EMILE KARAFIOL ORAL HISTORY

Christa whitney: So, this is Christa Whitney, and today is December 14th, 2012. I'm here in Chicago with Emile Karafiol, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Emile, do I have your permission to record this interview?

EMILE KARAFIOL: Yes, you do.

CW:All right. So, to start, can you tell me what you know about your family background, let's say your grandparents' generation?

EK:Okay. I'll go back a little further, 'cause I don't know my grandparents any better than I know my great-grandparents, the way things happened. So, my mother's father's family is from Warsaw and Poland. My mother's mother's family 1:00is from Lithuania -- though I think she may have been brought up in Poland. Both of them were rabbinical families, my father's father's family more recently. As far as I know -- I mean, everybody has genealogy, but leading us -- and I'm talking of real relations -- my mother's grandfather may have been the first rabbi in the family in that line for at least some generations. He became the grand rabbi of Warsaw. So, he became a big figure in Warsaw at the -- he died around 1900, 1902, 1904, I don't remember. He's in the encyclopedia. And very Orthodox, I want to say that. And my mother's father, her grandfather, his wife 2:00was from a much older rabbinical family, and they had ties all over Poland and Lithuania. The one I know about is in what used to be called Szczecin, Stettin -- today, I believe it's Wrocław. No, Breslau is Wrocław. Szczecin, Stettin -- Szczecin, I guess is the Polish. These names change. So, that's where I think her mother's brother was rabbi and her mother's father, succeeded by his brother. And where my mother's mother went back from Warsaw when she was old, and lived there in the last years of her life. My father's family was very different, at least the branch that I know, which is my father's father's 3:00family. They were based in Gdansk, and they were in the lumber business going back to the early nineteenth century. Which meant they did lumbering in the north, in Estonia or whatever, wherever the River Vistula begins -- or ends, I mean. No, begins. Way up in the top. And it would come down to Gdansk, Danzig. And so, they were in that for several generations. My father's mother was from Lublin. And my father was actually -- the family business started going down as several generations died young. And about 1900, I think they went bankrupt or they closed up shop. Now, his father had moved out since. When he got married he 4:00moved to Saxony in Germany. His main non-Jewish language was German, from Gdansk, from Danzig. And that's where my father was brought up. He was born in Lublin because his mother went back there to have a child. (laughs) But he was brought up in a town called Plauen in Saxony, which was the center of some kind of textile industry. Lace industry, that's what it was. Still is, a little bit. And that's what his father was doing. And so, he grew up in Germany. And I do know, though, that his grandfather, Leo Leib, is buried in the Warsaw cemetery. He died when he was on some trip on Warsaw, some charitable thing there. And the one thing I know about my father -- was totally irreligious. And my mother's 5:00family would have been -- so they would've been opposed to the marriage except for the grandfather, who was known in the Orthodox community of Warsaw. So, that's sort of the general background of the family.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

EK:I can tell you a little more.

CW:Sure.

EK:My mother's family was a large family, lots of kids. She was one of the youngest. The oldest was maybe twenty years older than her. All the men had their rabbinates, and most of them went into that, as far as I know. I don't think they stayed outside the rabbinical world. Though they didn't necessarily become rabbis -- different things. And she had a sister who was secular, like herself, and they lived together for many years. Even after my mother got married, she stayed -- they lived together. So, Guta, Gitl, who worked for 6:00"Haynt." She was a kind of glorified copy editor, as far as I know. I'm not sure, best I can tell. Tried to translate what I remember as a child, what I was told about her as a child, into terminology that's familiar to me today. So, that's sort of what it looks like. But, you know, my mother was very close to some of her brothers and not at all close to other brothers. (laughs) You know, that's how in any big family it is. One brother's daughter married an American. And they lived in Florida. And she was in touch with them, of course. This was a brother who did not get along with her. I don't think I ever met them. I met their daughter a few times when she was in college, about the time I was in college. But that's the closest contact I've had with them. Her oldest brother, 7:00who was a rabbinical scholar who barely made a living in Warsaw. (laughs) He had three sons and a daughter. He's actually described in Chaim Grade's "Der mames shabosim [My mother's Sabbath days]" because he was the father -- his daughter married Chaim Grade. That was Chaim Grade's wife, who did not follow him to Russia, finally. So, she was a nurse in Vilna. And he was very close. He was very close to my father. I mean, they were opposite poles, but they used to sit and talk for hours in mixed languages. But he would have coffee at our house. He wouldn't eat there, of course, but he would have coffee at our house. So, his 8:00three sons all became secular Zionists. Zionist in those days meant secular, of course. And they went to, as it was then called, Palestine. As the Zionists called it then, Palestine. And when the third one went off, the youngest -- who's also described in Grade's book a little -- when they went off, he followed them, where he became a scholar in a project to revise the Talmud after 250 years. I don't know how far they got. And he lived till after the war and died shortly after the war. I never met him. His widow lived on longer. And his three sons, the youngest one was killed the last day of the War of Liberation or 9:00whatever it's called today. And the other two survived and had families.

CW:Are there any family stories that have been passed down through the generations in your family?

EK:Well, the one story that I know well has to do with my mother. I don't know any of the stories of her -- she's told me some stories about her grandfather. When she was a teeny little baby girl, he used to allow her to be under the table when he did an arbitration (laughs) a few times. She was maybe four or five, and he died shortly after. And so, a few stories of those. But the one that's always stood in my mind because it's an example of Orthodox culture 10:00living on: my mother was a very Orthodox secularist. Her path there led -- began with a young woman from the small town who came -- you know, eighteen-year-old or seventeen or whatever -- came to Warsaw, left home. And the local rabbi wanted her watched over. So, he wrote my grandfather, Could he watch over her? And my grandfather decided the best way was to give her a job. She would be the tutor to his daughter, 'cause girls were not sent to school. Not of these families. He would be the tutor for his daughter, for Chaya, and in return she 11:00would get all her dinners -- which of course meant that she'd have to be there every day for the dinners. (laughs) And she did this for about a year, and then she told my mother -- she was ready to move on. But she also told her, "I've taught you everything I know. I've barely finished --" -- whatever, third grade, (laughs) whatever she finished. 'Cause she came from a poor family, and so she did go to school, but not very long. "But you should go to school." So, my mother informed her parents that she wanted to go to school. And they said, No, sorry, you can't go to school. So, she went on a hunger strike. And she was maybe eleven, twelve, around that time. And she went on a hunger strike for almost two weeks. That's what she told me. Maybe true, false memory, I don't know. But she went hungry, and finally they gave in. They said, Okay. So, they 12:00sent her to a Jewish -- obviously not an Orthodox Jewish school, 'cause those don't deal with girls. And that's how she got to school. So, that was her first step away. When she was at the university, she decided -- 'cause she went on to the University of Warsaw, then studied in Paris -- that she decided that she really wasn't religious. At least not in the sense of observant. And so, on Yom Kippur, one Yom Kippur when she was, what, eighteen, maybe, or something like that, she went into a café. And her first time in her life, she ordered a coffee. She drank it. She wrote a letter. And she paid for it with money that 13:00she held in her hands. And then, she came home, and either then or a day or two later, she told her parents. At least her mother, I don't know if her father was still alive. But she told her family. And their reaction was, Well, at least you did what you believed in. And she told me they -- she knew that if she had come home and -- she had expected they'd throw her out. But she knew that if she had come home and said, "You know, I've decided I'm going to keep kosher at home, but I'm gonna eat non-kosher out," they would have thrown her out. It's either/or. And she had that same Orthodox culture -- I didn't realize that till much later in my life -- with respect to her secularism. I have not had a bar 14:00mitzvah. We never went to shul. And we never joined any religious organization. And when I wanted to learn Hebrew as a child, I was sent to a folkshul [Yiddish secular school] where they didn't teach any Hebrew instead of to a talme toyre [Talmud Torah], where I would have learned some, at least. (laughs) So, I never learned Hebrew. So, that was her -- as I got older, as I got much older, I don't agree with that position. I'm no longer Orthodox. (laughs)

CW:(laughs) Orthodox secular.

EK:Orthodox secular or Orthodox otherwise. I don't agree with that position. Religion has a much larger role, and observance is important, but there's a range. Though by and large, it's probably true that historically Jews have been 15:00preserved by the observant. The others do drop off. There're a lot of Polish Jews who intermarried, far more than were ever admitted, and these -- in the ancient world too. There was at one time -- there are estimates that at the time of Jesus, maybe as much as ten percent -- maybe -- certainly over five percent -- of the urban population in the Roman world viewed themselves as Jewish. But most of them were not completely observant even in those terms, and they dropped off. So --

CW:Well, I will ask -- I want to talk more about your mother --

EK:Sure.

CW:-- in a little bit. But I know that you were a young child in Warsaw just for a few years.

EK:Yeah.

CW:But I'm wondering what memories do you have; what images or scenes do you remember?

EK:Oh, I remember fish in a fish tank (laughs) at home. 'Cause that's how we had fish; we brought 'em live. I remember -- I had to have an operation when I was born, pyloric spasm. And they were very common in America at the time, but the ones that were successful were done in Germany, and I couldn't go to Germany. So, I was the first successful one in Poland. So, I had that operation. I lived through it -- that I don't remember. But what it meant was that my mother lost her milk, and while at that time bottled milk was coming in, my mother's doctor said, "No, no, no. He needs real milk, mother's milk." So, we got a nanny -- I mean, a wet nurse. And the wet nurse stayed with us till -- for four years. And 17:00I remember her very well.

