ZACHARY BAKER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is January 10th, 2013. I'm here at Stanford University with Zachary Baker, and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Zachary, do I have your permission to record this?

ZACHARY BAKER: You do.

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

ZB: What do I know about it? My grandparents were the immigrant generation. My mother's parents came over as adults with children. My mother was born in this country, but three of her older siblings were born in Galicia. My father's 1:00family -- my grandmother came over as a young adult, and my grandfather came over as a teenager and they met -- and they met in this country. My mother's family met in Europe -- her parents. And they were all Yiddish-speaking immigrants, though in the case of my mother's family, my grandfather, whom I'm named after, had an ear for languages, and worked and lived much of his life in New York in English. Same is true of my grandfather on my father's side, who is a grad-- was a graduate of the Teacher's Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and taught bar mitzvah kids, and led services, and was a -- I use the word "factotum," in synagogues all of his career. It's interesting 2:00when I think about it, that both of my grandmothers really didn't speak English very well, but my grandfathers did. My mother, her native language was Yiddish, but she was not literate in that language. She spoke it with a very, very geshmak galitsyaner [delicious Galician] accent. My father's accent was American, but he was -- he was literate in Yiddish, he was a student in a yeshiva in Brooklyn -- uh -- before he went into a regular public high school, and pursued a career as a chemical engineer. My mother was a school teacher, and then later, a social worker.

CW:Did you get a sense from family stories, what life was like in the old 3:00country for your - from the generation that had lived there before coming here?

ZB: On my mother's side, no. My grandparents both died before I was born, so I didn't know them. And their older children came over -- that is to say, my aunts and uncle -- came over as a very small children, and had very limited memories of the old country. I really didn't know my father's mother, my paternal grandmother that well. I knew my grandfather. He didn't speak much, he was a Litvak, he didn't speak much about his home town, only -- it's only, though, through him that I know the name of the town, and located it, and in fact, I have visited the places where three of my four grandparents were born, or lived.

CW:What are those places?

ZB:In -- my maternal -- on my mother's side -- they -- my grandparents lived in a village called [Volka Tourebska?]. Nobody's ever heard of it. It's near a shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish population], a former shtetl called Rozwadow, Rozwadow in Polish, which is between Kraków and Lwów, slightly to the north on a triangle. Just north of [Jashov Reisha?]. So I visited there, my sister and I about twenty -- almost twenty-five years ago, when I took a trip to Poland together, and we drove around, and we made a point of visiting there. I shouldn't say that I've visited my grandfather -- my father's father's shtetl, I haven't actually. That's a town called Lazdijai, 5:00Lazdijai, in Lithuanian. It's currently right on the Lithuanian side of the Lithuania-Polish border -- south of Vilna -- Vilnius. I have been to Vilnius, but I -- I can't say I actually visited Lazdijai. My -- his wife, my grandmother's hometown, is in the Ukraine, Yekaterinoslav-Dnepropetrovsk. I haven't been there.

CW:So you grew up in Minneapolis?

ZB:Yes.

CW:Was -- would you say it was a very Jewish home?

ZB:It was culturally very Jewish -- religiously, not particularly. My sisters were confirmed in a Conservative synagogue, but they did not have bat mitzvahs. I had a bar mitzvah, and I actually was sent to Hebrew school for two-and-a-half 6:00years after my bar mitzvah, which was fairly unusual. Most of the kids -- uh -- dropped out right after their bar and bat mitzvahs.

CW:And did you observe the yontoyvim [holidays], were -- and were you religious and observant?

ZB:Selectively. (laughter) We selectively -- family was not observant in any meaningful sense other than, yes, Hanukkah, Pesach -- as far as the holidays were concerned, when I was studying for bar mitzvah, I won't say we observed Shabbos, but I went to junior congregation, every Saturday morning, and -- but my parents met, actually, at a communist summer camp in 1940, so there -- they 7:00had gone astray, I think, before I was even born.

CW:And was politics something that was often discussed in the home?

ZB:All the time. To the exclusion of almost everything else at certain moments.

CW:And as a child, was there -- were there certain aspects of Jewish culture that interested you, were important to you more than others?

ZB:Well, part of my upbringing, despite what I just said about the leftist background, is that I had close to nine years of Hebrew school, plus I was sent to Jewish summer camps, and this was the early -- the summer camps -- early 1960s, so part -- inevitably, nothing -- I can't think of anything specific, but 8:00there was a lot that filtered through in that part of my education. So when -- there was one year, one summer, when I was sent to the so-called Hebrew-speaking unit of our summer camp, Camp Herzl in Webster, Wisconsin. It's still there and for whatever reason, this was right after my bar mitzvah, I decided that I wanted to learn Torah trope, so that was one of the things that I did that summer at that camp. I didn't go much in -- much for canoes, or for water skiing, or outdoor sports, or any of that stuff at the Jewish summer camps I went to. Later on I took a more conscious interest, like, in my last year of 9:00high school, took a more conscious interest in Jewish subjects.

CW:And -- how did that come about? What did you focus on?

ZB:I'm not sure how it came about, but it was something that I just began to explore more than I had before. I had -- personally, I had rebelled against, or quietly rebelled against doing Jewish stuff -- by this time, it was a period when I was in high school, the height of the Vietnam War, and given the political climate it seemed so secondary to what was going on in America at that time, to get involved in Jewish things. On the other hand, because I continued to go to Hebrew school, and was a counselor-in-training at a Jewish camp, as 10:00late as when I was 16, which is 1966, I wasn't ever completely out of the loop, Jewish-ly in the community, and socially, in terms of who were my parents' friends, they were all Jewish, almost every last one of them. And so something Jewish got reinforced, simply by the kind of socialization that I had, being raised in that household. Now I should add that my father -- I won't call him a book collector, he was a book accumulator. And there were books in every room, on every floor of a three-story house, and in the basement, too. And one of the rooms was the Judaica room, so when I started getting interested in Jewish things, I could have full run of that room.

