KEN FRIEDEN ORAL HISTORY

JESSICA PARKER: This is Jessica Parker and today is December 18th, 2012. I am here at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference in Chicago, Illinois with Ken Frieden and we are going to record an interview a part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Ken, do I have your permission to record this interview?

KEN FRIEDEN: Yes.

JP:Wonderful, thank you. So, today we have the pleasure and opportunity of hearing something you've prepared, a personal project about your family history.

KF:Right. So, this is my yikhes [ancestry], the lineage going back to Lithuania. And I made a trip there in 1995. So, at that time, I wrote this narrative and recently put together the images with the narrative. So, I thought it would make 1:00sense to share that.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

(Reading from a text off-screen) A few days after Rosh Hashanah, on a Friday in October, 1894, my father's father, Alexander Ziv, later Frieden, was born in the northern Lithuanian village of Kvetkai, which Jews called Kvatki. The town's located just south of the current Latvian border. It's on the western bank of the Nemunėlis River. And in his memoirs, my great-uncle, Mendel Ziv Frieden describes the place as, quote, "A tiny village away from most of the world." And it was small. There were about a hundred Jews and some Catholics. By the way, that's a memoir that's being published next year by my cousin, Lee Shai Weissbach at Stanford University Press. Menachem Mendel Frieden's memoirs. The 2:00large family left Kvetkai in 1913 and changed the family name, previously Milner, from Ziv to Frieden. Because they emigrated before the First World War, they were fortunate enough to avoid both the war itself and the crisis of forced exile in 1915 when the Jewish inhabitants were evacuated to central Russia. An ocean away, my ancestors settled in Norfolk, Virginia in the 1920s. Sorry, in the 1920s, some emigrated to Palestine while others stayed in the US. Alexander, my grandfather, was the youngest son and the only Ziv-Frieden who received a university education. He went to University of Virginia and then to New York to study chemistry at Columbia. And he married my grandmother, Evelyn Gutman, who was a German Jewish family that had left Beerfelden im Odenwald in 1855. So, he 3:00married up. He married to an established family, German Jewish family with native English. She was a poet. Her English was excellent. So, after marrying her and as part of the whole package, he suppressed his memories of life in Lithuania. The story goes that when he was about eight, he went on a hunger strike to be allowed to go to a real school. He had been in a kheyder [traditional religious school] and he wanted out. He wanted to go to a real school. So, they sent him to Varshah, Warsaw, to live with his favorite brother, Yankev Ziv, in Warsaw. So, he studied there until the family then left in 1913. A real American, my father was born in New Rochelle, New York in 1924. He married my mother, Nancy Mandelker, whose parents were descended from 4:00Belarussian or Ukrainian Jews and also, on the other side, from Austro-Hungary. Alexander, my father's father, died only a few months after I was born, in the same New York hospital -- sorry, New Rochelle hospital as my father. So, although we met in 1956, I was too young to remember the meeting. They say that some things skip a generation. I have spent much of the three decades bringing back to consciousness what my grandfather chose to repress. A century after my grandfather was born, I decided to go back to the shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community] -- not with nostalgic feelings, but to see what was there. I left Berlin on the 20th of July in 1995, driving north in an old Volkswagen Passat. I passed Rostock, turned east, Stralsund, the north, the island of Rügen. And then, from the east coast, I took a Baltic Sea ferry bound 5:00for the Lithuanian coastal city of Klaipėda. It was a smooth, overnight trip and I arrived in the Old Country on Friday the 21st of July. I have an image of the harbor, which is very industrial. Doesn't look like the Old Country. But from Klaipėda, I drove quickly to Kaunas, Kovno, where I joined a minyan for Shabbat. And I have an image of a different shul, which was in Kovno, still standing. After the evening service, I met Chaim Bargman, who speaks excellent Yiddish thanks to his mother, Gita. She attended the Yavneh Yiddish school and survived in the Kovno Ghetto. Apart from speaking with them, the highlight during this leg of the trip was seeing the administrative building of the famous Slobodka Yeshiva, and somewhere I have a photo of that, a wooden building where 6:00two of my ancestors studied in about 1887. Unlike most of the Jewish quarter, which was destroyed by the Nazis after the Kaunas Ghetto uprising, the building of the yeshiva survived because it was outside the walls of the large ghetto. From Kaunas, I drove on to Vilnius, Vilna, the so-called Jerusalem of Lithuania. It's becoming a fast-paced, cosmopolitan city. But at its heart are traces of the destroyed Vilna Ghetto. With the help of two Yiddish speakers, Rosa Belauskene and Fanya Brancovskaya, I got a feel for the former glory and the current shambles of Jewish life. I also, for the first time, got to speak Lithuanian Yiddish and got to hear that dialect: "teyre [Torah]" instead of 7:00"toyre" and the lack of the neuter. Only masculine and feminine nouns. So, that was also fascinating, to speak what would have been my family's Yiddish on location. Now, I'm sure it's booming since 1995, but when I was there, there was already a Jewish museum, another museum branch dedicated to the Vilna Ghetto, a historical archive, a Jewish restaurant, a Judaica section of the national library and synagogue. So, Vilna was the center of Jewish learning for more than two centuries. But then, of course, 70,000 Jews were murdered there at Ponary, nearby, and only shards remained when I saw it in 1995. I went to the Ponary site. Difficult to find, in a forest to the south of the town. There's a small museum that has a copy of a German document from the first of December, 1941. 8:00So, I read it and I translate here: "The goal of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been attained." The commander of Einsatzkommando three then details every town and he records that on the 15th to the 16th of August, 1941, 3,200 Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish children from Rokiškis were shot. And on the 18th of August, 493 Jews, 432 Russians, and fifty-six Lithuanians, all active communists, were killed. In Rokiškis, the commander explains further, 3,208 people were to be transported four-and-a-half kilometers before they could be liquidated. In order to accomplish this task in twenty-four hours, more than sixty of eighty available Lithuanian partisans had to be detailed for the transport or the confinement. And there's been a lot of talk lately about how 9:00the Lithuanians had refused to accept their role as partisans of the Nazis. "The remainder" -- this is the commando still talking -- "which was again and again relieved, did the job together with my men." He complains that "motorized vehicles are only seldom available. Efforts at escape, which now and then occurred, were prevented exclusively by my men at their own peril." My eye was drawn to this part of the document which I just translated because some family members did move from Kvetkai, the family shtetl, to Rokiškis or Rakishok. Most of them seemed to have left Lithuania in 1913 or earlier. But any relatives who remained until 1941 were almost certainly liquidated then. And I started to choke when I saw the large pits the Nazis used to dispose of the bodies in 10:00Ponary. They were not resting in the cemetery of Rokiškis. And I have an image of the Jewish cemetery in Rokiškis. Back in Vilnius, my spirits lifted slightly when I got news from the head archivist at the historical archives. Following my request from a couple days earlier, she found extensive documents about my family in northern Lithuania. The 1895 census, probably with information from as late as 1897, includes two families that appear in the memoirs. The first is from Kvetkai or Kvatki. It accounts for the household of my paternal great-grandfather, Avram Ziv, who was born Milner. Listed him and his wife, his eight or nine sons, and a maid. A daughter was born later. The second document 11:00from Rokiškis lists the inhabitants living with Zalman Milner, Avram's younger brother, his wife, three