STAN EDELSON ORAL HISTORY

JESSICA PARKER: This is Jessica Parker, and today is Monday, November 12th, 2012. I am here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Stan Edelson, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Stan Edelson, do I have your permission to record this interview?

STAN EDELSON: Yes, you do.

JP: Thank you. So to start, I would like to ask: Can you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

SE: Well, yes, I can. My mother, at three years old, was brought here from Romania, in Europe -- and actually, didn't come to the US; she went to Toronto, Canada -- her family. And they lived in Toronto, Canada. And then she, growing 1:00up there, went to college, which was very unusual. And I think she went for two years, and she became a social worker. And then she came from Toronto to New York City, because she heard that there's much more opportunities for work there. And she married my father in New York City. My father grew up on the Lower East Side in New York City, from a family who had been here for a while. So they were more acclimatized to the US, or to America, than my mother was, actually. But my father had a very interesting history. He left school when he was fourteen years old. He didn't want to be in school anymore. But he was actually self-educated. And he worked, as most young men at that time had to. 2:00And he did a lot of work -- physical work. He was very able to do that. He ended up putting up telephone poles in the Adirondack Mountains for several years as a young man. And after that, he ended up buying a hunting and fishing lodge in the Adirondack Mountains. Now strangely enough, this was the time of Prohibition, so he actually was involved as a bootlegger for a while. And he used the lodge actually as a way station, and I would hear stories as a kid about how -- some of his adventures as a bootlegger, bringing in liquor from Canada. And he finally, actually, got caught, and was ready to go to prison. Instead of prison, my mother, apparently -- this is a folklore tale of the family -- got him off. 3:00She visited the judge and said that he couldn't be going to jail, 'cause he has two small kids, and (laughs) he has to earn a living. And the judge instead put him on probation for two years. And every now and then, when I was a little kid growing up, I would see a man who would come to the house once a month, and he was a probation officer. And he would always come in, and my mother would give him coffee and cookies, and he spent about an hour with my father. And I didn't even know who this man was -- I was about four years old. And I once asked my mother, "Who is that man?" And she said, "Oh, that's Mr. Sullivan. He comes to see your father once a month." I said, "Oh, is he a friend?" And she didn't really answer -- she didn't want to say what that was about. But they then were 4:00living in the Bronx -- they moved to the Bronx. And then I lived with them, of course, and my brother -- I have a little bit older brother. And the four of us lived on the South Bronx, really, off of Concord Avenue --- off of Concourse Avenue. And it was an interesting development there, because we were in the East Bronx. The East Bronx was a working-class area for Jews -- and we were that. We were in that neighborhood many years. And it became, for me, my old neighborhood, as I grew up in public school there. And it was a very wonderful place, actually. I didn't realize it at the time, as a kid, but years later, I went back to visit it myself to see what it was like, and it was very much like a little village. We had our own grocery stores and food stores and a 5:00delicatessen, and it was just all centered around a couple of blocks. And the people -- everyone there in the neighborhood lived in apartment houses, no private houses. There wasn't a suburb-- suburban area. It was very urban. But it was still the feeling that you were living in a village, 'cause everyone knew each other. It was very close-knit. And there was a synagogue in the neighborhood which people went to. My family, my mother and father, were very much into America, into the Americanization of Jews, so there wasn't really a very Orthodox environment for me to grow up in. It was more like Reform kind of situation of Jews. And we were really maybe considered secular more than religious. But it was still very Jewish. And I went to Hebrew school for about a 6:00year and a half. I never got bar mitzvahed -- and that was my choice, believe it or not. But I still understood that, and I understood what it meant to be Jewish and to use the Yiddish language. My mother and father both knew Yiddish very well, but they hardly spoke it in the house, because they were very involved with this idea that they wanted to become Americans. And actually, my mother, who had come from Canada, was Canadian, but she at one point decided to become a citizen. And she went through a whole process of learning to be a citizen, and she did become one. And they -- we lived through the Depression. Because I was born in 1929, and it was just a couple of weeks before -- around the time I was -- stock market crash, and that was really the beginning of the Depression here 7:00in America. And so we lived through that era of the Depression, which was over ten years in the making. And it was still -- we were still okay. Somehow we managed, even though my father was often out of work and not able to make much of an income. But he struggled, and he kept struggling all his life, to make it big in America. And my mother was a social worker, so she could work, but it was a time when male -- men were very sort of controlling of women, and so he didn't want her to work, so she didn't work. But she instead tried to really bring us up -- my brother and I -- in some kind of intelligent way. She was an intelligent woman. And she began, even in the neighborhood, in the local 8:00neighborhood, a group of women -- mothers -- to learn how to take care and bring up their children. And she led that group. So she was kind of a leader in the neighborhood in that way. And my father, who constantly was struggling to get a good job, or get something to bring in an income, was like a lot of fathers at that time -- so involved in just surviving that he was hardly home a lot. He was home every night, but we didn't see him for supper. He would come home late at night after trying different things out. And so that was my background. I went to public school. In the school, it was all -- almost all the kids were Jewish. The neighborhood was very involved with that. At the same time, we, in different ways, were very aware, even in New York City, of anti-Semitism. It was so very 9:00much in the -- not only in the air, but in practice. And there were neighborhoods that we were told not to go into because we were Jewish. So (chokes up) -- and I get to feel (chokes up) -- very emotional about this, because it was a time when in Germany the Holocaust was happening, and that we weren't really quite aware of it, but we were aware that something was happening. And my father brought home a short-wave radio. We would listen to it and the broadcast from Germany --- Ger-- propaganda broadcast -- which always made very strongly anti-Semitic remarks on the radio -- the broadcast from Germany. So we were very aware that something wrong was going on. And, you know, 10:00we all survived here, but a lot of my family -- my mother and father's family -- of course perished in the Holocaust. And we didn't know that, really, except that we stopped getting letters from them. So something had happened to them. So that was my background. It was a very working-class background. It wasn't -- I read many years later a book called "Jews Without Money" by Michael Gold, very well-known book now, and that made me feel -- I understood a little bit about us, then, as a family, and why we weren't rich or why we weren't in the suburbs or why we didn't have a house of our own. All of that became much clearer to me. Then, after I grew up --

