shouting. But there was always a lot of noise, you know, and good noise, too. And I associated it with my home life. I associated it with the most tender moments. Often, if I have, like, the most intimate conversations with myself, in 43:00my own life, they take place in Yiddish, because that's -- at my moments of greatest despair or greatest longing, the words that come to me are in Yiddish, because even though English is my best language, but I remember these from home. And so, this is how I express myself, to myself, in Yiddish. And of course, like -- I was always a kind of, like, countercultural, for better or worse, kind of guy. I don't want to be pretentious or something like that about myself, but -- and you see that in Yiddish. And I think even -- it's something that I could understand. Like, I heard an interview on CBC radio -- on the national radio -- in Canada, which is, as you -- in Canada, the main radio network is the public one. It's not like PBS in the States, where it's a small thing, although with all the government cutbacks -- this is one of the things also that I think is represented by this -- with all the government cutbacks, it's falling apart, 44:00kind of. But Eleanor Wachtel was interviewing -- who has a literary program -- was interviewing Etgar Keret -- you know, the well-known Israeli writer. And she asked him -- she said, "Well, I guess the -- what was the influence on you of, like, the previous generation of liberal Israeli authors like Amos Oz and Alef Bet Yehoshua." And his response: "Well, actually, I was much more influenced by the Yiddish writers, like" -- I think he mentioned Sholem Aleichem and Peretz -- I don't remember who else -- in which, he said -- his characters -- the life he describes are more -- it's more about people fitting in to society, how they can fit in. What's our role as human beings? What are we doing -- what are we on this earth for? What are we living for? How does somebody who's not part of mainstream society -- how do they deal with mainstream society? And I think I 45:00was much more -- I found that in Yiddish, in a way. I wasn't looking to show how I'm just like anybody else, although, you know, I guess to everybody, they do that, to a degree. I heard a very, very interesting, too, with Jenny Romaine. You know Jenny Romaine? And it was about the -- also about Yiddish. And she's also very countercultural. And one of the things that she said was, she wanted to bring back, like, all the forgotten thieves and prostitutes. And it struck me that when she said that, those were the very exact same words that Ben Gurion used to say -- when he talked about Israel, when he'd say, "We know that we're a normal people when we have our own thieves and prostitutes." Now behind this is, I think -- I'm trying to show that it's not so clear-cut. Because there's a 46:00degree -- there's a difference between showing how cool we are -- when we're showing how cool we are, or me, even I have to admit, like, sometimes probably, too, I want people who are not Jewish to know about the Jewish Left and Yiddish Left -- and now that there's a big school strike, I want them to know about the Jewish school strikes and the Jewish students who struck, you know, a generation ago in -- not a generation ago, but generations ago, right here in Montreal. There's this kind of thing as well. But I was always attracted, I guess -- maybe because I'm kind of a marginal guy -- so I was always attracted to that aspect of Yiddish. But trust me, it's like -- you can be, like, a right-wing, you know, you name it -- like, totally -- look, Jabotinsky I have, (laughs) like -- on 47:00YouTube, you can hear Jabotinsky talking in Yiddish, although he was an anti-Yiddishist, you know?

CW:So, did you start reading books in Yiddish, too?

MD:Yeah, and mostly poetry, because it's (laughs) a lot quicker. (laughs) A lot of Yiddish --

CW:So, what do you like?

