KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:Okay, this is Christa Whitney, and today is December 17th, 2012. I'm here at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference in Chicago with Kathryn Hellerstein. [pronounces as "Hellersteen"] We're going to record an interview --

KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN: Hellerstein. [pronounces as "Hellerstine"]

CW:Hellerstein. Sorry. Kathryn Hellerstein. And 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 interview?

KH:You certainly do.

CW:Thank you. So, as a place to start, can you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

KH:You'll have to stop me, 'cause I know a lot. Okay. On my mother's side of the family, my great-great-great-grandparents came to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1840, from 1:00a small town in Bavaria. And also on my mother's side, another set of great-great-great-grandparents came to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1854, from Bukovan, a tiny little hamlet outside of Prague. On my father's side of the family, his parents came to the United States from Brest-Litovsk, Brisk de-Lita, in -- around 1900. As they were both teenagers, they came separately. And my -- can I give names? Yes? Okay. So, I'll backtrack in a minute. But my father's mother was named Celia Zeiger, and she was the daughter of Rivka Soloveichik and 2:00Menachem Zeiger. And therefore, she was a descendent of the great rabbinic Brisk family, the Soloveichiks. My father's father's name was Samuel Kopel Hellerstein, although his name initially had been -- or his family name had been -- [Bar-Hoftik?] Hellerstein, and they were all -- he was a descendent of the Bar-Hoftik family, also a rabbinic family in Brisk. My -- I'm going to return to my mother's family in a moment. My grandparents -- as young teens, I think they had known each other in Brisk, but they re-met in the United States. My 3:00grandmother had gone to New York; my grandfather had gone to Pittsburgh, where he had relatives. They -- my grandfather became a peddler, wandered through the back roads of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, southeastern Ohio. And he ended up buying out a general store, the Finkelstein store, in Dillonvale, Ohio, a coal-mining town. Went back and got my grandmother, they got married, and they moved to Dillonvale, Ohio, where they raised five children. They moved to Cleveland in 1929, when my father was thirteen. My father's name was Herman Kopel Hellerstein. He was the fourth -- actually, he was the fifth of six children, but his oldest brother died as an infant. And he went to high school 4:00in Shaker Heights, Ohio, went to college at Adelbert College at Western Reserve University, medical school at Western Reserve University, became a -- well, I'm really going in one line here -- (laughs) became a -- was inducted -- volunteered for the American army, became a medical captain, fought in the European theater during World War II, and was the chief medical officer in the 3rd Armored Division of Patton's -- wait -- the 7th Armored Division of Patton's Third Army, which liberated Bergen-Belsen along with the British. Backtracking to my mother's side of the family --

CW:Sure.

KH:-- I just want to give the names --

CW:Yeah.

KH:The first set of great-great-great-grandparents that showed up in Cleveland, 5:00Ohio, in 1840, leaving Bavaria, were named Ella Strauss and Samuel Loeb Colman. They changed their -- they married in Cleveland because they were not allowed to marry in Bavaria. There was a law saying one son from every Jewish family could marry. This was the second son. His elder brother had the privilege. They left so they could marry. They went to Cleveland 'cause they had landsleit [plural of landsman (countrymen)] in Cleveland. And set up a store, a dry goods store, in what's now downtown Cleveland. There's actually still a little alleyway on the map in Cleveland called Colman Alley. There's just dumpsters there now, but there was once a store there, I think. And they had -- well, they had a lot of 6:00daughters. I think they had thirteen daughters, all born in Cleveland, Ohio, one of whom was my great-great-grandmother, Leah Colman. She married a man named Edward Rosewater, who was the child of the other set of great-great-great-grandparents that I mentioned at the beginning. Their names were Herman and Rosalia Rosenwasser, and they came from Bukovan, in -- the hamlet outside of Prague. And they came to Cleveland with their sons. I think they had two sons, Edward Rosewater and Marcus Rose-- well, it was Rosenwasser, Rosenvasser, at the time. My -- Edward Rosenwasser changed his name to Rosewater. He was thirteen when he showed up in Cleveland, Ohio. And he -- the 7:00short version of this very long story, which I'm writing about in an interesting way, is that he apprenticed himself to a telegrapher at the age of fifteen, which must have been 1856, and traveled all over the United States, especially in the South, setting up telegraph poles and learning this cutting-edge technology. And ended up -- during the Civil War, ended up in the telegraph office of the War Department of Abraham Lincoln's White House. And he happened to be on duty the night of January 1st, 1863, and telegraphed out the Emancipation Proclamation. He left Washington shortly thereafter, went back to 8:00Cleveland, married Leah Colman, who he had been corresponding with during the war -- his time in the telegraph office -- and took her off to Omaha, Nebraska, where he had an opportunity to work for the Pacific Railroad Company. He founded several newspapers but ended up being the founder and editor of the "Omaha Bee," which was one of the major English newspapers, Republican English newspapers, that lasted into the middle of the twentieth century. He was very successful and had many -- had three daughters and two sons, all of whom had children. His oldest daughter was the mother of my grandmother. Okay. So.