JP: Can you tell me --

SE: Yes?

JP: Can you tell me a bit about that book?

SE: Say that again?

JP: Can you tell me a bit more about that book?

SE: That book?

JP: Yeah. What made you realize what kind of Jew you were?

SE: Well, because in that book, it was a series of short vignette stories about families in the -- on the Lower East Side -- it was all about the Lower East Side -- and about how they were all struggling to earn a living, to just survive, and what life was like for them at that -- back in the 1920s, actually, in the USA. And that there was always hope for something better in the book. But it wasn't -- it was a grim book, in a way, because every family went through a lot of difficult times. And it made me feel -- because when I grew up in the Bronx, it was very much like -- I grew up in the East Bronx, but it was the West Bronx where there was -- Grand Concourse was the dividing line. If you lived on the East Bronx, you were on the east side of Grand Concourse, and if you lived 12:00in the West Bronx, you were on the west side. The west side was already people who had made a little money. And so we wanted always to move to the west side. It was very sort of (laughs) relevant. And I began to realize the difference between poor and rich and what that meant really -- and that there was actually classes of, you know, people in America -- there wasn't just, everyone was in the same class. And then I -- but I had a lot of feelings about growing up as a Jew in the Bronx. 'Cause what I saw around me, in the adults -- and even in the kids -- there were kids and families which were very sort of passive, and that -- I considered that the passive Jew, who just took everything and just couldn't do anything about it. That was their idea -- they just had to grin and bear it. 13:00And then there were other Jews who I knew, adults who were very aggressive. And so in my mind, I had this idea that Jews are either very passive or very aggressive; there was no (laughs) in-between. And I felt that way, too. So at times, I became very aggressive. And then at times, I beca-- felt I was just very quiet and very passive. And it was interesting that that developed in my family -- that I saw my parents -- my father, who intended to be very assertive, but not exactly pushy, but just trying to move himself into better situations, whereas my mother was the more passive one, even though she was a leader of women in the area, she was still quiet at home. It was that whole male-female kind of controlling situation. And then when I became a teenager and I could go 14:00on my own more, I decided -- 'cause my family life, really, was not easy. It was sort of a dysfunctional family in many ways, mainly because of my father's treatment of my mother and how that happened. So I decided, at sixteen and a half, to move out. And I moved out. And I was going to art school -- I decided to go to art school after high school. I graduated high school when I was sixteen, and then I decided I had to go out on my own. And where did I have to move to? I looked around New York City at that time. I was going to the Art Students League, which was on Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue area, and I was told by other students at the school -- this was right after the Second 15:00World War, it was 1946 when I started there -- and I was told that you could either live in Hell's Kitchen, which was west of the school and in the '50s in New York City, Ninth and Tenth Avenue, or you could move to the Lower East Side, which even had cheaper rentals. And that's what I needed, 'cause I had no money. So I moved to the Lower East Side. And I lived there for ten years. And I lived in a cold water apartment. I don't now if people know about that, but it was a tenement -- a tenement where a lot of the people from Europe -- from Eastern Europe, particularly Jews -- moved to the Lowest East Side when they first came to America, because it was cheap and because they could do that. And I lived in -- it was really a cold water flat. It was really cold. (laughs) It had no heat and it had no hot water, and so we had to create our own heat and create our own 16:00hot water. But we managed that, too. But I was an art student and an artist, and so I was sort of acclimatized to the idea that it was okay for an artist to live that way. But I also felt a struggle, all the time -- that somehow I should do better than my parents should -- were. And I --

JP: May I ask you a quick question there?

SE: Yes.

JP: Do you know how your parents felt that you were moving back to the Lower East Side after your father had left there?