children, a mother-in-law, and a maid. In Biržai or Ponevezh, there must be more records of births, marriages, and deaths in the family. The next day, I headed north with a guide-interpreter to seek out the towns of Kvetkai and Rokiškis, as well as the towns of Avram Ziv's parents, Žiobiškis or Zhibak. The first view you get of Rokiškis when you arrive is a dismaying view because you see Soviet-era brick buildings and cement houses on modern streets with no trace of the past. Then, when you go further north, you get to the old part of town. And I have an image of some houses from Rokiškis. My interpreter translated speaking Russian but I realized that I really needed a 12:00Lithuanian-English interpreter because in the outlying areas, not that many people speak Russian. We went to the central square in front of the Rokiškis church. It's an unusual building with a brick façade. There's a restaurant to the right, which I have an image of, also a stone building, where I met a woman who offered to show us the town. My interpreter explained in Russian that we hadn't come to see the general sites but just to see more of what had been of the Jewish community of former times. So, she took us to the museum, and I have a slide -- this is the estate of the Polish count, Pshezdetsky, which they restored and the museum is there. This Polish noble family owned much of the town in the nineteenth century, including the house on Kamaskayá or Kamayu 13:00Street, number sixty-eight, in which a Rubin family lived, possibly in-laws of the Milners at the time of the census in 1895. There was a historian in Rokiškis who had been doing research on the Jews of the town in the early nineteenth century, but our family hadn't arrived there yet. She told me that a lot of the records from the late nineteenth century were lost during the war. But she did give me two significant documents: a map of Rokiškis showing property lots in 1921 and a list of owners. Around then, the Jews of the community were returning from central Russia, where they'd been sent by tsarist authorities during the First World War. And in that document, you see one Milner family in house number ninety-five. And it's on the alleyway between Kamaskayá Street and the next street to the west, which leads to the church. The map shows 14:00four nearby synagogues. It seems that all were destroyed in the war. Walking around the streets of Rokiškis, especially along the alley west of Kamaskayá Street, one senses that many of these one-story wooden houses haven't changed much in eighty or a hundred years. Again, I have an image of these houses. About half of them were owned or leased by Jews. Now, it's a kind of ghost town in the sense that only one Jewish family lived there in 1995. They had come from Kamajai after the war. And then, I asked when the property went into new hands. So, I went on from there to the shtetl. And, of course, I don't take a nostalgic view of going back to the shtetl. It's a little bit ironic, back to the shtetl. You can't go home; you can't go back. But I wanted to see and to see, also, what 15:00my grandfather wanted to leave so much when he went on a hunger strike to go study at a real school. So, after Rokiškis, there were no signs, street signs indicating where to go. But someone pointed out the dirt road that you take to get to Kvetkai or Kvetki. On the way, we saw Žiobiškis or Zhibak, which was a farm town, and I have some images of houses there. Mendel describes that town in his memoirs as half-farm, half-village, and it hasn't changed much except that to the west, there are several post-Second World War Soviet brick block houses. In the main section, there's one store, or at least there was in 1995. And the only other buildings were one-story wooden houses, barns, and shacks -- and I have an image of a barn. That's how it was when Mendel visited his grandparents 16:00there in the 1880s and 1890s. Sometimes, I think we should thank the Soviets for leaving things almost the same for half a century. But I know it wasn't pleasant for the local inhabitants to live in what the visitor now sees as a museum of shtetl life. Mendel recalls in his memoirs that their business was a small store, which had everything, and an inn. Many village Jews and those in larger places did the same. Was a dependable income, though no wealth. Only a few Jews lived in the village and vicinity, and on Saturday and holidays, they would come to grandfather's house for prayers. There was a special room and a Torah scroll and some books, a sort of small-scale synagogue with an ark and table for reading the Torah. His son, Zalman, was the Torah reader when he was still a very young boy. In my time, only the youngest, Chaim, lived at home. Even after he got married, he remained with them and helped conducting the business. They 17:00lived in that village for many years until the decree that all Jews were to get out of the rural areas in Russia. Then, they moved to the neighboring town of Rakishok or Rokiškis. Three of their sons had been living there for a while. And that must have been around 1903, 1905, which were pogrom years. From the 1895 census, I had the records of Zalman Milner's family in Rokiškis. The head of the household was then thirty-five, about a dozen years younger than his brother, Avram, my great-grandfather, in Kvetkai. It was the uncle of Alexander, my father's father. It's poignant to think that he was Baal Korei [Hebrew: Torah reader in synagogue, lit. "master reader"], that he was a Torah reader, and could have read Torah in one of the four synagogues in Rokiškis. I went northward from there, west on a dirt road through Panemunis, where Avram Ziv's 18:00first wife grew up. And she died in childbirth at around this time in about 1872. Avram moved to Kvetkai or Kvatki. Mendel notes that the town's name means flower in Russian and Lithuanian. Driving northwest on a dirt road, I arrive in Kvetkai, and I have an image, and I stop in front of the striking wooden church. Mendel includes a long description of this village, our hometown, where he was born in 1878 and where my grandfather was born in 1894. First, he describes the river. I have a couple images of the river from the bridge over the river Kvetkai, which apparently hadn't changed. The town really hadn't changed at all except for a concrete bridge that spanned that river. Mendel writes that about a hundred families comprised the village population, mostly Jews. Some were 19:00craftsmen, some peddlers in the neighboring village, and six storekeepers. The mill owners were also Jewish. Then, there were the rabbi ritual slaughter shoykhet [ritual slaughterer], synagogue personnel, and two teachers, one for the young and one for the more advanced Talmud students. And I guess one of those teachers is the one my grandfather didn't want to study with. I found many things as Mendel describes them in the memoirs from a century earlier. I quote, "The Catholic church stood at the city gate, a beautiful, comfortable building. There was also a government school near the center of the village and it was attended by the children of the peasant folk and some Jewish children." Though I'm not sure about the government school, I saw the synagogue, and I have an image of that, which is described as being halfway up the street. A local inhabitant pointed it out to me as having been the synagogue, with a large lot in front. Mendel writes that his father had a general store on the Kvetkai 20:00square, opposite the church, and I have an image of that church. And then, I have an image of what seems to be ground zero, my grandfather's house. That's what I photographed immediately, following an intuition. Four one-story wooden homes on the east side of the street, across from the church. During the next visit, I'd like to look closer into the interiors. But usually, the inhabitants disappear when you show up. It was divided in two: according to the memoirs, half for the store, half for the residents. Mendel recalls, "Later, when our business prospered and father dealt in linens, the apartment became a warehouse and we moved in to the other side of the house, which we had leased earlier. Then, we had more space and when the family grew larger, we added two more rooms to the building." In this house, the third, apparently maybe the third along in 21:00the row of houses, he says, "We were all born: eight brothers, one sister of our mother, and the eldest son of father by his first wife. Here we grew into adulthood until the day we left the place, one by one, with changing times and events. My parents remained in that house