CW:What was in that room? (laughs)

ZB:What was in that room? My grandfather's set of the Jewish encyclopedia, and in the early '70s, not -- after I was in high school, the Encyclopedia Judaica. Jewish classics, mainly in English, there were a lot of translations from Yiddish literature into English in the library, so, that's where I first read Mendele, Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, in my father's library. And Opatoshu -- that was there, too, and then there were the complete set of "The Social and Religious History of the Jews," by Salo Baron, and that -- I don't think all eighteen -- I think eighteen volumes eventually got published, were there at that time, but whatever had been published. I read about three or four volumes, 12:00and then I got tired.

CW:Can you just tell me a little about what the Jewish community was like in Minneapolis?

ZB:Uh -- well, Minneapolis and St. Paul, two cities. Two different Jewish communities and yet, sitting next to each other. We lived not in the Jewish part of town. We lived in a neighborhood where there really was almost not Jewish presence when I was a kid, even though the big Reform temple was and still is practically around the corner, but Reform Jews don't need to locate their facilities in a Jewish neighborhood. There was a large Conservative synagogue about a mile and a half away, in a neighborhood that had once been sort of 13:00Jewish, but never really densely so. So we were not in the Jewish neighborhood. The big Jewish neighborhoods, it was a time of transition -- the North side -- North Minneapolis was where the biggest concentration was, and precisely in my childhood, it was a neighborhood that was changing from Jewish to African-American, and at one point, in the mid-'60s, the change became a stampede, and the Jewish population emptied out, and almost completely. We were not part of that, partly because my parents were not originally from the Twin Cities, they moved there in the late '40s and did not feel innately bound to neighborhood -- even though all of our friends, all of their friends were Jews 14:00from either North Minneapolis or St. Louis Park, the big Jewish areas. So I grew up as the only Jewish kid in my elementary school class for part of my elementary education, and then, one of two Jewish kids for the rest of it. When my older sister was in kindergarten, she was the only Jewish kid in the entire school, so -- that really reinforced a sense of otherness -- it was not quite the same as being -- growing up in Newark in a Philip Roth novel.

CW:And how did that otherness -- how did you experience that otherness, and --

ZB:I didn't experience, or I don't remember experiencing overtly anti-Jewish 15:00manifestations and a classmate of mine, the other Jewish kid in my class, told me later on that she used to be chased home by some of the bullies in the class, and anti-Semitic insults were -- called after her. I never had that. The otherness was really knowing that there is no Santa Claus or knowing that we celebrate Hanukkah, and everybody else celebrates Christmas, but what is everybody singing? This was a period when all of the Christmas carols were being sung, and there was a Christmas tree on the main floor of our elementary school. And feeling excluded, and yet being, not wanting to visibly remove myself from 16:00that type of situation, and Christmas was a pretty big deal for me as a kid, being something other than Christian in that environment. And I didn't have any classmates, really, that I could turn to, you know, for protection. On the other hand, my teachers were very supportive of this Jewish kid and at assemblies, I was allowed to tell the story of Hanukkah. Now I look back, and think what a trivial holiday Hanukkah really is, but that was, you know, that coincided with time of year, but it was mainly -- the otherness of being not a Christian. Maybe 17:00I didn't look like the other kids, it was an all -- almost all-white environment. The only non-white kids at that time, in that school were Chinese-Americans. So -- but I was a redhead, so I didn't stick out -- I stuck out as a redhead, not as somebody with intensely Middle Eastern features, or anything like that. I didn't get it from that standpoint, I mean, in terms of -- catch it from that standpoint.

CW:So I want to skip ahead a little bit here. Who were your academic mentors, or influences, once you started being interested in Jewish books and such?

ZB:Well, in college, I took classes -- I was a student at the University of 18:00Chicago. I took -- there was nothing resembling Jewish Studies there then. But there were a few people who, either on faculty, or adjunct faculty who offered classes. There was a rabbi, Samuel Karth, who was the rabbi of Sinai Temple, sometimes known as "St. Sinai On The Lake." Their services were on Sunday. That was in South Side of Chicago. But he gave -- I took a couple of classes with him. I wouldn't really call him a mentor. Another class I took was with Professor Arcadius Kahan, an economic historian, Eastern European-ist. I had no idea when I took his class, that his father was one of the major leaders of the Bund. But that's who he was. I wouldn't call him a mentor either, but he was a very supportive. It was really only when I got to the point of studying Yiddish, 19:00and getting more involved with the Yiddish world, that I could point to an academic mentor. My first Yiddish class was at Hillel, at the U. of Chicago, and I still am in occasional contact with Rabbi Max Ticktin, who is now Emeritus something at George Washington University, pushing ninety, but he was the director of the Hillel at U. of Chicago when I was a freshman and sophomore there. And he was certainly a mentor of sorts -- as was the other rabbi at Hillel, who was not involved in Yiddish things, Danny Leifer, Daniel Leifer. But it was only at Columbia in the summer program, when I met Mordkhe Schaechter that I -- a name I'm sure that you've heard over and over in your interviews -- 20:00that I felt that I had come in to a place where there was an academic environment that made -- that I connected to in a meaningful way.

CW:Just backing up a little bit.