CW:Can you describe her? What do you remember about her?

EK:Oh, that she was very warm and very close to me, and I was very close to her. I never confused her with my mother, but she was somebody who was very close to me. I just wish I'd gotten her name from my mother before my mother died. 'Cause I didn't go back to Poland for a very long time. Not really till the 1990s. When I bummed around Europe, I thought I'd go to Poland. I was in East Germany after college and so on. But I was told that in Poland, my Canadian passport -- I then was a Canadian -- would not trump my Polish birth, and I could conceivably be drafted. And the last thing I wanted (laughs) was to be drafted into the Polish 18:00army! So --

CW:So, war --

EK:-- so I didn't go back for a very long time. But I just remember scenes, that's all.

CW:What about the home? Do you remember anything about your home?

EK:I remember the apartment that we had on Mazowiecka. That's where they moved in after I was born. And I've been there. That house has remained. And I remember we were -- (said to wife) you were there, right, with me? And I remember the park outside, sort of apartment house around. And I remember the pigeons that came -- they were my favorites -- that I played with. So, I remember those scenes. But that's about all. The first scene that I really 19:00remember is leaving Warsaw. I remember being at the train station and getting on the train to Paris with my mother and sister. My father was already somewhere traveling. And a lot of people, my aunt and several others, were seeing us off. And we got on the train, and that was that. I do remember my aunt, but again, would I recognize her? I doubt it. But I do remember her. I remember some of the cafés, I remember being taken to. The names I've forgotten in the last five years because names have started to escape me completely. But you remember, (speaking to his wife) I took you to some -- a couple where I would be taken for a special -- whatever the Polish equivalent is of a sundae or whatever.

CW:So, growing up with -- well, maybe I'll get back to that question later. But 20:00so, you were in Paris for a little while, and then --

EK:Well, we came -- the other thing I remember about Warsaw, though this may be a learned memory than otherwise, is that every language was spoken there. And my mother told me later that I was very late learning to speak. And in fact, when I was three -- I do remember not speaking -- I mean, Polish, even -- having trouble speaking. Even when I was four, there were -- I wasn't as fluent as I could have been. And she took me to Vita, her old doctor and friend, and her doctor told her, "Don't worry; he'll talk your head off someday." As you can see. (laughs) But that was another effect, I later learned, of hearing many languages as a child. If you hear many languages at home, you have trouble excluding sounds, and if you don't exclude sounds, you don't learn sounds.

CW:So, what were the languages in Warsaw?

EK:Polish, of course. German. My parents spoke German to each other. They also had friends. My sister's native language is German. She was born in Berlin. Half-sister. Her mother died. Her mother was Russian. She died in 1932, and -- when my sister was six or -- yeah, about six. And Russian, a lot. A lot of Russian friends. French. Less so, but French friends. Polish, Yiddish, German, Russian, French -- I think those were the languages that I heard spoken.

CW:And who spoke Yiddish?

EK:Just about everybody in the house spoke some Yiddish. I don't know -- my sister is a fantastic linguist for learning spoken languages. Put her in any 22:00country, and in three weeks she's speaking the language. She doesn't write any language (laughs) very well. English, obviously, and probably a little -- and she retains the -- she still speaks a native German, native Polish, French. She was in the theater, and she went in Russia there for a few months, and by the time she left she spoke Russian. They went to Czechoslovakia for a few weeks. We lived in Portugal; she learned Portuguese. She still speaks Portuguese.

CW:So on --

EK:So, she would have spoken that. But other than Yiddish, German, Polish -- my father was -- spoken German, a little Polish, probably a little Yiddish. My aunt 23:00would speak Polish, probably Russian and Yiddish. I think my mother was probably the only one who spoke French in that household. And she also could speak Spanish a little.

CW:So, from Paris -- you spent a little time in Paris and then went to Lisbon.

EK:We spent a year in Paris. We arrived in Paris in -- not long before the war, outbreak of war. My father joined the army there. He joined the Polish division of the French army. How he got to Poland is another story, but that's a different story. Because he was in Germany until Hitler.

CW:Well, why don't you tell me that story, and then we can go back to Paris.

EK:Okay. Well, my father was brought up in Saxony. He then went to Berlin. His 24:00father died. His mother did not want my father to go to university. His older brother had become a singer, and she had just had it with that, so she insisted that he -- he was gonna be apprenticed to relatives of friends who owned a department store in England, but the war had broken out, so he was apprenticed to someone -- to Berlin in a department store. And he went there when he was seventeen. And he immediately got involved in politics, anti-war politics. He worked with a group of people who were hiding war deserters. He said he knew every brothel in the city 'cause that's where they were hidden. (laughs) And he was arrested and given six years in jail. And then, when the war ended, he was released. And he joined -- was one of the early members of the German Communist 25:00Party and was active there. He was doing all kinds of organizing, went back, organized seamen in Danzig, in Gdansk. And then, finally settled down to a job -- he had a little business. But he was still political. He was in and out of the -- he was in Russia, on a tour of Russia, led by the man who later became mayor of Berlin, West Berlin, after the war of (UNCLEAR) Berlin, Ernst Reuter. But he settled down. But he was in and out of the Communist Party and in -- until 1932, when they refused to oppose Hitler. Their theory was the worse, the better. Like some people here thought, Hey, if Sarah Palin gets elected, 26:00nominated, we'll be all right. And that'll be the end of the Tea Party. Yeah, sure. So, he dropped out then and in fact took a leave from his business, even, and was organizing street fighters -- what we would call terrorists -- to stop Hitler. But of course, as soon as Hitler -- the night of the Reichstag fire, he was arrested. His wife was dead. A friend of his, who was an anarchist, took care of my sister for a few months. Later, it turned out that he became a Nazi too. My father's partner became a Nazi right after. He said, "I don't mean you." But he got out, somehow. It probably cost money. He was in the cellars of the SA for a couple months. He got out and had a pass, twenty-four-hour pass, took my 27:00sister; they went to Prague, where the German political emigration went. And then, nothing was happening, as he suspected. So, he went to Poland, where his mother lived, hoping she would maybe take care of his daughter. And there he met my mother, and they got together. They had common friends. My mother frequently visited people living in his apartment house in Berlin. You know, it's a small world. And so, they had common friends, it turned out. They got together. He subsequently -- he was still active politically. He wasn't working. He went to Spain as a correspondent, quote unquote, for a German émigré paper, was arrested by the Communists. My mother got him out, somehow. He was very lucky, 'cause they had a vendetta against him. And --

CW:So then, at that point, the Communist Party was against him?

EK:Oh, yes. After '32, he was enemy. And made it clear that he was enemy. He was close to the POUM -- ideologically, to the anarchist movement, which is described in George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia," if you ever read it. That's the group. You've read it? Yeah. So, you know what I'm talking about, the world I'm talking about. But after the POUM rising, he got arrested and -- and then that was almost '38. And then, in '39, they were in Paris, and my father joined the army. And we stayed. My mother found a job. She could find a job almost anywhere. And she had studied in Paris, at the Institute of Statistics. And we stayed till June of '40. We left the same weekend that Humphrey Bogart left. But 29:00he went to Casablanca, and we went by way of Bordeaux and other cities and ended up in Lisbon, Portugal.

CW:Did you --

EK:And I remember that trip.

CW:Yeah. What was Paris like at that time?