to the last day before going to the United States in 1913." So, it's remarkable how much has stayed the same in Kvetkai since, really, a hundred years. I met an old man who was friendly, introduced me to the town doctor who was a pleasant blonde woman, happened to be riding by on her bike carrying a large metal milk container to get some milk. She spoke enough Russian to talk with my interpreter and she took us to meet the last child from a Jewish family in Kvetkai. Maria Bainowskene was born Esther in 22:001923. She was a short woman wearing a colorful scarf over her hair, peeling potatoes for dinner with her husband. He's a Lithuanian. She speaks Lithuanian to the doctor, who translates into Russian for my interpreter who, in turn, translated for me. Born to a Jewish family, she must have spoken Yiddish until the age of eighteen. At some point, she converted to Christianity. Her house is farther up the street on the right, a few houses past the bridge on the east side of town, close to the river. It has just an entrance corridor, a kitchen, and a few small rooms. I asked to use the bathroom and I got to see the backyard, a rooster, some other farm animals, and the outhouse. Few conveniences seemed to have been introduced into the shtetl since the Ziv family left in 1913. Maria Esther showed us to the Jewish part of town, and she remembered it 23:00from the 1930s, before the Nazis came. She pointed out two empty lots where the houses and shops of Lifshitz and Gorevitz stood. Mendel mentions Dov Lifshitz as having been one of the two richest men in town, the owner of a flour mill. The other was Avram Ziv, my father's grandfather. Across from the church, she pointed out the former home and store owned by the family Ratsonas. I guess they bought it from the Ziv family. So, I knew then I'd reached the goal of my pilgrimage back to the shtetl. I saw what we left. Maria Esther remembered when the Nazis came to Kvetkai in the summer of 1941. All of the Jews, including her entire family, were rounded up and held in a local tower, then they were killed at that place I had read about north of Rokiškis called Stepanov. Maria Esther was the only Jew in town to escape death, with the help of a Lithuanian in the 24:00summer of 1941. So, I don't want to end this narrative on a note of destruction but instead with hopes for the rebuilding of European Jewish life and culture. Now that Jewish communities are so firmly established in Israel and the United States, is it possible or desirable for a Jewish community to return to Lithuania? Should descendants of Lithuanian Jews work to establish museums, memorials, or ongoing Jewish cultural institutions? How would the local inhabitants react if we were to tell them, for instance, that we wanted to restore the Kvetkai synagogue? So, that's my yikhes. I go back to that because actually, Avram Ziv and family, including my grandfather, Alexander or Shander -- they were the latest immigrants in my family, 1913. As I mentioned, my 25:00grandfather, my father's father, married up. He married a German Jewish woman from a family that had arrived from Germany in 1855. And on the other side, on my mother's side, they arrived from Russia or Ukraine or Austro-Hungary -- not as clear. I do have a little yikhes I want to brag about on that side, which is that we're related. The name, the family name was Mandelkern. And we're related to the Shelomoh Mandelkern who was a poet. But also, he wrote one of the most important concordances of the Hebrew Bible and published it in 1899 and then suffered from mental problems. You can imagine trying to do a concordance of the entire Hebrew Bible without a computer. It could make you sick -- and it did, apparently. He said -- I think I read this somewhere -- he said that if he had a big enough desk with enough cubbyholes, he could do the same thing for the 26:00Talmud, a concordance of the Talmud, but he needed the technology, which then meant a huge desk with cubbyholes for each of the entries, I guess. So, that's yikhes. And I wanted to talk about yikhes because in entering the Yiddish world, I, like many others, have felt like outsiders and felt treated like outsiders. An unfortunate consequence, there's whole psychological things involved. But many, not all, but many of the native speakers of Yiddish, I'm sure you've heard this before, have acted -- many of them acted as if you'll never learn Yiddish. "We own Yiddish. We got it from our mother's milk and we've spoken it all our 27:00lives and we're native speakers and you're just -- and Yiddish is a folksy language, so how are you ever going to understand?" And I still resent that there are still people like that, very destructive. I mean, how are we going to build a future with that attitude? So, they talk a lot now about post-vernacular Yiddish. So, I'll go back now to my childhood. So, I did want to start not with my childhood but with my father's father's childhood, 'cause as I said, he was the last immigrant, the youngest immigrant, the most recent immigrant. So, it's a hundred years ago. And on the other side, we're more established. So, going back to my childhood now. And I was born in New Rochelle, New York, as was my father. His father was a successful chemist. He had done his PhD in chemistry, 28:00the first in the family. So, it continued his original drive to education that he went to the University of Virginia, then he went to Columbia, where he met my grandmother who was a poet. And anyway, so he moved to New Rochelle with a job, chemistry job. And so, my father was born in 1924. And you have to realize that that was the melting pot generation. Exactly in that year, 1924, is when the door shut, basically. No more -- I mean, they really clamped down and prevented most Eastern European immigrants from coming. So, that was the end of Yiddish-speaking immigration. And my grandfather was young enough when he came, maybe sixteen, that he was able to learn English almost perfectly and he was very proud of it. He didn't want people to know that he spoke Yiddish or Hebrew. 29:00He had maybe a slight accent but he didn't -- he tried to get away from that. He was proud to be an American. He hated the shtetl, from what he remembered of it, and you could see why: it was a tiny town with a river and about twenty houses and no modern things and no modern education. So, he wanted to get away, he got away. He went to Warsaw and then from Norfolk to University of Virginia to Columbia and that's how I ended up being born in New Rochelle, New York. And as I was just saying, you have to realize that my father was born into the assimilation generation, and was capable of it because he married Evelyn Frieden -- was Gutman -- from an old German Jewish family. They had been horse traders in southwestern Germany. I went there, too. That's a whole other story. But the 30:00story goes that they supplied horses to two or three different presidents of the United States, 'cause they were really into horse trading. And they were in Baltimore but she moved to study at Columbia. Creative writing. So, they met, they moved to New Rochelle, my father was born, his brother was born. It was about assimilation. Then it was the Depression. Assimilation is the point that -- my father even used to say that his father might have preferred that he marry a non-Jew. So, my father told me, he wondered, what would have happened? How would that have been? But instead, he married my mother, who was Mandelkern. They changed it to Mandelker and that gave me the yikhes on the other side of being related to Shelomoh Mandelkern of the concordance and -- which is really funny because I have a cousin, also Mandelker, first cousin, who's also in 31:00comparative literature, like me. And you almost want to think that somehow it transfers, not genetically but culturally somehow. So, that's what I want to talk about now. In my childhood, there wasn't much Yiddish in Larchmont, New York. Larchmont was a non-Jewish suburb until the '60s. And my parents bought in at the beginning of that. Maybe there was one or two other Jewish families around. Few other Jewish families around in Larchmont. Mostly German Jewish families, although, down the street, there was a Yiddish actor. I have to talk about this another time, but so, there wasn't any Yiddish around. No one wanted to hear from Yiddish in Larchmont in the '60s. "Fiddler on the Roof," we saw it in New York when it opened, but that was nostalgia and that was possible because we were so assimilated that we weren't threatened by it, 'cause that wasn't us 32:00and we didn't know Yiddish, okay? So --