SE: That's right. My father was almost ashamed of that. Because one time, when I was visiting him -- he was working in Manhattan at that time -- I needed a ride to get back home to my flat. I could take the subway or I could even walk, but instead, he decided he was gonna drive me home, and he did. And he stopped right 17:00in front of my house -- my tenement house. And it was on Twelfth Street and Avenue B -- that's a part of the Lower East Side. And he said to me that he used to live just a couple of blocks away from there. And I said, "Oh, what a (UNCLEAR), Dad. Would you like to come up and see my flat and my work, my artwork?" And he said no, he didn't want to do that. And I realized later, because he didn't want to go back t-- he was almost ashamed that I had to live on the Lower East Side, that I should've tried for something better. But I liked the Lower East Side. I felt very comfortable there. Because (chokes up) again, it was people that (chokes up) -- that I could (chokes up) -- that I could relate to. There were people who were similar to what -- who I grew up with -- even more so, in a way. I mean, it was a neighborhood. Again, it was like a 18:00little village, the area that I lived in, so I got to know everyone in that neighborhood, and I felt comfortable there. And there, a lot of the people did speak Yiddish -- you know, even though I didn't grow up in a family where people spoke Yiddish, but on the Lower East Side, they still were speaking Yiddish a lot. And I met a lot of friends -- I have a friend today who I've had for now seventy years as a friend, and he grew up on the Lower East Side. He was born there. And he was an artist, too. (cries) Even today -- he moved finally out to New Jersey, but right in Teaneck, very close to the city, and that's where he's living now. And every year I go and visit him a couple of times, to keep that 19:00(cries) friendship up. The other thought about being Jewish, for me, was, I couldn't quite know whether I wanted to be Jewish or not. Because I heard and I knew about anti-Semitism -- and actually, one time, my parents -- my father -- wanted us to go away for the summer and get out of the city, the hot city, so we did go up to the Catskill Mountains and look for a place to stay, to rent a room. And we first, for some reason -- I don't know why this happened -- we were on the one side of the Catskill Mountains which was not Jewish -- and matter of fact, there were signs up on all the houses essentially saying, "No Jews allowed." And so I saw first-hand anti-Semitism in practice. And we did (chokes 20:00up) find a room on the other side of the (laughs) Catskill Mountains, the Jewish side, and there we lived for the summertime, just from renting a room. And it was a kokh-aleyn -- a place where people came and rented rooms and had a common kitchen. It was like an old boarding house made into a -- sort of a resort, but not really very resort-conscious, you know? And we slept -- the room we had was an old kitchen of this boarding house, and I slept on top of the stove. (laughs) It was an old iron stove which was no longer being used, and they didn't have any more beds to give us, so -- you know, my older brother and my mother and 21:00father had a bed, and I had a mattress on top of the stove. And I slept on that. And it was okay, you know? I didn't think anything of it. But I had all these feelings about, was it good to be Jewish, because of what was happening to the Jews -- you know, in this country and in Europe. So I began to think, Why should I be Jewish? And here in America, people can be what they want, supposedly. So I had this struggle, this internal struggle, with whether to acknowledge or accept being Jewish. And I decided, really, to do it -- to accept it, and to want to be Jewish. But it was a personal struggle for me. And I thought that was good idea -- that I had to go through a struggle, that I had to understand the value of being Jewish. And I began to understand that there was a whole tr-- not only tradition about it and not only religion, but whole culture that I could be part 22:00of, that I could -- that was my roots. So I did. (laughs) When I lived on the Lower East Side and my best friends were all Jewish, I felt very comfortable then -- in being Jewish, and I didn't have to not be. And I could really engage with them in the High Holidays and with Jewish tradition. And I worked on the Lower East Side. I actually became a settlement house worker. On the Lower East Side there were many settlement houses, which were the places where the Jews and other minorities would come to get settled, to have a place to be for the first couple of weeks in America before they could find their own place or relatives could take them in. And then, when I had grown up, I started working in these 23:00settlement houses as a group worker -- working with kids, mainly, but also with adults, helping -- and I became, like, a teacher of arts and crafts, and of painting, and of woodworking, and things like that. And I worked in all of the -- actually, all of this happened when I was on the Lower East Side. I was living there for ten years, I worked there for ten years. And even in the summer, I worked in the camps of these settlement houses -- and very well-known camps at that time. And they were all run by social workers, by group workers. And that, again, was (UNCLEAR) Jewish settlement house camps, and those were the ones that I usually worked in.

JP: Where were those?

SE: What's that?

JP: Where were the camps?