EK:Well, Paris itself I don't rem-- I mean, I remember -- I have a child's view of Paris. I remember the Luxembourg Gardens. And I didn't learn French. I didn't play with any children there, except sometimes in the garden you played with kids. But I didn't know any French. I know only Polish. And the only French I learned was my address in French. So, when I got lost once I could say it, and they took me home. And I remember the Eiffel Tower. I remember, what do you call it -- lights and things like that. But don't remember much of Paris as such. I 30:00remember leaving it. I remember the trip out. We went with massive refugees leaving Paris at that time. There is a French movie, "Les Jeux Interdits," "The Forbidden Games," which if you get a chance, you should see it. It's a wonderful movie. And the scenes of people leaving Paris with children, they just brought that to life, you know? I don't know if it's a real memory or a cinematic memory, but that's brought to life. And we first went to Bordeaux -- I don't know why, where we stayed -- we were in Bordeaux during the bombardment of Bordeaux. It was a very exciting time for me because we were in the cellar of a large apartment house, and there were cracks in the wooden thing, and I could see the -- the house across was destroyed, or largely destroyed. And it was like 31:00-- there was no TV in those days. This was a video game in real life. And I treated it as a game, as a -- old five-year-old child (laughs) in 1940. And so, I remember that. I remember a scene walking -- and then our house itself was hit, the top floors were hit. And I remember the wreckage when we came out. I mean, it was -- that and Rotterdam were the two big bombardments by the German. Both ports; both had some military significance. And I remember walking along the street with my sister, who was then, I guess, fourteen. She was taking me. The next day it was sunny. Beautiful sunny day. And I think it was June. And she 32:00was taking me down the street. And there was a loose electric wire. And it hit somebody. She just grabbed me and turned me around, and I don't know if he was killed or not, but I do know -- I remember that scene as one of terror for a moment. But that's all I saw. A very peaceful way to see the war. And in Paris, I also remember going to air raid shelters when they were not real air raids. And then, we went on, and eventually we crossed the border -- which is another story, but not interesting here. We went to Spain, and we got to Portugal, where we had a visa. We were one of the people who got visas to Portugal from a Portuguese consul who was giving visas. And my mother found work there too for -- I think there she worked for the Joint. With her languages and her experience 33:00and so on, she worked for them. And my father -- and I went to school. And I went to a French school there. My mother was going to send me and my sister to a -- English boarding school, but my sister after one week said, No, she wants to be in Lisbon. (laughs) School was not for her at any time. So, we were ta-- she wasn't gonna leave a five-year-old alone in a boarding school, so I went to this French lycée [French: high school] where they had no room in kindergarten, so they put me in grade one, which was okay. There were a lot of foreigners there, some wearing swastikas, some wearing freedom (laughs) things in that school, which was a Vichy school. It was run by the Vichy government. And I learned French there. I had a wonderful teacher, whom I admire to this day and remember. 34:00And one thing that that left me with -- she was an admirer of Pétain and conservative French. And to this day, I can't take Pétain as badly as I take the others. Somehow Pétain in my heart is all right, (laughs) even though he was a son of a bitch. (laughs) Anyway. And then, my father was -- he was wounded, badly wounded, in the war. His whole regiment crossed over into Switzerland, and he was interned. And I think my mother was finding ways that we could get to Switzerland if she could find some work there and be there too. But he was afraid that Switzerland was gonna join Germany. Everything we've learned since about Swiss collaboration and so on was -- I knew that as a child from 35:00him. And the mood, at least in German Switzerland, was totally pro-German. Not necessarily pro-Nazi, but pro-German at that time. And he was afraid they would join it, which they didn't, mainly because they were more useful to Germany as a neutral country. And he knew if they did, he'd be done for. So, he joined a group -- the British were spiriting these interned soldiers away, and then they could rejoin the army. And the Swiss were only too happy to let them go. So, he came, part on foot, from Switzerland to Lisbon, but to do this with lungs that had been shot, that had developed tuberculosis, was not good. And he really remained an invalid the rest of his life. So, he joined us in Lisbon, and we couldn't stay because he wasn't there legally. And while Portugal was sort of an 36:00English satellite at the time, they couldn't allow escaped prisoners of war to live there indefinitely. That just wouldn't work. So, the English gave us a choice of Canada or Australia. And my mother tried to get a transit visa through the United States. She was good at getting visas from people, and she knew that once you entered the United States legally, you could stay. You didn't want to enter it illegally, but once you entered it legally you could get extensions. But the problem was that just at that point, a decree came out preparing for World War II that nobody with relatives in occupied countries could come to the country, the United States. It lasted until Pearl Harbor, approximately. But they didn't want masses of spies coming in, I guess, or whatever. So, we couldn't get in. So, we came to Canada. And we were given -- Canada or 37:00Australia; Canada was closer. And we came to Canada for the duration of the war, and stayed. My parents didn't intend to stay. We didn't become citizens till fairly late. But within a couple of years after the war. My sister got married; that was one factor. But going back to Poland was impossible -- not only because of the Holocaust, but because of the communists. My mother was a Bundist, also active politically. Neither of them would have lived long under the communist regime. And going back to Germany -- my father would have gone back to Germany. 'Cause my father fought against Germany as a German patriot, as a bitter anti-Hitler German patriot. And sort of like the future prime minister of Germany, the chancellor -- what was his name? The one who had fought in the 38:00Danish army.

CW:I don't remember.

EK:The socialist. The first one to go to Auschwitz and do a kind of a penance. Willy Brandt. Willy Brandt. Before your time. Before your time. He was the first socialist chancellor of Germany after the war, like in the '60s or '50s -- '60s, I don't know. But my mother wouldn't go back to Germany, wouldn't go to Germany. She'd lived there, but she wouldn't go there. And so, for a while they thought of going to France, where my father could have had -- we could have had French citizenship because of his army -- he was decorated, actually decorated soldier. But they didn't do that. They stayed in Canada. And I lived in Canada until I was sixteen. I went through school there. And then, I went to college in the States. And that's sort of the story of my childhood. Nothing interesting 39:00happened to me after that. That was it. (laughter)

CW:Well, Montreal really was a special city in terms of Yiddish culture. And I'm wondering if you can describe the home that your parents created in Montreal once you got there.

EK:Well, it wasn't very self-consciously a home of Yiddish culture as it might be today. It was their home. And there were other languages spoken, and there were other peoples. Where we lived, we became friends with our neighbor upstairs. Not close friends because -- and he was close to --- a relative of his was a Catholic priest who was head at a Catholic school. At that point, if I hadn't already been going to the English public schools -- my mother intended to 40:00send me to the French schools. In Montreal, there was at that time a sharp division between Catholic and Protestant schools. The Protestant schools, except for the daily prayer, were basically secular. The Catholic schools, the public ones, were run by the parish priests and were very Catholic. Everybody who was French Canadian who could afford to send their children to a private Catholic school, which was comparable to those here, much more intellectual. Especially the Jesuit ones were very good. Humanistic, not scientific, but very good. But in any case, she just figured I already knew Polish, I knew French; to learn English was just too much at this point. The trouble is that for a Jew to go to a Catholic school -- and there were English Catholic schools too, but she wanted 41:00me to go to a French school -- you have to pay money. For a Catholic to go to a Protestant school, you have to pay money. It's like going to a suburban school when you live in the city and vice versa, which we didn't have. So, I went to the English school to learn English. I'm delighted I did. But we had close friends. They were close friends of ours. So, almost all of our friends were Jewish. And a number of them were -- my mother's center was the Workmen's Circle, the Arbeter Ring. She actually taught French at the Jewish Public Library for immigrants who needed to learn French for jobs. Her work in Montreal for a few years was doing that. And other things too, but that was part of it. So, those were the organizational centers, I would say. She was also still 42:00active in the Bund, and there were a lot of -- this was, by this time, more of a social than a political organization. But there were a lot of Bundists among the Jewish population in Montreal. So, that was a large circle, which overlapped with the Workmen's Circle, with the Jewish Public Library. It was one world with several circles. And these were our circles.

CW:And at home in Montreal, what language would you speak?

EK:From the time I was about eight, Yiddish. My parents stopped speaking German. I think my mother really didn't want to speak German. And partly because she -- we knew what was happening. My father wouldn't believe it. I remember the arguments. He said, "No, no, this is just like World War I. Look at all the lies that were spread by both sides about World War I." And some very famous English 43:00historians -- I mean, Arnold Toynbee wrote a book then on German atrocities in Belgium in World War I, which was mostly made up. He didn't make it up; he believed it. It's an interesting little book. And my father just wouldn't believe that -- he believed all kinds of horrible things, but that they would do that? It's gotta be stories. But my mother did, and -- who was the Jewish member of the Polish government in exile who committed suicide in protest against everybody's silence? Zygielbojm? No. No, no. I don't remember his -- I mix up names. And that was, I think, in '43 that she knew that. She knew that. So, part 44:00of it that she didn't want to speak German. Partly also -- and then to speak German in a largely Yiddish area is just -- I think she decided no. So, they began speaking Yiddish, and he became a great fan of Yiddish literature. He learned to read it, that he hadn't before. So, he read everything. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, you name it. He was a voracious reader. And at that point he started reading almost all Yiddish literature, and -- without becoming a Yiddishist at all. Just fascinated.

CW:And you read a lot of Yiddish literature too.

EK:And I read a lot of Yiddish. Yeah. I went to the Jewish Public Library a couple of times a week and usually took out one book in Yiddish or two and one book in English and read them and -- children's books. I stopped reading Yiddish as much when I got older, and this had to do with the Hebrew. Adult Yiddish literature has a lot of Hebrew in it. And it bothered me that I didn't know the 45:00words. I could look 'em up but, you know, (UNCLEAR) you have to look up a word every two paragraphs sometimes. So, I wanted to learn, and I didn't. So, when I went to college, I thought I would take Hebrew as a language. It wasn't taught in those days. So, I went to Hillel, which was actually new. I didn't realize it was fairly new at Princeton at that time. Their quota was down, and they had a Hillel and so on. And the rabbi was fairly new too, but -- I was a difficult teenager. Nerdy, difficult teenager. And I asked him if I could take some -- did they have some beginning Hebrew? He said, "Well, no, but they do intermediate Hebrew. But you can do that." I said, "No, I don't know any Hebrew at all. I need to begin at a beginning." Now, I probably could have done it. It's not -- he said, "Well, you've had Hebrew for your bar mitzvah." So, I said, "No, I didn't have a bar mitzvah." He looked at me. "You mean, you were brought up in 46:00the Jerusalem of North America, and you didn't have a bar mitzvah?" And I said to myself, "Screw you. I'm not coming back here." (laughs) It was a very silly teenager reaction. I wish I had learned Hebrew then, but I never learned it.

CW:I know that the Montreal Jewish Public Library was an important place for you --

EK:Yes.

CW:-- at that time. Can you describe the -- you mentioned some of the librarians that you knew while you were there and the people that were around in the library?