MD:Glatstein I love very, very much. By way of example, he's probably the Yiddish poet who moves me, like, the most -- not the only one. I was thinking -- why I hesitated a second ago -- because I was thinking, too, about how for Glatstein, for example, in one of his poems, he talks about how we made God in our image. You know? The pinkt farkert [exactly the opposite], the way you usually think about it. And it struck me -- I imagined, like, God as a Jew -- but a Jew the way we used to think of, What's a Jew? And I remember being moved 48:00-- that was something else -- that when I first saw Yehoash's Tanakh -- you know, the Bible in Jewish -- all of a sudden, the Bi-- in Yiddish -- (laughs) see? All of a sudden, the Bi-- that's funny, the Bible in Jewish. (laughs) We think of it as the Jewish Bible. (laughs) But I guess for me, it became real when I saw it in Yiddish. And I start-- you know, in "Breyshis [Genesis]," right at the beginning. And I started to imagine God as, like, a Jew. (laughs) As a Jew. You know, so he's saying -- if I can only remember it -- like, "In onheyb, hot got bashafn dem himl in di erd. In di erd iz geven mist in leydik. In finsternish, geven afn gezikht fun tkhum. In der gayst vi got hot geshvebt afn gezikht funem vasern. Hot got gezogt, 'Zol vern likht.' Un s'iz gevorn likht. Un got hot gezeyn dos likht az es i git. Un got hot funander gesheydet tsvishn dem 49:00likht in tsvishn der finsternish. In dos likht, hot got gerifn 'tog.' In der finsternish, hot got gerifn 'nakht.' S'iz geven ovnt, s'i geven frimorgn, eyn tog. [In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty. The face of the earth was dark. And God's spirit glided over the surface of the water. God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God divided the light from the dark. And God named the light 'day.' And the darkness, God called 'night.' There was evening, and there was dawn, one day.]" And this is kind of like -- in a way, to me, it's kind of like a Yiddish God -- like, the way I see it -- because, like, how God would -- All right, so God said, Okay, so let there be light already! You know, Okay, let there be light! You know, you want light, so there'll be light! You know? Not the way -- like, people either think of God as this kind of like -- you know, he's kind of like -- he's gonna -- you know, get out of his way, or watch it -- or else -- or not as something else, either -- like, as a small, still voice, but as Jew who taught -- you know, he's in our image; we make him in our image, so to speak.

CW:Yeah.

MD:But -- anyway, that was also -- like, seeing the Jewish Bible. God, I'm sidetracking.

CW:No, no.

MD:Seeing (laughs) --

CW:I think that's great.

MD:Seeing the Jewish Bible was, like -- the Jewish Bible (laughs) -- seeing the Bible in Jewish and Yiddish also, like, was --

CW:Made it more Jewish.

MD:Made it to me more Jewish. Absolutely. All of a sudden, it was a Jewish book. I could -- you know?

CW:Now I get this.

MD:This kind of thing.

CW:Right.

MD:Yeah.

CW:Right.

MD:But of course, you can have it in Yiddish -- like, I'm sure there's -- all around these cities -- all around this city, there's rabbis who are teaching their yeshiva students in Yiddish the Bible with the most wild, crazy, unacceptable, embarrassing interpretations that you can imagine, so let's not, you know what I mean, kid ourselves. But to me, this was something that was, like -- that was the Yiddish that kind of like I love and that I still see. And it is kind of a stereotype, in a way. But look, it's my own -- it's what I grew up with. Like, I grew up -- I didn't -- I mean, I grew up -- my best language always was and always will be English, but Yiddish is my language in another 51:00sense, you know? I grew up with it. I don't have to explain why in a certain sense. That's all. It's always been part of my life. That's it. You know?

CW:So, do you have any other good stories about the library? People you met here, things that have gone on in all your --

MD:Oh boy, oh boy, if I don't --

CW:-- decades hanging out here? (laughs)

MD:Oh, my what?

CW:In your years hanging out here?

MD:I could -- does it have to be about the library?

CW:No.

MD:Can I -- (laughs) I have plenty of stories about (laughter) the library, I'm sure -- but, like, not necessarily Yiddish ones, but about the characters that hang around in the library. Like --

CW:Yeah.