CW:Great.

KH:That was probably too much information, but -- (laughs)

CW:Where did you find all this out, on your own research or your --

KH:Oh, my -- yes. Well, the family is well-documented. My parents were keepers of family history, and one of my brothers and I are working on a book on Edward Rosewater, and I want to write a book about Leah Colman Rosewater and her daughters and her granddaughters. And I want to write about Jewish women in the Midwest.

CW:Were there times in your family when you would sit around and hear family stories that accompanied these documents?

KH:It wasn't so organized; what can I say? (laughs) Um -- oh dear.

CW:Or are there any family stories that have been passed down?

KH:Well, there are a lot of stories. But you want me to tell them? I -- let's --

CW:Well, if you have a -- let's go somewhere else, and then if we have time --

KH:Yeah, let's go somewhere else right now --

CW:-- we can come back. (laughs)

KH:There's -- because I sort of want to stay on the Yiddish topic, because this is related but not central.

CW:Sure.

KH:I guess one thing I could say is that I have found, Yiddish-wise, in recent months as my siblings and I, my five siblings and I, are clearing out my parents' -- my late parents' -- home, we have found a stash of Yiddish letters that my father's parents, Celia Zeiger Hellerstein and Samuel Kopel Hellerstein, wrote to him when he was in the army in Europe. And the letters were all in Yiddish. I said that already, right? Yiddish letters. And these -- we didn't 11:00know they existed. I found them just about a month ago. So, I will have more stories when I read them.

CW:Definitely.

KH:And on the other side, rather than stories, in terms of objects that are connotative and full of meaning and -- but the meaning, I'm not sure of quite yet -- we have found a number of siddurim [prayer books] and -- or siddurs, and Bibles -- well, some of them are khumeshim [Pentateuchs] and Tanakhs, and some of them are Bibles, in English, including the New Testament, that belong to the Rosewater-Colman family. And they have inscribed in them family births and dates, and often these are inscribed in -- it's not exactly Yiddish. They're inscribed in Hebrew letters with German spellings. And then, there are some 12:00Yiddish phrases thrown in. So, I'm sort of trying to figure out how -- what Yiddish, what German, the Czech and Bavarian branch of my mother's family spoke. If they spoke Yiddish in the mid- to late nineteenth century.

CW:Wow. Would you say you grew up in a very Jewish home? What about your home felt Jewish?

