DIANA COHEN ORAL HISTORY

JORDAN KUTZIK: So, I'm with Diana Cohen at the National Yiddish Book Center and we're going to make an oral history interview.  And do I have your permission to continue?

DIANA COHEN:   Please.

JK:  So, what do you know about your family's background?

DC:  Well, my father's family came from a little shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community] in what is now Belarus.  It was called Telekhan.  It was sometimes in Poland, sometimes in Germany, sometimes in Russia depending on the vagaries of the wars and history.  My mother's family 1:00came from the same general area, a town -- I don't remember the name of it offhand.  It's hard to pronounce.  And not too far from what later became Auschwitz.  They each arrived separately.  My father actually made aliyah first, spent a few years in Israel building the -- he was laying the bricks in the road of Talpiot in Yerushalayim and became very ill.  His sisters and brother had come to the United States and he came to join them.  And my mother made -- emigrated with her parents.  She was a child, and her brothers, and they met here, I don't know how, and got married.  And got married in February 2:00of '27.  I was born at the end of November in '27.  Only child.  And they divorced or separated about eight years later.  I lived with my mother.

JK:  You said that you wanted to describe how you got your English name.

DC:  Well, in my family, Yiddish was the lingua franca and I actually didn't learn English until I went to kindergarten.  So, my mother brought me to school and they said, What's her name?  And she said her name is Dina, because that is my name, and the school clerk said, "There is no such name."  So, my mother, who was a rather timid immigrant, said, "Then what is her name?"  And they 3:00said, "Diana."  And that's how I became Diana.  My birth certificate says "Dina."  I was always called "Dina."  But my name and the name I use is "Diana."

JK:  And did you have your legal name changed or it's still Dina?

DC:  It's still Dina, yeah, yeah.

JK:  You grew up in the Bronx in the 1930s and '40s.  What was life like then?

DC:  Well, we lived in the northeast Bronx in an area that was either Yiddish or Italian.  Until I went to junior high, I didn't realize that to be not Jewish was anything other than Italian.  So, it was sort of like living in a shtetl in the sense that all the storekeepers were Jewish, and the kosher 4:00butcher and the appetizing, the typical neighborhood of the Bronx in those days.  As I say, my parents spoke Yiddish at home.  After my parents separated, my grandmother came to live with us and she, my mother's mother, she spoke only Yiddish.  So, it was during the Depression; the early years were during the Depression.  We were very poor.  I didn't know it but my parents certainly were aware of it.  My father had trouble finding work and so he used to bring home collars from downtown, collars to be sewn, bring it to the apartment in big bags.  My mother would sew it, my father would turn them inside out and then bring them back downtown.  That was one of the ways we 5:00ear-- he earned a living.  That was essentially -- my friends were all Jewish.  That was essentially our lives.

JK:  What was Jewish life like in your neighborhood?  Did you attend synagogue or participate in Jewish cultural institutions?

DC:  Okay, my father's father had been a Hasid, a Stoliner Hasid.   My father was a Labor Zionist.  He had left religion completely.  Of course, he could quote Talmud, Torah by heart, but after he grew up, he became a secularist.  My mother's family was observant but not very, and certainly not in America.  So, I grew up essentially in a secular home but it was a very Zionist home and it was culturally -- very strong Yiddish home.  We did not belong to a 6:00synagogue.  My uncles, on the other hand, some of them did, and I would go to synagogue on the holidays to see them.  I attended a shule [school], a Yiddish folkshule [Yiddish secular school] first and then a Hebrew-Yiddish one from the time I was six until I was eighteen.  At first, I attended the Sholem Aleichem Folkshul, which was a Yiddish school completely.  I did that for two years and then, because the Farband Folkshule was too far for me to walk when I was a little girl.  So, then, I went to the Farband Folkshule, which was really -- it was a Labor Zionist school, completely secular.  We studied Hebrew, translated it into Yiddish.  Everything was done in Yiddish and in Hebrew.  But, had I been a boy, I would not have been bar mitzvahed.  And so, that was the exte-- 7:00and, as I say, my father was a very strong Labor Zionist.  I went to the Farband camp, Kinderwelt, and then later on to Labor Zionist camp, Kvutza.

