AUGUST MAYMUDES ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:So, this is Christa Whitney, and today is January 16th, 2013. I am here in Los Angeles with August Maymudes, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Auggie, do I have your permission to record this?

AUGUST MAYMUDES:Absolutely. My pleasure.

CW:Great. So, to start off, can you tell me what you know about your family background?

AM:The Maymudes family -- well, let me just say my grandfather -- Maymudes -- and I can never remember his first name. But he was extremely Orthodox. He 1:00belonged to a sect, and I'm told by Bible students, that the name Maymudes refers to this sect that believes the only way to talk to God is to be within the Temple at Jerusalem. And what others who cannot be there would do was that they would send a representative. This specific sect believed -- they would send a representative to Jerusalem who would pray directly to God. And at a pre-arranged time, the entire village or extended family he came from would pray at exactly the same time, pre-arranged time, and would therefore -- their 2:00prayers would go to Jerusalem and this representative, straight up to God's ears. Maymudes, the name, is a remnant of that Jewish sect. So, my father was born and brought up under those beliefs in the town of Ostrawa, O-S-T-R-A-W-A Mazowiecka. The Mazowiecka refers to a stream or little river. So, it's -- there apparently was more than one Ostrawa. This was the one on Mazowiecka. And he left there at age eighteen to immigrate to the United States, which is a whole other story which I may get into in a minute or two. [BREAK IN RECORDING] As my 3:00father tells it, that he was brought up under this Orthodox Jewish plan where he went to a Torah school, Bible school. But the family, as many families did -- when my father was about twelve, which would have been -- he was born in '01, this was 1913. The father came to America by himself, because they could only scrape together enough money to send one person. So, he came by himself with the idea that, in America, he would work and earn enough to later bring the whole 4:00family. Within a couple of years, it turned out that World War I intervened on that plan, and he did not -- he and the rest of his family -- his mother and other children did not find it possible -- the father did not send enough money, and they got the legal right to immigrate to America after World War I. Would have been about 1918. Father was seventeen or eighteen. And so, the whole family, including my father, came to the United States. Now, in those six years between the ultra-Orthodox father and the rest of the family -- the rest of the family all became secular. My grandfather felt that his absence had allowed the 5:00rest of the family to go wayward. So, when they arrived in America, grandfather said to his wife, grandmother, that, "We're going to have one kid and I'll show you how to raise a proper Jewish kid." So, my father has a brother that's twenty-two years younger than him, Moysh. Moysh was -- grew up in New York, went to parochial school, to religious -- Jewish religious schools all his life. Very fortunately, he found a job in the post office. So, he lived a -- in spite of the fact that he never learned that two plus two equals four -- I mean, he never 6:00learned the simplest things you learn in secular school. He did learn a lot of Biblical arguments, one way or the other. But never learned, as I say, simple grammar school kind of stuff. But in the post office, he lived a very secure life. Lived to his middle seventies. Died recently. But he found a way to be like that. [BREAK IN RECORDING] One of the things in Jewish life is that they don't like and are forbidden to make graven image. All the way back to Moses, 7:00the Jewish tradition has been to make no graven image, because that would just -- leads to praying to a false god, to an image of a god. Not the millions of copies that Jesus has. There are no real images of Moses. Grandfather found it possible to save up enough money to go to Israel and Jerusalem for his last few months of his life, and while he was there, my father and some other in-laws, a couple of my uncles and aunts went to visit him in Jerusalem. And they got a 8:00picture of him, the only picture known to exist of him, by knocking on the door of his apartment, and the minute the door was opened and he was inside, they snapped a picture. And that stolen picture, so to speak, a copy of which is here, is the only picture known to exist of my ultra-Orthodox --

CW:Could you hold it up in front of you, just like that?

AM:Yeah, my ultra-Orthodox grandfather. And he appropriately died within a month or two of having his image stolen.

CW:Wow. Did you get -- here, I can take that if you want.

AM:Yeah. So, that's as much as I know about the history of -- beyond the history 9:00that I lived through.

CW:Did you get a sense from your father or your grandfather of what -- or especially your father, what life was like during -- before -- you know, during World War I and in the Old Country?

AM:They were very, very poor. But other than that, they lived a -- my parents, both mother and father, lived a pretty good life in the town of Ostrawa. It was not -- it did not have the shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community] characteristic that the stories of Sholem Aleichem portray. It really was a relatively small, industrial town. Maybe a hundred thousand people, and had several sort of factories, clothing, and rubber goods and other things. My 10:00mother's family were small store owners. Mix of retail stuff that they sold. My father's family, my father was a -- and that's another cute thing. He was a -- a tailor, but at a low technical level. He was a patch maker. Rina? I forgot the word -- Jewish -- maybe you know it, Jewish word for patch -- oh, late. He was a latnik [person associated with patches]. Well, it's kind of humorous. He was -- 11:00he could fix clothes. He didn't make clothes. Latutnik. Made a living out of fixing clothes. But hardworking and enough to get by. He tells -- dad -- my father -- tells stories about during the German occupation, World War I, that he would run behind German trucks, and things might dribble -- if it was a truckload of potatoes, there might -- couple might fall off and he would grab them, and he would get things. So, he was not a beggar, but he was just half a step away from being a beggar, 'cause they were that poor. But, on the other 12:00hand, he lived a healthy life. I have photographs of him as a young man, as a sixteen, eighteen-year-old, and he looks very healthy and well-dressed and well-coiffed, well-combed, et cetera, et cetera.