JP:And who was this Yiddish actor?

KF:Oh, so, down the street, Selwyn Freed. It's an amazing family. Here's the story. His grandfather was the famous Jacob Adler, one of the stars of the Yiddish theater. Jacob Adler's -- had two daughters, Stella Adler and Celia Adler. The more famous of the two was Stella, famous acting method. But Celia was also an excellent Yiddish actor and I think both crossed over to English-language theater. So, Celia Adler married Lazar Freed, who was also a Yiddish actor and you can see him in some of the movies that are still available from the 1930s. He was ashamed of the movies. He was proud of his acting onstage. Movies were low culture. So then, his son, our neighbor, Selwyn Freed, 33:00appeared a few times onstage in small parts, as a child. And when he was thirteen or fourteen, his father said to him, "You can be in this production of "Yoshe Kalb," based on the I. J. Singer novel. "You can be in this production, but it's going to be a hit and we're going to tour the country and you'll have to drop out of high school. So, you have a choice. You can stay in high school or you can tour the country and become a Yiddish actor." Fortunately for him, he stayed in school and went to college and went to medical school and became a successful doctor, which is how he ended up in Larchmont, going from the Yiddish stage to Larchmont. So, that's the closest to Yiddish being there. And I had spoken with him in Yiddish a bit and we've talked about, shared Yiddish films and talked. So, I guess it's not as true as I say that there was no Yiddish 34:00around. It's just it was in hiding, for sure, in the '60s, just as my father's father didn't want anyone to know that he knew Yiddish and Hebrew. But actually, there was also something funny about that: my father has a middle name, Emmett, which is a good British sort of name that my grandmother would have chosen for him because she was a poet and she wrote English poetry. She liked the late nineteenth century English poets. So, Emmett was a good -- but the funny thing is, of course, in Hebrew, especially the Sephardic pronunciation, "emet" means "truth." So, I always wondered if that was a joke that my grandfather played by sticking some Hebrew and Yiddish into my father's name without him knowing it. He was Julian E. Frieden but he never used the E, and no one ever knew about it. So, it was suppressed, it was camouflaged. So, Larchmont. And now, my family has been associated with Larchmont for fifty years. My mother is still in the same 35:00house, fifty years. I had a good public school education. My parents were on the left, my grandparents were socialists in the '20s, '30s. So, my parents were always on the left. We were involved in peace protests during the Vietnam War. My brother, Jeff, founded the Peace Club at Mamaroneck High School, which -- it's funny, because Frieden, the name they chose when they came over, means "peace," both in Yiddish, "fridn," and in German. So, they chose, in 1913, on the eve of the First World War, they chose peace and they left. And so, we were still pacifists in the '60s. And I remembered going to vigils and protesting. I remember when Nixon drove by, protesting, and the hardhat construction workers 36:00also there, cheering for Nixon. So, I remember that and I had no Jewish education. I was raised like a goy. But I don't entirely believe that and here's why. I wrote a book about it, indirectly. My second book was about Freud, Freud's "Dream of Interpretation" [sic]. And it's not Freud-bashing and it's not about how Jewish Freud was, but it's about how Freud's method of interpreting dreams echoes Jewish methods of interpreting dreams, and I think I proved it and I don't think it had been done quite that way. Lot of people have tried to say Freud was Jewish, blah-blah-blah. But I really wanted to show in the text how his methods of interpretation echo Talmudic methods, rabbinic methods of interpretation, and I think I proved it. I also showed that Freud denied it. 37:00Freud didn't -- just like my grandfather, Freud had been brought to Vienna by his parents when he was two or something from Galicia. He didn't want psychoanalysis to be known as a Jewish science. That's why he wanted Jung to run the foundation, association for a while. But here's the thing: I believe that displacement -- there is such a thing as a cultural displacement that -- it's not genetic and it's not direct. Freud learned a little Hebrew, more than I did as a child. But I think that somehow, there was a cultural displacement so that Freud -- even though he never studied Talmud, somehow he developed a method of interpretation that has a lot of similarity to rabbinic interpretation. And I say that book, in a way, was an indirect attempt to prove that I, too, could be Jewish even though I had almost no upbringing -- I mean, I went to some friends' 38:00bar mitzvahs and there were a lot of Jews around. But I guess the most Jewish thing I did in high school was play chess, 'cause chess had been very much a Jewish game. I played with my father. I became an expert. I was a top high school player. And I later realized that chess is a lot like literary studies or Talmudic studies. It was actually the first scholarship I did because I researched openings, I researched things in chess very bookishly, and I also bought my first books in German and Russian because that's what the chess book -- some of the best books were in German or Russian. So, I became a scholar, in a sense, when I was sixteen, and a teacher. I also taught chess at the local library when I was sixteen. So, that was, I guess, my Jewish education was chess. And I actually had a Jewish teacher, famous grandmaster, Arthur Bisguier. 39:00Through a family connection, I was able to hook up with him and I took lessons with him for a year or two. Actually, he wrote recommendations to college I think may have helped me get into Yale and other colleges. But I'm getting ahead. Let me just say, then, that I think that I didn't have direct Jewish education. My parents were atheists or at least agnostic. My father used to say he's hedging his bets, he says agnostic. But what happened? Okay, so then -- and people have always asked me, What happened? How did it happen? How did you get interested in Yiddish? Right? It's the clichéd question. So, let me continue with my education. So, maybe chess helped and my father, too. My father had gone 40:00to Yale. Very smart guy, my father. And of course, there was a ten percent quota then. So, it's not clear how he got in. But it was the war. According to some accounts, possibly he got in because of the war. He was in the class of '45 W and it was easier for Jews to get in the war class and there was a kind of elitism between '45 and '45 W. They were separate and there were more Jews in '45 W, the war class. In any case, my father got in. My father graduated from Yale and from Yale Medical School.

JP:So, just to clarify, what does a war class mean? How is that --

KF:Oh.

JP:-- different than the class in general?

KF:They accepted more students and I guess my father did basic training to be a private in the Army. And then, his father, who always was very deep into education, why he left the shtetl -- he told my father, "I didn't raise you to be cannon fodder. Take the test. There's some test you can take not to be 41:00shipped out to the front." It was some test and he took the test and he scored very high. And so, instead of being a private, they put him in a different track to go to college and to be a researcher. So, he did his first -- he went to college, he went to medical school, and he worked in some labs. And actually, I remember stories -- this is kind of spooky. I remember stories of him telling me about a German who was imprisoned somehow. I don't know exactly how, where, but there was a German prisoner who said to my father, "Du lachts -- you laugh." Somehow, my father felt very guilty about having somehow been in connection with this German prisoner. And if I remember correctly, the German prisoner committed suicide in his cell with a belt. So, that's a dark past. But you asked '45 W. 42:00So, somehow, they had a separate track. It wasn't the regular '45 class, it was an additional class, maybe, that they allowed in through an Army -- but I think my father had applied to Yale anyway, so that's what I'm not clear about. I think he'd already applied to Yale but then he enlisted, 'cause -- born in 1924, Pearl Harbor, 1941 -- so maybe he was in his senior year. He was applying to Yale anyway, but then he enlisted.

JP:Sorry, but you were talking about your journey into Yiddish.