JK:  The school met in the afternoons?

DC:  School met four afternoons a week and then, on Saturday and Sunday, we had khor [choir] and dance.

JK:  Wow.

DC:  Yeah.  It was a big commitment.  I loved it.

JK:  Do you remember any of the songs you used to sing?

DC:  Oh, sure, probably most of the songs that I know in Yiddish.  I remember, (singing) "Haynt iz purim, kinder, da da da da da da, zol mir zingen lider un gayn fun hoyz tsu hoyz -- shpil, yankele, shpil [Today is Purim, children, da da 8:00da da da da, let's sing songs and go from house to house -- play, little Jacob, play]."  I can't remember the whole thing but -- and others like that like "Hanukkah, Hanukkah" and all the Hebrew Zionist songs, of course.

JK:  What languages did you speak -- well, you mentioned you spoke Yiddish at home but what did you usually speak on the street with people your age?

DC:  English.

JK:  Mm.

DC:  Yeah.  Spoke Yiddish at home and, when I got older, a little older, my father started teaching me the Hebrew along with the Hebrew I was learning in shule.  But we never spoke Hebrew, really, except just as a pedagogical way of communicating.  But my father spoke -- my parents spoke Yiddish to me.  Gradually, they became more and more comfortable with the English and, of 9:00course, my father's -- they both spoke English with an accent but they -- by the time my father was here about ten years, he had a really good command of the English language.  And my mother also, a little less so, but also.

JK:  Did your family read Jewish publications or --

DC:  Yes, yes, "Der Tog" was our newspaper.  And my father read "Der Kempfer," which was a Labor Zionist magazine.  He also read Hebrew periodicals.  But "Der Tog" was the paper that we brought into the house.  And we went to Yiddish theater when we had the money to go.

JK:  Do you remember anything particular about the theater?

DC:  Well, my father was very intellectual, so he did not go for the musical 10:00comedies.  So, we went to see every Maurice Schwartz play there was.  Basically, it was anything that was serious drama.  I even remember seeing a Yiddish movie but I can't -- think it was "In grine felder [In green fields]," but I can't imagine where that would have been playing, but I sort of recall seeing it.

JK:  Um-hm. Back to the Farband shules --

DC:  Yes.

JK:  -- what was the curriculum like on a regular basis?

DC:  Well, we studied Hebrew dikduk, grammar, but we read the Bible.  We read the khumesh [Pentateuch] in Hebrew and then, as I said, translated into 11:00Yiddish.  We studied history.  We studied culture, literature, economics.  It was a full curriculum, as if we were going to a public school.

JK:  And the classes were in Yiddish?

DC:  Yeah, yeah, completely in Yiddish or in Hebrew.  And we met in the -- there was a tall apartment building with 80 Adee Avenue in the Bronx, in the northeast Bronx.  And in the basement of that building was the school.  So, there were a number of classrooms and an office.  And we had a number of teachers, wonderful teachers.  And it was a full school for many years.  I 12:00graduated both from the folkshule to sixth grade and then I went on to the mitlshul [high school].  And when I graduated from there, the lerer-seminar [Yiddish teachers' seminary] was held downtown Manhattan, so I used to go down to -- and that was in the evenings, because by then I was a teenager and I could stay out late at night.

JK:  Do you remember what you studied at the lerer-seminar?

DC:  It was a continuation of the Hebrew and the -- it was a continuation of everything that we had learned.  I'm not sure that there were any departures in terms of curriculum.  I can't quite recall.  I went for two years.  But, at the same time, I was going to City College.  So, after two years, it got to be a bit much and I dropped out.

JK:  Were they training you to be a teacher?