CW:Did you ever know your grandfather?

AM:That's a whole 'nother story. My father was not -- was a secularist, and he -- the Jewish word for those people was veltlakh. That is, he believed in the whole world and its reality, so to speak. My grandfather caught him breaking the 13:00Sabbath at around age eighteen or nineteen. That is, on a Friday night, you know, the Jewish day began and ended at sundown every day. So, after sundown on Friday, it had become Saturday, Shabbos, and he was not allowed to do anything productive to break the Sabbath. But he was in the basement in a club room in the building they lived in. Old apartment building in New York. And he was writing, after the Sabbath. And my grandfather considered that to be breaking the Sabbath, a terrible, costly sin. And so, when my father finished his 14:00writing, whatever it was he was writing, and went up to the apartment, the front door was locked. Unusual. So, he knocked on the door. The grandfather would not let him in. He threw him out -- in effect, threw him out of the house at age eighteen, nineteen, because he had been writing -- writing -- on the Sabbath, breaking the Commandment. So, the grandfather never saw my father from that day, for thirty or forty years. I'd have to get a pencil and paper to figure out exactly how long that was. But the next time my grandfather saw my father and me 15:00was in 1949. Is the event -- my father was disinherited in 1919. That's '49, it's thirty years. Well, that answers that question. I went to New York with my father in '49, and my father -- there is a Jewish tradition, as in many cultures, that places a value on the firstborn son. And my father figured his father, my grandfather, would break his rules to see his firstborn grandson. Me. So, we went to see him. And before going up to the house where my grandfather lived -- we knew he would not feed us with anything. Just wasn't part of the 16:00tradition in religious Jewish families. So, we stopped in a restaurant in the neighborhood, ate, and got up and left. And as we were going out the door, there was my grandfather. He had seen us through the window. Would not come in to greet us or anything. He just waited outside until we were done. We came outside. He turned away from us. Deliberately turned away from us. Then my father, in his pocket, got a yarmelke, the Yiddish religious cap, and put it on me and him. Put one on me and one on him -- at which the grandfather deigned -- that's a good word -- he turned around and said hello for the first time, and 17:00gave me a little hug and said hello to my father for the first time in thirty years -- to show you how intelligent the Jewish religion is. (laughs) I'm afraid it's normal to all fundamentalist religions. A little bit crazy. Anyway --

CW:So, can you tell me a little bit about the home that you grew up in? What was -- it wasn't a religious home, but what was Jewish about it?

AM:In New York -- I was born in New York. Family lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in a typical apartment. One room walk-up. I lived there till I was 18:00three, so I do not remember anything, to be honest. And we came to Los Angeles when I was three-and-a-half. And I do have some memories when I was four, five, six years old. And it was quite normal in the sense that friends of mine who grew up in Jewish or non-Jewish, religious or non-religious families -- virtually the same. We had -- didn't have much money. My parents' incomes never was very much. We lived in rented houses until I was about sixteen, fifteen or so. Fifteen or sixteen, when we moved to a purchased house in the suburb of LA, 19:00Rosemead, a town about twenty miles east of Los Angeles. But we ate three meals a day. I was a little bit jealous of my neighbor kids who had more toys than I did. But other than that, I would think it was a perfectly comparable life. We were a hundred percent secularist. I did not ever talk to my parents -- as I grew older, you know, and went to college, et cetera, I began to -- to understand the meaning of the word "atheist," and then called myself an atheist. 20:00But one of the things about being an atheist is we had no religious holidays. I felt a little jealous of my friends who got Christmas gifts. I never got a Christmas gift. The only things we celebrated were birthdays and some other things later in life, like the date of the Jewish resistance to Hitler in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland.

CW:How did you mark that day?

AM:We really did not celebrate it in any normal sense of the word. It just had a regular suppertime. My parents would just mention the event, the rising in the 21:00Warsaw Ghetto, and perhaps read a bit of -- recite a bit of poetry that commemorates it. But really, not a celebration in any normal sense of the word.

CW:Right. Did you -- what languages -- language or languages were you speaking in the home?

AM:My parents spoke virtually a hundred percent Yiddish, practically till their death, till -- all their life, although later in life, they both were quite fluent in English. But they chose, inside the family, to speak Yiddish. So, I heard a lot of Yiddish, although, as I grew older, went to public schools, my native language became English. And, in the house, they would speak to me in 22:00Yiddish. I'd answer in English. And so, I never learned, really, to be fluent speaking Yiddish. And the -- matter of fact, one of the thing-- I cannot pronounce (laughs) a Yiddish "R." A Yiddish "R" has got a little rumble in the back of it that I can't -- don't normally do. And I was embarrassed by that and I stayed away from words that had an "R" in them. Reyshl [diminutive of Hebrew letter reysh] was not at all the way he pronounced reyshl. (laughs)

CW:Yeah.