SE: Oh, most of them were -- well, they were all in New York State, but most of -- many of them in the Catskill Mountains, but also around -- outside of the Catskills, too. And they were good camps. And there was one particular camp, 24:00which wasn't particularly Jewish but was very progressive in its attitudes, and that was Camp Woodland. It was called Camp Woodland. And the director of the camp was Norman Studer, who worked as a teacher in the Little Red Schoolhouse in New York City, which was a private school, like a charter school today, but very progressive. And to that camp, every summer, Pete Seeger would come, because he had kids in that camp. It was, like, a wonderful camp, because -- not only because Pete Seeger came, but Norman Studer was very interested in folklore, and so he would bring the kids -- and I was a counselor there, and I would go, of course, with him and do work with them. And they would bring us to other people in the Catskill Mountain area who were craftsmen or woodworkers or people who 25:00had done the old crafts, in a sense, to bring back the folklore of the area and of their lives. So that all influenced me in terms of my work, my artwork, because I was an art student and an artist. And so I began to do woodcuts, which was in a folklore tradition -- of doing artwork through sort of a craft, a woodcut craft. And I belonged -- early on, when I was eighteen, I joined a group of artists in New York City around the Lower East Side, but the artists were from all over the city. And they were a collective group, before there even was an idea of collectives. And we, together, did woodcuts -- not only individual woodcuts, but what were called at that time woodcut newspapers, which were just 26:00a whole series of woodcuts put onto a page as if it was a page in a newspaper -- but instead of being articles or separate pieces, it was all a group of artists who had done separate woodcuts but they were all part of this theme. And we even did a theme on Jim Crow, even in the early 1950s, because we were a progressive artist group. And it was fascinating, because as we were doing that kind of work, which was a very direct political comment on what was happening in the world, there was abstract expressionism in America, and in New York City, which was just the opposite of what we were doing. And we sort of almost very consciously decided to go one direction, whereas the other artists were going in a different one. That was okay, but we needed to do what we wanted. And so it 27:00was very -- much more sort of socially conscious kind of artwork. And it was within the tradition of Mexican artwork -- Mexico after the Mexican Revolution, when Diego Rivera and Siqueiros and Orozco did big murals about the Mexican history. And then, after I went to art school -- I finished art school when I was about seventeen and a half -- I decided to go cross-country, because I wanted to see what the rest of the world was like. I grew up in New York City; all I knew was New York City. And that was sort of very insular, and it wasn't the rest of the country. So I decided to take a trip across this country. And I did it -- from here to the we-- from the East Coast to the West Coast. And on 28:00the way, I stopped, because I had no money -- and I stopped and worked. And I did all kinds of different work. Like, the first job I had was working on the railroad. I was on this section gang in the railroad who replaced the tracks on the railroad. And then I also worked in a meat-packing plant, and I worked on farms and ranches -- and in a logging camp and all kinds of work situations. We weren't able to do that in New York City -- it was an urban area. And this was the rest of the country, where all these other kinds of activities were going on. So I learned first-hand, by doing it, what it was like to be a worker, to be working-class.

JP: How was it to be Jewish in these different jobs across the country?