MD:-- certainly I could -- I mean, it's a -- thoughts about, like (laughs) -- but it would have to -- like, I would be betraying -- I wouldn't be betraying secrets. I would be betraying people, like, eccentric people: their habits, it talks about Jewish Montreal, in a way. I know one day I was in the library and there was -- of three people, there was -- it was a cold day. There was one guy in his, like -- here in the library with a big icicle coming down from his nose 52:00to his chin, all through his beard. And there was another guy who's got a very eccentric mannerism here, and it's very loud. And there was me. And I called up a friend of mine (laughs) and I said, "You know, I'm at the library. I don't know if you want to come, but there's just me, so-and-so, and so-and-so." And my friend said, "Well, what do you think? Because everybody else left Montreal" -- we're talking about that Jewish generation that grew up at a certain time that went on to bigger and better -- greener pastures -- "so the only ones left are the losers like us (laughs) that hang around the Jewish library." But (laughs) that's another story. Can I tell you two Yiddish stories --CW:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

MD:-- that are, like, disconnected, but this is -- one is a political one --

CW:Yeah.

MD:-- and one is just a cute one, okay --

CW:Definitely.

MD:-- in its own sense, okay? I'll tell you the cute one first. It has to do with growing up in Montreal. There used to be a department store: Simpson's, a big department store. It was downtown. And once I was there, it was the first 53:00time -- I was very young -- that was the first time that I went not with my mother to buy an article of clothing. It was to buy a new winter coat. And I was trying to get the salesman's attention. And he was being, like, almost harassed by this older man and his -- either his son or daughter, or son and daughter-in-law, or son-in-law and -- you know, (laughs) son-in-law and daughter or whatever it is, but by this young couple. He was with them. And this guy was a stereotype, as we used to say, to use old Montreal Yiddish, of Verdun goyim: that is, non-Jewish, probably from the suburb of Verdun, an Irish working-class suburb of Verdun. He wore one of these jackets with -- he had a big, gray moustache with straight gray hair, really straight, and a jacket with crossed hockey sticks. And these -- a young couple with him. And I'm trying to get the 54:00salesman's -- I want the salesman's attention. This guy is going on and on. We used to say "Verdun goyim" is "working-class" -- as we used to say, "Westmount goyim" -- "Westmount goyim" -- are goyim -- non-Jews, also Anglo-Saxon, but from the wealthy Anglo-Saxon suburb of Westmount, the old Anglo-Protestant elite of Montreal. So, these Verdun goyim are, like, harassing the guy, and I'm waiting, I'm -- ikh shtey afn fis [I'm standing on my tip-toes], you know? And I'm saying, Come on, already! 'Cause I want to ask the guy about the price of this item, this coat. And finally, after the ten millionth question, the young woman turns to the older man -- this older non-Jew -- and she says, "Shvag, s'vet zan gringer" -- you know, "Be quiet, it'll be easier." They were Jews, but you 55:00wouldn't have believed it (laughter) in a million years. But they were. In the old days, incidentally, when I was a kid, you still saw, like, Yiddish signs on banks in the center of the city, because there was still a big Jewish population around there. That's out of context. Something else I'll tell you -- it's connected to something else. Something else is obviously connected to something else, (laughs) right? (laughs) But it has to do with the role of Yiddish today, because we're talking about the library and stuff. What's the future of Yiddish? Sometimes people ask that. I was once asked kind of to be part of another project like this, to talk about Yiddish. And what I felt was, I was hesitant -- and maybe I was misinter-- maybe I misinterpreted what was asked of me; I don't deny the possibility. But I felt -- and this is what makes me sad, in a way -- somebody said, "Come on, and, like, talk about Yiddish. Talk about Yiddish 56:00words. Explain Yiddish words." And I had the impression that what they wanted to hear was, like, what does tokhes [person's buttocks] mean? If somebody says, like, "Kiss my tokhes," what are they saying? What does it mean? What's a putz? If this guy's such a putz, what does -- what am I saying? Isn't that a Yiddish word? What do I mean by that? You know? And I have nothing against that. That's absolutely an important part of Yiddish. But also, it goes beyond that. And