AM:But, yeah, when I hear spoken Yiddish now, I understand it very, very good, although my wife understands it even better. But I think that's just because the 23:00years have treated her head a little better than they've treated mine.

CW:So, can you tell me about the political atmosphere in your home?

AM:There really was none. On the one hand, it was a hundred percent -- the books we had included Marx. My parents were far-left in Europe. In the years after my grandfather had left, my father joined the Bund. B-U-N-D. The Bund. The Bund was a mixture, political and social and union organization, that was veltlikh, that was worldly. But not -- it was in opposition to the communists. It was just kind 24:00of the way of the Labor government in England. That level of radicalism. So, it was far distant from the religious fundamentalism of my grandfather, but at the same time was not revolutionary, were not really active politically. But their thinking and their intellectual thinking was very secular, very non-religious. And they had very poor -- very limited schooling in that. So, it was not developed. They would never have thought of themselves as atheists, but Bundist 25:00was kind of a common -- with socialist overtones -- a common citywide secular belief community.

CW:And was --

AM:In Los Angeles, they did, in fact, over time, early in my childhood, actually join Communist Party, Los Angeles. They were, both mother and father, were active political members and grew into leadership, but always with a heavy, heavy cultural tone rather than political activity.

CW:So, about Yiddish culture, Jewish culture in the home, did you have -- what 26:00were the -- what was the emphasis? Was it books, music --

AM:Well, it was very much cultural. The library, my father's library, was peopled, almost exclusively, with Yiddish, left-wing, Bundist, socialist-oriented, labor-oriented writers. Sholem Aleichem -- I don't remember the names of the other common ones. But we had many, many books of Jewish people. And Singer, Y.B. Singer was not read, because he was considered to be -- writer of dirty books. I never read a Singer anything, English or Jewish, so 27:00(laughs) I really don't know any examples.

CW:Shund [literature of inferior quality].

AM:But he was described as being -- the things he wrote were described as being shund, S-H-U-N-D, or D-T. And the word means dirty. I forgot -- there's a better word.

CW:Well, I think my favorite -- a good word for that I just heard recently might be rubbish. (laughter)

AM:Yes, yeah, in English. (laughter) Rubbish, from the gutters rather than sexual rubbish.

CW:Right.

AM:Yeah. But anyway, we went to plays. They promoted -- although they didn't 28:00especially join, but promoted choruses, theatrical, other cultural things.

CW:For you, personally, was there a part of Jewish culture that was appealing to you as a young person? More appealing to you?

AM:Well, appealing is a word I would never use. It was just normal to me to be interested in Jewish things. It -- I enjoyed them. Matter of fact, when I joined, somewhere around age forty or fifty, a Jewish reading circle that would get together once a month and read literature, Yiddish literature, just for their own pleasure. And so, they -- this group got together for its first 29:00meeting and people were describing why they came there. And they had these flowery reasons about -- they were interested in this, that, or the other thing. And when they got around to asking me why I came there, my answer was I just enjoyed it, you know? It just felt normal. I never found it necessary to work out some intellectual reason.

CW:Right. What -- looking back on your being raised and your parents and childhood, do you see any certain Jewish values or traditions that they were 30:00actively trying to pass on to you?

AM:Well, when you talk about that, finding its basis in Jewish and Yiddish -- in Jewishness, Yiddish or Hebrew or whatever, my father attached himself and attached good Jewishness to the -- now, I forgot -- the signs of my age -- to the prophets. Not to David or Moses, but to the prophets, who were invariably anti the leader, who invariably were trying to make the Jewish nation better than the leader was trying to make the Jewish nation. So, they were 31:00prophet-oriented and could quote prophets from the Bible very easily. And they were forever talking about the needs of the people, the requirement that every Jew -- every Jewish farmer should leave a portion of his crop for the poor, that every Jewish family should welcome strangers to the dinner table. Various things of that sort that demonstrated that to be a Jew made -- you had to be -- a Jew had to be a good person. You couldn't be a bad person and be a Jew. So, they attached -- as I mentioned, they attached themselves and their political 32:00leanings to that.

CW:And your father was a Yiddish teacher.

AM:Yes.

CW:And can you just tell me, briefly, a little bit about his -- what he taught and his involvement in --

AM:When he came here, when he and his family came here, at his age, eighteen approximately, he looked around to see what he was going to do with his life, you know? At the -- as is appropriate at that age. And I'm not sure at what age -- perhaps nineteen or twenty, the Workmen's Circle, the organization of secular Jews, non-religious, operated a teacher training school. It's funny, the teacher 33:00schools have this -- are called normal. Normal schools. But anyway, the Workmen's Circle operated, in New York City, a school for teachers in Jewish and about Jewish -- about Yiddishkayt. And both my mother and my father went to it. I don't even know how long it was. I never have spoken to them about what it really was like, other than the fact that they went and graduated. And my father, especially, after I was born in 1930, when my father was twenty-nine -- 34:00he, through the Workmen's Circle internal organization, took a full-time job as a teacher as he learned -- had learned in that school -- training school. So that he also tried -- he had relatives who were in the clothing business, especially with furs. Turned out he was allergic to the fur business. Developed both rashes and asthmatic-like breathing problems. And so, he worked as a furrier for maybe a year when he -- then you know, somewhere around age twenty-five. And so he quit that, and his sole inclination at that time, the 35:00only thing he knew, and what his -- direction that he turned was to be a Yiddish teacher, mostly in children's schools.