DC:  Teacher, yeah, yeah.  That was the only higher educational Yiddish and 13:00Hebrew experience there was at the time.

JK:  Hm. You were a member of the Labor Zionist group Habonim.

DC:  Um-hm.

JK:  How did you come to join this group?

DC:  Again, my father was a Labor Zionist, so it was very natural for me to join the youth group.  I formed friendships there.  I did not plan on making aliyah, although most of the people in my group did plan on it and many of them did.  Or some of -- at least did because I saw them in Israel later on when we went to visit.  But I was very committed to Labor Zionism.  And, as a matter of fact, the Sunday of Pearl Harbor, I was at a Habonim meeting and heard the news there.  And my memory of significant events occurring.  But it was a 14:00great group.  We just did a lot of singing and dancing and talking about issues.  Of course, there was no Israel, those days, so yeah.  And we'd go out with our JNF box.  I'd go on the subway.  And I hate asking for money but, of course, that was the thing you did.  And, yeah, we were very committed.

JK:  What languages did the youth group usually speak?

DC:  English, except all the singing and dance was in Hebrew.  And we probably used a lot of --- you know, it's like when you go to a camp, a lot of the activities you do have the Hebrew name as opposed to the American name.  I'm sure there was a lot of that.  I don't exactly recall.

JK:  Um-hm. What was the relationship for you like between attending the 15:00Farband shules and Habonim?

DC:  There was no -- nobody from my class was in my Habonim group.  So, there was really no rela--, except that we all had the same underlying philosophy, so --.  I remember I was very shocked -- when I was about sixteen, my parents at this time were long since separated.  My father took me to some resort for -- it was probably for the Simchat Torah weekend, something like that, and I met -- my father played cards with the other people and I was with a group of young people and it was the first time I had ever met young Jewish teenagers who were opposed to the creation of the State of Israel.  And it was shocking to me.  I spent the whole weekend arguing with them and then I would come back very upset 16:00and talk to my father, crying, about how could they feel that way?  Because everybody I knew either didn't -- if they didn't come to shule with me, well, we didn't talk about politics, I guess, or Zionist politics, anyway.  But everybody in my shule, all my -- and I had friends there.  And in my Habonim group, we all were on the same wavelength.  So, I didn't realize that there were people -- Jewish people -- who didn't believe in Israel being created.

JK:  Was there any tension in the various youth groups you were in between supporters of Yiddish and supporters of Hebrew?

DC:  No, in Habonim, everybody was -- supporter of Hebrew.  And that didn't really play out in this country because we were all children of immigrants, so Yiddish was very much the family language.  And we were all committed to Hebrew.

JK:  Okay.  You went to different Labor Zionist camps --

DC:  Yeah.

JK:  -- Kvutza and Kindervelt.

DC:  Kindervelt, right.

JK:  What do you remember about these camps?

DC:  Well, first of all, I went for very short periods of time because we didn't have money.  And they were pretty inexpensive camps.  Kindervelt was a camp my father had helped build.  And I went there for several summers, probably for a week or two each summer.  I loved it.  It was wonderful.  It was like a continuation of everything that I was familiar with: the dancing and the singing and the activities, which were -- they weren't very sophisticated but they were wonderful.  And it was being away, which was great.  I went to 18:00Kvutza when I was older.  I think I was already in Habonim by the time I went to Kvutza.  Again, I didn't -- one cousin came with me, but we weren't particularly close.  But she was there and that was good for both of us.  I had a great time there.  We lived in tents and there were no -- everything was very sparse and rudimentary.  Very pioneer-like.  I loved it.  Loved it.

JK:  Do you remember any songs from camp that you used to sing?

DC:  Oh, it was things like "Artza alinu [Hebrew: We ascended to the Land]" and, oh, my goodness, if you find any old Hebrew pioneer songs, we sang them.  At the moment, I don't remember them.  And we sang and danced to them.

JK:  Do you remember anyone discussing the fate of Jews in Europe in the --

DC:  Yes.