KH:Well. Okay. It goes back to my family background. My mother grew up in Cleveland, the daughter of Nellie Rosalie Elgutter Feil and Harold Stein Feil -- those were my maternal grandparents -- both of whom had grown up -- how am I 13:00gonna put this? -- both -- anyway. My mother grew up in Cleveland as a member of what is now Tifereth Israel but what was then called The Temple or Silver's Temple, which was what I would call a -- it's a very distinguished and old Reform congregation in Cleveland. The Rosewater-Colman families were instrumental in founding not the beginnings of what turned into that particular temple, but rather, what turned into what was later known as Fairmount Temple, another big, important Reform temple in Cleveland. So, my father's parents, as I said, were both children or grandchildren of rabbinic lines. My grandfather 14:00reportedly -- Samuel Kopel Hellerstein reportedly had been a yeshive-bokher [Yeshiva student] in Brisk, although I have no documentary evidence; I just know what my father said and what he wrote in his autobiography. And yet when they came to America, they -- and settled in Dillonvale, Ohio -- they were the only Jewish family. Certainly the only Jewish family with children. And there was a small Jewish community in Wheeling, West Virginia, which was a short train ride away. But it was hard, I think, to maintain a fully observant household. And anyway, they were both rebellious. My grandfather who ran a general store -- a dry goods store -- and then eventually went to -- when they moved to Cleveland in 1929, owned a trousers factory, was actually -- had wanted to be a doctor and 15:00wanted a secular education. He couldn't pursue that in the States for financial reasons and circumstances. But his sons both became doctors. And what does this have to do with religion? And my grandmother, the daughter of a Soloveichik and therefore the granddaughter of other Soloveichiks, worked in a sweatshop briefly, supposedly was a foreman -- the forelady of the sweatshop for a while, and I think became a -- turned towards -- I'm gesturing left -- towards socialist tendencies. But ended up as a socialist Zionist. And so, they were secularists, and my father grew up secular. When his parents moved him and his 16:00three sisters and one surviving brother to Cleveland when my father was thirteen, in 1929, his parents said, You have a choice, now that we're -- they moved to Cleveland to be nearer a Jewish community. And they said to the son, my father, You have a choice. You can learn for your bar mitzvah, or you can go to the Arbeter Ring shule [secular Yiddish school] and learn how to read Yiddish. And he, and then his younger brother Earl after him, chose Yiddish. So. We grew up in a Reform family. We did not keep kosher. I didn't know what keeping kosher was until I was an adult, really, a youngish adult. We went to Sunday school. 17:00I'm the oldest of six children. And we went to Sunday school at The Temple, or Silver's Temple. And the temple did not actually have bar or bat mitzvahs at the time. This was in the '50s and the early '60s. And so, instead of becoming bar or bat mitzvah, my siblings and I were all confirmed, which took -- a ceremony that took place on Shavuos -- although I never put it all together until much later, either. And it was a ceremony that did involve learning some khumesh, some prayers, you know, in Hebrew. So, I had a Reform Jewish education. But more than that, I have to say that my Jewish education was very much more about a 18:00sense of morality and eth-- not an ethnicity, to a degree, but a kind of distant nod towards ethnicity -- but ethical precepts, and also my father's -- also my Jewish identity and the Jewishness in our family was very much shaped by my father's memories of the trauma of having been a soldier in the war, an officer in the war, Second World War, and having been a liberator of a concentration camp. And long ago, when I was in graduate school in the '70s, I came home to Cleveland for a vacation, and my father had been going through -- I have more to 19:00say about my parents in a minute -- my father had been going through some files from his office. He was a cardiologist, a very prominent cardiologist. And my mother was a very accomplished pediatrician, I should just say. And during this visit home, he set up on the dining room table an old Dictaphone and player, and he pulled out a red, translucent disk, about this big, looking like an old-fashioned record, but it was made out of this sort of jelly-like red plastic, and put it into the machine. And I heard -- some of my brothers were home with me at the time, too. And we heard my father dictating in the early '50s, dictating patient records into the Dictaphone, you know, for his secretary 20:00to type up and put into the files. And suddenly in the background of my father's medical, professional voice came the shrieks and shouts of small children. My father paused in his dictation about some patient whose name luckily I can't remember, 'cause it would be breaching patient confidentiality if I could, and -- but kept the Dictaphone running. And he turned, I guess, when he was recording this, and he yelled, "Hey, kids, what are you fighting about? Come here and talk into the Dictaphone with me, and tell me what your problems are." So, it was me -- I must have been six -- my brother David, who was four and a half, and our littlest brother, John -- well, then Johnny, who was three. And we 21:00all sort of shuffled over to the dining room table, where my father had been dictating his patient records, and my father started interviewing us to try to calm us down and figure out why were fighting. Well, why were we fighting, I don't know. But what he said was -- and I hesitate to say this on tape, 'cause I don't want anyone, ever, to call me this -- but he said, "Kathy --" -- 'cause that's what I was when I was a little kid. Don't ever call me Kathy! (laughs) Whoever's listening to this interview. He said, "Kathy, what did you do today?" And I said, "I went to temple." And he said, "What did you do in temple?" "I went to Sunday school." "And what did you learn in Sunday school?" And I said, "I learned that the Nazis want to kill the Jews." So, I was six years old, and this was what came out in a -- out of my mouth when I was thinking about my 22:00Jewish identity. So. I'll stop that story there. (laughs)

CW:Great. Well, I want to skip forward a little bit, 'cause there are lots of topics that I want to be sure to cover. So, how did you become interested in -- I'm not sure which came first, Yiddish or translation, as an academic focus?