ZB:Yeah.

CW:How did -- what was the -- I meant to ask this earlier, what was the attitude -- presence of -- non-presence of Yiddish in your childhood?

ZB:There's a famous saying, which I'm gonna mangle by Kafka, that you know more Yiddish than you think. And he was talking to a Jewish audience in Prague, where they probably did know more Yiddish than they thought. I knew more Yiddish than I thought I knew, I thought I didn't know any Yiddish, certainly didn't know it in any speaking, or fluency, or literate context, but it was a language that was 21:00spoken in our house for the often -- the usual reasons that -- my parents used it when they didn't want their kids to be part of a -- their conversation, and when they were obviously talking about us, or about things that they didn't want us to know about. So there was Yiddish there. My grandfather moved to Minneapolis after my grandmother died, when I was sixteen, and he and my parents would mainly speak in English, but occasionally, in Yiddish as well. And -- Yiddish -- so it was -- there an awareness that there was such a thing as Yiddish, an active awareness, and it was something as Aaron Lansky has written about and spoken about many times, and I think -- he's five years younger than I 22:00am, but I think in this respect, our upbringings were very similar. It was an absence in our formal Jewish education. The gap between the Bar Kokhba Rebellion and 1948, or 1897, if you want to go back to Theodore Herzl. But the civilization -- in between our civilizations world-wide, Jewish civilizations were virtually absent from any formal education, and part of what I was striving to do is fill in that gap. I mean, there are many other gaps I didn't fill in, I don't read Talmud, but that was one that I felt was, personally, very -- it was a presence that was not addressed in my childhood, or Jewish education. And I 23:00remember, one of the first days in my Hebrew school class, I was eight, the teacher asked, "How do you say 'synagogue' in Hebrew?" and I think this must have been a trick question, 'cause I raised my hand, and said, "Shul." And I was corrected: "Beit HaKnesset," or "Beit Knesset." And that reinforced in me that there was something that I had heard at home, but was not going to be transmitted in school.

CW: And so, how did you become interested in this as something that you wanted to fill that gap? How did you become interested in Yiddish?

ZB:I took my first Yiddish class at Hillel in my freshman year in college and I 24:00didn't complete the course because I had too many other demands on my attention as a college freshman, and it was not a course for credit, but that planted the seed. Also, seeing Yiddish films at Hillel, like "The Dybbuk" at that point. Now, what I saw, and I'm looking back on this now, I mistook "The Dybbuk" for what Poland was like in 1937 or '38. I was -- but that was part of the experience of coming to Yiddish, but that there had been this world where people dressed like those actors, and spoke like those actors, and there were people in the audience at Hillel, who understood what they were saying without the subtitles. I wanted to be one of those who also understood without having to 25:00look at the subtitles.

CW:And so -- was there anything -- I mean, did you just see the Yiddish chorus, and decide to do it? Or was it some -- I mean, how did you decide that, "Oh, now I want to learn Yiddish?"

ZB:Well I never -- I didn't -- it never left my -- even after I gave up the class in my freshman year, something I wanted to go back to. One of the things I'll be showing you a little later, is an article that came out in "Midstream" magazine, which was a magazine published by one of the American Zionist movements. An article by Ronald Sanders, who was a writer and an editor for "Midstream," this came out in the spring of 1970, I was a sophomore, and the 26:00article was entitled, "On Learning Yiddish." Ronald Sanders was more than -- well, almost a generation older than me. And he decided, in his twenties, that he wanted to learn Yiddish, and he didn't have recourse to the kinds of resources that I had, namely zumer program [summer program] at Columbia University, although he could have -- and he mentions this in his article -- taken a class with Uriel Weinreich when he was -- uh -- when he decided he wanted to learn Yiddish. Instead, he bought a copy of college Yiddish, and he taught himself. And gradually, and there was more of a Yiddish milieu around at that time at that point, Yiddish-speaking milieu, and so somehow or another, he 27:00pursued this. And reading this article was, for me, a pivotal moment. If he could do it, I could do it. And if he could do it on his own, pretty much, I could do it with a little more help than just on my own. His -- Ronald Sanders' father was an Englishman, not Jewish, though married to a Jewish woman, and Ronald Sanders was raised in Midwood in Brooklyn but he had this mixed background and less of a visceral connection to the Jewish world than maybe I had, though he grew up in Brooklyn, which, I didn't have that advantage. So I read that article, and I decided that summer, I would find a way to be tutored 28:00in Yiddish. And my parents talked to -- first they talked to one of their friends, a woman who was from Winnipeg. There are a number of Jews from Winnipeg, living in the Twin Cities and Winnipeg was much more of a Yiddish center than Minneapolis and St. Paul. And then, my father came up with the idea, maybe his father would be the tutor, my grandfather. My grandfather was not a warm and cuddly fellow, he was not easy to get close to, I never felt close to him in any personal way, he didn't have a very happy life, maybe he was temperamentally unhappy, but he was an educator, that was what he did! And earlier in his life, one of the things he'd been doing is tutoring boys, not of 29:00my generation, but of my father's generation for their bar mitzvah speeches, their droshes. And so some of -- they had --these kids in that generation had more passive knowledge of Yiddish than I did, but they needed some kind of more formal training. And he was -- that was one of the things he did. So he arranged with Brochin's Bookstore, which was the Jewish bookstore in Minneapolis, to order a set of "Der onfanger [The primer]," by Yankev Levin. I don't know if you've seen these books, you might have. I'm sure the Book Center has many, many copies, six volumes, starting with the first, and these are children's textbooks. They're not "College Yiddish." I mean, I still have my copy of "College Yiddish," and I could turn to it if I needed to. This was Perele un Semele [Pearl and Sam], and -- there was one -- poem in there, and it was kind 30:00of like "The House That Jack Built," or "Chad gadya [Hebrew: One little goat]," where you go from verse to verse, building, building, and building. This was a children's book, and I was going through it day by day with him over a period of six to eight weeks over the summer. And at the end of the summer, I don't know how, but I was able to read Yiddish newspaper articles. And I think part of -- I actually do owe to my Hebrew education the fact that I didn't have to worry about learning a new alphabet, I had that. And I didn't have to worry about a big chunk of Yiddish vocabulary, which I already knew. But I had to worry about grammar, and another part of the vocabulary that I didn't have. And that's what 31:00I was learning with my grandfather. And at the end of the summer, as I said, I was reading newspapers. His newspaper was the "Morgen Freiheit." He was also a leftist, even though he was kley-koydesh [functionary of religious life] -- that is to say he was a religious -- he worked in a shul, in a synagogue. But that was one of the contradictions of him, and of my upbringing. And then, that was -- the following summer, over the year, between that year and my junior year of college, I was reading Yiddish on my own -- I graduated to short stories, and to a Yiddish novel. I read "Stempenyu" in my junior year on my own, by Sholem Aleichem, and then I applied to the zumer program. I don't know if we're jumping ahead to things.