SE: That was hard. That was hard. And I even, believe it or not, was hiding from 29:00that fact. 'Cause I didn't think about myself as looking Jewish -- I didn't have the usual Jewish nose or whatever y-- was considered Jewish, so I could pass, in a sense. Just like a black person -- some could pass as white 'cause they were light enough skinned. So I felt I could pass as not being Jewish. So I never told anyone on that trip that I was Jewish. And matter of fact, when they asked me where did you come from, I didn't say New York City, because New York City was Jewish; I said Boston, Massachusetts. (laughs) And I never had been to Boston. I hardly knew anything about Boston (laughs) except that it wasn't Jewish. And years later, I moved (laughs) to Boston and found out what Boston (laughs) was like, too. But at that time, it was hard to be Jewish -- and be --- and other parts of the country -- which were still very anti-Semitic. But, you 30:00know, I got through -- went through it okay. And then after I did that, I came back to New York and I wanted to go to Mexico, because I heard that Mexico was the place for artists like me who were sort of politically conscious to go and do your -- and learn from the artists of Mexico -- instead of Paris, which was still, you know, kind of like the -- how to explain it -- sort of the art center of Europe, and a lot of Americans went to Paris. But I had the choice of going either to Paris or Mexico, and I couldn't even afford to go to Europe, so I went to Mexico instead. I just took the Greyhound bus for fifty bucks from New York City to Mexico City. So we could do that at that time, and I did that. And I ended up in Mexico City. And I was there for a month or two and then met people 31:00-- Mexican artists, political artists -- in a graphic workshop, just like I was engaged in in New York City, in a graphic workshop. And then, from that graphic workshop situation in Mexico City, I was getting sort of antsy; I wanted to get out of Mexico City and see the rest of Mexico. So one of the artists there gave me the name of a person I could go to in a small village outside Mexico City, so I decided to do that. And one day, I got on the train in the central railroad station in Mexico City. It was at five o'clock in the morning and it was going out to the Valley of Mexico, where there were a lot of villages (UNCLEAR). So I got on that train -- I didn't know how -- I didn't speak much Spanish, so I didn't know even where to go -- I mean, where the -- find a train to go, and so 32:00I kept asking people in the train station, "I need to go" -- I just tried to say it in English, in the hopes I'd find someone who would understand, and I asked them, "Where can I" -- oh, they gave me the name of the village that I was supposed to go to -- Fiores, in Mexico -- it was Robles -- Robles was the name. So I just said, "Robles, Robles" to everyone I met in the train station. And one of the people who worked in the train station showed me where to get the train. And I got on that train at about five thirty, six in the morning. And on that train, it was crowded with people going out to the villages. And there were people on it and animals -- in the actual cars of the train -- they were mixed together. People had chickens with them; someone had a young goat with them. And I had -- what I had with me was a paint box and canvases. And the train took off 33:00and it went for hours. The village was only fifty miles outside of Mexico City, but the train was going about ten or fifteen miles an hour, and we'd stop, and we'd just go through little villages. And then I kept asking the conductor on the train -- the guy who took the tickets, walked through the train cars -- "Robles? Will you tell me when Robles is?" And then finally, about a hour, two hours later, he said, "Robles!" -- he shouted it out -- and I went to the door of the train, but the train didn't stop. It just kept going. And so one of the people on the train said, "Jump!" And they meant it -- that there was no way the train was gonna stop, 'cause the village was so small. So instead, I jumped off the train. And you could do it -- it was ten to fifteen miles an hour, you could 34:00manage it. And they threw all my stuff out (laughs) with me. And I ended up on the ground. And I wondered, Where the heck am I? 'Cause there was no village there. And I sat on a rock for a couple of hours waiting for something to happen. And I began to think, They lied to me. This isn't Robles. There's no village here. And then, finally, someone came by -- a man and his donkey -- with stuff on the donkey, carrying stuff. And I said "Robles" to him, and he pointed up the hill. And I finally found a little road, a path, so I went up the hill to Robles. And after about a half hour of walking up the hill, I came to a shack -- there was a shack right on the little pathway. And on the shack, on the front of the shack, there was a Coca-Cola sign and a Milky Way sign. And I said, Oh, this 35:00must be Robles. So I went into the shack, (laughs) and there was a Mexican woman in the shack. And it was like a -- what do you call it, those kind of stores? A town store -- I forget the name of it. And, you know, they had sacks of flour there and sacks of nuts and so forth -- and a couple of canned goods, but not much. And Coca-Cola -- there was a Coca-Cola box there, too. And I asked her, "Is this Robles?" She shook her head and she just pointed up the hill further. And I got my Coca-Cola and my Milky Way and I went up the hill (laughs) and I came to the town of Robles, which was one street, with houses on both sides of the street and big areas behind the houses. It was all on the hill, like a mountain. And I went down the street, looking for the person's name that I was 36:00given -- I had a little piece of paper with the name of the person. And I finally came to the last -- are we running out of time? Okay. And I finally got to the house where this man lived. And they were very friendly. They didn't speak any English, but they had a cousin across the street from them who spoke some English. And this man -- and his family -- he was a stonecutter. He made tombstones and everything involved with the ritual of dying. And it was an adobe house, and there was just one room in the whole house. And there was a big bed in the room. And I asked him, "Well, where am I gonna sleep tonight?" And he pointed to the room. And I thought, Oh, am I gonna sleep in the bed? And the husband and wife were there, and a couple of young kids. And I thought, Well, 37:00we're all gonna sleep together in the bed. (laughs) I didn't know that. And then, when it became around eight o'clock and it started getting dark, they all moved out, and they gave me that room. And I was -- you know, I was eighteen years old, and they gave me that room. I was so shocked about that. And I began to understand something about people in the world who lived in rural areas, who had very little, but they gave of themselves so much. And every day, they would make breakfast for me. I'd pay them a little bit of money each week, but it was very little, 'cause I didn't have much, and they accepted it. And I lived there for about two months. And I painted and stayed with them and so forth. And then I decided to finish my Mexican trip and then went back to New York City. And 38:00again, it was back to the Lower East Side.

JP: Do you know about your father's experience of the Lower East Side -- how the Lower East Side was different when you lived there versus when he lived there?

SE: Well, he would talk about it. He told me that, again -- and all my uncles -- you know, his family -- were all, of course, from the Lower East Side, too, and they would talk about it -- they would talk about their growing up. And again, it was kind of difficult for them, but they managed. They were kind of survivors. That's what gave me the idea that the people on the Lower East Side learned how to survive. And they were very communal in the way that they helped each other -- you know, as much as they could. And so it was a kind of -- again, for each of them -- my uncles, and my father -- just a way of managing things -- 39:00no wealth, no money sources, but all working-class. All got jobs as workers in the garment industry or other industries in New York City, and they all managed to survive. And they -- my father -- again, because he want-- he was very into -- not that he talked literally or in sort of an educated way about what it was like to be Jewish, but he made it clear to me what the difficulties were in America to be Jewish when he grew up, even harder than when I grew up -- when they first came here.

JP: And what were those difficulties?

SE: The difficulties were, again, that Jews were not allowed in any substantial situation. They weren't allowed on the police force. They weren't allowed into colleges. You know, that was a time when Harvard had no Jews allowed at all. And only after there was City Colleges -- like City College -- and I went to Brooklyn College, which was also a City College -- there were plenty of Jews then, in these colleges. But when he was growing up, they weren't accepted into schools. And the only jobs they could get was in the garment industry, or some of them -- some of them became doctors, you know, and maybe lawyers, but they, you know, had to struggle to get through the school to even get there. So there was a lot of segregation in that sense -- of not allowing Jews to be in any 41:00significant places.

JP: Do you know if the Jewishness of the Lower East Side was different when you were there versus when your father was there?