KF:So, how did I get there? So then, I went to college. Actually, I wanted to follow in the footsteps of either my uncle, who was a mathematician, or my grandfather, who was a chemist. I went to Yale thinking I would major in chemistry. I was always good in math. Chess, math, music. So, I played clarinet, I was into music. And somehow, I started writing fiction. Actually, in high 43:00school I started writing fiction. And when I went to Yale, already in my first year, instead of taking a composition class, I took a creative writing class with Charles Poverman, short story writer. And then, the next semester, I took another creative writing class with -- famous writer now, David Milch, who is a TV writer. Famous TV writer: "Hill Street Blues," some other top shows. He was my teacher my second semester at Yale and he -- I developed a really strong rapport with him. And he encouraged me but he said, "You haven't lived." He was right. So, I wrote and I continued writing and I still write fiction, but I've never published any of it. Someday. So, I sort of circumvented the chemistry 44:00route by writing. I wrote myself into an English major. And I took a couple more creative writing classes and broadened my knowledge of English and American literature. And then, I applied to grad school. And I really didn't want to go to graduate school. I really still wanted to be a writer. But I met one of the fellows of the college, some scientist. I talked with him about it, he said -- I mean, he encouraged -- science is okay, he encouraged me, but he said, "If you want to leave academia, you should go over the summer and dig trenches." (laughs) So, I did. One summer, I traveled around the country while I was at Yale. One summer, I traveled around the country and I took jobs wherever I could and I dug trenches and I worked in a factory and -- to see, and I understood 45:00that I could only live in a city or town where there was a university. There was no way I could live in mainstream America. So, I applied to graduate schools, mostly philosophy but also one program in comparative literature. So, I wanted to do phenomenology and literature. The one literature program was the University of Chicago because Paul Ricoeur was there at the School of Theology, amazing French phenomenologist, great interpreter. So, I was accepted to several programs, but they made the best offer and it meant I could study with Paul Ricoeur and maybe also go up to Northwestern and study with people there. It didn't happen. So, then I was in comparative literature, okay? So, when I graduated, I was already fluent in French because I took French throughout high school. I also, one summer -- first summer at Yale, I worked in a French 46:00restaurant in Westchester, in Hartsdale. It was called Chez Maya. First time I heard that name, Maya, and I since named my daughter Maya. So, I worked in a French restaurant and spoke French with the cook and the waitress for about six weeks. Then, I went to France for six or eight weeks and I was fluent in French at the end of that and I took classes in literature, in French, at Yale. That was my first foreign language. The funny thing is, I never could say the American R. I think it was viewed as a speech impediment in school. I tried to pronounce it but I always preferred the French R because you don't have to do that thing with the lips. So, it's as if English wasn't even my native tongue. But it was. So then, when I was accepted to Chicago, I knew I had to learn another foreign language and then I was doing philosophy, so I went to Germany. 47:00First time, summer of 1977. Tiny town near Munich. And I worked hard. In fact, I went into the second level because over the summer, I read a review textbook of German and took some lessons. And only later, I realized it was a doctrine of remembrance that I -- somehow, in some distant life, I knew German and I only had to remind myself. So, I used a review textbook and I read it. I don't really believe that. I don't believe in that kind of genetics. But somehow, it was easy for me. Languages seemed to come easily for my family. And so, I learned German one summer there. Then, at the University of Chicago, I took a year of German literature classes in German. So, I was already working in German. And then, another year, I went back to the Goethe Institute, summer of '78, to Freiburg, which was the home of phenomenology, Husserl and Heidegger. And I took another 48:00summer intensive, advanced German, then I went back and then I applied for the German academic exchange, DAAD grants to go to Germany for a full year. So, I was in Chicago two years, I got an MA in Chicago and then I left for Germany. And I went to Freiburg, which was the home of phenomenology, and I studied with the students of Heidegger and Husserl. That's a very charged thing if you know, because I think it was in '76 after he -- right before -- Heidegger gave an interview to "Der Spiegel" before he died but stipulated it could only be published after he died. And I think it was published in '76, in which he admitted to his Nazi past. I mean, he had lost his professorial rights as a result of it. He had been de-Nazified, he'd been kicked out, in a sense. He was really nasty to his teacher, Husserl, who was Jewish. Husserl lost his teaching 49:00rights at the university under the Nazis and Heidegger didn't help. Anyway, so I was there and I learned that. I learned about that when I was there from another American student. And it came up in one of my classes. I had some interesting classes. But basically, I found phenomenology went there to die and I thought it was not happening. So, I started going to Heidelberg, where philosophy was much stronger, and I started listening to two important philosophers: Theunissen and one other. So, I commuted and that changed my course because Theunissen, after that, moved to Berlin and so did several other -- they were building the philosophy faculty in Berlin. And a man named Ernst Tugendhat moved to Berlin, 50:00also, from the Max Planck Institute. He became my teacher. I applied to the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange, to move from Freiburg to Berlin. At first, they said, No, you can't. You've been messing around too much, travelling to Heidelberg, and you haven't taken advantage of Freiburg. So, you should just stay there. But, I somehow got them to agree and I moved to Berlin. I moved in with another philosophy student. Well, I guess I should save that -- but basically, to make it short, make it a little shorter, I've probably -- I don't know how much time we have. But how I came to Yiddish -- through German. So, I was then fluent in German after two years in Germany. But that wasn't the only thing that happened in Germany. I'm always very uncomfortable in Germany and I never thought it was because of the history. But maybe it was. Maybe I denied it to myself. And I tried to live there. And I even went there last summer for two 51:00months, with a grant. But I'm always very uncomfortable there, for different reasons. But what happened was that teacher, Tugendhat, was a friend of Theunissen. I went to their classes in Berlin. Tugendhat was a Jew. Very rare cases of a German Jewish -- he wasn't really German, he was Czech -- Jewish professor in Germany in 1980, and a very successful one. There were a couple others. Taubes, I think, was there. But he was a great professor, great philosopher, and a nice guy. He even had me to his house. I think I and my roommate had him over for dinner and he had us over. He was single and he was available in a certain way that he was just -- he didn't have the distance that 52:00was typical of the German professor, Herr Doktor [German: Mr. Doctor], right? Professor Doktor [German: Professor Doctor]. And Theunissen was also very nice and supportive. But here's what happened: so, I had lived in Dahlem, which was near the free university for a while and basically got kicked out by my landlady for not being discreet enough or something. But then I moved in with this -- in the second year with another philosophy student whom I had met. He had a small room which was really the maid's room of an old Berlin apartment. Beautiful, amazing apartment. It had in it a huge studio for art, art studio, and there was a third inhabitant -- was Frank Daike, I think was his name, a German painter who drove taxicab at night and painted during the day. And so, we had this -- 53:00that's because I had moved in with Marcus Otto, whose father was an artist and had lived in that apartment but had moved to West Germany. At that time, Berlin was -- it was an island. West Berlin was just West Berlin and to get there, you had to drive across East Germany and it was very nasty. In fact, that was an experience of fascism, basically. I mean, they called them red-coated, red-colored fascists. That's the closest I came to experiencing being a Jew on the run: crossing the border, I guess, into Berlin. I was driving with some German woman in a Volkswagen Bug and there was some issue about my passport. I thought, I don't know -- anyway, I really felt how German society can exclude and destroy. So, anyway, but I lived another year in Berlin and what I realized 54:00-- so, in the second year in Berlin, I couldn't take the Germans anymore, really, so I started learning Spanish. (laughs) But as I left -- and I went to Spain, actually. I spent a couple months in Spain and -- in a language class, when I left. Went through East Germany, Budapest, Spain, and I realized the only two people I got close to in the whole time was Tugendhat, who was Jewish, and the girlfriend of Marcus Otto, who's now a psychoanalyst in Berlin. Adriana Behar-Kremer. Great woman. Incredibly friendly. Those are the only two friendly people, practically. And still, to this day, I don't know if I've ever been invited to anyone's house in Germany -- I've lived there for years -- for a meal. It's not a very open society unless you're part of it. So, when I left, I 55:00realized the Jews were missing, obviously. I mean, how did I neglect to see that? Only two people who were friendly to me, basically, were Jews. And there were no Jews in Berlin, basically, at that time. They came later, the Soviet Jews, when they were let out in the '90s. And I saw them coming in when I was back in Berlin in the '90s. It was a lot of Jews from the former Soviet Union went in. But there were no Jews. So, that's how I came to Yiddish, you may be surprised, through its opposite, sort of Hegelian dialectical thesis-antithesis-synthesis. I went through Germany and experienced the lack of Jews, what it is for there to be a Germany -- great German culture. That's why I went there. Great Germany philosophy and music, art, literature. Great Jewish -- 56:00a German civilization without the Jews, it's hollowed-out. And where are we?

JP:And did learning Yiddish and Hebrew fill in that lack for you?

KF:Yeah, so that's what I did. Right after that, instead of going back to Chicago to finish my PhD in comparative literature, I decided to go back to Yale. I had studied with Paul de Man in Chicago. He was a visiting professor in Chicago and I studied with him. So, when I was coming -- I think in the middle of the last year, when I was in Germany, I called Paul de Man. I said I was thinking of transferring to Yale and he said, "There's good news." He was happy -- I'd worked hard at his seminars in Chicago and he wanted to accept me. So, I shifted back to Yale and from the beginning, I met Jews. In fact, even while I was in Berlin, I met another guy who was going back to Yale and he was a Jewish 57:00guy. And so, immediately, I was in a circle of Jews and I went to services with the new Hillel rabbi. The same time as I arrived in 1981, a great Hillel rabbi, James Ponet, Jim Ponet arrived at Yale. And I remember his sermons, I remember him, his great family, Elana, his wife, his kids. It was a whole gestalt and I wanted to be part of that gestalt. I really loved his family and that was missing. I knew it was missing in Germany and I knew it was missing in me, in my identity. So, I, in a way, I was uncorrupted by having gone to Hebrew day school or any of that stuff. I didn't have any biases because I knew nothing. But I started learning Hebrew and I do things intensively when I do them. So, I went 58:00very fast. I learned Hebrew in '82. Actually, I learned some with Elana Ponet, the wife of the rabbi, Jim Ponet. And then, I went to Jerusalem to the ulpan intensive language classes. And again, I went into an advanced, a more advanced class. I didn't start at the beginning 'cause I just prepared a lot on my own. And I continued. I went to classes at Yale in Hebrew and then I went back to Israel another summer and I also went to yeshiva for a while, to experience that, and then Yiddish. So, since I was fluent in German and I had become fairly capable in Hebrew, I realized as I was browsing the library on Mount Scopus, I 59:00could read Yiddish. So then, I got out "College Yiddish," the textbook of Yiddish, and I read it. I read the textbook and so then, I could already work in Yiddish. And there was a woman in comparative literature, she and I sat together and read some Bashevis Singer together in Yiddish and actually that became my first article about Yiddish literature. It was "I.B. Singer's Monologues of Demons" and -- about what I consider to be some of his best short stories about -- not monologues by demons, published in "Prooftexts," 1985. Around that time, then, I took summers in Jerusalem and then I switched to Yiddish. So then, I went to YIVO for two successive summers and Jeffrey Shandler, now president of 60:00the AJS was one of my classmates in the advanced Yiddish class in '84 and '85. And we had the great teachers, Mordkhe Schaechter, Chava Lapin, and the next year, Novershtern and Niborksi, I guess. And then, I was writing my dissertation and I also attended classes by Dan Miron, who you probably know as one of the great Hebrew and Yiddish critics, and unusual for doing both. Not many people dared or wanted to do both. Most people did Hebrew literature or Yiddish literature and there was a lot of competition between them. Yiddish studies managed to get a department going in Jerusalem but it was not working together, really, with the Hebrew department, so -- and the same thing at Columbia. They had the summer program and they had a Yiddish program, but Dan Miron had to go 61:00to YIVO to teach Yiddish literature. At Columbia, he taught Hebrew literature. So, it was separate in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, he could only do Hebrew literature, and Yiddish he did at YIVO. So, I got to know him. I've been very lucky. I've had great teachers. I mean, I haven't even mentioned them -- I don't want to drop names, but I've been very lucky. I've had some of the best teachers for what I was doing. When I was at Yale, it was in comparative literature, which I think was the best program in comparative literature at that time, around 1980. Even Jacques Derrida would come through for a month every year and I actually translated a big essay by Jacques Derrida from French. So, where was I?