KH:Okay. There's a story here, too. All right. I promised you when I filled out your form, I said, "I'm not gonna write this down; I'll tell it to you in person." So, I was -- I went to -- let me think. I attended Wellesley College for two years in the early '70s, and then transferred to Brandeis University and 23:00graduated from Brandeis in 1974 as an English major. Although I did take one course to fulfill some requirement, taught by -- oh my God. Well, I'll remember his name. A wonderful guy who's still around. A course on Yiddish literature and song in translation at Brandeis. But I went on to graduate school at Stanford University in the creative writing program as an Edith Mirrielees poetry fellow, and I earned a master's in English and creative writing in poetry. And then, entered the PhD program in the English department, in English and American literature, at Stanford. And initially I had intended to follow up on my 24:00academic interest from English at Brandeis, which was Renaissance English poetry. And I was particularly interested in Sir Thomas Wyatt's translations into English of the psalms, from the Hebrew psalms. But I -- let's see. Several things converged in my -- there's -- I'm telling the story -- I'm going too far back. Okay. Anyway. So, I had first started thinking about translation of poetry really from -- in this academic course on Renaissance literature long ago. And I'd also done a few translations from French a couple years before that in an English creative writing class at Wellesley, taught by David Ferry, in which he 25:00gave his students an exercise to take a French poem and translate it into English. And I had never thought about doing such a thing before, but the exercise made me aware of translation as a possible means of writing poetry without having to worry about what to say. Fast forward a couple of years into my Stanford PhD program, and one summer, I took a reading course with a poet-professor named Donald Davie, a British man who had translated some Russian poetry because during the war, he had served in the British army and had been a decoder and a translator from Russian. And the course that Donald Davie taught 26:00me that summer was on Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. And Donald Davie was a very important teacher for me, a very fatherly figure -- academically speaking, a poet-scholar. And Donald Davie said to me one day, "You must read the early Ezra Pound. If you want to be a poet in English --" -- which I was, and I still am -- "-- if you want to be a poet in English, you have to read the young Pound, because he will tell young American poets what they have to do to write poetry that is meaningful and good." So, I read the young Pound. That "young Pound" 27:00meant reading his collection of essays, the "ABC of Reading," and reading his translations from Old English, from Chinese -- although he didn't know Chinese -- and from Provençal, and he may have translated from a couple of other languages. And then, also reading his poems of this earlier period -- this means the nineteen-teens and early '20s -- and reading a series of poems called "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley." Well, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" is -- some critics have said it's like reading a Henry James novel in ten pages -- or twenty pages, perhaps. It's a very dense, condensed series of poems. And, you know, honestly, at this 28:00moment I don't remember very much about it, except that there was a character called "the jew." And "jew" was spelled with a small J. And "the jew" in Pound's poem had a hooked nose and a slouch and was lascivious and greedy, and was an anti-Semitic stereotype. So, at the same time, I had just read an essay by Ezra Pound on reading and on translation. And what he says -- it's advice to the young poet. And what Pound says to the young poet is, "Read poetry that is not contemporary. Don't read what your contemporaries are writing. Don't worry about being part of the fashionable flow of literary style. And don't read the recent 29:00generation, the generation right before you." He says, "But rather, go back to older periods, to languages and cultures and traditions of poetry that are completely foreign to you, and read and translate. Because if you translate, you will find a new idiom and a new voice and new material, and you will not be repeating the clichés of the moment." So, on the one hand I was hearing this inspiring directive to explore and discover and translate, and on the other hand, I was reading, by the hand of the same poet, a depiction of a Jew as -- a Jewish character -- as a stereotype and in a very negative and diminished and 30:00nasty and silencing way. Coupled with this moment, which must have been about 1976, was the appearance of a book for the bicentennial of the United States, a book by Irving Howe called "World of Our Fathers" -- which my father actually mailed to me from Cleveland to Palo Alto, where I was living, and said, "You should read this. This is important." And so, I did. So, I'm reading Pound, I'm reading about translation, and I'm reading Irving Howe. And Irving Howe's book, for -- you know, it seems dated to some degree now, but it was a revolutionary work in 1976. And I think it still holds water today. And he has an incredible chapter on Yiddish literature on the Lower East Side and a special focus on 31:00Yiddish poetry. So, I put these things together, and I decided to learn Yiddish, to read Yiddish poetry and translate Yiddish poetry, and to become -- to become a scholar and teacher in this subject. So, I guess I didn't -- I told the story in a milder way than I usually tell it, but my -- if you wanted a summary, I would say, How did I get to Yiddish? I got mad -- I got really mad at Ezra Pound. And I said, "Okay, Ezra, I'm gonna learn Yiddish, and I will follow your dictum to translate, and I will translate, but the language I will translate will redeem 'the jew' from the small J and reformulate what a Jew is in poetry 32:00in America."

CW:Wow. That's a great story. (laughs) So, you then started learning Yiddish. Was -- did you go directly to the YIVO program? I know you did that program. How did you learn the Yiddish language? How'd you go about that?

KH:Well, so -- okay. Sorry. More stories. But --

CW:That's okay.