I wanted to -- and so I decided I didn't want to do it. Because I felt -- there's a line between which -- one side of which you're laughing with Yiddish, and on the other side you're laughing at it, from a position that you're sophisticated enough to have passed it by. I often get that impression when I go to the Yiddish theater over here, that there's a -- you know, you have a well-heeled crowd; you have these enormous musicals with, like, a cast of forty thousand; 57:00for each of the forty thousand, that's -- they've all got relatives that are gonna buy tickets and stuff like that; and we pass it by once we leave the show. Everybody loves it. It's nostalgia. We lo-- nostalgia's great, incidentally -- but we love it, you know, for this reason. But what's the point at which -- and it's something I'm always afraid of -- at which -- where we're making fun of what's going on, as opposed to understanding the richness of the culture. And it's like -- they used to say, for example, one of the advantages of Yiddish and old Jewish life was the absence of class distinction. You know, there's an old Yiddish expression, basically -- or a proverb, if you want to say it -- that the person who puts -- when you're sitting on a train traveling -- you know, Jews used to always travel on trains, and the person you see facing you who's very -- a well-dressed gentleman, but once you realize he's also Jewish, so you put your 58:00feet back on the seat, you know, beside him. And I remember once seeing this skit in a film -- you may have seen it, with Leo Fuchs -- where he's kind of imitating Fred Astaire, you know, that kind of "Puttin' on the Ritz," you know? And he's -- stumbles through the whole thing. Now if you watch it from a certain eye and from a certain, one might almost say, Yiddish sensibility -- from a certain one -- you can see that he's making fun of that phony -- you know what I mean, putting on airs, phony aristocracy. But from another point of view -- and you can laugh -- but from another point of view, you see it, and you realize people are laughing at Leo Fuchs, you know what I mean? And you've got to, like, make sure -- I think, in a way -- when it comes to Yiddish, are people laughing with Yiddish or are people laughing at it, and feeling that they themselves have 59:00separated themselves from that culture? When I was -- I attended the Yiddish theater recently. They had -- on Second Avenue. And I went Saturday night. And right before the performance -- it starts right after Shabbos -- they have havdole [the ceremony performed at the close of the Sabbath], you know? Blessing for the end of the Shabbos. And what I found very surprising was, they have the havdole ceremony in ivrit [Hebrew: Hebrew] -- you know, using the Israeli pronunciation when it -- there's nothing wrong with it, but we're at a Yiddish night here. We're at Ashkenaz night. And havdole was a very big part of Jewish life of the people that you're talking about. And of course, right after havdole -- you know, formal part of havdole -- you have the only -- if I'm not mistaken -- the only real Yiddish prayer in its entirety that you can find in a siddur 60:00even today: "Got fin avruem [God of Abraham]." Why didn't you have that? And to me, it's because only the play part -- the part that's the play formal is where you're in the Yiddish world, and outside, even immediately outside, there's a havdole. The havdole, there's a separation -- you know, where we separate ourselves, not just as the havdole does, in separating the Shabbos from the week and all the other separations that the prayer talks about, but that you're separating yourself from the Yiddish, from the Yiddish world. You're here to show you've gotten past it. It's nostalgia. You remember "kiss my tokhes" and all of that stuff (laughter) -- or -- which is good, because who -- I say that all the time myself. But -- you know what I mean? But there's that borderline here. And I saw that when I was at the Yiddish Festival here, the Yiddish Theatre Festival a couple of -- last year. And where it was just like Yiddish 61:00literature today, as they say -- an older generation, for the most part, of, like, well-heeled people, and a lot of -- it's very hopeful -- and a lot of young Yiddish performers, but very few Yiddish -- young Yiddish -- young people who are not performers. So, it's like that they used to say about Yiddish literature -- you know, in recent years, there's as many writers as there are readers, you know? Or as many readers (laughs) as there are (laughter) writers. And it was the same thing among the younger generation: a lot of young people performing for each other.