CW:No, this is where I was going, so --

ZB:Okay. There were two classes -- class levels at that point in the zumer 32:00program. Beginner's and Intermediate. And I signed up for intermediate. And then, when I showed up in New York, I had self-doubts, and I met with Professor Herzog, Marvin -- Mikhl Herzog, who was overseeing the zumer program, and I said, "Do I belong in Intermediate? After all, I've never had a formal course, I didn't grow up speaking the language." He said, "If you wrote me a letter in Yiddish, you belong" -- which I did -- "You belong in Intermediate Yiddish." And what amazed and delighted me in the my first day in the class with Mordkhe Schaechter speaking full sentences in Yiddish, is that I understood him, and I was able, in my way, in my still very stilted way, to respond, and to participate in the class as a full participant, and not as some -- as a shtumer, 33:00somebody, you know, a mute witness or bystander. So what I -- my auto-didactive work, and my grandfather's training have actually been successful.

CW:I want to get back to YIVO, and the Columbia zumer program. But what ---

ZB:"Auto-didactic." Not "didactive." Okay.

CW:(laughs) Okay.

ZB:That's a correction, yes.

CW:What -- people talk about, you know -- sort of -- worlds opening up through languages. Did you have any version of that experience with learning Yiddish language?

ZB:Worlds opening up? I had already studied, before Yiddish, three other 34:00languages. Hebrew, German, briefly, as in elementary school, and Spanish, which I studied for five years in junior high and high school, and the equivalent of two years in college. And I had had an immersion experience in Spanish in high school, in an exchange program. Unfortunately, not long enough, because if it had been a few months longer, my Spanish would be much better today. But with Yiddish, I wasn't able to go back and eavesdrop on those conversations that my parents were maintaining over the years -- deliberately -- so I couldn't say I learned things that I wish I'd known earlier in life, but it did open up -- I 35:00think my interests were both personal and academic, or personal and scholarly. It did open up access to things, to knowledge that I didn't have, and to literature that I wanted to be able to read in the original, especially the literature.

CW:Now, as you've sort of alluded to, Mordkhe Schaechter is one of these figures who's very important to --

ZB:Yeah.

CW:-- a generation of Yiddish scholars today. Can you just describe what he was like for someone who never met him?

ZB:Okay. I met him -- the zumer program had been around for like four years, 36:00that was about the fourth year of the program. He hadn't yet published his new textbook, "Yidish tsvey [Yiddish II]." He hadn't codified a lot of what he was developing in terms of his pedagogy, and we were his guinea pigs. And there was a lot of spontaneity there, as a result. Our textbook for his class was "Motl peyse dem khazns [Motl the cantor's son]," by Sholem Aleichem, an edition by -- published by "Matones farlag" in New York, slightly watered down with, I think it has some glossaries on the bottom of the page. But what he tried to do with us was impress upon us idiomatic expressions, grammatical issues that are not 37:00obvious from reading. We were also going through Yiddish -- college Yiddish, that was -- where were we? I think we were there, but I won't swear to it, the later chapters of it. But trying -- he was trying to impress upon us that there's more to this than just the words, the lexical element, or even just the grammar, but the colloquial and idiomatic aspects of Yiddish, as it -- as they come through in a Sholem Aleichem text. So here -- he -- I think back, and I've done the arithmetic, he was almost a generation younger than I am now. But he was a grown-up, and I was a kid. He was father of young children -- his youngest kids, two kids were in elementary school. Actually, maybe they were all in 38:00elementary school. He had a thin reedy voice. He put as his classroom accent, the klal yidish [standard Yiddish] accent. Some years later, when I was working at YIVO, one of my co-workers was born and raised in -- Czernowitz, and even though she heard him speaking to me with his klal yidish accent, she could tell instantly that he was from - Czernowitz, there was just something there in the way he -- in his intonation, probably, that told her that's where he was from, because that's where she was from. She, you know, landsmen [fellow country-people]. So -- he was a man, a teacher with a lot of humor -- one of my classmates -- a man named Simcha -- what was his name? Shimke Levine -- Stan 39:00Levine -- objected -- or -- he objected to a neologism, or maybe it wasn't a neologism that Schaechter used for the word "sandwich." He used "shnitke [sandwich]" from "shnaydn [to cut]." And he -- and so Schaechter, with a smile on his face, addressed Shimke, as belonging to the anti-shnitke lige [anti-sandwich league]. That was the kind of thing, and he wasn't doing this accusatory -- in an accusatory fashion, he was doing this as -- for our amusement. He -- when I started reading Schaechter writings and his publications, like "Afn shvel," I could see this was a man -- kind of an ideologue, actually -- with very strong views, especially on Yiddish -- but he 40:00didn't -- he wasn't parading them to us. Or if he did, he did it in a subtle way -- but his -- he was -- I felt a great deal of affection for him, because he was such -- because of the humor and dedication that I felt. I wish I had more anecdotal examples, but that anti-shnitke lige in the intonation: "anti-shnitke lige," that was the way he put it. (laughs)