JP:So, how did you negotiate between Yiddish and Hebrew, both personally and professionally, if it wasn't kind of assumed that people --

KF:I was in --

JP:-- would be doing both.

KF:-- comparative literature. My first language was French -- I mean, English, French, German, that's the standard. Especially then, you were expected to know 62:00English, French, and German to do comparative literature because the theory was in those languages. So, I did English, French, and German. But then, for my spirit, I -- first I had done some Spanish, then I did Hebrew and Yiddish and no one was going to stop me. I used, as much as I could in my dissertation -- one chapter in my dissertation uses Hebrew. There's even some Spanish in there. But I couldn't use Yiddish yet. But, as I mentioned, I started publishing about Yiddish literature soon after I graduated Yale. My PhD is 1984 and while I was still there, I wrote this essay about Bashevis Singer. So, there I was. Job market was terrible but it was getting a little bit better and I was fortunate that Harold Bloom, one of my best teachers, helped me, wrote a letter to Bernard Kendler of Cornell University Press and recommended my book, my dissertation, 63:00which I then revised into a book. So, I was very lucky -- it went very smoothly and quickly. And by the time I graduated, the book was in press. So, basically, when I went on the job market, I was marketable because I had a book that was coming out at Cornell University Press. And I guess that saved me because today, coming out -- if it had been a dissertation in Yiddish, then no jobs. There were no jobs. Even Hebrew, 'cause I'm not Israeli. I'm not a native speaker and they can always hold that against you. But since it was comparative literature and Judaic studies, 'cause I was sort of doing that on the side, I was able to get -- the Dorot Foundation created assistant professorships in different -- NYU, Emory, and some others. So, I had some job offers. But the most intriguing was at Emory, a very nice offer to be a Dorot assistant professor between modern 64:00languages and classics, comparative literature, and Judaic studies. And I was thrown into the depths by Oded Borowski. My first semester at Emory, fall '86, I was asked to teach third-year Hebrew. And I was only a step ahead of the students. But I skipped a year in Jerusalem just to say -- that also enabled me to make the switch, to retool. I got a Lady Davis fellowship. I think that's -- yeah, and some others to -- studied for a year in Jerusalem. So, I studied with some of the most famous Yiddishists like Chone Shmeruk. I got to know Chava Turniansky. I met Vera Solomon. I did a class in Yiddish with Avraham 65:00Novershtern. So, that enabled me to make the switch, a year intensive doing Yiddish studies. That was definitely the center of Yiddish studies at the time. But then I took on this job where they asked me to teach Hebrew, third-year Hebrew. And I had four students and I've been doing that class ever since. I also -- at Syracuse, I get four -- up to ten, eleven students in advanced Hebrew. I like to teach that because I like to work in the original and I can read Hebrew literature with them in the original, which I can't do in Yiddish. So, Yiddish, then, was my research. In '85, '86, and again in '88-89, I lived in Jerusalem and I was doing research on Yiddish literature. That became my field.

JP:So, just to clarify, you're not teaching high-level Yiddish to students and 66:00reading in original with them.

KF:No, I've never been in a context where I could do that.

JP:Oh, okay.

KF:I've never had that luxury. I wish I did. What happened was -- so, Emory was improving. Coca-Cola gave them two hundred million or something and they were building and the dean, David Minter, supported me and I created a really unique program called Judaic languages and literature, which was supposed to be for the study of Hebrew, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, maybe even Ladino, Judeo-- you know, Judezmo. It was an amazing program. We created a major in Judaic languages and literature. I think JTS might have been the only other place that had a Jewish literature major. And we had a linguist, Benjamin Hari, who did Judeo-Arabic. And I sometimes taught Yiddish language. I did teach Yiddish language to some students. I even had a great student who was Korean and became a lawyer. So, 67:00Emory, I was there and I was fortunate they allowed me to go on several sabbaticals where -- so, I deepened my knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish. I published my second book, the one on Freud. The first was comparative literature, the second was Freud, and I wrote the third while I was at Emory, which -- "Classic Yiddish Fiction," which was my third and my central contribution to date to the study of Yiddish literature. Dead white males. So, "Classic Yiddish Fiction," 1995. I think a mistake I made was publishing at SUNY Press. It had been at Indiana, they held it a long time. There's a funny story. One reason it didn't get accepted was there was a Yiddishist whose name I won't 68:00mention who wrote a critical review complaining that I used too much literary theory, 'cause that was what the nativists thought about people like me who came from comparative literature. She said, "Trying to read 'Classic Yiddish Fiction' through Bakhtin is like trying to cut a steak with a butter knife. And not only it's not sharp enough, it's not kosher." So, it was held at Indiana for a while, but -- and then I wanted to get it out already and I gave it to SUNY. There was a nice acquisitions editor but I think it didn't get as much notice as it would have at a better press. Then, I moved from Emory to Syracuse where I've been for the past twenty years. And I'm glad I moved to Syracuse. It was an endowed chair. They made me a better offer. I had been promoted -- I'd been tenured at Emory and promoted to associate professor, but Syracuse University offered me a 69:00promotion to full professor, an endowed chair in Judaic studies, so I moved there in 1993. And I met my wife in '95 and she's Israeli, American Israeli. And there, I tried to do a lot of what I did at Emory, which is basically literature in translation 'cause I didn't have -- except for Hebrew, there was no -- right, I could teach Yiddish but it wouldn't go anywhere because it would be seniors, it would be people who weren't serious. I could never build myself a program for Hebrew and Yiddish and I have always expected that Syracuse would help me fundraise to hire more people to do Yiddish language and more people to do Hebrew literature but it never happened. So, I'm left there and I've been doing my research. After we had kids -- I have two kids, '97 and 2000, they were born 70:00-- I couldn't do the same kind of deep research, going to Jerusalem or YIVO all the time. So, I shifted to translation and I published a book in 2004 with translations of classic Yiddish writers. So, there's the "Classic Yiddish Fiction" book, scholarship, and then I wrote "Classic Yiddish Stories" with my translations but also some translations by Michael Wex, Sholem Aleichem's Tevye stories, and by Ted Gorelick, some monologues by Sholem Aleichem. And I also got involved with a series. In fact, I think it's my greatest accomplishment at Syracuse. When I got there, also, Bob Mandel arrived there and created a Judaica line and I created a series called "Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art." We've published more than fifty volumes now with a real focus on Hebrew 71:00and Yiddish literature. So, there's about fifteen books of translations of Hebrew Yiddish literature and about fifteen of scholarship about Hebrew and Yiddish literature and then some other things: Polish Jewish, French Jewish, and a little bit of art and a little bit of music. So, I was able to continue my scholarship and I became more of an editor, also, in the time when my kids were little and I didn't have time to do the deep scholarship. I edited a lot of -- we acquired a lot of very good books in Yiddish and Hebrew studies. I think we helped a lot of people get tenure by publishing their books. And then, finally, 2004, I went to Harvard for a semester at the Center for Jewish Studies, where Ruth Wisse was doing the Yiddish program and she oversaw this group, which 72:00included Avraham Novershtern, whom I had known since '85, since YIVO. And there, my research took a new turn. I'm not sure how it happened, but since I'm really a scholar of comparative literature, I was never satisfied to just be in Yiddish and I realized more and more, maybe as my Hebrew got better, how essential it was to work in both together. It's not two separate traditions, it's a linked tradition, so -- which Dov Sadan said and Dan Miron said but few people have shown it and done it. So, that's what I've been doing since 2004. I wrote a paper at Harvard on Joseph Perl and I consulted with Jeremy Dauber, who had 73:00written a book, a lot of it, about Joseph Perl. He was there, too. He was in that same group, which was a good thing for me. He was helpful, so -- and I published that in the "Association for Jewish Studies Review." It was "Joseph Perl's Escape from Epigonism Through Parody of Hasidic Writers." And that's where I began to realize, Okay, so the Hasidic writers have been way underrated. This is, I think, now my research contribution to the field and I lectured on it a couple days ago here. Most literary historians have not given much space to Hasidic writers. Or there are also some moderate maskilim, enlighteners, like Mendel Lefin, who contributed a lot. So, I've been showing, on the one hand, how Yiddish helped create modern Hebrew and how Yiddish helped create modern Hebrew 74:00literature and then also how working from Hebrew to Yiddish helped create modern Yiddish literature. So, as I argued in my paper two days ago, I'm trying to push the literary history back fifty years, because the cliché is modern Yiddish literature begins with Mendele in 1864 and modern Hebrew literature begins with the tchiah [Hebrew: renaissance] -- maybe it's Smolenskin but really, it's Mendele, Abramovitsh, with the stories, 1886 to 1896, right? That's supposedly the beginning of modern Hebrew literature, which is, I think, a real misrepresentation caused partly by Bialik. So, now, where my research is, I'm writing several books, editing a couple of books, really at the border, but the first one will show how Yiddish contributed -- and not just Yiddish, actually -- 75:00also German. I'm in comparative literature, I can do it. And see, this is the bizarre thing: one of my current heroes, Mendel Lefin, he was from Ukraine. He was very important because he went from Ukraine to Berlin in about 1781 and he studied -- I mean, he was already thirty. He apparently suffered from an eye ailment but he got to know Moses Mendelssohn and other of the great enlighteners of Berlin and he published in their journal, "Ha-Meassef," and then he went back to Ukraine. So, he had part of the ideology of the Berlin Haskalah, but he also didn't lose touch with the masses of Jews of Ukraine and Yiddish-speakers. 'Course, the Berlin writers wanted nothing to do with Yiddish for the most part. 76:00Lefin was an exception. So, he did for Yiddish-speaking Jews what the German enlighteners were trying to do for German Jews: get them -- but the difference is Mendelssohn and his followers tried to get the Jews to forget Yiddish and just speak German like everybody. Lefin thought it was fine for them to go on speaking Yiddish. I mean, after all, they were in Ukraine, the assimilation language would have been Russian or Ukrainian, but he didn't foster that. He wanted them to develop the culture in Yiddish and Hebrew. So, Mendel Lefin wrote several very important books, first in Hebrew and then translations into Yiddish, but from German, some of them. That's the thing, he translated Hebrew to Yiddish and German to Yiddish. And that's a whole strand that I've been working on, too, to show how translation played a role because neither Hebrew 77:00nor Yiddish had a modern literature in 1815. But it got it partly through translation, partly by importing forms and sentences into Yiddish and Hebrew. And that's what the linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann has been showing from a more linguistic perspective. He's making the polemical argument that in Israel, they don't really speak Hebrew, they speak Israeli -- it's gotten so far from the source. My point is not to say something about the Israelis but actually, I think I've invented a new term. I call it pre-Zionism. You've heard of post-Zionism, right, that they have post-Zionist theorists who have questioned Zionism and moved beyond Zionism in a certain way. So, I move before it. The writers I'm working on now wrote before there was Zionism. There was a longing for Zion, but it wasn't political Zionism. There were pilgrimages to Zion and 78:00I'm writing about them. But there wasn't Zionism. I heard you mention diaspora nationalism earlier. In fact, that's always fascinated me, since the '80s, Dubnow and that whole idea. I support diaspora nationalism. I guess a boy from Larchmont always would.