CW:Do you think there's anything we can do to sort of help -- you know, help people stay on one side of the line? Or --

MD:It's just -- it's a psychological thing, too. It's, like, obviously -- and I -- that's why, like -- sometimes, when I was younger, I used to regret that Yiddish wasn't big in Israel. But now I could see why, you know? It's a different project. It's not the same project. It's not the same. Perhaps in the 62:00future, when -- I mean, we're leaving the whole issue of the yeshiva world outside, you know? Perhaps in the future -- there are, today, people who are looking to somehow be Jewish but who are not attracted to that, are not attracted to any kind of, like, right-wing politics or not -- and maybe not attracted -- some are. It's like, some see it in, like -- some see the goal or their outlet in, let's say, Jewish New Age rituals or something like that. Or Jewish alternative minyanim or who knows what, that also exists. For a lot of people, they'll turn to Yiddish. But for some people, it's like I say -- there's, like -- it's a touchy thing -- about -- which is what I started to say. Like, this thing with the tokhes and all that stuff. There's tremendous expressions -- like, in Yiddish, if you know the -- you have to know partly, 63:00like, the religious heritage, too, not just the secular. You know how you say "a brothel" -- like, you know, one of the idiomatic expressions for "a brothel" is "boyre nefushes klayzl." You know that one? "Boyre nefushes" is a blessing that you make after you've eaten but not -- it's kinda -- but not when you've eaten a whole meal. If there's no bread, it's not a whole meal; it's like a snack. A "klayzl" -- you know, a "kloyz" is like a house of study, where you're going to study; a "klayzl" will be a little house of study. So basically, it's "the little house of study where you go for a snack." (laughter) And in the prayer also it talks -- in the blessing, it talks about our imperfections. Because it's not a complete meal, and we're not complete as human beings, so we've gone there, (laughs) in this little study house, to have a little snack that's not 64:00(laughs) -- you know what I mean? Because we're not perfect, you know? This is the beauty of Yiddish. And, you know, here, look, you've got something to do with sexuality that goes beyond the issue of just simple words. Or, like, another one -- you know how to say, like, a very voluptuous woman in -- for better or worse, you know, in Yiddish -- or one of the ways? You say, "an oylem aze dike" -- you know, "she's a this-worldly woman" -- as opposed to "oylem abe" -- you know, "the world to come." So, you might say, well, she's earthy, or something like that, but maybe you could take it a step farther. Because, you know, in the "Pirke-oves," so the "Ethics of the Fathers" -- it talks about how there's one mishne -- excuse me -- one mishne is saying that the -- and it's 65:00talking about the importance of moral choice, how -- and I'm gonna reverse it from the way it is in the mishne, but with the idea in mind that a moment of bliss in the world to come is better than any bliss that you can have, like, from however many years you have on earth, but one moment on earth is better than all the bliss of the world to come. Obviously, because there's ethical choice in this world, and that's what life is all about. But now going back to the woman -- this voluptuous woman -- basically, perhaps, when we call her this woman an "oylem aze dike" -- "from this world" -- what we're saying is, better one minute with this woman than all of your purity (laughs) of an eter-- in that other world. (laughs) You know? (laughs) So, like, let's get things straight 66:00over here. You know, that's, to some, the beauty of Yiddish. Now ten years ago or more, I was involved in a discussion with a friend who -- I was hanging around with somebody and he wanted to kind of like -- and this is where I think the choice comes -- and maybe where, like, the future comes -- and here I'm gonna make a boast; this is a boast. This guy was thinking of developing a rap routine, kind of like a Yiddish or a klezmer rap routine. And he was thinking of -- he needs a name -- like, what he should call himself. So, right away -- and I have to admit, I was really pleased with myself -- I was really, you know, like, smugly pleased. I thought right away: Dr. Dreykop [schemer, lit. "spinning 67:00head"]. You know? Why Dr. -- you know, obviously, Dr. Dreykop because -- from Dr. Dre, you know? And a dreykop -- what is a dreykop, really? A schemer, like, somebody's who's gonna convince you to do something that you don't really wanna do with words. He can make your head spin just by talking -- you know, you're -- like a snake oil charmer or whatever you call it, this kind of thing. So, I thought it would be great: Dr. Dreykop. So, he says to me, "Nah, that's lousy. I've got a better one: Dr. Drek [filth]." And I didn't think that was as good. But sometimes, I've thought of that over the years. You know, there's a kind of pragmatic sense of truth. And probably from his audience, his intended audience, Dr. Dreykop would be meaningless to them; Dr. Drek, that's great for a bunch of belly laughs. So, maybe he was right and I was wrong. But the fact that he might 68:00be right and I was wrong is, to me, a very sad fact. And it's a fact that makes one pessimistic in a certain sense. But who knows? You know, it's -- not because of my own personal pride, but because of what it signifies in a certain sense -- about Yiddish and its future, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

CW:So, what does it signify? Well, you -- I mean, that more people are crossing that line into --

MD:I think for a --

CW:-- laughing at?