CW:And did -- how much contact did you have with different Yiddish-speaking populations that summer?

ZB:That summer? In the zumer program [summer program], we did have speakers coming in, speaking to us in Yiddish. It wasn't face-to-face contact. So the 41:00most memorable one, although I don't recall a thing he said, and he died later that year, was the poet Yaakov Glatstein. My friend Jack Kugelmass remembers that Glatstein was a little tipsy. I don't remember that. So the main contact that summer was with classmates in the program. We were taken on a field trip to Camp Hemshekh and then my other teacher that summer -- we had two instructors, one for language, one for literature. The literature instructor was the twenty-three-year-old David Roskies. So I was twenty-one, he was twenty-three. And he was of course, light years ahead of any of the members of the class, in 42:00terms of his knowledge at that point of Yiddish literature. David Roskies who, nevertheless, despite his deep Yiddish background, had a reysh problem, and his sister, Ruth Weiss also has that same problem, the North American problem of the reysh, but that doesn't detract from what he knew. He, at that point, was very active in the group "Yugntruf." And so, part of what was going on in the zumer program, there was a recruitment effort for Yugntruf. And so I was inducted into that fraternity.

CW:And that particular summer, there were names that we -- with you, in the 43:00class, I think that are known now in the Yiddish field. So what was the scene, sort of among your classmates, and then once many of you were involved in Yugntruf?

ZB:Well, I could enumerate several of the people whom I remember in my class, who were involved either in Yiddish or in Jewish studies. Jack Kugelmass was one, Michael Stanislawski, professor at Columbia, history. [Vera Lockwood?], who died young, but was a Yiddish linguist working on the atlas. Janet Hadda was not one of our fellow students, but she was in the classroom every day, she claims, as a kind of T.A., but I don't know what her role actually was. She participated as a student, I thought she was a student, but -- And then, in the beginner's class -- that year was David Miller -- David Neal Miller, who teaches at Ohio 44:00State. I don't remember the others. There were quite a number of people in the class -- oh, Robert Shapiro in my class, Robert Moses Shapiro -- there were quite a number of them who went on to academic careers that had in some ways an involvement with Yiddish. So, okay, we're in class, we're talking in Yiddish to Schaechter, but we go to lunch. We sit outside and we're not speaking Yiddish anymore. We're chatting and, you know -- in our mame-loshn [mother tongue], English. I had memories of lunches with Jack and with Michael and that that was what we were doing, we weren't doing Yiddish. And -- but Yugntruf -- because I was a student, because I wasn't from New York once I left the zumer program, I 45:00went back to Chicago, I wasn't -- there wasn't a milieu there. There were a few people that connected to, or connected with there, who were involved in Yiddish things. And there was also Chicago YIVO Society that had an annual banquet, and I went to a couple of them. And one of the stalwarts of the Chicago YIVO Society, was a guy who actually didn't really speak Yiddish Danny Newman, big cultural impresario in the city of Chicago. But his wife, Dina Halpern, was a Yiddish actress. She was in fact, Leah's aunt -- played Leah's aunt -- in the film of "The Dybbuk." So she's the aunt of the bride whose mother died in childbirth. And I, you know, seeing live and in front of me, this Yiddish 46:00actress who I assumed had perished in the Holocaust -- that was -- eye-opening, and she would recite Yehoash's Yiddish poetry at the Chicago YIVO banquets. Then I would come to New York in those years, both at the end of college, and shortly thereafter, and come to New York for Yugn-- I'd be there over Christmas break, and I'd go to Yugntruf. They always had their tsuzamenfor, their annual meet -- gathering -- right around that time. And I got to know a bunch of people, Sheva Zucker, I remember, I didn't get to know him, but Wolf Yunin, who was a writer and personality, and in the Yiddish world, with his -- emaciated-looking guy, 47:00but with his -- what do they call these? They're not ties, they're not cravats but they're kind of dandy-ish things sticking out where my t-shirt is -- there's a word for that, it'll come to me later. And so I got to know Perl Teitelbaum, Perl Teitelbaum, getting to know more and more people my age who were involved with Yiddish. And when I moved to New York in my mid-twenties, this became part of my social milieu. And a group of young, Yiddish enthusiasts.

CW:So maybe this is happening at the same time, or already happened at the time you're discussing, but how did you decided that Jewish, and especially Yiddish 48:00topics were gonna be an academic focus for you?

ZB:Well I had no real -- I wasn't really adept at doing anything technical with my life, in terms of thinking of careers. I was always going to go in some kind of academic-related direction, although I didn't really want to be a classroom instructor. And I was a little nervous about the whole idea of "publish or perish." I had worked on a couple of occasions in public libraries, and it struck me that working in libraries might be a good path for me. So -- I'm trying to get back to your original question, which, remind me what it was.