JK:  -- 1930s and '40s?

DC:  Yeah, my father would take me every year to the Third Seder.  This was a Labor Zionist -- basically a fundraiser, I guess, that was held in a hotel in New York.  After a while, in two hotels: the Waldorf-Astoria and the Commodore.  And we would go there -- it was not a real seder.  It was a dinner, a Passover dinner, 'cause it was held during Passover.  And the speakers and the entertainment, if you could call it that, all dealt with what was going on in Europe.  And people like Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, before they 20:00were in government, would come and tell about what was going on and how terrible things were.  So, I was aware, from the time I was very young, about the Holocaust.  We didn't call it that at that point.  But nobody really knew the full extent of what was happening at that point.  But we knew that Jews were in big trouble and that they were being killed.  But nobody spoke about it.  It wasn't in the streets or any -- it wasn't in the newspapers because nobody believed it.  It was always, "Those Jews are being hypersensitive and paranoid again."  So -- but I knew about it.

JK:  Do you remember if there was anything in the Jewish press at the time?

DC:  I don't remember.  I don't remember.  I was not reading "Der Tog."  First of all, by that time, my parents were already separated.  I don't even know if my mother was getting the newspaper.  I mean, I know we were getting the "New York Post," which in those days was a good liberal newspaper, and after a while "PM," which was a very good radical -- a little more radical newspaper.  But I don't know if we were still getting "Der Tog," 'cause my father was the one, essentially, who had been reading that.

JK:  And the Third Seder, were there a lot of people your age or --

DC:  No.

JK:  No.

DC:  My father took me but -- I mean, there were other teenagers there but there were not a lot.  And like my Farband group did not go, 'cause that cost money.  But I went every year, yeah.

JK:  You recalled seeing Golda Meir and Ben-Gurion.  Do you remember what they spoke about and in what languages?

DC:  Hm. Interesting question.  Well, my sense is Golda Meir spoke Yiddish.  And I would imagine Ben-Gurion did, too.  I think pretty much everything of the program was in Yiddish.  There was also a very well known actor, Zvee Scooler, to whom we were -- my father had a close friend who was a cousin of his, so we were somewhat related.  So, I knew who he was.  Actually, I went to camp, to Kvutza, with his daughter.

JK:  The Grammeister is his persona, the radio --

DC:  Yeah.  Right, that's right, on WEVD.  But he was also a really good actor.  And he would -- I can sort of remember him doing dramatizations, probably along with other people, but I remember him -- just about how perilous life was for the Jews and how import-- I mean, that was the theme: how important it was to build up -- for Palestine to become a Jewish homeland.  I don't recall the specifics of it, but there was a lot of kind of pageant stuff like that.

JK:  And the Third Seder obviously was tied into the holiday.

DC:  Right, right, essentially for secularists.  My father had a sister and we would spend our seders -- and she was a general Zionist, which meant that she 24:00was a religious Zionist, as opposed to my father being this Labor Zionist.  So, we would have our real seders with her.  I mean, she would hold the seder, my father would conduct it.  But then, there was always the Third Seder that all the Labor Zionists would go to.

JK:  You went to CCNY and Rutgers and became a social worker.  What led you down this path?