SE: Well, I imagine the Lower East Side when my father was there, that all the families were Orthodox. 'Cause my friends on the Lower East Side would talk about their families and how they were often in the shul praying and that they had Orthodox kosher houses -- you know, kosher -- for eating and so forth. And -- yeah. And when I was there, the Lower East Side was still very Jewish, but it was a little bit more sort of Americanized -- or beginning to be Americanized.

JP: Can you tell me a bit more about your art? Did you create in a studio? Did 42:00you have a special process to your woodcuts?

SE: A studio, you said?

JP: Yeah. I was just curious about your visual art.

SE: Yes.

JP: You know, you talked about woodcuts. Was there a specific way in which you did them? Did you have a process? Did you have a studio?

SE: Yes. Well, because I lived in a flat, a cold water flat, and it was just one and a half rooms -- essentially, that's what it was -- I did 'em right there. I just had a kitchen table kind of, and I brought the wood there and did the cutting there, and that was my studio. You know, like a lot of the young artists at that time -- again, it was the mid-1940s to the late 1940s and '50s -- artists were like that. They had their studios where they lived, usually. And 43:00that worked. You know, it wasn't wonderful, but it was possible to do that.

JP: Was there a relationship between your artwork and your artist identity and your Jewish identity?

SE: That's a good question. Again, because at that time Jews were now getting more easily into other areas of America -- American life -- and they were artists -- there were a lot of Jewish artists. And because I was living on the Lower East Side, I could meet these artists. And so that the connection between being Jewish and art was very possible. It was very close. You know, people like Marc Chagall and other Jewish artists were very prominent -- began to be 44:00prominent in the art world. And so the art world was more open to being Jewish than other areas of life. Maybe that was one of the reasons I became an artist -- 'cause I felt -- possible, it was possible, to do good in that area of work. Yeah. And the settlement houses, again, were very cultural. They had art classes. There was one settlement house called the Edgies -- the Educational Alliance, that was the full name of it. And it was a really -- basically a Jewish settlement house, run by Jews, and where the kids -- most of the kids were Jewish. And they had art classes and music classes and dance classes. And there was another settlement house called the Henry Street Settlement House, which still exists to this day. So does the Educational Alliance. And both of 45:00them would have a lot of cultural activities, like painting and drawing and music and dance and theater. And theater became very important on the Lower East Side. There was a whole Jewish theater -- groups -- on -- I keep mixing it up -- I think it was Second Avenue -- there were theaters, Jewish theaters. And a lot of the Hollywood actors in the '30s started in the Jewish theaters movement, and then got into Hollywood. Paul Muni is an example of that -- a great actor, actually, who started off on the Jewish theater. And I went to Jewish theater when I was living on the Lower East Side. Of course, it was all in Yiddish -- 46:00almost all of the plays were in Yiddish, so I didn't quite understand them, but I could understand the idea of the play. And the acting was -- it was very good, actually. It was very expressive -- very emotional, very expressive. So I liked it. And I finally went into theater myself. When I moved out of the Lower East Side, we first moved to, actually, New England, and eventually to Boston, to the Boston area. And in the Boston area, I was very curious about Boston, because I had said I had come to Boston -- lived in Boston, even though I hadn't. And then I wondered about the Jewish community in Boston, and was there one. And my wife at that time had relatives in Dorchester -- the Boston area, in Dorchester -- 47:00and we went to visit those relatives. And that area was -- at that time it was very Jewish -- and Yiddish. You know, they spoke Yiddish -- her relatives. So I began to see that there were other areas of the country which had a Jewish population -- you know, in part of the cities. So my art -- some of my art reflected being Jewish. Of course, right after the Second World War, a couple years after that, and when there was the discovery of the concentration camps, of the Holocaust, (chokes up) I was very -- very (chokes up) -- very moved by what happened to Jewish people in Europe, and so I decided to comment on it through my art. And I did a large woodcut which was an expression of my response 48:00to the Holocaust. And I read -- at that time, even, in the early 19-- late '40s, 1950s -- books by Jewish writers, 'cause I wanted to understand more about what it meant to be Jewish in Europe.

JP: You mentioned to me that your explorations and questioning of Jewish identity was life-long.

SE: Yes.

JP: Can you tell me about some of those harder moments, or moments of real connection where you felt really proud to be Jewish?

SE: Right. I was always conscious of whether I was really going to follow a Jewish tradition or not. So actually, in the early, young adult years of my 49:00life, when I was in my twenties, I began to celebrate the Jewish holidays. And when I was growing up in the Bronx, there were, of course, the Jewish holidays, and people celebrated them, but my parents never fully celebrated them. Some of my -- other families in the neighborhood were very involved with that, but I wasn't very involved. So the idea of Purim, the idea of Passover, you know, the -- celebrating those holidays as a family and going to the shul and also celebrating at home. I then began to try and celebrate them myself when I was in my twenties. And (UNCLEAR) (chokes up) my friends -- (cries) -- I would invite 50:00my friends over for Passover and have a Passover seder, even though I had not had that tradition when I was growing up. So I got (chokes up) -- very much wanting to do that, and I did it. But then, at times, I didn't do it, you know? And then, after I was married -- my wife came from a very Orthodox family, Jewish family, in Brooklyn. And because of her, I began to then -- and then with my kids, when we had our children, we began to celebrate the holidays. So that was it. But because my early involvement with being Jewish was this mixed feeling about it, and some of that carried over even into later times. Even today, I find myself in company where I sometimes don't say about my background. 51:00Even today. That anti-Semitic approach, culture that we grow up in -- it still stayed with me -- you know, the concern that -- kind of the internal censoring of being Jewish, instead of -- no one's telling me that I can't be anymore, but I keep thinking that. And then I have a problem (clears throat) with -- because I grew up in -- are we running out of time?