CW:How did you get to decide that Jewish or Yiddish was going to be an academic focus?

ZB:Right. I -- for a short time, long enough to get a master's degree in American History, was going on that track, academically, and I -- there were not a lot of academic jobs in the early to mid-1970s, and a lot of competition. And I really wasn't inclined to follow that one out. One of my sisters was married to a fellow who had a Yale PhD in History, and had terrible problems finding jobs -- so I wasn't Yale, and I didn't -- you know, it was -- so what's a good backup plan? Library work. And -- so I went back -- moved back to Minneapolis for about a year and a half, and studied in the now-defunct University of 50:00Minnesota Library School. And then, you know, what was I gonna do? I was working part-time during that period in a public library. I could have stayed in that library system but I got a flyer -- I and got one every year from the Max Weinreich Center, YIVO's academic arm -- and I noticed that there was -- I was just finishing library school, I'm in my last quarter in library school -- and I see "Internship in Judaica Librarianship," at YIVO Institute, taught by Dina Abramowicz and Bella Hass Weinberg. So, I conferred with one of the people in the Happen County Library, the county -- the suburban library system in 51:00Minneapolis, where I was working. Guy named Sanford Berman, who's quite notorious in the library world for his outspoken views, and radical views on Library of Congress subject headings and their discontents. So I said, "Sandy, what do you think?" He said, "Well, I think you should look into this, but when you write to them, ask if there's a job possibility." And so I wrote. I wrote, "Dear Miss..." or whatever, "Abramowicz " -- and I got a letter back from Bella Weinberg, and I imagined Bella, anyone named Bella to be a generation older than me and she's my age, nine months older and we were in our mid-twenty when I finally met her, that was a surprise. Anyway, I got a letter back from her 52:00saying, "We'd love to have you for the internship, and there is the possibility of a job," and as it happened, YIVO had gotten NEH grant money for a cataloguing project, involving Yiddish books. And the project was just getting underway at the time that the internship was taking place. So I pulled up stakes, moved to New York on the vague promise that there would be a job in my chosen field, and was lucky enough to find that that promise was real, and, as a result, worked for five-and-a-half years, almost six years, in that round, just at the start of my career as a librarian, cataloguing Yiddish books day-in, day-out, which means 53:00that I've handled a tremendous, without reading them, but a tremendous number of Yiddish books.

CW:And what was YIVO like at that time? I mean, what was the -- you know, Dina Abramowicz is of an older generation, so what was that like?

ZB:Yeah. well, somebody, and I was tempted to this -- there was a conference in early December, last month, 2012 at YIVO on the history of the YIVO Library, and I was tempted for my -- I was invited, and I went and gave a talk -- I was tempted to speak about how big government rescued Yiddish culture. The National Endowment for the Humanities was critical to saving YIVO at a time when other 54:00funds -- sources of funding had dried up. Those sources were in the '60s, and into the -- really, ending in the '60s and early '70s were -- from the Claims Conference, the conference of Jewish material -- Conference On Jewish Material Claims Against Nazi Germany. Those funds had supported bibliographical and other research projects at YIVO, and they were gone. What was YIVO's next step? They turned to Uncle Sam. NEH-funded, not just the library, not just the archives, for projects, but projects that brought new blood into the organization. It also underwrote the academic arm, the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies. And enabled YIVO, as a result, to bring in young -- a cohort of young 55:00students, and faculty like Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who I consider a mentor of mine, even though I never actually studied with her. Donovan was teaching -- when he was at Columbia, he would give a course every year at YIVO, and there was a synergy going on, with this younger, academically and also-Yiddish enthusiast-ly cohort. So who did I hang out with at YIVO? Not just the librarians, in fact, mainly, not the librarians, but the students. And these were students, many of whom -- or a fair number of whom went on to, well, remained good friends and remained in the field. And these students, after the 56:00passage of time, had students of their own, who are out there, doing things. And what's more, this came slightly later in my time there -- just the presence of the amazing resources of YIVO, attracted people like, at the time, Henry Sapoznik and Adrienne Cooper, who died last year. She came first, I believe as a student, but I might be wrong about that, but she was the Assistant Director, and YIVO was where KlezKamp was born. And KlezKamp has spawned its own children. Now I won't say that without NEH having planted this seed, this wouldn't have happened, but I don't think it would have happened quite in the same way, or 57:00possibly in this -- in as ramified a manner. I mean, people will always be searching, like I was. But the institutional basis might not have been there. So for me, YIVO in the late '70s was an amazing, amazing place! It was a place where I was opening -- I was cataloguing books by Yoysef Tunkel, which had parodies of Yiddish writers that I was reading, and I was able to get the joke as I was turning the pages, and trying to think about which subjects to assign to this book. And I was learning, especially the first couple of years I was there, every day, I felt like I was learning amazing new things. Every day was a day that I looked forward to getting up and going to work, and seeing what new knowledge I would be acquiring that day.

CW:What did that version of the YIVO building look like?

ZB:The YIVO building on Fifth Avenue?

CW:Yeah.