KH:-- so I -- so, how am I gonna learn Yiddish? I'm at Stanford University. It's an English department of fifty-some people. Two people who were Jews, I think. Two women. The women were not Jewish, but two women professors. Maybe there was a third who was sort of in linguistics. And a couple of instructors. But -- and two Jews. One was a professor; one was sort of an acting professor, an adjunct professor. And no Jewish Studies program. This was way before -- way, way before 33:00Stanford had a Jewish -- anything Jewish Studies. Although there were the inklings -- a few years later, the inklings of the beginnings of a Jewish Studies program. Anyway. I went to the religion department at Stanford, and I found a professor, Professor Berman, whose wife -- he was a professor of Bible. But his wife, Hannah Berman, was an instructor of -- well, she was an Israeli, and she knew Yiddish. She had grown up speaking Yiddish in Israel. So, I begged Professor Berman to -- to lead me in another independent study project, which was to read -- to allow me to go to the Stanford library and read every book 34:00about Yiddish that the library had. Which, unfortunately, wasn't all that much. But there was something. There was a small Yiddish collection there. And then, I begged him to let me sit and work with his wife. So, I would go to Hannah Berman's house and sit in her living room with her and drink tea, and we would read together. But this -- I'm also telling this story in a backwards way. Because -- let me backtrack. Maybe you'll just erase this whole little segment. And -- let me backtrack. So, I -- so Donald Davie; I get mad at Ezra Pound; I say I'm gonna learn Yiddish. So, I think first, I did find Larry Berman. Larry Berman. I read whatever there was about Yiddish in the library at Stanford, Green Library at Stanford. And then, I discovered in the winter -- it must have 35:00been the winter of '76 or early '77 -- I discovered that there was a grad student at Stanford in the computer sciences department, which was then a relatively small and unimportant part of the university -- which is pretty funny if you think about it in retrospect now -- named Ray Finkel, who was teaching an ad hoc Yiddish grammar course through the linguistics department. At Stanford, if a graduate student wanted to study a language that wasn't taught or supported in one of the departments or in the major normal curriculum, they could petition the linguistics department to help them pay for an instructor who would teach basically an independent study course in the language. Well, there was already a 36:00course up and running, and I entered it in the winter quarter. It was me -- as I remember, me and two women who were -- I was in my twenties, and they were in their thirties or forties -- who wanted to learn Yiddish for personal reasons, not for academic reasons. And they were sort of in the middle of "College Yiddish," Weinreich's "College Yiddish," and I just jumped in and sort of ran through the beginning chapters somehow, inadequately, but taught them to myself and jumped in in the middle and joined this class. I guess somehow, at the same time I was -- I then was also connecting with Hannah Berman, with whom I sat and read Sholem Aleichem, which was way beyond me. I mean, I couldn't really read it. But we would just look -- she would hold the book on her lap -- she was 37:00pregnant -- I would sit next to her. We would both look at the old, blue, falling-apart -- one of the seven-volume, thick edition of Sholem Aleichem -- I can't remember which date it was American publication -- and we would sit, and we would read sort of word by word. She would read a phrase, and then I would look at the text, and I would read it out loud. And then, she would translate it, and I would try to figure out which English words went with which Yiddish words. It was pretty bizarre. But I -- we did it. And then, shortly thereafter, I had a friend, an older -- slightly older friend/acquaintance, who had been at Brandeis working on a master's degree, I think, while I was an undergraduate there -- I didn't know her well, but I had known her a little bit -- named 38:00Marcia Falk. And she was in the PhD program at Stanford, also in the English department, and she was just finishing her doctorate -- her doctoral dissertation on -- which was a translation of the "Song of Songs." She was working with John Felstiner in the English department, one of the two Jewish faculty members in the English department. And Marcia -- I bumped into her one day, and she said, "I'm going off to Israel for a year to work on my dissertation and live and whatever." And she said, "And I heard that you're starting to work on Yiddish, and I've heard that you're interested in translating Yiddish poetry." She said, "I have somebody I want you to meet." So, she introduced me to Malka Heifetz Tussman, who was in her eighties, living in 39:00Berkeley, California. And it worked out beautifully. I -- Malka very generously agreed to take me on as her pupil. She always called me her pupil. And -- (imitates Malka) "Keti, du bist mayn pyupil [Kathy, you are my pupil]." And Malka, she refused to take any payment. I tried to offer her -- I didn't have any money, but I still tried to offer to pay her. I thought it would be a -- you know, a professional thing to do. But she said, "Look --" -- she said, "We are -- the payment is to you read my poetry, and I'll read your poetry. And we -- and I'll teach you Yiddish poetry." So, for every Friday for a number of years in the late '70s, I would take the -- I would either drive my grandmother's 1968 40:00blue Plymouth Valiant, or I would take the shuttle bus that ran between the Stanford library and the Berkeley library, and -- the UC Berkeley library. And I would go up for the day and spend the day with Malka, sitting at her round dining room table, reading poetry. We would cook together. Sometimes I would help her go grocery shopping at the supermarket across the street. But she was -- her eyes were diminish-- her vision was diminishing, and she was a stalwart and a tiny, birdlike, beautiful, beautiful woman. But she was a little shaky on her feet, so it was good to have somebody else there to help her pick groceries up and carry them home. And then, we would cook together and make sort of -- now 41:00that I think about it, I don't think we ever called it this, but I think it was sort of a Shabbos -- it was a Shabbos dinner at lunchtime. Or mid-afternoon lunchtime. And we worked together, and we read together. And she introduced me to all of her poetry. I was worki-- I had decided at that point to read and translate Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's first book, "In New York." And she was very impatient with Halpern. She thought he was sort of crude, and he was too sarcastic. She was a very ironic writer, very witty and ironic writer herself, and sexuality was not something she was afraid of addressing in her own interesting ways. But she found Halpern a little harsh and a little too out 42:00there. So -- but she respected my desire to work on Halpern. And so, she helped me go through my translations. And I was very arrogant, and I thought I knew a lot more than I did. And I made some grievous bloopers in my translations. And she wouldn't -- you know. She'd mince no words. And she really made me humble, and rightfully so, about what it means to translate a poem. And what it means to really learn and respect a language. So, I worked with Malka for -- (sighs) gosh. I -- you know what? I'm losing my sense of the exact dates. But we worked together for a number of years on Fridays. And after I left Palo Alto -- I finished my PhD in December of 1980, went to Israel, following Marcia's 43:00footsteps inadvertently, but went to Israel for six months to study Hebrew in an ulpan. And then, came back to Palo Alto in the summer of '81 and stayed there till the -- through March of '82, teaching freshman English at Stanford and working further with Malka. But after I left and went to Chicago, and then to -- taught at Wellesley College for four years, I kept in very close touch with Malka, and we wrote and spoke on the phone frequently, and I visited every time I possibly could. And she was my mentor and my friend and my inspiration. Oh! And I left -- of course I left YIVO out of it altogether! (laughter) The summer 44:00of '77, I went to YIVO for the -- and I think I was in the lower-level intermediate class, based on -- you know, I got that far based on my work with Ray Finkel, who's now known as Refoyl Finkel, and my work with Malka and my work with Hannah Berman. And just the sort of stubborn determination that I had to learn Yiddish. And I -- that was a turning point summer for me, too. The YIVO program was fantastic. It was absolutely just riveting, stunningly wonderful.