EK:I didn't necessarily mix with the people very much. My friends' friends were not Yiddish readers. With one exception, but even he -- wasn't quite in the circle. You probably know of him now. His name is Saki Bercovitch, Sacvan 47:00Bercovitch, the Harvard professor of New England literature. (laughs) But he and I read advanced English literature -- advanced for our age, right? And I got that at a library too. But I knew the -- I used to get advice on books from the librarian, Rokhl. Rokhl Korn, by the way, whom I mixed up the name with -- she was a good friend of ours. She lived with us for a little while when they came to Canada, she and her daughter. Her daughter Irene, Irene Coopersmith, was my doctor all the years I was in Montreal, and on into my twenties. When I went back to Montreal, if I had any problem, I would see her. But I didn't after 48:00that. And so, she was a close friend of my mother's.

CW:Well, what was Rokhl Korn like? Such a -- I mean, this figure, (laughs) this writer.

EK:No, just a very intelligent person. I was surprised. I didn't realize that she was a poet, even, until later. I mean, I knew she was a writer, but that she was quite as eminent a poet -- I didn't read Yiddish poetry. I read stories -- and some nonfiction, some history, later. And occasional essays. But mostly the sorts of things a teenager, even a precocious one, will read, which is -- even English poetry I came to more during my college years, and I stayed with it then otherwise. I actually read French poetry more than I read even English. I read 49:00French in those days too. And then, of course, the person who was a friend of ours, close friend of ours, so we -- I saw him at home too sometimes -- was Melech Ravitch. And he -- what can a twelve-year-old say about Melech Ravitch? Just a great man, you know? I don't know how much of a librarian he was, but he was a great man. (laughs) He was a poet, a very well-known poet. And I wonder what's happened to his family. He had a child. I know he did, and I don't know what happened. I'm not a in-touch keeper very much.

CW:So, did you -- were you aware that these were sort of eminent figures --

EK:Oh, yes. I was aware that Ravitch was an eminent figure, and I was aware that -- my mother knew a fair number of eminent figures. Most of them did not 50:00survive. But, for example, she was a very close friend with the two leaders of the Bund, Ehrlich and Alter, whom Stalin killed. And Ehrlich's wife came to New York. And I remember coming to New York with my mother once, and we stayed with her. And in fact -- this is a sad story -- my mother was in New York in 1968, and she was living there for a while. And she was on her way to have coffee in the evening with Mrs. Ehrlich, who lived a couple of blocks away from her, when she was killed by a car, in December of 1968, just about -- today may be the anniversary. I'm not sure. This was very close to the fourteenth. So, she was 51:00very close to Mrs. Ehrlich. Mrs. Ehrlich was the daughter of the historian Dubnow, whom you know. And so, that world was part of her world. And the other part of her world was Yiddish cabaret, my mother's. So, that -- she knew all the songs. It hit me once when I was in -- the first time I was back in Warsaw, in the '90s, and I went to the (UNCLEAR), small Jewish museum. And on the top floor, they had -- was their Holocaust floor. Which they had a wall of pictures of famous Yiddish cabaret singers, actors, who were killed. And when I looked at 52:00them, almost all of them were my mother's generation. And I'm sure she knew them all. And --

CW:Would she sing around the house?

EK:Yes. To herself. She could sing almost any of these songs. But -- sort of like her. (laughs) Not as good. Not as many. But she knew those -- she loved the Yiddish cabaret.

CW:Did you go to the theater growing up, or --

EK:In Montreal, there wasn't much theater. There was a little English theater, a little French theater. Later, in New York, I did. My mother was there. But the interesting thing is she loved the theater. She did not go to the Yiddish theater in New York. Maybe once or twice. She never suggested we go to the Yiddish theater. And I'm sure she didn't. And at that time, it didn't strike me because I wasn't even aware how vibrant Yiddish theater was still in New York in 53:00the 1950s and '60s. So, that was part of her certain resistance. Though she was very active with YIVO always.

CW:Did you --

EK:I've maintained that relationship, though not as -- it came back more. But not as actively as she. So.

CW:So, did you go to any of the events at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal?

EK:(pauses) Some. I don't remember them. Most of them were for adults.

CW:Yeah.

EK:You know, I was fourteen, fifteen, turning sixteen. I just don't remember. I know I went to some commemorations. But I didn't go to talks and things. I still don't do that very much. (laughs)

CW:Given your mother's political and social relationships, did people come visit you, your home?

EK:Oh, yes. Hugely. In fact, one of the most -- (sighs) I got to know the Holocaust one summer. I think I was about fourteen -- no, maybe thirteen, fourteen. We had a outside veranda, one flight up, outside stairs, outside veranda. And during that summer -- not just then, but that was particularly that summer -- it was like, almost every evening. The Holocaust survivors who came to the States on some kind of temporary visa, special visas, to get a full visa at that time you had to leave the country to get the visa. So, they would come to 55:00Montreal. Sometimes they would stay with us, but very often they would visit us. They were friends, or they were friends of friends. And just about every evening for a summer, people would come up, and there'd be six, eight, ten, twelve people -- not all from -- some from Montreal, but some -- several survivors. And that first wave, they talked. The repression came after, for Holocaust survivors. As they made a life for themselves, as they had children here, they didn't want to talk about it anymore. And every night -- I was allowed to stay up late rather -- usually if I wanted to stay up late, I had to hide in bed with a cover over and with a little flashlight so I could read silently. (laughs) Which I'm sure my parents knew I was doing, but it was -- I was asleep. But I 56:00was allowed to stay up. Maybe I was thirteen. I'd have to reconstruct when it should have been, and I just don't remember. And every night. And they were there till eleven, twelve, one, on the weekends when they came. And I would stay up. And I heard more stories about survivals, non-survivals, relation-- I don't remember most of those stories. But it really made an impact on me. And later, as I read about the Holocaust -- years later, when people were writing -- that was very little new. The Polish Holocaust, the Polish events. Life in the ghetto, the Christian churches in the ghetto for converted Jews who were Jews under the Nazi laws. It might not have been under the Nuremberg Laws, 'cause the 57:00Nuremberg Laws were a little looser than the Jewish laws in Poland, in the east. Or in France, for that matter, when they applied them. And, you know, the escapes to Russia. Heard a lot of stories about Russia, about life in Russia at the time. One of my favorite stories is a man who came -- he lived in Montreal for a number of years with his family. His brother was a good friend of my mother's from -- kind of a mentor of hers, from Warsaw. Lemkin, the "genocide" author who was at Yale at this time, then lived at Princeton, I believe, for a while. Whom I've met several times. His brother was not like Lemkin: Raphael was 58:00intellectual, a scholar, et cetera, et cetera. This one was a matter-of-fact businessman in a small town in the east, in the part occupied by Russia. And when the Russians occupied it, they did a census of what were people, what were their political views -- at least with the Jewish -- the middle-class population. And he told the story, and I remember his telling it, that I -- maybe I remember the retelling it, that every -- many of his friends, they claimed they were socialists. They were immediately arrested. Orthodox communism, like Orthodox Judaism. But when they asked him what he was, he says, "I'm a businessman." "What do you do?" "I own real estate, and I build. I'm a builder and a real estate owner." So, they sent him and his wife and children to 59:00Moscow to run a construction firm. The juiciest job during the war. And he spent the war in Moscow, with a good job, food, because he was a ca-- "I'm a capitalist," he said. "I'm a businessman." "Okay. You're honest. We can use you." And then, he told us a number of stories about life in Russia. I remember only a few of them, those that stuck in my mind as having some larger significance. But that was -- I remember that summer very well. And that was the 60:00kind of life I had. Was it a self-conscious Jewish life? No. As far as religion goes, the only -- once, there was a synagogue down the street. When I was a kid, eight or nine, my friends were going -- were there, playing. So, I took an apple to eat on the way. And it was Yom Kippur. And my mother said, "Oh, you can't eat on Yom Kippur." Says, "But we eat -- all my friends do." They weren't thirteen, so they could, right? She said, "Yes, but you don't eat in front of people who are fasting." That rule was established in the house. But at home, we could eat anything on Yom Kippur, even pork. (laughs) Orthodox secularism. But other than that -- that was my world.

CW:Did you celebrate any of the yontoyvim [holidays] in a secular way?

EK:A little bit. Passover we used to have a kolatsye [evening meal]. (laughs) We had a last supper, so to speak, which is what the seder started as, right? (laughs) So, we would have kolatsyes with our other secular friends. Not a Passover. No reading of the thing. I mean, I knew what was going on. I was told what the holidays were about. I read about them. But we didn't light candles on Hanukkah. I say, it was a very -- my father wasn't Orthodox secularist; he was just secular. And his home was, and he was. His father actually did belong to a synagogue, and I think his father was Reform at this time. And vaguely know a story, he was kicked out once for something. I don't know. (laughs) You know. Intracommunal issues. But my father would -- if my mother had been a -- I'm not 62:00sure he would have -- he certainly would never have himself become observant. But he could have lived in an observant place. He could have lived in a half-observant place. It didn't worry him. I asked my father, "Look, you're so secular -- I mean, you're not religious at all. And unlike my mother, you know Yiddish and like the literature, but you don't consider yourself a Yiddishist and so on." Though in those days, he would have been more likely to go to Palestine than my mother, because it was in a place to escape to. Whereas for my mother, it would have been in a sense betraying the Orthodox view of Zionism as heretical.