CW:And then, he also became sort of the West Coast representative of the Morgen Freiheit, right?

AM:Yeah. So, he's -- the development through the years was that he went to the training school around age twenty-five, twenty-six. Taught in shules [secular Yiddish schools] the first couple of years. He spent one year in Cleveland, one year in Philadelphia. And then, in 1930, I was born. But still, he'd spend most of the year as a teacher in these children's schools. And in '33, he was offered 36:00-- the year, the school year of '34, in Los Angeles, if he was willing to go, and he was, he felt that it would be healthier for him and me, the baby -- so, in 1930, the spring of '34, the whole family came to Los Angeles. I never did ask the question, but it's my understanding that they came by -- well, I shouldn't say that. I have no idea (laughs) how they came here at that time. I was going to guess. But the pay at that time that he got was fifteen, one-five, 37:00fifteen dollars a week -- was the official pay. And even the fifteen bucks, he had to raise it himself from the Jewish families in the neighborhood that would send the kids. So, he had to do fundraisers along with his teaching of the children. Consequently, my mother, who was a machine oper-- was an operator, was the word that was used in English. I don't know what was used in Yiddish. But she was a dressmaker, and she made more money than he did, as little as she made, you know? A buck an hour, seventy-five cents an hour. But it came to more than fifteen bucks a week. So, most large -- a large portion of their lives for the first twenty-five years or so, she made much more money than he did. What 38:00did I start out to talk --

CW:How he got involved with the Freiheit.

AM:Oh. But anyway, he, in Los Angeles, was the chief shule teacher. Shule, at that time, was not Sunday only. There was a concept in the public schools called released time, to where people of any specific cultural group, not just Jews, could get out of school early, couple hours early, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for religious instruction. So, the shule ran an hour or two, from -- from four o'clock to six, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and all Saturday. Now, 39:00because they were secularist, Saturday didn't mean -- they did it on purpose maybe, even, to put a thumb in the eye of the Jewish religious community. But -- very often, they met on Sunday, not Saturday. But, any rate, shule teaching was a five-day-a-week -- was a full-time job. So, he did that the first five or six years in Los Angeles. But then, he was just accepted, and so he was successful in the community to bring in additional families through their children and the shules, and the children's schools. And also their parents, just in their 40:00progressive interest, progressive and labor interest. He was, in a sense, elevated to be a staff member in the Los Angeles office. And over time -- and, really, over fifty years' time -- became the leader of the community, of the left-wing community in Los Angeles, which would have different names or different responsibilities at different times.

CW:During the war --

AM:Forty-one to '45.

CW:-- were you -- was -- was the war a topic of discussion in the home, in your community? Were you -- yeah, was it something that you were talking about?

AM:Well, we were -- I wouldn't want to kid you. We were highly influenced by the Russian role in the war. That is, at the time of the Russian-German pact, we were non-supportive of the American war effort. And when the Germans attacked Russia in '41 and Pearl Harbor -- we became very, very much involved -- supported the American effort, although we also supported Russian war relief. But paper drives and stuff like that for young people.

CW:What did that mean?

AM:My father, in particular, had dodged the army, in a sense, because -- born in '41 -- born in '01, in '41 he was forty already, so he was not really draft-eligible. So, they -- the Jewish organizations had various types of support. They used to have knitting clubs, just to knit socks and shawls for American and Russian soldiers. And the participate -- parents would participate in the fund drives, in war bond sales. I have pictures of the war bond sales in 43:00Los Angeles that were done by the IWO, organized in Boyle Heights. But as far as I'm concerned, other than my involvement in paper drives and fund drives and various other little community things -- had no effect, you know.

CW:Yeah. Did you grow up in -- maybe you already said this, I missed it. Did you grow up in Boyle Heights or --

AM:Yes. We lived in Boyle Heights up until -- my age -- maybe fifteen.

CW:Well, it was a --

AM:Oh, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm confusing the issue. No, we lived in Boyle Heights 44:00-- yeah, till my age fifteen.

CW:I mean, it was a historically very Jewish community.

AM:Yeah. Yeah. Right.

CW:Can you describe sort of what it looks -- what it looks like, looked like and what [UNCLEAR].

AM:It looks -- strangely enough, it looks exactly the same now. Every house that I remember that my friends lived in still exists, except now it has Mexican American people living in it, but at the same financial level that we were in when we lived in those houses. It all went together. The house and the poverty and the schools, everything looks just the same, I must say, except, you know, I 45:00can still remember the houses, like I say, that my friends lived in, let alone me. I --

CW:So, what did they look like?