ZB:We were terrible custodians and stewards of that grand space, terrible. It was marvelous to be there, as long as it wasn't July or August -- because in July and August, with the heat and the humidity, and lack of air conditioning, we had the windows wide open, and the fans going full-blast, and we were sweating constantly, and let go for the day when the temperature reached a certain level -- but I got to know -- I worked in that building in two separate phases of my career, for -- let me do the arithmetic -- uhh -- five and a half 59:00-- let's say six plus seven -- thirteen years! I got to know that building as well as I knew -- got to know the house I grew up in. I knew where everything was, or at least what, generically, was everywhere. And I've been in that building once since the Neue Gallerie was installed in there, and it's very disorienting, because the bathrooms aren't where they were, the elevator isn't where it was, the grand staircase is still there, but the chandeliers aren't there. As a physical space, it's -- it was an amazing architectural experience to be in this building with chandeliers that could fall on your head and with 60:00leaky toilets leaking onto the stacks on the floor below, but nevertheless, that didn't happen everyday, thank God, but it was just an unforgettable experience. And it was a time when there were other similarly not well-heeled Jewish organizations, and even Yiddish organizations, occupying real estate on the Upper East Side in fabulous buildings as well. And about a ten-minute walk away from us was the Atran House on 78th and Madison. Think about it, 78th and Madison, that's where the headquarters of the Bund were, that's where Camp Hemshekh had its office, that's where the CYCO Bookstore was, this Yiddish bookstore, and though it was slightly before my time, because it closed by the time I moved to New York, in the basement was this Eastern European Jewish 61:00cafeteria -- on 78th and Madison. Just -- it was a different era. Of course, it was a grungier era, much grungier all around in New York, and the subways were filled with graffiti, and violent crime was endemic. But it was -- the YIVO Building, I was one of those who felt very strongly that we had to leave, but I wish it would have been -- I wish it would have had a lot more space, and a lot better -- it were a lot better equipped, because it would be a much grander home than the Center for Jewish History is.

CW:Yeah. Now I there -- I'm wondering if there are any stories, or anecdotes 62:00from your time at YIVO. I mean, you've named a lot of fascinating and important people. Are there any anecdotes or stories that you wanna share from that time?

ZB:Uh -- I'm always terrible at anecdotes. They come to me when I least want -- or when I least expect them. And so, for example, when Dina Abramowicz died in 19 -- in 2000, a reporter from The New York Times called me, and asked for anecdotes, and I really -- you know, I couldn't think of them. I worked with this person for years, and there are things that I remember about her so vividly. But are they anecdotes? It was more -- the fact that -- when she needed to count, or do arithmetic, it was in Russian, it wasn't in Yiddish. Or that 63:00every day in the warm weather, as she left the Fifth Avenue building, and walked across the street into Central Park, almost inevitably, she would turn around, and come back into the building because something she'd forgotten. I'm like that now myself. But that sort of thing. Or the fact that -- well, here's a kind of an anecdote. My -- maybe first -- no later than my second year at YIVO, 1976 or '77, at the suggestion of Irving Howe, a personality named Rob Reiner made an appointment with Dina to pick her brains about a pilot for a TV show that he was 64:00thinking of doing, and I forget what the show was, but it had some ethnic dimension. And Irving Howe had just published "World Of Our Fathers," and he had done a lot of his research at YIVO, and Dina was very much -- he acknowledged her with great enthusiasm in his -- acknowledgments. So Irving Howe said to Rob Reiner -- Rob Reiner presumably had a copy of "World Of Our Fathers," "Talk to this woman." So Rob Reiner, a star of "All In The Family," -- you know, it's before your time, but are you familiar with the show? Okay. So he's bald, but in 65:00the show, he had long-ish hair, but he's bald. But people recognized him. There was a whole buzz going around in the reading room, because she -- her desk was in the public place -- in the reading room -- and people, you know, Look at -- who is this? Even Malka -- Malka Herbstman, the Czernowitz-born woman with a wig on her head from Borough Park knew who this was. And so after Rob Reiner left -- Dina -- we were talking about this with her, and she said, "Who was that?" I said, "Well, have you heard of 'All In The Family?'" She said, "No." "Archie Bunker?" "No." Not a clue. Dina didn't have a television set, and the number one 66:00show on TV in those years was "All In The Family," and "Archie Bunker" was -- to say "Archie Bunker" was -- it a cliché by then. And she had no idea who he was. So I liked to say about Dina that, well she was from Vilna. In Vilna, they had the radio, and they had movies, but they didn't have television, and therefore, she didn't have television. Now that's ridiculous, but that's what I like -- that's what I liked to say about her. Because she went to movies, and she listened to the radio, but she didn't have a TV, and she didn't -- she was completely out of touch with American popular culture, even though, when she spoke English, she would self-consciously use the word "ain't," knowing that that was grammatically incorrect, or it was on the wrong register. She liked to use that type of language every so often. Another thing about Dina is how much 67:00of a New Yorker she had become. And though she was pushing -- she was in her late 30s by the time she came to the United States, but once she came to the US, New York was her entire universe, and she did travel a bit, but this was her world, and how utterly a New Yorker was, just as when the obituaries ran for Isaac Bashevis Singer, it was all about Isaac Bashevis Singer, this fixture of the West Side of Manhattan. Anyway, Dina -- this is not an anecdote, it's just sort of an atmosphere I could convey about this person.

CW:Yeah. (laughs) Now, you've mentioned a couple of the projects that you worked in at YIVO, with the NEH grant, and such. Were there -- was there a moment, or a 68:00particular book that -- a wow moment for you in that -- well, I mean, it's a lot of years. But is there anything that stands out as particularly meaningful to you, or impressive?