JP: We have about ten or fifteen more minutes.

SE: Okay. Because I had a problem of -- when Jews in America finally got accepted, and they flourished in Harvard and places like that, and in Wall Street -- a lot of the stockholding companies in Wall Street, stockbrokers, are Jewish today -- and major, major companies. And I had problems with that. Not 52:00that they shouldn't do it -- they should do it -- but that I wasn't one of them. I wasn't a rich Jew. I didn't come from that background; I never got there. I never wanted to get there. So I always had this dichotomy, this kind of splitting, of, I am Jewish, I want to be Jewish, I want to live a -- in a semi-way, a Jewish life, but at the same time, I don't want to be seen as a Jewish stockbroker. It was this whole question of class that came into it.

JP: You mentioned that you chose not to have a bar mitzvah.

SE: Right.

JP: Are you able to tell me a bit about that -- about that decision?

SE: I think my brother did have it. He was older than me -- just a year and a half, but he got it. And I had the offer to have it, and I didn't -- even as a 53:00kid, I didn't see why I should have it. I had that ambivalence. And my parents, as a lot of those Jewish parents, would have done -- would encourage me to have it, but they didn't -- they weren't that involved in me having a bar mitzvah. So I had no backup, no support at home, to having it. So I decided not to. You know, going to Hebrew school was almost fun, but not really, because after (laughs) five hours or six hours of school, and then to spend another two hours at Hebrew school after school -- it wasn't always fun. So, you know -- I sort of enjoyed it, 'cause I was learning the Hebrew alphabet and things like that, but I didn't really want to spend more time in school.

JP: You mentioned that you incorporated Jewish traditions in different ways in your personal family life, the family you created with your wife and children.

SE: Right.

JP: Were there certain traditions or values that were especially important for you to transmit to your kids and the next generation in general?

SE: Yes. It was the idea of liberation and of the Jews -- it's the story of Passover, that the Jews were slaves in Egypt and that they had to free themselves, to finally break out of that, and it was Moses as a leader, and to free themselves, liberate themselves. And that had a big influence on me, that idea. And that (clears throat) -- Purim and the story of Purim was also about 55:00liberation, so that I began to think of Jews -- and then I went to Israel. I actually -- at first, when Israel came into existence, I was very excited about that. I liked that idea a lot. But I didn't go there. And years later, I finally went to Israel. And when I was in Israel the first time -- I went there three different times -- the first time I went there, I wandered through Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and I had someone who I went with who knew people there, and I felt at home. I said that. Because wherever you go in Israel, they say, Why aren't you living here? That was a common comment -- you know, If you're Jewish, you should be here. And I said, "Well, I'm living in the US. I don't need to be 56:00here." And they said, you know, You need to be here. We need all the Jews that can be here to be here. And so I began to understand something about Israel and the needs of Israel. And then I also had problems with that, because I didn't like sometimes the foreign policy of Israel. I thought that sometimes they were too antagonistic to the Arabs. And so the first time in Israel, I ended up on a kibbutz, one of my times, and I began to understand what Israel was like, that it had to defend itself. Because this kibbutz was right on the border of Lebanon and Israel. And I stayed with a family there, where the father of the family was the civil defense leader of the kibbutz, and he even showed me the bunker that 57:00they would go into -- all the people in the kibbutz -- when the rockets would come over from Lebanon or people would come from Lebanon, you know, to fight the Israelis. But I had trouble with that. I had trouble with the Israeli foreign policy. And I went a second time to Israel as a teacher, and I actually taught there for a week -- an intensive course. It was through a college in Cambridge called Lesley College, who had a adjunct situation in Israel. And I taught Israeli teachers -- school teachers. And these were teachers from all over Israel, and from different backgrounds -- European and Middle Eastern backgrounds. And I went to visit them in their homes -- not only by teaching 58:00them. So I began to get much closer to what Israel was about. And then my last trip to Israel was a peace delegation with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which was originally a Christian organization after the First World War, but now it was sending a delegation to Israel of many faiths to make peace, to help make peace. And we went to Israeli people who were peace activists and Palestinian people -- we went to the West Bank, to Palestinians who were trying to make peace. So I began to get a larger picture of what that conflict was about. And that helped me a lot to reconcile my feelings about the Israeli situation. You know, I understood how important it was to Israel to have security, to feel that 59:00they were safe, and I also understood how sometimes the Israelis were being hard on the Palestinians. And so I began to understand that.

JP: Sounds like a difficult negotiation between Jewish nationalism and progressive politics.