JP:I want to ask you a bit more about translation. How do you feel engaging in translation personally and professionally, especially since you're not actually teaching Yiddish literature to students --

KF:But I read Yiddish all the time. I probably read or have read as much Yiddish as anybody alive. I mean, that's what -- I work in Yiddish and Hebrew. That's basically all I read. And this is the fallacy of the native speakers. They think they own it, but they don't own nineteenth century Yiddish or Hebrew. They don't speak nineteenth century Yiddish or Hebrew. In fact, what they speak is often very heavily accented by the country they live in, whether it's Argentina or New York or our friends -- often, their Yiddish reflects where they live. It's not 79:00as if they speak some perfect Yiddish from over there. And language changes. There is always language shift. So, they don't understand nineteenth century Yiddish better than I do.

JP:But does the practice of translation reinforce a certain belief in community accessibility for you? Is it a necessary evil or --

KF:Oh, the issue of -- okay, well, I would love it if we could train a new generation of Yiddish speakers or if more Hasidim would leave the fold and write secular literature and read -- I wish there were more secular Yiddish culture -- people active in secular Yiddish culture. Maybe it's happening, okay, but in the meantime, I haven't had that chance. I would love to. I've given lectures in Yiddish in different places, in Tel Aviv, in Paris. Actually, recently I Skyped 80:00with Naomi Seidman, a favorite Yiddishist, Hebraist on the West Coast. So, we Skype once a week lately, and she read me her paper in Yiddish couple weeks ago, 'cause she was going to YIVO to read it. And she is a native speaker, in a sense, but she has problems 'cause at YIVO, they teach klal [standard] Yiddish, which is Litvish but it's also got grammar from the south, so it's a mish-mash. So, you have a combination of what you learned, Polish Yiddish from her family, but then what she was taught at YIVO, and how do you put that together? Anyway, no one -- I mean, that's why Jeffrey Shandler coined the term post-vernacular. The only people for whom it is a native tongue, really, are Hasidim and a few children of families that have taken this step of trying to become 81:00Yiddish-speaking families. Actually, I'll have to say -- I married an Israeli. It's in our ketubah [Jewish marriage contract]. We were supposed to speak both loshn-koydesh [holy language, i.e. Hebrew] and mame-loshn [mother tongue, i.e. Yiddish] at home but she didn't keep up that end of the bargain. She speaks Hebrew at home. I sing Yiddish songs -- when my kids were little, I sang to them in Yiddish. You know, so they know some Yiddish from songs. The only person who will listen to me in Yiddish is my dog. He listens. I talk to him only in Yiddish and he listens. He knows what "esn [to eat]" means. He licks his lips if I say "esn." (laughter) I say, "Kum aher [Come here]," he comes. But my kids don't listen to Yiddish. You can't force. Some families have. A handful of families have forced -- have raised their kids speaking Yiddish, as -- it's the same thing with Israeli families in the US. Often, they rebel. When the kids get 82:00to school, they want to be like the other kids and they want to speak English, too. So, you can fight the trend, but what can I do? What I can do, what I really can contribute is scholarship on Yiddish. And a lot of graduate students know my work and talk to me. I think I've fostered a lot of grad students. They read my book. The "Classic Yiddish Stories" book, I've been told, is required reading for your comps in Yiddish literature because it's a very organized book, it lays things out. But now --

JP:How does --

KF:Yeah?

JP:How does it feel to make such a foundational contribution to a field like that?

KF:Feels good. Funny, yesterday I was in a session, a woman was handing out her handouts and she said, "Oh, Ken Frieden! I read you!" (laughs) It feels good, of course.

JP:On the flip side of that, I mean, you've both written on and produced "The Dybbuk," you're an active klezmer clarinetist, you are involved in two different groups: the Syracuse University Klezmer Music Ensemble and the Wandering Klezmorim, which you founded.

KF:Yes.

JP:How does this speak to both your scholarly work --

KF:Right.

JP:-- and your personal convictions?