ZB:Wow, in an aesthetic sense was seeing all of those Yiddish -- illustrated Yiddish books, some, but not all of them for children, but the ones with illustrations by Chagall, Chaikov, El Lissitzky, and seeing that Yiddish was -- the world of Yiddish publishing was connected to an art world in a significant way. That, and -- the couple of examples I could point to in my career, one I'm 69:00still kicking myself about it. A woman got in touch with YIVO, and her brother, her late brother's collection of art books, and such like -- he wanted them to go to YIVO, but his library had been consigned to an auction -- or was being help by an auction house, but we could go there, and take what we wanted. So I was sent over there by Dina, and I --looking through the boxes, and murmuring out loud, "Oh, this is El Lissitzky -- this has illustrations by El Lissitzky!" And they heard me saying this! And these idiots at the auction house, who had no idea what they had in their hands! I didn't have the presence of mind to take everything with me right then. I said, "I'll come back for it." And when I came 70:00back for it, half of the stuff was no longer there, because they had -- they saw that there was money to be made off of this stuff -- off of this Jewish stuff. That really bothered me. I didn't, you know -- didn't have the -- just -- I should have just taken a cab, swallowed the cab fare, because YIVO would never reimburse me, at least that was my sense, and just brought it over. But the other El Lissitzky-related incident happened about five years later, when I was working at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal. And they had a -- they used as a storage area -- I won't call it a storage facility, it was a basement. Things were in boxes -- in an apartment complex across the street, apartments owned and 71:00operated by an agency of an Jewish Federation. And I stumbled across, in one of those boxes, a set of the famous "Chad gadya" lithographs of El Lissitzky, with a not-fully-intact cover, but partially intact cover. Needless to say the paper was on this very poor quality, post-World War I paper -- if you bent it, it would chip, it would break in half. Not in good shape. I brought it over, nevertheless, put it -- told my co-workers about it -- some fellow on the board of directors refused to believe that a set of this had sold, or was offered at auction at Sotheby's in London, or Christie's, one of the two, for like $50,000 72:00within the last year or so -- and here it was sitting in my desk. And we couldn't really do anything with it! But I found it in a box, and it had to be somewhere. Finally, in the last year I was there, in 1987, a conservator from the Canadian Centre for Architecture was -- her services were volunteered to professionally conserve this set, these lithographs, and I was able to breathe a little more easily. And -- but this was -- these were moments, I would say that were quite overwhelming. Now other moments -- bibliographically overwhelming moments at YIVO had to do with stuff that wasn't in Yiddish, necessarily. Because it's a very, very, very rich library in other respects, as well. And one of their great -- I won't call it -- I should call it a treasure are Nazi 73:00propaganda materials that were brought over at the end of World War II. And were -- there are some unique publications there that are chilling, but are very important for a research library to have.

CW:Hmmm. Wow. So I'm gonna ask you some naive questions. (laughs)

ZB:Okay.

CW:Just -- just go with me (laughs). So is there something about Yiddish books that you think people should know, that they don't?

ZB:Is there something about Yiddish books that people should know?

CW:Yiddish literature, I guess, sort of.

ZB:Well, one thing people should know about Yiddish books is that they're still being published. A few are still being published by authors who are of a 74:00non-Hasidic persuasion, there are some. An example -- my, my --

CW:Yeah, you can --

ZB:This came out just a couple of years ago. "The Biographical Dictionary of Yiddish Writers In The Soviet Union" - "Leksikon fun yidishe shrayber in ratn-farband," by Khayim Beider. So there are books like this still coming out. But there are also -- we get them here, a lot of them. Not the juvenile literature, but we get a lot of the Hasidic publications that are coming in New York or Brooklyn, or in Muncie, and places like that. So that's something. But Yiddish books, in the more accepted sense of the term, I don't know -- they've 75:00been so much a part of what I do, that I -- I just -- it's hard to say what people should know about them. One thing people should know about Yiddish literature is it's not only a literature of books originally written in Yiddish, it's a literature of translations. And in fact, the Yiddish Book Center, at one point, issued, when they were still issuing paper catalogues, a catalogue of translations. And when you look at old Yiddish -- what people had on their shelves, an awful lot of it is world literature, but world literature in -- translated into a language that the readers of Yiddish literature could 76:00understand, or were more at home at with. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. Not too much James Joyce, and we still haven't found Lewis Carroll.

CW:Now I know that one of the -- that you've had some involvement with the Yiddish Book Center at various points. I'd like to just ask specifically about the Essential Yiddish Books catalogue that you put together. How did you go about doing that, and deciding, sort of, what should be in there?

ZB:The Essential Yiddish Books -- it was -- first of all, I was working from a specific database. And a database that is extensive, but not comprehensive. But 77:00it's a database of digitized text. And so that was the starting point. I was working from more or less armchair or experiential knowledge of, "Who are the major writers? And are they in the database?" Or "What works in the database must be included, even if they're not by specific individual authors." For example, the Sholem Aleichem-edited "Yidishe folks-bibliotek [Jewish people's library]" from the 1880s is in there -- we have to have it in there as an essential Yiddish book. And then I added a few things, primarily academic publications, editions from Israel from the last twenty to thirty years, in the hope that it would be possible to include them. I remember that there were 78:00issues, copyright-related issues with the estates of Chaim Grade and Isaac Bashevis Singer. I think, though, for the Essential Yiddish Books, I'd have to go back and check it, but I -- even though they were not necessarily in the database, they had to be -- the authors had to be in that collection somehow. I don't know, at least for -- from a bibliographical standpoint. And I felt a little nervous because ultimately, I'm a bibliographer, but I'm not a literature person. And so, I got -- I was nervous. What would David Roskies say if I left out, and I can't name who I left out, but if there was somebody, some glaring omission there, and there doubtless are, and I was given a quota of roughly 79:001,000 books. And that -- so. Ultimately, I sifted, and judiciously sprinkled in a few things that weren't in there that I -- wherever I could.

[END OF INTERVIEW]