CW:When you were -- I mean, YIVO went through various periods, and what was the scene in the YIVO program in '77 when you were there?

KH:Oh God. It was great. Well, I don't know if you saw in the "Forverts" just a couple of weeks ago or a month -- maybe a month -- maybe it was in September/October 2012? There -- I think Rukhl Schaechter -- I think found a picture, the class picture of the summer of '77 YIVO class. And she emailed everybody she knew who might be able to help identify any of these people. And I was in the picture. I was front and center, looking very thin and very (laughs) young. If only. And very California. And I could identify a lot of the people. But then other people helped her as well. But Steve Zipperstein was in that class. Eric Goldman. Jonathan Boyarin. I mean, we weren't all at the same level. 46:00Aaron Lansky was there. Aaron. Hi, Aaron. (laughs) There -- it was an extraordinary class. Josh Waletzky was the music teacher, and every Yiddish song that I still know I owe to him. And other people too, of course, but Josh was sort of the beginning. He got us singing. It was -- Irena Klepfisz was the sort of grammar review person. She did those first two cram-it-all-in review of "College Yiddish," right before the actual YIVO classes started. Mordkhe Schaechter was my teacher of language, and we used his -- the manuscript version of what turned into the "Yidish tsvey [Yiddish II]" textbook that he produced. And Steve Lowenstein was the -- who's a -- he was working on his book on the 47:00Jews of Washington Heights, I think, at the time. But he was our Yiddish literature teacher. Yiddish wasn't his first interest, but he was wonderful too. So, it was fantastic. And if you look at the photograph, if you can get your hands on it, it was a big class. There were a lot of people there. I mean, there was also a guy there who was a British guy -- I don't remember his name, and I couldn't find him -- I thought I found him in the picture, but then somebody told me I was wrong. But I remember him saying that he had -- he was a tailor. I mean, he was a -- this was his profession. And he had made some of the performance costumes for the Rolling Stones. So, that was one of the things I remember. You want one more thing I remember?

CW:Sure.