KF:So, it's really the same thing. I did in music what I did in scholarship. I was trained as a classical clarinetist. In college, I had a roommate. They put us together because we played clarinet, I guess. Andy Biskin, who's still a jazz clarinetist, and he taught me a bit about improvising and jazz. And while I was in Germany -- part of my crossover, I became fascinated by Indian music, Indian ragas. And actually, I spent a lot of time going to the ethnographic museum, listening to and taping some of their collection of ragas. And it's still, in 84:00some ways, my favorite music -- is Indian ragas, and I tried to play them on clarinet. I learned about the modes and the different scales that they use. And that was my transition because then, somehow, I started playing Jewish music, I guess at the Ponets' house, at the Hillel rabbi's house. There was some other -- and we started playing Jewish music. And so, I started to make the transition. Then, in Atlanta, I met some other musicians and I got deeper into it. And then, I was in Tzfat, I was in Israel one time, I think it was '93, and I was so lucky to have Joel Rubin as my teacher in a workshop. There were about twenty high school accordion players and two clarinetists. And accordion players worked with Josh Horowitz and the two clarinets worked with Joel Rubin, who may be the best living klezmer clarinetist, at least his technique. He understands the 1920s style as well as anybody. And he made me understand what real klezmer is. I 85:00mean, this is early. I mean, there were bands. But he took me back to Brandwein, Naftule Brandwein and David Tarras and helped me understand what you have to know to be able to go beyond it. I mean, there are people who want to do klezmer rock without being able to play the '20s. It's like in art, you should master some of the basics before -- but any case, I wouldn't have learned that without Joel Rubin. I mean, a lot of people think that Israeli songs can count as klezmer. At the klezmer festival in Tzfat sometimes, Hebrew songs are all you hear. But the repertoire is -- there's a big repertoire. And so, I did the same thing in music is what I want to say. Basically, I follow the same trajectory with music as I did with scholarship. I have been trained as a classical musician. I moved into some jazz and some Indian music and then Jewish music and 86:00I sing Yiddish songs and I perform klezmer music. I have a program that I've enjoyed doing several times where I read passages from Yiddish stories, usually in English 'cause usually that's all the audience can understand. Sometimes in Yiddish. I have them in Yiddish, too, and then perform, interspersing klezmer music. I've enjoyed doing it with Pete Rushefsky at the Lubin House in New York City. It's great to have the cymbal. He plays cymbal. He was able to also improvise behind me when I was reading passages 'cause it's very velvety quiet. And I did it in Australia this past summer with the great band, Klezmania. They have a great Yiddish singer. In fact, let me say just a word about Melbourne, Australia, where I spent a week this summer. I went to Limmud Oz and gave about five lectures. Got to meet Ghil'ad Zuckermann, the linguist, and I also got to meet Freydi Mrocki, who is the Yiddish vocalist for this band, Klezmania, and 87:00she was great, very welcoming, hospitable. What was most amazing about Melbourne was she took me to a dinner party with about fifteen people, all of them speaking Yiddish. And she explained to me, "These are all either survivors" -- but more so, children of survivors. The children of the survivors speak Yiddish. So, not older than me, just about my age. Maybe a little older than me but also younger than me. A large group of people. I never saw that. I didn't even see it in New York. I didn't even see it at YIVO. People complain sometimes, at YIVO they don't speak Yiddish. There were stories about it yesterday, about the librarian refusing to speak Yiddish with the patrons. And in a way, it was a very appropriate audience. I didn't even realize when I flew to Australia that I was flying to a place, maybe the best place in the world to do a program of 88:00Yiddish stories and klezmer music. And I could have done it again in Yiddish for that crowd. I didn't know before I left how much Yiddish they would know. But I gave some other lectures using Yiddish and Hebrew examples, but --

JP:And --

KF:Yes?

JP:And is that about your personal interest or is it also about cultural transmission for you?

KF:Yes. I love music. I've always loved music. And it's the same thing, really. That's why my series at Syracuse University Press, Judaic traditions in literature, music, and art. I mean, it's a whole civilization. That's why Judaic studies is so problematic, in a way. It's everything. You have to have all the disciplines or no discipline.

JP:So, further to that, I guess, what trends or changes have you seen over the time you've been involved with Yiddish and Jewish studies? I know that's a broad 89:00question but --

KF:Well, it's a work-in-progress because, as I said, I still think that some of the nativists think they own it. And until that stops, it will hold the whole thing back. (long pause) The only place to study Yiddish literature at an advanced level formerly was, really, the Columbia program. But how many dissertations did they produce? David Goldberg wrote one on Linetzky and Dan Miron wrote one, 1973, the -- which became his excellent book, "A Traveler Disguised." We reprinted it in my series. How many real literary scholars came out of Columbia? I'm not sure. They, in a way -- because of the Weinreichs, they were more linguistics. So, the question is where could you study, where can you 90:00study Yiddish literature at an advanced level? So, it was Jerusalem for a long time. Thanks to Dov Sadan, I guess, they built a real department of Yiddish with Chone Shmeruk and others and it was a remarkable thing. And I was privileged to see it while it still existed. It's gone. It was folded into the Hebrew department, right? There's one faculty member now. They didn't have students. Israelis don't want to even study Hebrew literature. How many are going to study Yiddish literature? But what has changed, and we saw it at this conference -- nevertheless, partly thanks to Chana Kronfeld at Berkeley, a whole generation has been encouraged to learn Yiddish. Okay, you came to do Hebrew literature? Learn Yiddish. And I'm very impressed by what Chana Kronfeld has accomplished. I mean, I think she only published one book of her own scholarship but she's 91:00trained probably a couple dozen scholars and at least a dozen have tenure jobs and are major people, like Naomi Seidman and Shachar Pinsker and Ilana Pardes and I could go on and on. Eric Zakim. And there's all these people who she helped train. And because it was an open attitude -- it wasn't the nativist, You're never going to be good enough. It was, You do Hebrew literature? You should also know Yiddish literature. It was a very open, welcoming attitude, encouraging attitude. It had results. And I wish there were more of that. I'd like to be part of more of that. What I regret is that at Emory and Syracuse, I've had very few grad students who could do what I can teach them. I have grad students -- there are people who see me at the conference or at different conferences who -- they see me at different conferences and they use my work and they talk to me and I try to advise them, but I've never had -- I've never advised a dissertation on Yiddish literature because I've never had those students. I've never been at a place that had grad students in Yiddish. I'm now 92:00at a place -- Syracuse, it has a grad program in religion and in English. And through those, I've had students who know Hebrew or learn some Yiddish. Creative writing program, there was a great student who knew Hebrew and learned Yiddish. But I've never had that privilege and I think it's a waste of what I have to offer.

JP:On that note, in our last couple of minutes -- I mean, you've talked about what professors and what departments could do to foster a greater sense of openness and provide some resources to students to do this kind of work that you're hoping will be done. What advice do you give to students who are trying to keep on keeping on in Yiddish studies and Jewish studies? What advice do you have to students of Yiddish?

KF:Well, there's the academic side and there's the economic side. I could give lots of advice academically, depending on what they want to do. But 93:00economically, that's forces beyond our control. And humanities are in decline and to what extent they will bring Yiddish down with them, I don't know. Judaic studies has had the advantage of private donors. That's why there is Judaic studies to the extent that there is Judaic studies today, because of private donors. It's not 'cause the universities wanted it so much. Same with Yiddish. There have to be -- economically, it's not feasible. You can't maintain a large group, a cohort of grad students doing Yiddish without jobs. And actually, who has a job in Yiddish literature today? Maybe Jeremy Dauber at Columbia. Ruth Wisse, it's a chair. I'm not sure it's a Yiddish chair. Are there other tenured positions in Yiddish literature? Well, I'm tenured but it's not -- it's a position in Judaic studies. And others are in English departments and here and 94:00there. And so, my advice is somehow, we have to work together to create the possibility of more studies of Yiddish at universities.

JP:Well, on that note, I want to thank you for sharing your stories and reflections with me today. I also want to thank you on behalf of the Yiddish Book Center for participating in the Wexler Oral History Project.

KF:You're welcome.

JP:Thank you, Ken.

[END OF INTERVIEW]