CW:Bundist views, right?

EK:Well, not the Bundist view, the Orthodox view. The Bundists were not so anti-Zionist. Her parents were anti-Zionist. And the oldest brother who went there, it was a big step for him. Because it's not through fighting in a -- 63:00remember the old thing, that the early Zionists, the goal was, as the founder said, for Jews to become a nation like all other nations. You know who said that before: Saul. In the debates with Samuel. And my mother's family was on Samuel's side. Jews are not a people like other peoples. And if God wants us back in Palestine, then -- that she always called Israel. But all her Zionist friends called it Palestine. And finally, she learned to call it Palestine. And a year later, it became Israel. (laughs) But in any case -- so my father was -- but he said, 'cause I asked him, "Look. You are so -- why do you call yourself Jewish when you write down? I mean, you know Yiddish, but why do you call yourself 64:00Jewish?" He said, "Because as long as there's one anti-Semite living in the world, I'm Jewish. I'll call myself Jewish. Let 'em know." (laughs) So, that's a different kind of approach. That's the home I grew up in. Enough of that.

CW:Well, looking back -- I'd like to ask you about some other things, but looking back on your childhood and your parents and the world that they were a part of, what were the values that you felt they were trying to pass on to you?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

EK: I can't put my finger on it. I mean, they didn't seem any particular -- I wasn't taught values as values. This value of my father's has been very important to me. I wouldn't -- I feel more Jewish than he did. Especially as I got older, though neither of -- I was married before; my first wife died -- neither of my wives was Jewish. My mother, for all her secularism, was unhappy 65:00that my first wife was not Jewish. Which sort of surprised me, because she had so many friends -- Alter, one of the two leaders of Bund, his wife wasn't Jewish. And there was a lot of mixed marriage in her circle. But I guess it's one thing to have mixed marriage in a Yiddish world, and it's another one to have it in a destroyed world. And I think that was the difference, which I didn't grasp. So, there were the -- my father's statement, is that an ordinary value? No, but it's -- I certainly learned the value of being an Orthodox at whatever I do, much more than I should have been. I don't think it was the right -- you're either in or out. You either do it or you don't do it. If you're not doing it right, leave. Do something else. That kind of -- not teaching, but that 66:00kind of example. (pauses) And it's a good value, but it has also misled me in a number of ways. As I go back on it, it was a little too cut and dry. On the other hand, in so many other ways, both of them were very Jewish, in different ways. He was German and very different -- brought up in Germany, at least, in Danzig, Germany, that world. And my mother was in many ways a typical Jewish mother. I recognize that now.

CW:So, you became a historian and then a lawyer. (laughs)

EK:Right.

CW:And I'm curious what drew you to European history.

EK:Well, I was interested in history always. I wanted to know the past. I'm still interested in history. I was interested in academics. That was the positive attraction. I was interested in earlier periods. If I had known Hebrew, I might have gone into Jewish history. I might have. I later started -- I taught Jewish history at the University of Chicago. I was one of the first people who taught nonreligious Jewish history. The last few years I taught a course on the assimilation of German Jewry in the -- emancipation, sorry. Not the assimilation. The emancipation of German Jewry. So, it was taught from the German point of view, not from the Jewish point of view. From the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of nineteenth century. And also, obviously, the circle, 68:00the Mendelssohn circle, all of whom converted within two generations. (laughs) You know? But I taught it as part of -- I taught central European history, and my field was Austria-Hungary. Not quite Germany, but Austria-Hungary. And that was the affirmative. I was attracted negatively -- I was escaping a little bit from the world. I didn't see myself as going -- my mother wanted me to be a lawyer, of course. Jewish mother. Lawyer or doctor. I wasn't gonna be a doctor, so be a lawyer. And she was right. I'm a good lawyer. I probably should have been a lawyer from the start. But I think some of it was escape. My idea of becoming a teacher, in fact, was -- going in academics -- was to go to teach in 69:00a smaller college. Got a job at the University of Chicago, so I took it. But that was not what I was aiming for -- any more than when I left and went into law, my goal was to become a solo practitioner. And I got a job at Kirkland, so I took it, you know? Stayed there. I've only had two jobs in my life -- I mean, other than temps. And why the eightee-- in many ways, I knew that even then. I studied the period between the religious wars and the modern ideological wars. I didn't want to study the ideological wars. And that's not just Nazism, but communism, the Cold War, the -- so basically until the French Revolution, and starting in the middle of the seventeenth century. That was my period. The period when war was rational, fought by armies that treated civilians horribly, 70:00but still, there was a reason, there was a policy. I was interested in the development of the state of public administration and in political theory, and a lot in the literature of the period as well. So, no, I didn't teach that. So, the world of the -- as my students -- I think they were graduate students, or the undergrads -- maybe both. There was some event or other, and then they started playing a game, Which teacher would you go to if you went to another period? So, if you had to go to the past and had to get a job, where would you go; who would you go with? "Oh, I'd go with Emile to Vienna." That's how I knew Vienna. I knew Vienna in the eighteenth century as a place where you could get a -- how to get a job, where to find coffee, where people lived, what was going on. I didn't write about that, but I knew that. And that was my attitude to 71:00history, and so -- I visited, intensely. But it was a period, I say, between the religious wars and the -- and why did I change? I wasn't publishing. I had tenure. I got it because I -- my students liked me, so they -- they had not given tenure to one person who was a great teacher, and who turned out to be a great scholar, too. They couldn't do it a second time in three years. So, I got tenure. And both undergraduate and graduate students apparently fought for me. So, that was nice. But I didn't go there to never write. I had a writing block. I still do. And my dissertation was accepted for publication. I didn't like it, so I never sent it in, finally, for the publication. I should have gone to a -- 72:00for counseling, and they would have told -- forget it --- taught me to forget it, just send it in, and go on to do something else. Maybe I would have stayed in academics if I'd done that. But any rate, I didn't want to do that. And one person I know, who's a cantor and a psychiatrist and a jazz singer, all three, an older man, very wise man, he told me that he taught -- he sees me as having very much the life pattern of a Holocaust survivor. I read a lot about it; I heard the stories when I was thirteen or fourteen; I read literature; I read memoirs -- then just stopped. I stopped following it. I knew about it. I read a few things, but I stopped following it. And it really was in a way with the 73:00Jewish cemetery project, going back, that was -- I know it was cause and effect. Engels said that everything in history is both cause and effect of the development in which it takes place. So, it was both cause and effect. And things came back, in a way. The interest came back, in a way.

CW:So --

EK:But he told me that the years -- I left after I'd been teaching this course in German Jewish history for about three years. And he thought that may have had something to do with my leaving. I was getting too close to it again through my history. 'Cause I had not read much and so on about it before. Now, this wasn't the Holocaust, but still, it was very central to development. And he might have been right. So. But that aside, I was interested in the history of law. I'd spent a year doing a law fellowship once, as a faculty member already. I got 74:00interested in history of the -- law of the Holy Roman Empire, this administrative law, how it interacted with other things. More its legal administration than the general structure. And I knew I could do law. I knew I could earn a living at law. And the downside economic risk for being an associate professor of history is very small. It was even smaller in those days than it is today. So, I could always earn a living. So, I decided -- I took my LSATs and went to law school. And I was accepted the Univ-- I wasn't going to go to a school like University of Chicago Law School, but I was told by someone if you wanted a job, you gotta go to one of the top schools, with your age and so on. 'Course, he was thinking of a job like the one I got; (laughs) I was thinking of becoming a solo practitioner. So, I went to the University of Chicago. I did well there in the courses and stuff. I liked it. And then, I got 75:00a job as a lawyer for a specialized -- not in litigation, 'cause it was a little -- your first years as a litigator, you write long memos on -- you know, you do the history of the -- I said, "It's too close to history." So, I went into transactional practice, venture capital, which became private equity. And that's how I became a lawyer.

CW:And then, what brought you back to an interest in Jewish culture? I know -- maybe we could --

EK:Well, I always had an interest in it. I don't mean that I lost an interest in Jewish culture; I always did. I have a substantial library, many of them unread, from many years back. And I continued reading Yiddish from time to time, only books -- and it got harder for me. That took me longer to read. I'm a slow 76:00reader even in English, and then I became a very slow reader in Yiddish; I used to read fast. I read Chaim Grade's "Der mames shabosim." I read a fair amount of Singer, though my mother disapproved of Singer. You know who else disapproved of Singer?

CW:Well, many people, but -- (laughs)

EK:But you know what famous person disapproved of him?

CW:Who?

EK:Chaim Grade. Did you -- you know what he said?

CW:You can tell me.

EK:When Singer got his Nobel Prize, Chaim Grade said publicly that it was a shand [shame]. Singer wrote what was then considered sort of racy, romance-type stuff. Unserious, because he often got -- a lot of it got published, serialized, in the "Forverts."

CW:And now many people -- and even at the time -- argued that Grade should have gotten it instead.

EK:Many argued it even at the time. But Singer has far more appeal to -- I think 77:00more non-Jewish readers read Singer than Grade. Am I right? I mean, does anybody read Grade in English? Except people who are interested in Jewish history or something?

CW:Uh-huh.