KJ:That for one of the afternoon programs, somebody came up with a copy of a print of "The Dybbuk," the film, which was -- this was pre-videotape, VCRs, and pre-DVDs, and pre-streaming and Netflix. And so, there was a reel-to-reel copy of the film, which was fairly rare. I mean, there weren't very many copies. I don't know the full history of the preservation of this. But this -- we watched it one afternoon. And I believe this was one of the first screenings of "The Dybbuk" that had been presented since -- the '30s? The '40s? I don't know. And if my memory serves me right, the stars, the two actors who had played the male 49:00and female leads in the film, were living in the New York area. And whoever organized that program brought them to watch the screening as well. And after we watched the film -- and it was a crackly, jumpy, sometimes blurry, sometimes dim print of the film, but it was unlike anything I had ever seen and probably anybody else in the room as well -- the two actors were brought onstage to discuss what it meant to -- what it was like to watch the film, what it had been like to be in the film, what they -- and I just remember they both said, in one way or another, that they too had not seen the film since the -- soon after its 50:00screening, and that everyone in the film but them had been murdered during the war. And they had been in the United States -- again, this is my recollection. Some fact-checker can go check it someday -- but they had both been in the United States doing a publicity tour for the film when -- in late August 1939, and September 1st, 1939, they realized they couldn't go back. And they didn't. So, they survived, and the film survived, but the cast, the crew -- nisht do [not here]. (laughs)

CW:Wow. Well, I'd like to switch here -- we just have a little bit more time -- to ask you about Yiddish in the academy, which I have a couple of questions about.

KH:Can I just ask you a question?

CW:Sure.

KH:Is this gonna be the last topic? 'Cause I'd rather talk a little bit about my work.

CW:Okay.

KH:Or both?

CW:Well --

KH:I can do both. Maybe I'll do short answers.

CW:Yeah, maybe we --

KH:Okay.

CW:-- I'll just ask you one question about this, and then we can -- I'll give you time to talk about whatever you'd like. I'm wondering -- I mean, you've been involved in Yiddish in academic ways for now a while. Where is Yiddish now, and how has it changed in its position in Jewish Studies and the academy?

KH:(pause) Hm. There's about twelve different ways I can answer this question. Okay. Well, as I said in my sort of autobiographical monologue just now, you 52:00know, I started doing Yiddish when there was no Jewish Studies at Stanford. And the only place to study Yiddish in the United States was actually -- in a PhD program -- was at Columbia, in the 1970s. And there might have been some classes elsewhere, perhaps at City College. And McGill, of course, had Yiddish -- some Yiddish -- at the time as well. And Hebrew University had a Yiddish department. But otherwise, there was very -- there were very few places where one could actually study the language in a university setting, or do any kind of serious research and writing on Yiddish-related topics. And today there are programs -- 53:00there are Jewish Studies programs at innumerable colleges and universities in the United States -- Ivy League, distinguished state universities, colleges -- some colleges have Jewish Studies departments or programs. And Yiddish is included in -- not all of these places, but in one way or another in many of them. You know, there probably was somebody teaching Yiddish at Brandeis when I was an undergrad there, but it was below the radar. I didn't -- I wasn't aware of it. Or interested, actually. The end of the 1990s through the first decade 54:00and a half of the twenty-first century, there's been a real boom in Jewish studies, and Yiddish has sort of ridden the wave, to have a mixed metaphor.

CW:And what do you think of the term "Yiddish revival"? And do you think there is one?

KH:(sighs) I think you have to define the term really carefully. So, I mean, it's pretty obvious that in secular, academic, modern contexts, Jewish contexts, Yiddish is not reviving as a vernacular language on a widespread basis. From 55:00what I understand and know, in certain Chasidic communities, you know, enclaves in the States and elsewhere -- and Israel, to some degree -- and maybe in Europe -- there, Yiddish is a first language, and these are communities where there's a burgeoning population, and Yiddish is being used to -- for whatever reasons, I understand it to be separating the population from the modern world and modern Jews, who may also be Yiddish speakers. So, Yiddish is not gonna come back as it was, but it may come back in a new way, in the religious communal context. On the other hand, there's a revival in popular culture through the klezmer boom 56:00that -- I don't know if it's peaked. I don't really -- I'm not a scientist in this at all. But it's -- and then there's also been a revival academically of interest, academically. And the question is how that plays itself out. I mean, there are students. But Yiddish classes -- Yiddish language is taught in, as I said, a number of places, but most of us teaching Yiddish language in universities have a real issue in retaining students beyond the first semester or beyond the first year. And students' motives for taking Yiddish vary tremendously. But learning Yiddish is a major commitment, like learning any other language is. And students often don't follow through beyond a beginner's 57:00level. And so, "revival" is a relative term. On the other hand, as the -- we're at the AJS right now, and I've just heard two panels of incredible papers by scholars ranging from recent PhDs and grad students up through senior people in areas of linguistics and literature and cultural studies and history, and there's just such -- there's a boom of research and creative thinking and learning and translation. So, all of the above and none of the above. I don't know, that's my --