AM:Just Los Angeles houses. Single-family houses on a decent-sized lot with all kinds of trees. I remember we had an apricot tree for a while. I lived -- so, time-wise, I lived in Boyle Heights till -- funny, I'm gonna have to go to some effort to put it down. I lived in Boyle Heights till my junior high school years. Then, the family had gotten together enough money to buy a house in Rosemead. So, during most of the war and during my early teens, from twelve 46:00until sixteen or seventeen, I lived in Rosemead -- suburb, because real estate was a lot cheaper twenty miles outside of LA.

CW:Right.

AM:And then, at that age, we lived one year in New York. From my nineteenth birthday to my twentieth birthday. And then, we came back to LA, but I got drafted soon after that.

CW:So, why did you go back to New York?

AM:My father had -- grew up in the -- my father's position with the IWO or its Yiddish branch, which had developed by that time, the Jewish People's Fraternal Order -- he was the chief. What they did was they -- as the expression goes, 47:00they kicked him upstairs. The local people in LA promoted the idea of him going to a higher position in New York. Los Angeles, at that time, had five -- membership in the IWO of ten thousand. Five -- and this was in '41, like -- five thousand Jews and five thousand other immigrant groups put together. Russian, Polish, Bulgarians, other Slavic groupings. And my father, as the leader -- although titles came and went. But anyway, so then he was transferred to the 48:00Bronx to be the co-chief. He, my father, the Yiddish-speaking guy and his guy with him, whose name escapes me at the moment -- the English-speaking guy -- the IWO in the Bronx had fifty thousand members. So, it was a kick upstairs. He was the co-chief of the fifty thousand. It's funny, they had an office over a movie theater called the Dover. I still have a thing in the -- in the garage, the remnants of a poster for the film theater, over the Dover, where the IWO office was. But anyway, so it -- but then, after living a year in New York, he found 49:00that his symptoms returned that had originally driven him out of New York to Los Angeles. So, the only way to come back to LA was to quit, so he quit the IWO, 'cause they wanted him to stay in the Bronx. He quit the IWO and came back to LA and became a chicken farmer. Actually, an egg farmer. He raised chickens for eggs, and that's a whole 'nother story. Different interview. The chicken farm lasted for three years, at which time he was hired by the Yiddish newspaper, the Morgen Freiheit to be the Los An-- to be the co-chief, along with other people, 50:00for a few years, and then he was the single co-West Coast editor from let's say -- (laughs) let's say from 1960 all the way to his death in 1980.

CW:And did he --

AM:In 1990, yeah.

CW:Did he write a lot?

AM:No.

CW:Do you have memories of him writing?

AM:No, he really was not a writer. He wrote a -- for the Freiheit, he wrote a weekly column called "From the Streets in Los Angeles" -- but a column about what was happening in the secular Jewish community. Progressive secular Jewish 51:00community. And he wrote one or two little, you know, two or three hundred word stories that were included in the Freiheit. But other than that, he never wrote. And he also wrote that inclusion in the Yizkor book.

F:He's not here. Who's calling please? Who is -- who is this again?

AM:Yeah.

CW:And now, in the -- after the war --

AM:Yeah.

CW:You had mentioned before --

AM:Forty-five.

CW:And before we started the interview, you were telling me about your experience getting drafted. Can you -- I mean, it was a time when being -- when people of the left were really targeted.

AM:Right.

CW:Do you have any memories -- I know your father, I think, went before the committee. Do you --

AM:No, I don't think my father ever was -- he was followed around for a short time. He had one coworker who was later identified as an FBI spy internally, but I don't think he ever was interviewed or anything like that by FBI or anybody else. There also was a Los Angeles Unamerican Committee, the Jack B. Tenney Committee in California -- listed him in their book about communists in Los -- in America. In California.

F:Okay.

AM:But the --

F:Okay.

AM:Yeah, I don't think he ever did. Now, I joined the CP in 1958 --

F:Okay.

AM:-- '58, yeah. And about 1960, the Youth CP were called about the ten people -- roughly around my age, including me.

F:Okay.

AM:Were called to the investigation by a congressional committee. My own appearance, just my turn of phrase, they asked me a question and I would say, 54:00"My lawyer advises me that I should not answer." I said that four or five times and that was the -- my entire thing with them. And they -- a couple of FBI people, FBI agents -- I went to work one day, and in the parking lot, they stopped me and wanted to talk to me, and I spoke to them for a minute or two. Largely refused to talk to them. And they spoke to my boss about me. And my boss refused to do anything. He told me, years later, that they had told him -- they asked him to fire me, that I was a communist with anti-American -- stuff like 55:00that. And he was totally non-political as far as speaking out on anything. But at the same time, he didn't speak out on the dangers of communism, either. He was totally, to my eye, absolutely non-political, so --

CW:Was it --

AM:-- so, he did nothing for them. Nobody -- did nothing for them. Nobody -- other than that one visit, and my name appearing in some of their books or publications, along with my father's, meant absolutely nothing.