MD:Like I say, I think that -- or -- there was always a lot of people laughing at. There was a lot of people who didn't want anything to know with -- anything to know about Yiddish, people who could speak Yiddish. I remember once being with my father in the hospital when he was a room of all Jewish men, and one of these Jewish -- and I remember one -- all the men would be telling jokes in 69:00Yiddish to each other, three other men in the ward. Or in their room, in their hospital room. And one guy, who always claimed he didn't understand Yiddish -- a Hungarian fellow -- laughed at every joke. He got them, but he didn't want (laughs) people -- it was like a sign of, like, low status that he got the jokes, you know? It's like, we used to -- when we were kids, we used to imita-- or when we were adults, really, young adults, and we were really firm in our Jewishness and in our Yiddishness and all this kind of business, I was in a small group of people, and we had a Jewish socialist group where Yiddish was very important, and we thought we were carrying on the tradition. Like in -- I don't know if you've ever read the play, "At the Anarchists' Banquet," [sic] by John Sayles? Anyway. And we used to make fun of, as we used to call them, "of origin Jews," because still, people didn't want to say, I'm of Jewish origin. I 70:00mean, "I'm Jewish" -- they would say, I'm of Jewish origin, or, My parents were Jewish. And we used to know people who used to say -- I used to do an imitation, and people would laugh at the time, because they knew exactly what I was talking about. And we literally used to know people like this -- they would talk like that, in that, like, stereotyped way, with their hands out, folded, and they used to say, (pronounces with Yiddish accent) The fact that my parents were of Jewish origin has had absolutely no influence whatever on me in my whole life. (laughs) You know? (laughs) We used to (laughs) see this. (laughs) And when we were young, we used to laugh. We used to sometimes have these meetings where, like -- and people would come like that -- would, you know, talk about politics, about socialism and the world and stuff like that and insist -- now people -- you know, a younger generation doesn't even recognize those accents. I know younger people -- I say younger people -- people in their twenties who are doing 71:00-- who want to imitate what they think are Yiddish accents, and they all sound like Bela Lugosi, you know? (pronounces with Dracula accent) What do you mean? Why are you talking like that?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:So, for you, how was your political, you know, activism connected to Yiddish?