DC:  Okay, I went to CCNY because my marks were good enough and 'cause you had to have over a ninety-three average, I think, the year I went, or ninety-five, I don't remember and -- because it was free.  And I was majoring in languages, French and Spanish, 'cause I have an ear for language and I really enjoy them.  But I didn't have the self confide-- and at City College, in those days, a girl 25:00could only get one of two degrees, maybe three:  a business degree, I had no interest in that, an education degree, which -- I really did not want to teach -- and the third was -- I think girls could become engineers and I certainly was not going to be an engineer.  So, I had to study for a bachelor of science in education and that way I could major in my languages.  And I took the minimum number of education courses that I had to because I knew I did not want to teach.  Mostly, I think, in looking back, because I don't think I had the self-confidence -- I thought teachers were a world apart and I didn't think that I was able to do that.  I did not have a lot of self-confidence in those days.  And my other thought was I would become an interpreter for what was then going to be the United Nations.  But I was quickly aware that it's not a great 26:00field for Jews in those days.  And I also didn't really have the self-confidence to push it.  So, I didn't have a strong career bent when I went to CCNY.  I graduated.  By that time, my husband and I had fallen in love and we were getting married as soon as one of us earned some money, because he had been in the Coast Guard and he had to finish college when he came back.  So, I got a job in an office and we got married shortly afterwards.  And then, I had three children and I was the housewife and the mother and all of that.  And then, years later, many years later, when I was in my late forties and my youngest son was in high school, I decided it was time for me to start thinking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.  And by then, I had 27:00already -- doing a lot of volunteer things -- sort of found this path of what is called Jewish Communal Service.  And for that, at that time, the preferred degree was an MSW.  So, I went back to Rutgers at that point for an MSW and from that point on worked in the Jewish Federation field for the next twenty-five years and was very happy.

JK:  What kind of work did you do for the Federation?

DC:  Well, I started out doing community relations work 'cause I was very politically -- and I was interested in politics, I did that.  And then, my portfolio kept expanding and I became the associate executive director of the 28:00Federation.  And after sixteen years there, I went to work for the umbrella organization, which at that point was called United Jewish Communities and is now called Jewish Federations of North America.  And I went into the personnel services department, where I trained -- I helped train people, I helped recruit people for the field, and helped place them, because that way, I used all the hands-on talent and skills that I had from working in the field, my own maturity -- and so, that worked out very well and I worked there for eleven years before I retired.

JK:  You were also a Hebrew school teacher.

DC:  I was, briefly, while my kids were still home.  I had gone back to study 29:00Hebrew again.  In New Jersey, there is something called the Jewish Education Association, which has a midrasha [Hebrew: institute for Jewish studies for women].  And so, I studied Hebrew for five years.  I started studying it when we realized we were going to take our first trip to Israel in 1967.  I wanted to refresh myself and be able to hold a conversation.  And then, I continued for the next five years.  And after that, I became a Hebrew school teacher.  I did it for two years.  I really hated it.  The kids hated being there and I was very much -- I had to be the disciplinarian.  That was not what I wanted to do.  I wanted to teach people who wanted to learn.  So, I stopped doing that as soon as I felt I had really given myself the opportunity to get -- I just wasn't good enough to be able to overcome all the hurdles of their sitting there 30:00with their baseball caps on wanting to get out and play, and being forced to sit in this room and learn something that had no meaning to them.

JK:  What do you think had changed between when you went to the Farband shules and when the next generation were your students?

DC:  Everything.  I went to the Farband Shule at my father's behest.  But our generation, if my father wanted it -- I guess there were two paths to take: either you completely rebel or you integrated and it becomes what you want.  And I was a very good student and I loved to learn.  And languages, I loved.  So, for me, it was very natural.  I was also not particularly happy at home, I guess.  So, it was a great place for me to be.  But kids, I mean, even my own 31:00kids, when they would go to Hebrew school, it was -- yes, because we wanted it.  But they never integrated -- that it was going to be really important to them.  It's a whole different generation and it has to do with parent-children relations, it has to do with the state of the world, it has to do with all the opportunities that I -- I mean, if I didn't go to Hebrew school, I would've been playing with friends.  I wouldn't have been going for piano lessons and ballet lessons and this and that.  Nowadays, the kids have to juggle so many things.  And Hebrew school comes very low on the list.

JK:  You went to Israel for the first time in 1967.  What was that experience like?