EK:Nobody reads Grade as a poet, and that's what he really was, originally.

CW:Right.

EK:So, nobody reads Yiddish poetry.

CW:Yeah. (laughs)

EK:As far as -- you do, I know, but it's not --

CW:Yeah.

EK:But in any case, so --

CW:Can you tell me about the Warsaw Cemetery Project and --

EK:Sure. It started when --

CW: -- how it came about?

EK:-- my son and I went back, my first time back. And we wanted to get it registered. And I won't tell you about the politics, that -- we were told there was no registry, that it'd all been destroyed. There in fact was one being made 78:00up by the head of the cemetery himself, and there were fights inside. He charged for people going to see the graves. The cemetery was terribly overgrown. The only grave I could see were -- the one of my grand-nephew, Mihal Krevich. So, it was actually my son's idea. We should get a group of students -- that was my first thought -- American students, to come in the summer and start writing down the names and locations of graves, create an index. Well, I realized after all that wouldn't have worked. And obviously -- it was overgrown or needed to clear it a little. And I couldn't get through to anybody to clear my way. I wasn't 79:00gonna go -- I suppose I should have gone to gmine [Polish: the Municipality] and asked them, "Can I do this?" But I'm not a doer in this sense. I'm not a person who breaks through things this way. Then, I got a contact; a friend of mine in Lublin had contacts with the Lublin city assembly people, the government. And in Lublin, the Jewish cemetery's owned by the city. And I was about to go for a meeting there to see if they would give me the permission to do this and what it involved and so on when I read about all the eighteen thousand Jewish genealogical groups who are having disputes. And I said, "No, I'm not getting involved in this kind of dispute." I went to YIVO. I had gone before too, and I 80:00asked them, "Who can help me?" And they gave me several names, actually. And two or three of them who are fairly well-known really just wanted some money. But the one who was sympathetic was Rabbi Schudrich. And he opened the way. He did two things. He got the gmine to allow me to do this. It was owned by them. And they agreed. And he also got me somebody who would act -- who'd worked for him and who was -- advised people on Jewish cemetery matters. He was not a rabbi, but he would -- studied this and knew this, and he was sort of a key advisor on these issues, on -- and they arranged -- they got me admission to the Warsaw -- to Okopowa. And the head of the library, of the Okopowa -- greeted me. Friendly. 81:00I thought we would work together. I didn't realize that he was not the one who years before had had a register. That one did all kinds of nasty things, and I won't give his name, and he was fired and so on. But what he did do is he continued, and he had his own register, which he didn't tell me about for years. And that register went online with the Lauder Center register. And they charged money for that. (laughs) So, we did our own. So, this young man -- what's his name? I can't remember names! (said to wife) You remember his name. No.

F:Give me a minute.

EK:(sighs) He's no longer involved. He was my chief operating officer, so to speak. He got people from the university who came and worked on this. They were paid. And the gmine allowed me to do it through the gmine. I gave money to the gmine; they used it so that -- I wasn't gonna do it where they didn't pay taxes and things like that. I've had to be done totally kosher. As a lawyer, not just as an Orthodox secularist, it had to be done totally kosher. And so, they did that. And so, they ran the project, but I organized it; I went; I directed it, with the help of the COO. And eventually, three or four people made it just about their life. One of them left at the end to do something else. The other three stayed with the project after it ended. They're the three who are running 83:00the new center that they formed, which I was going to help them with, but I was -- I just didn't feel I could start something new. If they could organize it themselves and find others, fine. I just wasn't up to it intellectually. My mind wasn't there.

CW:Can you back up just -- and give me -- I know what it is, but can you explain --

EK:Yeah, okay --

CW:-- what the concept behind the proj--

EK:-- the concept started out -- it grew. The concept started out as just a register so people would know whose graves were there. And you get this register by going and checking the graves. Now, if they're already -- so you get the location, the name on the grave, and maybe some other information from it. And that had to be written down, and that would be put on the web. And it'll be accessible, free, to everybody. Szpilman, the head of the Okopowa, did not allow 84:00us to put the location. Somebody came to visit, he came, Oh, they would just walk all over the place, we have to get -- actually charged a fee for showing people. That's how it turned out. I don't know if he still is there or not. I don't think so. I haven't been that much in touch the last couple years. I'm in touch with my team, but -- and then after a while -- early on they said, You know, it would be much faster, and we'd get more done, if we took photographs. And then, we could enter some of the information, but we could take it from the photograph later -- in the evening, on rainy days when we can't work, et cetera, et cetera. 'Cause you're limited in the cemetery except -- especially in the winter -- to, what, twenty, thirty -- you can only go when it's open, and within 85:00that time to maybe twenty hours a week or thirty. So, I thought, Gee, that's a good idea, speed it up. Well, of course, it did nothing of the kind. Taking the photographs made it much longer. But it also made it much more interesting. It suddenly became a virtual cemetery. You could actually see the grave. And you still couldn't really see the location. That they have since gotten the gmine to override Szpilman and to allow the location to be shown -- several years ago, right? One of them vetoed the -- Vrezinsky. He is outstanding in dealing with bureaucracies. Remek, who is exceptionally bright -- he is (makes blowing noise) 86:00not the best guy for dealing with bureaucracy. And Alicja is -- she actually got interested in it because -- not in connection with the cemetery project -- she wrote her master's dissertation on the cemetery and its history. So, she got interested in it intellectually before. And she has a passionate interest in Jewish history and in Jewish events. Has she gotten her doctorate, or she's getting it or -- whatever. And those three became the heart of it. And in fact, there was a movie -- I don't know if it's on the website. They're probably too shy to put it on the website. There's a movie about them. There's a movie about the project. But it's really about them and their work, which is tremendous. It was done by one of the best documentary people in Poland. His father was head of the national film soci--- you know, the government film thing that focused on 87:00documentaries and things. And a great documentary maker, filmmaker. And the son's a grown-up. I mean, he's a -- I wish I could remember that name. But I'll send it to you. And it was a very, very fine movie. But it really is on them and the work they do, if you -- the work that's involved. You had to love it. You have to know Hebrew. You have to know Polish, of course. You have to know some English. At least enough to -- at least a little. Alicja knows some, and Vitek -- Vito Vrezinsky -- knows English well. He writes well. So, I think Remek has docu-- he went to Israel for several months, was thinking of moving there, but I don't know if he has. I'm sure he hasn't. So, that finally finished about two, 88:00two-and-a-half years ago. But they've decided to go on. First they did -- and I helped subsidize that too -- and the gmine pitched in with money too, for the main project. And I didn't raise it from outsides -- I can't raise money for my -- something I'm doing. (laughs) But they did a whole series of small Jewish cemeteries in suburbs, exurbs, of Warsaw. But their plan is to integrate this with the cemeteries all over Poland -- some of which have already been done by local groups, but not necessarily virtually. A few small ones have been done virtually. This has caught on. This has become a big thing since -- when we did 89:00it I think we were the only ones to do any significant -- we were about the first which had a register. There were registers in some, but I don't think there was anything like this kind of effort. And now there are. So, they've formed a new organization, a parent organization, where the Warsaw Cemetery Project is a subsidiary, so to speak. And they've just recently entered into an arrangement with the community, the gmine, that has transferred all of its rights to the project. 'Cause it had rights. It supplied some of the money. It was on its location. We used their server. But the gmine gave up -- it reached agreement where they have all of the gmine's rights and support. So, this new organization, which is on the website, is now doing -- about to do -- for the three of them, is gonna be their life's work. They'll be doing other things too, 90:00but they'll be running this.

CW:So, what interests you in supporting a project like this? Why was it important to you -- is it important to you?

EK:Well, I believe in preserving history. This is my history. I found my grandparents' graves. I found my great-grandfather's Karafiol grave. And lots of -- that should be allowed. You don't -- if they found a -- it's not the same thing. I don't want to claim it's the same thing. But if they found a grave of Ethiopian -- no, of pre-Roman Italian residents, a full grave of the pre-Roman, a full cemetery, and if I was really rich --- (laughs) if I had any money, in 91:00fact -- and they asked me for a contribution, I'd make a contribution. I think those things should be preserved. I believe in preserving ancient cultures and the remnants of it. I would like to see a lot of the stolen archaeology returned, but it's still being stolen right and left through countries that will go unnamed. And I think that's a crime. Especially if they're then sold for nothing, to be scrapped. But in addition to that, I have a bond. This is where my family lived for -- my mother's family -- for generations. And I'm glad -- I think they're gonna do Lublin, and I'm gonna look for my grandmother's -- if I 92:00can find her name somewhere. (laughs) I just think I can find it.

CW:Yeah. So, what has been the role of Yiddish in your life since growing up in this environment where Yiddish and reading Yiddish literature -- over your lifetime, how has your relationship to Yiddish maintained, changed?

EK:It's part of me. I mean, it hasn't been a conscious -- as I say, I haven't read much Yiddish. I've had very little opportunity to speak Yiddish. I know very few people of -- I know some, but very few of my generation who are Americans or Canadians who speak Yiddish except occasionally. In that sense, 93:00I've been a moral and to some extent -- not hugely, but to some extent -- a financial supporter of the Yiddish Book Center. I've followed its history and what's going on there. And so, whenever Aaron came to Chicago, I was there. And he used to come once a year, at least. I don't think he does anymore. Does he? I don't think so. Doesn't travel much anymore. How old is he now?