MD:When I was a lot younger, I used to -- like I say, for a long time, we used to have -- we had a crazy -- like, a small group of people who called themselves the Jewish socialists' group; we really thought Yiddish was integral. Then, we had a crisis, because two of our members left to join this -- a group called the Black Rock, which was, like, an Irish Montreal cultural society, even though we were Jewish -- they were Jewish. And we thought of demanding that they give us two Irishmen in return. (laughs) But it eventually faded away. I've gotten, from 72:00time to time, involved with projects that all seem to be short-lived -- like, having to do with Jewish left-wing activism. I'd love to again, in a way. I have a project, but because my work is -- like, because it's hard to make a living sometimes and I'm disorganized on top of everything, and it's hard to make a living as a Yiddish translator, which is how I actually make money, or what you call money, (laughs) if you can call it that. And so, I don't have much time, but I've always had, like, this back-of-my-mind project to translate a lot of Yiddish work -- partly -- not just political work, but translate a lot of Yiddish anarchist literature, because I'm very close -- I'm closer to that 73:00stream of thought than any other political thought, probably. Although, I'm what Harold Barclay called an anarcho-syndicalist, because I believe it's a life-long struggle -- like, it's something we don't -- as it says also in "Pirke-oves," we don't necessarily live to see the work due to its completion, but neither are we permitted to step back from it. And so, I still have this -- whether I ever do it or not, I've got tons of stuff. Like, God only knows how much junk I've got in boxes and shelves and everywhere that I'll never -- if I do one translation -- and of course, a translation is a -- a translator is a traitor to a degree, too, because you can't really reproduce things. You can't reproduce a culture. You know, we could talk about any -- I was teaching -- God, I'm so pretentious -- it's only pretentious in the sense that people who know -- who knew, know, or virtually know Yiddish -- Yiddish. And I do that sometimes. And usually for 74:00nothing, 'cause I enjoy it. And if my friend hears that, then I'm in big trouble. And one of the things I often bring is -- when I do this kind of thing -- is this short story by Dovid Bergelson, "Bay nakht -- At Night." And only because -- only to -- in the first few sentences, you get the drift of how you have to understand -- like, to understand Yiddish, you have to understand the whole culture, and you have to understand the religious and the secular culture, and you have to understand the -- you know, the world that people come from and live in. And it's still a goal of mine. It's still something I'd like to do. If I knew people now who want to wait till I can catch up on some of my other 75:00obligations and want to study Yiddish and they're interested in Yiddish for -- excuse me -- for these kinds of reasons or reasons that are similar, you know, I'm available. And then, they can go on to someone who knows more Yiddish, who's more fluent and more -- and knows more of the culture and more -- has a better background -- and maybe growing up -- grew up speaking Yiddish fluently or something like that -- which I didn't -- I can't even speak English fluently, you know? (laughter) But that's another (laughs) --

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

MD:But anyway. But that's it. So, like, yeah, whenever anybody's interested in Yiddish, I get excited or something like that, but I'm not -- but I think I'm realistic. But so what, you know? As long as there's people who are, like -- you know, we'll see what the generation will bring. I'm not so optimistic like Dovid Katz, like, if you read "Words on Fire" -- because of what the Hasidim -- like, this idea that the Hasidim will transfer Yiddish as a spoken language into all 76:00of the succeeding -- to the succeeding generations. Even among a lot of the Hasidim that I know here anyway -- I've known Hasidim; I've been asked to interpret for Hasidic people here, and I've come to -- because they've asked for somebody who can speak Yiddish, who can converse in Yiddish. And the questions -- and, like, sometimes they said, Are you sure -- like, you don't have somebody who can speak ivrit [Hebrew: modern Hebrew]? And, like, they're capable of speaking Yiddish, but even among Hasidim, I think, even among the -- what we used to call the "gor frime [very observant]," there's more and more of a movement towards ivrit. I can't talk about that sociologically, I can't -- but it's a hunch that I have.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Well, we're running out of time, but I want to just ask you, since we've been 77:00talking (laughs) so much about this, about sort of where Yiddish is going. Do you have any advice for future generations?

MD:Speak only Yiddish twenty-four hours a day. (laughter) Think in Yiddish. Dream in Yiddish. I used to have a Yiddish teacher that -- I used to ask her, Does she ever speak Yiddish in her real life? And she said, Only when she's making love. And so that, too. Whenever you want. Insist that everybody around you speak Yiddish. In the 1970s in Argentina, some of their right-wing extremists -- you know, fascists in Argentina, insisted that the Jews of Buenos Aires had a plot to separate the province of Patagonia from the rest of Argentina and impose Yiddish as the only official language of Patagonia. I say, 78:00go for it! I say it's up to the younger generation to push forward that project, full steam ahead. And the Jewish community should support it. Forget Birthright, Shmirthright, (laughs) you know -- (laughs) -- all this (laughs) -- whatever it is that they're wasting their money on. That's what I would advise. That's it. Like, by law. Law. I'm an anarchist, but I would support a law imposing Yiddish as the only official language. I think that would be a start.

CW:Great.

MD:Okay?

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

MD:Nishto far -- (laughter) nishto far vos [you're welcome].

[END OF INTERVIEW]