CW:Was it a time when people were frightened? I mean, was there fear around the --

AM:There were friends of mine, very good friends my exact age that I'd grown up 56:00with, who were bombastic people, you know, who would -- loud rejecters. If you asked them a question they didn't like, they would holler at you. So, they would do that there also. There are some people in this appearance before the congressional committee that I mentioned, that I was asked three or four times and answered always that the -- my lawyer told me not to say anything -- that they would actually have big, elaborate, academic responses. Nothing ever happened to them, either, tell you the truth. I don't think anybody ever was injured in any way.

CW:Oh, well, I'm wondering -- I know that you -- that there are, in Los Angeles, 57:00several Yiddish organizations.

AM:Yeah.

CW:I'm wondering if you could just give me -- I mean, I know, you know, Yiddishkayt LA, the cultural -- the Yiddish -- CYCL, the Yiddish Institute, and also the Sholem Community. And I know you were also involved in the Yablon institute.

AM:Yeah.

CW:But could you just tell me, briefly, sort of what these various organizations are and what their different missions were in the community?

AM:Going back to my childhood, there were really three organized groupings in Los Angeles. I mean, that's -- that all the -- what I was familiar with was the 58:00three. On the one hand, there was the synagogue-based Jewish religious community. Now, it existed -- there were a number of synagogues around LA and a number of -- they all had members, and there were well-known people -- Rabbi Magnin -- a big temple on Wilshire Boulevard was known by the whole community. His name was known. Even people who totally rejected -- like, my father would totally reject his beliefs, but still, he knew him and of him and his following. Then, there was the Workmen's Circle -- was a moderate size in LA. They had shules also, but they only had two, maybe: one in Boyle Heights and one in the 59:00West Adams, Adams Boulevard area. The JPFO, Jewish People's Fraternal Order, the Jewish branch of the IWO, had eight schools in the -- in the '40s, before -- during the war and after the war, and had maybe two thousand children in the schools, and a membership of ten thousand. Total membership. I'm sorry, five thousand Jewish -- and clubs all over the city that I was familiar with. And now -- well, oh, there was one other thing in LA. There was this women's -- the name 60:00escapes me. A women's organization whose purpose in life was to teach Jews to be good citizens. Teach them to do various trades, and how to get along. There were books printed, how to write a letter. And I have a copy, "Letter Writing for Workers." (laughs) But anyway, that -- that's when I was younger in the -- I guess the total Jewish population was smaller. Now the population these days is somewhere between a half million to three quarters of a million. There are a wide variety of organizations. There are different levels of commitment to 61:00Israel. There are groups that -- whose purpose is to arrange tours to Israel for eighteen-year-olds that are supported by money from Israel. There are adult groups that raise money for Israel. There are groups that support a specific university in Israel. A specific university or college or hospital in the United States. City -- like City of Hope is a whole town that's supported by endless fundraising. Originally, it was in the belief that rest, R-E-S-T, rest was the 62:00-- the real treatment and cure for tuberculosis. So, that -- if you had got TB, you'd be shipped out of town to a place where you didn't have to work. You just lay in bed or on a couch, twenty-four hours a day as treatment for TB. But the fundraising around the City of Hope was a year-round organizational thing. There were City of Hope clubs, City of Hope support groups everywhere. So, nowadays, there are many, many, many Jewish cultural -- and nowadays, because of Israel, there are cultural groups based in Hebrew. In my childhood, there were none in 63:00Hebrew, other than the Orthodox. But I don't know if that answers your question.

CW:What about the Yiddish organizations?

AM:Well, the Yiddish organizations, again from my standpoint, my eyes -- I think of the IWO-based organizations and the Workmen's Circle. Workmen's Circle remained a liberal, pro-labor focus. The Jewish People's Fraternal Order remained farther left, anti-Israel, in the belief -- in the classic old Bund belief that the Jews have to fight for their rights where they live and not just 64:00fight for their rights off in some distant homeland. But more important to fight for democracy and et cetera, et cetera, where they live. So, it's -- except now, the far-left organizations are very limited, very few. And there's some Workmen's Circle activities -- still have that JPFO character. They have old-time JPFO people in them, I guess, who lead them in that direction.

CW:What would you say is the JPFO character? How would you describe that?

AM:Oh, more militant, more interracial -- consciously, aggressively interracial. 65:00(laughs) The old story -- they always had a token black or two, and now a token Mexican or two. Used to -- and no Jewish JPFO club would go a year without having an honorary black or two honored at a banquet.

CW:Well, you mentioned that there are many Zionist organizations as well as these Yiddish organizations. I'm wondering where you see the -- the place, the role of Yiddish in the Los Angeles Jewish community now?