CW:Um --

EK:Seventy?

CW:No --

EK:Not quite.

CW:-- not quite. His children are in college, so he's --

EK:So, he's in his fifties. But the Yiddish Book Center was started when? What was the opening -- not in Amherst, but the opening of the new (UNCLEAR)?

CW:In the '80s, so --

EK:So, thirty -- a good thirty years ago.

CW:But he was young.

EK:Yeah, he was young. So, in that sense I can't say -- but I would say the same 94:00thing: What role has American literature had in your life? I can't specify the role it's played. I've read a lot of it and less recently than I would have liked. One of the problems with universal literacy is that so much gets published. (laughs) The ten best books. Every week, a new list comes out. But others could say it better than I. People who observe me, who know me, might be able to answer that question. But I can't say introspectively how much it's -- it's just part of me.

CW:And why has philanthropy been important to you?

EK:It's not been as important as it should have been. But it's something one 95:00should do. Especially of causes that I know, and a lot of it has focused -- especially since I became a lawyer and could philanthropize. As a teacher, I couldn't philanthropize very much. You know, I gave pennies. But especially since then and -- on Jewish institutions. The Spertus Museum in Chicago. Again, I'm not on the board; I haven't been asked to be; I didn't want to be. I'm not that active there. But I am a supporter and -- including of aspects of the Spertus Museum that the local Jewish community doesn't like. You heard of the scandal. Oh, they had an exhibit on Palestinians and Jews in Palestine, which -- 96:00it was objective in the sense -- it showed maps of the area written from an Israeli point of view and next to it, maps from a Palestinian point of view. It showed videos. One of his videos was a -- oral history by a former Palestinian who grew up in Israel and her history and her family and what they went through. And that insulted many people. They had one in particular which I think caused a lot of trouble. They had a video of people asking -- in Jerusalem -- an experience I had too, by the way, when I was there -- in Jewish Jerusalem, in Israeli Jer-- well, they're both Israelis in one sense -- in Jewish Jerusalem, I'm talking ethnically now -- rather than Palestinian Jerusalem -- for an 97:00address which was in fact on the side in Palestinian Jerusalem. Nobody knew it. Nobody knew anything about it. Never heard of it. Don't know. And they'd walk away. Don't know. Never heard of it. Don't know. Now, some of it may have been what I call the suburban life, where you can be in a suburb and ask somebody where something is that's two blocks away, and if it's not on his car ride to work or to the train, they won't know. But it wasn't that, obviously. They asked the bus driver. He doesn't know. I think they asked the cabbie. Oh, he has no idea. It was very striking, the kind of isolation, mental isolation, of what was technically part of Israel. And that irritated a lot of people. The result was I think the JUF threatened to withdraw support; the head of the museum left, was 98:00replaced. They're no longer doing exhibits of this kind at all. And I was very sorry. I think Spertus is a great institution. It's a fine school, and it has a great library. And I think there's nothing wrong with showing points of view that you don't necessarily agree with. Including -- particularly, there's nothing wrong with criticizing your own people. You know? People who didn't criticize their own people in Germany became Nazis. You have to criticize your own people. 'Cause if you don't, outsiders, they're just gonna hate your people. But any rate, that was -- that's been the history of Spertus. But it's still a 99:00great institution.

CW:Now, what has been important for you to pass on to your children and grandchildren about Jewish identity and your Jewishness?

EK:I wasn't very successful passing along anything about Jewish identity to my son, who was technically not Jewish, of course; mother wasn't. And when he -- he married somebody who was not Jewish. And he eventually converted to stay with his family, I think. But when he was in college, not at my urging, he took a number of courses in Jewish history. I don't know if he's read much Jewish literature in translation; I have no idea. And it was his idea to do the 100:00cemetery project. There's no denial there. So, passing along my identity? Consciously, no. But I'm told he's very much like me in all kinds of ways, including some he wishes he weren't. So --

CW:And have these trips back to Poland changed your view about your own past there, or reinforced any ideas that you had?

EK:I think they were part of my return to interest in Jewish matters that I didn't have as much. Let me put it this way. There is a woman who did the legal work for me, pro bono, who's not Jewish, in the -- and her sister is very active 101:00in all kinds of Jewish and non-Jewish matters. She's a filmmaker. She has made some wonderful films about survivor histories. And again, I'll send you the name 'cause I don't remember names anymore. I know her very well. And she wanted actually to make a film of me in connection with the cemetery project. And I agreed. But it never came to anything. Part of it -- this other film was started, and I said, "Look, let's not do the two at a time. Let them do theirs." And I think she and -- it just didn't work out. Which is fine with me. I was very hesitant anyway. I wanted to film on the project, but on me? What? (UNCLEAR). But she told me, "Look, you're somebody who's rediscovering Judaism, your Jewish identity." I said, "What do you mean 'rediscovering'? I've always been aware of it!" Me? Rediscovering it? And for that matter, my mother -- I was 102:00almost thirty-five when she was killed. I was thirty-three, almost thirty-four. I wasn't a kid anymore. And I was very close to her. She lived with me in Chicago for a couple years when I first came here. That was short-- not long after my father had died. And she was sort of at loose ends. And I knew her world. She didn't force me into it, but it was part of the world. I knew her friends. After the shock of her death, I didn't stay in touch with her friends. I should have, but I didn't. They wrote me grievance letters, and that was that. But that was still part of my environment. So, it's not as if I somehow moved away and lived in a totally different universe. But other than Warsaw, if I'd returned to Montreal -- I wanted to go back to Montreal. My goal -- I couldn't 103:00get a job in Canada. I've later learned that my field -- at that time, Canadian universities were only -- in history -- were only hiring people in French, English, Canadian, and maybe -- and US history. But they were not hiring -- in fact, a friend of mine who was a major -- a great lawyer, he was a Rhodes Scholar. He's a Jewish guy. And he wrote his dissertation at Oxford, his PhD, on German-Polish relations, international relations in the '20s. He couldn't get a job in Canada. So, he went to law school right away and followed his father, became a lawyer. But I would have gone back to Montreal. My plan was to go back to Montreal -- or Toronto -- after the war. I felt very Canadian. I didn't want to develop a still third identity, having been Polish and then this and then this. But as it turned out, I got this job, and I didn't get a job in Canada, 104:00and I stayed, and I got married, and I had a child, and so I just stayed. But if I had gone back to Montreal, I probably would have been active again in Jewish Public Library and things like that. Here, the Jewish institutions of Chicago as such, other than Spertus, didn't particularly attract me. They were either more actively Zionist than I would have been, or they were synagogal or related. There were others, but they were very far north, in the Skokie and suburbs and so on.

CW:What do you think is the future of Yiddish?

EK:I don't know. I mean, my mother thought it would die out. And in one sense she said, "Let it die out. The world is gone, the country is gone, the people are gone -- let it die out. This is just --" -- I remember the son of a friend 105:00of ours who was -- one of them went out and taught Yiddish, I think in Oregon or something. And she said, "What the hell's he doing this for? Who wants it? Who needs it? Ver vort es [Who values this]?" (laughs) And he later became very eminent. I won't mention his name. And then, there was another one who was the son of a good friend of ours -- again, there was a Yiddish paper in Montreal. Oh, by the way, my mother was a subscriber to the "Forverts," the daily. And there was a Yiddish paper, the "Keneder Adler." So, we always got the "Keneder Adler" and "Forverts" and "Montreal Star." And occasionally a French paper. And his son decided to go into Yiddish theater. And he moved with his wife and kid, 106:00young kid, to New York, to go work in Yiddish theater. And again, my mother's reaction was, "What a waste. A talented guy, what's that for?" And this is a lover of Yiddish. So, she didn't have the sense of, Maintain the continuity of Yiddish. Her sense was Yiddish was fated to die out, and it's sort of a little bit like a relative you see who is on life preservers. Cut 'em off. It's time. It's time. I mean, it's fine as long as they're conscious and doing things. She goes to YIVO, she supports it, this, that. But none of this illusion that this fancy new antibiotic will bring you back to life.

CW:And what do you think?

EK:I don't know. I don't see the future of Yiddish as what I would consider a 107:00living language. A living language is a language you speak when you go to a store, that you speak at home, that you speak with your friends. Not your only language, but a living language. I mean, Farsi's a living language in some parts of the world and among immigrants. I don't see that in America, and I don't see that in Israel. Though I don't know Israel that well, on visits and reading about it. It's obviously, as you've pointed out, no longer as negatively viewed as it used to. But it's not negatively viewed as an academic subject. I don't think the public schools of Israel teach Yiddish, right? And nobody has Yiddish theater as a major event in -- so I don't see that -- many of the Russians knew 108:00Yiddish, but I don't know how many of them actually speak Yiddish. I think they speak Russian, or Hebrew in the next generation in Israel. I don't think there's much Yiddish spoken by Russian emigrants. They're the old ones, but they're too old. So, I don't see it as a living language. Would it ever be revived? Hebrew was not really a living language for much of the time. But it was something, because men learned it, you prayed in it all the time, you wrote it -- the men wrote it; the women wrote Yiddish -- the men wrote Hebrew. In that sense, it was a living language, though not one where you went to a restaurant and ordered in Hebrew.