DC:  Well, first of all, it was our first experience out of the country.  So, right there it was wonderful.  And, of course, going to Israel, for me, it was 32:00particularly wonderful, although we -- my husband and I went and we went with very close friends.  So, we were four of us.  We planned our entire trip ourselves.  And it was a wonderful experience.  We were there for Yom Ha'atzmaut.  And we were there for ten days but we rented a car and we did a lot of travel.  We were in Yerushalayim and we went up north, all the way up to the Golan -- or not into it but as close as we could and all the way down south.  It was fabulous.  And I got to use my Hebrew.  I was the only one who spoke Hebrew, so -- not that I spoke that well but I had to because I was the one -- and in those days, there weren't that many Israelis who spoke English.  And I got to see my old friend Temi, who had been in Habonim with me and visited 33:00on her kibbutz and visited her in Jerusalem.  It was fabulous.  And since then, I've been back many, many times.  Often on business, often for pleasure.  As a matter of fact, my husband and I were there last year.  And each time I go, I love it, but there's nothing like the first time you go.

JK:  How has the country changed?

DC:  Well, we were there just befo-- two weeks before the Six-Day War.  So, it has changed dramatically.  We went -- in Jerusalem, we could only go so far.  But a friend of -- a guy who had actually been in the same folkshule I had been, but he was a couple of years older so I didn't know him then, we met him through my mutual friend Temi, our mutual friend Temi, and he was a wild man.  And he 34:00took us right through the UN guards into no man's land.  And on the way back, they were waiting for us.  But he talked his way out of it 'cause he was really a nice guy and it was obvious we weren't going to do any harm.  And we were lucky.  I mean, nobody shot at us.  But it was wild.  It was a wild experience.  And everybody was poor and the food was terrible and the toilet paper was terrible, and the napkins -- it was wonderful.  (laughter)

JK:  The toilet paper was terrible and it was wonderful.

DC:  Right.  (laughter) Right.  And we saw all the clichés, but in '67 it was not yet a cliché: the Jewish policeman and the Jewish street cleaner and it was wonderful and we just loved every minute of it.

JK:  You describe yourself as a lifelong Zionist.  How is being a Zionist 35:00today in 2012 different from being a Zionist in the 1940s?

DC:  Very good question.  Very good question, one I grew up with every day.  I am very, very unhappy with a lot of what's happening in Israel, particularly the treatment of the Palestinians, the lack of a peace treaty, all the inequities that have emerged.  All the terrible choices are of tremendous concern to me.  And I am still a Zionist because I do believe that we need Israel and that Israel needs to be what Israel set out to be.  But it's very difficult and I'm constantly questioning myself.  And I keep -- I was very 36:00close with my father, as you can tell from all the references to him.  I keep saying to myself what would my father be saying now if he were here?  I'm still a Zionist but it is very difficult and I do have grave despair about the future of Israel, which I hate to admit even to myself.  But I do.

JK:  You have three children.  What values did you try to instill in them?

DC:  Well, I tried to instill all the values that were important to me.  But you can't transmit values in changed times exactly as you would like to give them, I discovered.  So, they are all -- well, let me -- first of all, they are not all anything.  They are three individuals.  Two of them have integrated 37:00both my social justice values and my love for Israel and Judaism values but in very different ways from the way I had integrated them.  And the third was more the rebel against Judaism and, to some extent, against Israel.  But he's a very good person, a good human being, with real concern for the underdog and for inequities.  He just translates them, again, a little differently.  So, two of my kids have been to Israel a number of times.  My oldest, who was the rebel, 38:00has not been there at all.  We sent each of them there originally when they were teenagers.  My oldest son would not go, so he's still not been there.  They are all, I mean, they're all very good people.  I say that in all modesty.  But it has nothing to do with me.  They are good human beings.  But they're very different from me.  And, see, my father was able to transmit Zionism to me, again, for some of the reasons we already talked about.  But by the time I was transmitting to my kids -- and I say I, it's my husband and me, but I -- it was already -- Israel was already a state and so everything was different.  And you can't transmit concern that the Jews don't have a homeland 39:00at a time when the Jews do have a homeland and they're acting like a nation.  And things happen when you are a nation -- that doesn't happen when you're in the diaspora.  So, that's where transmission doesn't work as easily as it did in the generation between my father and myself.  Or at least that's the way I see it.