SE: Now in one of the museums in Tel Aviv, there is a wall --- there is a part of an exhibit which says just that: that the Jews in Europe had the option of Israel -- or Palestine, at that time -- of nationalism, of forming a national state of Jews, or becoming social activists, in terms of the whole world. And I began to understand that that was the dichotomy, the split in the Jewish population -- that some people were just that. They needed to be Israelis, they 60:00needed to have a country of your own, that -- where Jews from all over the world could come to. And of course after the Holocaust, it was so apparent that there needed to be a place like that, where Jews could come. At the same time, the idea of nationalism -- I don't even like American nationalism, you know?

JP: So you just told me a bit about how Israel fits into your Jewish identity. How does your connection to Yiddish, Yiddishkayt, Eastern European Jewish heritage -- fit into your Jewish identity, if at all?

SE: It fit in because it was the way -- from what I understood -- how Jews, when they were in Europe -- and still in Europe -- Eastern European countries, and in Germany itself -- they needed a language. Not the language of the country, 61:00German or Polish; they needed to be their own people, their own culture, and that Yiddish was a development for that reason, that it (UNCLEAR). I actually went to Poland years later with a theater group. We were part of a theater group. We were invited to a theater festival in Poland by a Polish student group, and then we toured Poland for months putting on a play that we brought over. And so I saw the situation in Poland. And I met people in Poland -- in the audience -- who were actually teaching at the Polish -- I forget what it's called -- the university in Poland. And they were Jewish, and they wanted to leave Poland because there was still anti-Semitism after the war in Poland. And they finally did.

JP: Wow.

SE: So I was aware of that. And that being Yiddish, you know, was a direct expression of the Jews to be their own people -- not to be absorbed, not to become Americanized or Germanized or whatever. They had to keep their identity, and they understood that.

JP: Well, we're near the end of our time, but we are here at the Yiddish Book Center, so I would like to ask: Do you perhaps have a favorite Yiddish word that you would like to share with us?

SE: (laughs) That's good. That's a good question. Well, I know several. "Khazeray [Filth]" -- "Khazeray, khazeray." And what was the word about -- it's sort of -- it's the Jewish spirit -- but not spirit, even -- di grese [the 63:00great] -- assertion. What the heck is this -- I can't -- when you're -- "chutzpah, chutzpah." That's it. And so (laughs) -- and that "chutzpah" and other words that are Yiddish have been incorporated into America, into American language. They've become American (laughs) -- our non-Jews will use those words, you know, today. And a lot of these Jewish comedians were -- of course, came with a Yiddish background. And that was, I think, sort of cute -- you know, that they could be that way. You know, if you saw "Seinfeld" -- and what's his name -- Milton Berle, you know, Sid Caesar -- these are all Jewish people who were 64:00Yiddish in background, you know? So they could use it, it could be there.

JP: You've had a wonderful life history and life experiences.

SE: Yes.

JP: You've just celebrated your eighty-third birthday.

SE: Yes.

JP: Happy birthday!

SE: Thank you.

JP: And as we say in Yiddish, "Biz hundert un tsvantsik" -- may you live until a hundred and twenty.

SE: Oh, thank you. (laughs)

JP: Reportedly, Moses's age. And, you know, you spoke so eloquently about the Passover story. What advice do you have for future generations?

SE: Say that again?

JP: What advice do you have for future generations?

SE: What do I see happening?

JP: What advice?

SE: Oh, advice.

JP: Yeah.

SE: Okay. Well, my advice is really that young Jews should understand that the Jewish background in the world history is not only nationalism, Israel, but it is social progress, to be a progressive Jew. There's a guy in San Francisco, a 65:00Jewish rabbi -- what's his name? Do you know who I'm talking about? He's written several books, and he's very progressive in his approach. You know, he believes we should have a Marshall Plan for the world, for example, and that Jews should take part in that, in helping the world out, and people in the world -- and very involved with attempting a peaceful settlement in the Middle East between the Arabs and the Jews. I can't remember his name right now. But people like that should be admired -- Jewish -- for these young Jews to follow in that mo-- to model -- of how we could be in the world, and be Jewish and yet part of the whole world struggle. That's what I'd advise -- to keep within the social 66:00tradition of Judaism, the social conscious tradition of Judaism -- that that's part of Judaism. And it's even in the Torah -- you know, in Jewish religious practices -- to be understanding and kind to all people.

JP: What beautiful words, thank you. Is there anything else that you'd like to add before we close for today?

SE: Well, I'm very curious (laughs) about this center -- the Yiddish Book Center. And I heard about it, actually, a long time ago -- on, I think, one of the public radio stations -- that there was such a place like this. And I'm glad that I came here and visited today, because I heard about it, but I never came 67:00before today. So this was very good for me to be here. Yes.

JP: Thank you.

SE: I'm glad that it happened. Yes.

JP: It's wonderful to have you. I want to thank you personally for sharing your stories and reflections with me. I also want to thank you on behalf of the Yiddish Book Center for participating in the Wexler Oral History Project. Thank you, Mr. Edelson.

SE: Thank you very much.

[END OF INTERVIEW]