CW:(laughs) Yeah. Well, I have some questions that I want to ask about your work in translation, especially of women Yiddish writers and also in teaching of 58:00Yiddish, but we just have a few more minutes. So, maybe --

KH:Why don't you ask me --

CW:-- I'll ask --

KH:-- the questions --

CW:Okay.

K:-- and then I'll answer them --

CW:Sure. However you want.

KH:-- the way I want. Yeah.

CW:(laughs) So, I'm curious sort of what drew you, I mean, to -- from working with Malka Heifetz Tussman to then later making the translation of Yiddish writers, women Yiddish writers, a central focus of your academic work.

KH:Well, my dissertation was on Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's book "In New York" -- his first book, "In New York," came out in 1919. Part of the dissertation was a translation. I translated the book, the whole book, and then wrote a critical -- a big critical book-length essay on, or series of essays, on this series of -- on this book of poems and its context and genre. And in the early '80s I was -- 59:00and that actually came out as -- a selection from my dissertation came out as a book in 1982, with the Jewish Publication Society. The book is called "In New York: A Selection." And I was writing articles about Halpern and hoping to write a book about him, but Ruth Wisse was working on her wonderful, great book, "A Little Love in Big Manhattan." And I -- it was sort of not the moment for me to try to -- I just -- I didn't follow that route. So, I changed directions. And I went to the women poets, partly because Malka showed me the anthology of Ezra Korman's "Yidishe dikhterins [Yiddish women poets]" one afternoon when I was 60:00working with her at her dining room table. And she told me that she had refused to be in this anthology. So, I was intrigued. And we read some of the poems in it. We read Kadia Molodowsky's poems, Rokhl Korn's poems, Celia Dropkin's poems, together in -- from other books. And Malka had been friends with both Korn and -- close friends with Rokhl Korn and friendly, professional friends, with Kadia Molodowsky. And so, I was reading their poems and reading Malka's poems. And I didn't actually know -- all right. Anyway. I didn't understand why Malka would have refused to be in the anthology. She told me -- this is what she said, but I still didn't quite get it; she said, "I'm a poet; I'm not a woman poet." And she really was quite adamant about not framing poetry with gender -- in terms of 61:00gender. So, I -- that piqued my interest. And a few years later, somebody invited me -- Lewis Fried invited me to contribute an essay to a book he was editing, co-editing, on Yiddish studies of the moment, in the early to mid-'80s. And I wrote an essay called "A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish." And sort of did a survey of a number of Yiddish women poets, and tried to sort of make sense of what it meant for -- where women poets fit into the tradition and why Malka might have not wanted to be part of this. I'm trying to cut to the chase. Well, this turned into a very long project, which is now about to appear as a major -- if I must say so myself -- scholarly book that's coming out from 62:00Stanford in, God willing, in the fall of 2013. And which has the title "A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish." And I've also done an anthology, which is -- I'm putting the final touches on, which will be a companion book -- a separate publication, but related to this, also to be published by Stanford. So, I turned to the -- well, I guess -- and also, I should add, the short answer is I became a feminist. I didn't think of myself as a feminist, for some reason, in the '70s, for complicated -- there's another story behind that, but I can -- it involves Adrienne Rich, and I'll have to tell you another time, but I didn't think of myself as a feminist. But then I just be-- I went into the world. I taught at Wellesley College. My eyes were opened. The world was not what I 63:00thought it was. And I realized that feminism was a helpful tool for coping with an unbalanced reality. And that's where my interest started and emerged from. And now, though, my interests are turning -- I continue my work on women Yiddish writers. I'm interested in prose writers as well as poets. And I'm also very interested in cultural translation as a topic. And my new project is called "China Through Yiddish Eyes: Translating Cultures in the Early Twentieth Century."

CW:Wow. Well, looking forward to these publications! (laughs)

KH:Please, God.

CW:And we're out of time for today, but maybe some other time we can explore 64:00lots -- this -- there's so many more questions that I'd love to ask you. But I really want to thank you and say a hartsikn dank [thank you very much] for taking the time to talk with me and for -- with the Yiddish Book Center today.

KH:My pleasure. A sheynem, hartsikn dank [a big, heartfelt thank you].

[END OF INTERVIEW]