JK:  You recently met a first cousin --- um --

DC:  Right.

JK:  How did you meet and who is this person?

DC:  Okay, that was -- it's really a great story.  There is a man in Boston who is the producer and host of a Yiddish radio program.  And he went to Israel, I don't know why.  I didn't know him.  But while he was there, he was 40:00taping Yiddish-speaking people to bring back for his program.  So, he was walking on Ben Yehuda Street and he saw a man, an elderly man playing the violin out on -- you've been there, so you know many of the immigrants are playing instruments out on Ben Yehuda and they're busking, actually.  So, he saw this man, he said he looks as if he might be an émigré.  Maybe he speaks Yiddish.  So, he waited till he finished playing and then he approached him and said, "Do you speak Yiddish?"  "Yes."  "Can I interview you for my radio program in America?"  "Yes."  "What's your name?"  "Semion."  "What's your last name?"  "Godiner."  "Where are you from?"  "Siberia."  "How long have you been here?"  "Eleven years."  "Do you have any relatives in the United States?"  And all this is being conducted in Yiddish.  And Semion says, "Well, 41:00I know I have a very famous cousin."  "Oh, who's your cousin?"  "His name is Daniel Schorr."  "Oh, Daniel Schorr, he's an NPR correspondent.  He is famous.  How do you know he's your cousin?"  "Well, years ago in Siberia, I was watching the news and Daniel Schorr was interviewing Khrushchev and a relative of mine came in and said, 'See that man?  He's your cousin.'"  That's how he knew he was his cousin.  So, the American continued the interview, came back, a year later sent a copy of the interview and a letter to Daniel Schorr, who is my first cousin, and said -- care of NPR and said, "This may be of interest to you.  This guy says he's your cousin," blah-blah-blah.  So, my cousin, Danny, who also spoke Yiddish but who had forgotten it -- he didn't 42:00study it as long as I did -- sent it on to me and he said, "Your Yiddish is much better than mine.  Why don't you see if this guy is related to us."  Well, I translated the interview and then I got very excited because my father was one of eleven children.  The oldest one was a man named --- a boy at that time named Kalman.  My father was one of the younger ones.  So, there is a seventeen-year difference between the two brothers.  Semion's father was Kalman and Kalman had left the house and gone to Russia for work after the First World War because there was no work anymore in Telekhan.  And then, during the interim between the two World Wars, there was some correspondence and then it 43:00died because of the Nazis and all of that.  So, I got so excited when I read this, so I wrote a letter -- oh, and first I had to call -- I had to send an email to a good friend of ours in Israel who was a city planner.  I said, "All I know is the man's name is Semion Godiner.  I assume he lives in Jerusalem because he was busking on Ben Yehuda.  Can you find out his address and telephone number or anything you can find out?"  Within fifteen minutes, she sent back his address, his wife's name, and then I wrote a letter in English and I wrote a letter in Yiddish, the same letter in Yiddish, and a letter in Hebrew, which takes me quite some time.  And then, I have a friend who is a Russian émigré and I gave him the English letter to translate into Russian.  I sent all four letters to Semion.  And with that, we began a correspondence.  He has 44:00a daughter who is my kids' age or maybe even a little younger.  And she has email; he doesn't.  I figured chances are he wasn't going to have email.  So, we have been corresponding back and forth, learning more and more about one another.  Everything I get from them I translate or have translated by my Russian friend, or if it's in Hebrew I translate it and send it to everybody in my family, all my cousins.  That's what's left, all -- but we're a bunch of cousins and we're very close.  And so, last year, my son Robert, who is a writer, was in Italy on sabbatical with his family.  And then, they asked him to come lead a workshop in Bar-Ilan, a writers' workshop.  So, he was in Jerusalem for ten days and he met Semion and the whole family.  And he came 45:00back and he called us and he said, "You must -- they're wonderful people and you've got to see them soon."  He's eighty-eight ye-- he was eighty-seven at that time.  So, my husband and I decided we got to get to -- I mean, we wanted to go anyway but my husband has some physical problems, we didn't know whether we should go.  We decided we'd better go and we went last May.  And we went -- I mean, we had a wonderful time, we did all kinds of things, but we really went primarily to meet them.  And they're delightful.  They're wonderful.  He was a violinist in the Siberian orchestra in Omsk -- in the Omsk orchestra.  And we communicated, he and I communicated, in Yiddish.  I communicated with his daughter in Hebrew.  He has four grandchildren, so we communicated with them either in Hebrew or my husband and they spoke a little English.  So, we were 46:00like going in every language possible.  It was fabulous.  It was fabulous.