AM:Well, the Yiddish, you know, it's still just the left that identifies with Yiddish. There are one or two university-level programs -- two or three, I should say -- university programs that are in English, and the Jewish part is about fifty-fifty, Yiddish and Hebrew. But by and large, in Hebrew, there is very little Hebrew cultural anything. Cultural activity or program in LA. Almost 67:00none. You almost never hear -- there is a Jewish symphony orchestra. It almost never plays Israeli or Hebrew-oriented material. Still does Yiddish-based. There are Jewish programs, but they're almost a hundred percent developments of -- leftovers of the JPFO -- of the left-wing Yiddish schools. You mentioned CYCL, the Conference of Yiddish Culture and Language -- I forget the exact words in 68:00its name. But their material and their people -- is virtually a hundred percent leftover from the JPFO. There is a Workmen's Circle in LA, but it's funded by New Yorkers, almost fifty percent or more than fifty percent. And if it does language material at all, it's Yiddish. It's funny, even though organizationally the Israeli and the Hebrew predominate, culturally the Yiddish predominates, 69:00because the majority of Jews, the largest group, come out of Eastern Europe, and we're Yiddish-based. I mean, that's a pure and simple fact. And its reflections are seen in today's -- even though, if you look in the newspaper about Jewish this or that, it very likely will be talking about a Hebrew-based event, but very few people involved in it.

CW:When you were creating -- you and your wife were creating your own family and deciding sort of how to raise a family, what aspects of Jewishness were 70:00important for you to pass on, and how did you go about doing that?

AM:Well, we did send -- well, first place, we have three children, but two of them are stepchildren. Now, of the two stepchildren, we sent them to Sunday school. And by that time, the Yiddish-based Sunday school -- I call it Sunday school, even though it may have been on Saturday -- I don't remember, to be honest. They went for two, three years. It had very little impact on them. They went 'cause we insisted they go. But they have no feeling and no -- no memory of learning anything. The son that we had, the youngest of the three, he went the 71:00full course, the eight years, to -- one day a week. And the fact of the matter is, he also has very little impact -- matter of fact, my stepdaughter, Melissa, who is now about fifty and went to the Sunday school maybe two, three years, her -- her big project -- upon graduation, you're supposed to have a personal project that relates to the Jewish community. The project that she picked, which reflected her own head, was Jewish costumes over the years. So, she got -- she sewed costumes that three or four of her classmates and she wore, which represented typical Jewish clothing over the centuries. And it was very nice. 72:00But zero remains. She doesn't even have the book. (laughs) I have the book, because it's not of interest to her. I've offered to give it back to her many times over the forty years. She's not interested, so -- and actually, she took a year of Yiddish at University of California. It was taught in Davis, in the Sacramento area. Davis campus. And she did very poorly and remembers zero, so -- but anyway, it's okay. We also have very little -- none of us -- neither my stepchildren nor my child nor Rena and I -- have very, very little connection 73:00with or feeling for Israel. A little. A little. We do not donate to Israeli things. We even complain that too much of the money raised in LA goes to Israel rather than dealing with LA's problems. But we're not especially anti-Israel, except Rena refuses to buy Israeli wine. But we buy cheap wine, and Israeli wine is not cheap. But, anyway, so, Israel has very little impact on us. [BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Well, I'd like to just ask a few more questions about -- for example, when 74:00you were working at Camp Kinderland, what was your role there and how did you get involved?

AM:When my father said that he was being transferred to New York, I said, "Terrific! I want to work at Camp Kinderland," 'cause I was -- I had never been there. As a child -- I have pictures of me at age one in Camp Kinderland. But that was before the family had moved to LA, needless to say, 1931 or '32. Anyway, I was thrilled to be able to work there, and they let me, although my -- I was not very good. But anyway, that's all beside the point. I really enjoyed 75:00it very much, to be among a group of people very, very similar to me. As close as my friends were in LA, my schoolmates and some that I knew out of the Jewish Sunday schools or out of my father's organizational activities -- but no one -- one guy, Teddy Cohen -- the one guy that really was a close friend, I grew to not like him. He was kind of a jerk. And in Kinderland, I met people that I really liked and that really fit me culturally. So, you know, the Jewishness is 76:00wrapped up in that. It was very important, but --

CW:Yeah. Well, I asked earlier about the different Yiddish organizations and I know that you were involved in the Yablon Cultural Club.

AM:The Yablon -- the family Yablon, Misha and something Yablon, donated to Jewish cultural clubs a building that they had used as a dance studio -- rented out as a dance studio, and also as retail furniture on big business streets, Beverly Boulevard, in LA. And the cultural clubs, in the low '90s -- eighteen -- 77:001993, '94, they'd been shriveling and shrinking for a long time. But in one of those years -- I'd have to look it up to make certain, '93 or '94 -- it was noted that, in the entire summer, three months of that year, the buildings had been used twice. Two individual times, for three or four hours each. And yet, 78:00had been paid for various things. Taxes, upkeep, a full-time caretaker, water and power and stuff like that -- of many hundreds of dollars, for two meetings, two events. And so, the club committee -- at that time, the buildings committee consisted of about fifty percent old-timers, my parents' generation, and young-timers. My generation. First -- the generation born in America. And we decided that it was a waste of money to keep up the building that the Yablon 79:00family had donated. So, we sold the building for roughly six hundred thousand, and devoted the money to supporting the same kind of activity that used to be held inside that building. Cultural and educational programs and meetings. So, it took us ten years, roughly, from '94 to a hundred -- to 2004 to spend the six hundred grand. We supported the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony. We supported various dance groups. We paid rent for the Emma Lazarus, wherever they met. They got to choose it. We just gave them money. Cultural club meetings of one sort or 80:00another and theater programs, cultural programs for young people, shules. So, that's the history of Yablon, the Yablon Center. We had a fight, originally, with the Yablon family, the children of the Yablon family. They wanted us to give them the money we got for selling the building, give it back to them. If we don't need it, should go back to them. They were going to turn it over to a Jewish family service -- Jewish welfare group. But we insisted that it be -- go to cultural -- not just to people's needs, rent and stuff, but the cultural usage. And so, like I say, we were -- we spent it over six -- over ten-year 81:00period, during which I was the chair.