CW:Right.

EK:Even in Orthodox Warsaw. So --

CW:Okay.

EK:-- so I don't see -- but I'm interested in what it is. If I was -- given where I am now, if I was thirty years younger, I might have decided not to go into law but to really learn some background and become a Yiddish historian. I might have done that then, given my interest in -- thirty years ago, in the '70s. Almost forty years ago. And I'm now seventy-seven. When I was in my thirties, I was getting there. And if there had been this kind of -- the situation there is now, I might have very well moved into that area. But again, more as an academic thing. Because let me put it this way: Nobody is keeping 110:00alive the Yiddish culture of Poland or Lithuania. This is not the culture of a language. It's the culture of a people. That people is gone. It's very much -- culture lives on. So, the culture of the Yiddish Ashkenazic world lives on in America all the time. The businesses Jews do, the education -- we're all Talmudists in one form or another. My wife keeps complaining that I ask too many questions. (laughter) You laugh. So, the culture lives on. It will live on. Will it ever revive? I don't know. Let me finish this by telling you a history of culture, my view of culture. In the ancient world, Christian world, probably the 111:00most important, most widespread, most established heresy was Manichaeism. Manichaeism was the view that God does not control the world alone. God and Satan are both in control; they're fighting. And God will win at the end. But there's good -- it's a much more rational explanation for evil than seeing evil as somehow the will of God. So, God's will does not rule the world. And that was very strong in North Africa. You can see remnants of that in the writings of Saint Augustine, who grew up in that kind of atmosphere, and in southern France. In Europe, on the continent, very strong in south of France. It died out. I'm not a detailed medievalist who checks the maps and so on, but I have read and I have been told that probably the next big heresy in western and central Europe 112:00-- there are others -- was the Albigensian heresy in southern France. I'm not quite sure what it was about, but what I know best about it is it was rooted out in a mass crusade, the Albigensian Crusade, when a great many people were killed. It was in the same areas as the Manichean, maybe eight hundred years earlier, seven hundred years earlier. It could be a coincidence. And then, when Protestantism came to France -- and we often forget that France was once almost a majority Protestant country, Huguenot -- Calvin was French -- its center was southern France. Not northern France. The same area as three hundred years 113:00earlier had been Albigensian and six or seven hundred years before that Manichean. So, culture lives on, in a way. I don't know what the connections are between the three since then, but these coincidences one finds not infrequently. And so, yes, the culture lives on. But it's not the old culture. So, if you ask me what I think of the future of Yiddish as a language, as a living literature, I don't know. Are there many people, talented writers under forty, writing in Yiddish?

CW:A few.

EK:You would know better.

CW:A few.

EK:A few. Okay. The major writers I can think of of my generation -- (UNCLEAR) Grade (UNCLEAR) next one -- did not. Philip Roth was a very Yiddish writer, but he didn't write in Yiddish. Saul Bellow was another very Yiddish writer, not 114:00just a Jewish writer. He was not a Sephardic writer, but he did not write in Yiddish. So, will it live on as a living literature? I don't know. But will it be preserved as a culture and will people know more about it and study about it? I would love to see more -- what I haven't seen in the courses on Yiddish is courses just on Jewish life in -- seventeenth and eighteenth century. There's a teacher at -- she may be at Smith -- a Polish woman, not a Jew, who teaches Jewish history, who has done very interesting work on Jewish-Gentile relations in eighteenth-century Poland. She's either -- name me some other women's colleges.

F:Smith --

EK:I think she's Smith.

CW:Mount Holyoke?

EK:She's not Vassar.

F:Holyoke?

CW:Wellesley?

EK:Which one?

CW:Wellesley, Mount Holyoke --

EK:No, I think she was at Smith. I know where she is now.

CW:Scripps?

EK:No. It's one of the sort of Ivyish schools, I think. I might have been another one. I don't know. And she gave a lecture in Chicago at some -- I don't know. Was it Spertus; was it something else? But any rate. I read some of her stuff. For all I know, it may have been at University of Chicago, I don't remember. And she pointed out, first of all, that the notion of rigid separation of Jews and Poles in the eighteenth century was almost geographically impossible. All of Warsaw -- she showed on a map -- in the eighteenth century had a physical size equal to one district of Paris. Now, there's only so much 116:00separation you can have when everybody lives within walking distance of everybody else. And in the small towns, all the more so. You didn't have ghettos. The Jews lived together, as they do in America too, very often. But there were certainly no ghettos for twelve families in a small town, in a shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community], small town of -- I'm not even talking of the villages. A small town of a few hundred -- couple of thousand was a big town. And pointed out there was a huge amount of intermarriage. But of course, the intermarried disappear. So, you don't know about it as much. But there had to be. And then, she talked about particularly the close relationships between wandering Jewish peddlers and Polish bandits -- 117:00excuse me -- and Polish bandits. She talked about the close relations between wandering Jewish peddlers and Polish bandits. 'Cause the peddlers were the advance men. They would scope out the village or the town: what's going on, where to do, where to grab, what to rob. And they'd inform the Polish bandits. And the Polish bandits would then come in and pay a fee to the advance man. So, there're all kinds of interrelations that aren't talked about. The Old World was not -- it's not till the nineteenth century that it became its -- in fact, in many ways -- I mean, the Polish anti-Semitism goes back a long way, the Ukrainian much longer. But it's not till the nineteenth century that a kind of 118:00an intellectual anti-Semitism -- that the church became much more anti-Semitic and that more -- the separations. And that a Yiddish culture developed too, that was self-conscious and different.

CW:Well, I want to ask you about leaving Israel.

EK:Oh! (laughs) My anecdote about leaving Israel and Yiddish. I was there with my son and his daughter about, what, ten years ago, maybe? Just before their daughter was born. So, she's eleven. Eleven years ago. And we went all over. And it was very exciting. I didn't see my relatives. I was with them, and that's 119:00another trip, which I planned out -- I haven't done it yet, but I will. We had a Tel Aviv r-- this goes back to my Hebrew, right? The immigration guy, securities guy, asked me -- he said something to me in Hebrew. I said, "Well, I don't know Hebrew. I'm sorry, I don't know Hebrew." "You don't know Hebrew?" "No." "But you must know. I mean, you had your bar mitzvah." So, I said, "No, I never had a bar mitzvah." He looked at me very strangely. "Oh." I'm sure there are Jews in Israel who don't have a bar mitzvah too, so on. "Oh." Then, I wanted to prove my reality as a Jew. And I said, "I don't know Hebrew, but I do know Yiddish." And you know what he did? He took my passport. That was a sign of danger. I may be a 120:00terrorist. I know Yiddish, but I don't know Hebrew? And he had our passports. And then, he took my son's and hers -- I don't know if he took theirs or they simply didn't know whether to travel without -- but my passport, they kept for two-and-a-half hours. And they gave it back just in time to catch the plane. Okay. So, don't offer information (laughs) that you're not asked for. So, Yiddish culture in Israel? Who knows. It's the culture of dangerous people. For all we know, they might be peaceniks. (laughs)

CW:Right. Well, I just have one question that I like to ask everyone. Do you 121:00have a favorite Yiddish phrase, a saying or oysdruk [expression] of some sort?

EK:"Oy vey," of course. Which is, of course, not originally Yiddish. It's a Slavic expression. And in fact, naturally I don't say, "oy vey." I say, "Ojej." I've learned to say, "oy vey." The Polish is "ojej." And I learned that it was a Slavic expression from a student of mine who was Balkan. And she used a similar expression. And I said, "Where'd you learn that?" She said, "Oh, every Slavic language has that." And I found out that it's true. Everyone has a variant. And "oy vey" is really Polish "ojej" or Lithuanian, whatever, with "vey" being the German word, Yiddish word. No. I mean, I had some. But my memory for things like expressions has gone down over the last few years. And I would probably scramble 122:00it -- as I do English expressions whenever I use one. I get the words mixed up, and I -- but, uh -- no. But I never had too many favorite expressions. But there were some I could've cited just to cite some, but I can't do that now.

CW:Um-hm. And do you have an eytse [piece of advice], a piece of advice, for the future generations?

EK:(pause) I think people should not forget their past. And they should know that they -- not just genetically, but culturally -- their past. And there is a 123:00-- and to be conscious of it is important. I believe in knowing your country's history, and I believe in knowing your culture's history. And I think people should do that. I think people do. How can it be preserved? I certainly think that universities are part of it, though the other side of it is they're being relegated more and more into a combination of trade schools or -- and humanities centers. And I don't know how much is being kept alive in a real sense. This has not to do with just the Jewish, but with -- generally it's a problem that they're all facing. But things change. They're not the way they were fifty years 124:00ago. I don't know how they'll be fifty years from now. My mother once said to me that she wouldn't mind dying if she was the last person on earth. But she just wishes she knew what was gonna happen. (laughs) She wants to be there. And I'd love to be around to know what's happening fifty years from now at least, not to mention five hundred years from now. But one thing that's sure, it's nothing anyone else can predict.

CW:Well, a sheynem dank -- thank you very much for --

EK:(UNCLEAR)

CW:-- making this time and sharing your story with me and with the Yiddish Book Center.

EK:A sheynem dank tsu aykh oykh [Thank you very much to you as well].

[END OF INTERVIEW]