JK:  You're also related to the Yiddish writer Shmuel --

DC:  Shmuel.

JK:  -- Nissan Godiner.

DC:  Godiner, right.  And I always knew lore that's handed down in the family.  I always had heard two things: one, that there was a famous violinist in our family and the other that there was a writer and that they had both lived in Russia.  Turns out the violinist is my cousin Semion and the writer, I knew, had died.  And I had a book, I think, with some of his writing, which I may have donated here a couple of years ago.  But then, when I saw that you had the archives, the Spielberg Archives of all the writers, I downloaded a whole bunch 47:00of his work and I've translated one of his short stories into English and sent it out to everybody in the family.  And my goal is to translate more of them but it's not easy work.  (laughs) And so, I've been -- and other things have come up.  I'm also trying to write my memoirs and stuff like that.  So, it's on my list of all the things that I'm going to do.  But he's a wonderful writer.  He died -- he fought with the Russian army.  He was a dyed-in-the-wool communist and he lived in Moscow; he fought and he was killed by the Nazis in 1941.  I don't know whether he was killed or starved or what but he died then.  But he was a wonderful writer.  Just the most beautifully 48:00poetic writer.  And it's a thrill to read his stuff.  And I try to keep the sense of it as I translate, which is not easy to do.

JK:  He is a cousin of your --

DC:  He is my father's cousin.  So, he's sort of like a second cousin or whatever, however one defines that -- yeah, yeah.

JK:  You mentioned that you're writing memoirs.

DC:  My cousin Danny wrote a book of his memoirs.  He had a fascinating life and his brother, who was in the social work field and was a very important figure in social policy, he also wrote his memoirs.  And we used to talk about 49:00it a lot, trying to check memories in terms of the geography and family relations and stuff like that.  I'm not writing that kind of -- I mean, my memoirs are not going to be published.  But I'm trying to put down -- because my grandchildren certainly and even my children can't conceive of what life was like when I was a kid.  I mean, we tell them stories but there's too much that everybody takes for granted these days.  House without a telephone, without a car, literally not knowing sometimes where the money was going to come from for food, the milieu.  So, I'm trying to put that down and since one of my sons is a writer, I'm a little intimidated about being too terrible about it, so it'll take me a long time to polish and polish and polish.  But I am trying to do 50:00that, yeah.  It's very interesting, revisiting.

JK:  Do you have any advice for future generations?

DC:  Oh, God, I can't even give advice to -- no, I don't, because life has just become so different, you know?  What worked and the lessons of -- used to be you saved your money for your old age.  Well, what happened to that piece of advice?  So, it's very hard to give advice for generations that I can't even begin to understand.  I have a hard enough time -- I understand what my kids do.  But when it comes to my grandchildren and they start talking about some of the things that they're doing, it's a little beyond me.  I try.  I try really 51:00hard but I can't even imagine what life is going to be like as the computer gets smaller and smaller and you're never away from it.  The answer is no.  (laughs)

JK:  Okay.

DC:  But I do -- you know what?  I'll modify that in one way.  I do think that life, when you have a cause in your life about which you really feel passionate, other than family, et cetera, et cetera, it adds such great meaning to your life.  I do believe that.

[END OF INTERVIEW]