CW:Yeah. What do you see as the current state and maybe idea of the future of the role of Yiddish in American -- in America?

AM:Well, in America, Yiddish still dominates the cultural life of the Jewish community. The Jewish community is either English-speaking or Yiddish, and Hebrew is a distant third. Now, there have appeared, in the last few years, even, pretty much in the last few years, only, two or three Jewish -- Hebrew 82:00movies have appeared. I mean, one would appear every ten years. But in the last few years, three or four have appeared. So, there's a little upswing in it, and organizations whose -- like, Hadassah, whose main purpose is to support Israel. But they never had any cultural programs. The cultural stuff was Yiddish. So, they have had lately, in recent times, a bit of Hebrew. But in general, in the language wars, Hebrew dominat-- I'm -- Yiddish dominates, yeah. As little as 83:00there is, Yiddish dominates.

CW:Yeah. So, just two other questions. What -- what is important for you now? What does it mean for you to be an atheist and a Jew to you today?

AM:I enjoy it. No more, no less. I could recite to you some Jewish jokes.

CW:Sure. (laughs)

AM:Well, I'll give you one in particular, because it's really the answer. After the revolution -- needless to say, the communist revolution -- the revolutionary 84:00congress meets. And in their first meeting or so, one of the things on the agenda is "What language shall we speak? I mean, if we're gonna have one outfit that the whole world is gonna belong to and work in for mechanical simplicity, there's got to be a single language." So, everybody agrees, and the delegate from France stands up and says, "Historically, French -- since Napoleon's time, French has been the international language of discourse, and it should be 85:00continued because that's the tradition." And the guy from England stands up and says, "Well, if you go back far enough, that may be true. But the fact is, in the last hundred years, English has been the dominant because of England's historical control of the oceans, of the seas, you know, into international travel and stuff. English has been the most common, widely used language, and is -- it is just absolutely appropriate that English should be officially adopted to be the most widely-used language in the world." And the Japanese delegate 86:00stands up and says, "Khaveyrim, lomir zikh nit narn. Comrades, don't -- let us not fool ourselves," he says in Yiddish. So, anyway, Yiddish still has some character as an international language. Small groups. There is, for instance, in China -- there's one town in far western China that Yiddish is -- half the people there speak Yiddish. There's one town, of course, in -- on the Chinese-Siberian border. It's --

CW:Birobidzhan.

AM:Birobidzhan, where Yiddish is the official language, although I've never seen a study -- how many people there actually speak Yiddish. But the streets are named Sholem Aleichem and Yud Lamed Peretz -- named the -- streets named with Yiddish famous people. But there are Yiddish speakers in a large number of countries and cities around the world. I don't know if that whole thing is -- that I have just said is as true today as it was thirty or forty years ago when those people all over the world all came from Eastern Europe, (laughs) 'cause 88:00now they've come from a lot of different places, the Jews. And they don't necessarily speak Yiddish. One of the biggest Jewish cities in the world is Buenos Aires. But they speak Ladino, which is Jewish-Spanish instead of Jewish-German.

CW:So, I -- just to -- my last question is if you have an eytse.

AM:Yeah.

CW:Do you have any advice for future generations?

AM:No, just take it easy and don't worry about it. Do what you enjoy. I have no -- no magic connection to Jews and Yiddish. I think, and it runs through my head 89:00all the time, how Jews are, in fact, the best people in the world. But, to myself, I say -- the minute I say that to myself, I then say, Okay, August, you're saying that Jewish bullshit again. (laughs) 'Cause, you know, it's the way I feel, but I don't pretend that it means anything more than a Mexican saying it in Spanish or whatever.

CW:Well, a sheynem dank, thank you --

AM:I'm -- you're welcome, s'gornisht [it's nothing].

CW:-- very much. (laughs) Thank you so much --

AM:It's funny --

CW:-- for speaking --

AM:-- the answer to a sheynem dank -- is there an answer?

CW:Nito far vos [You're welcome].

AM:Nito far vos. The Spanish --

CW:Similar. De nada [Spanish: you're welcome], right?

AM:Yeah, de nada, it's nothing. Yeah.

CW:Well, it's been great to talk with you and thanks for taking the time --

AM:Yeah. It's been a pleasure.

CW:-- on this busy day.

[END OF INTERVIEW]