AVI HOFFMAN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney and today is March 12th, 2013. I'm here in Boca Raton, Florida, with Avi Hoffman, and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Avi, do I have your permission to record this?

AVI HOFFMAN:You do.

CW:Thanks. So, to start, can you just tell me a little about your family background?

AH:Sure. Both of my parents came out of the European Holocaust experience. My father was a survivor of Auschwitz, and my mother, although not in a concentration camp, was born in a slave labor camp in Siberia. Her parents were 1:00from Lodz, Poland. My father's family was from the Carpathian Mountains: Czechoslovakia, Hungary. A tiny little shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community] called Apshitze. After the war, my mother ended up in a DP camp in Germany, in Ulm. My father survived Auschwitz, survived a death march, and ended up coming to the United States. They both met in the United States, in New York, working for the YIVO organization. Both of them dedicated their lives to the preservation of the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture. So, Yiddish was actually my first language. I was born in the Bronx, and I grew up in an area of the Bronx that was very heavily fortified in that Yiddish cultural world. And my 2:00family, together with several other very substantial Yiddishist families comprised what was then a major center of Yiddish, on Bainbridge Avenue. To this day, it still exists, the Sholem Aleichem Folkshul [Yiddish secular school], number twenty-one, which is where I studied. My mother was a teacher there.

CW:Before we get to that, can we --

AH:Sure.

CW:Did you get a sense from your parents what -- if -- what life was like for them, their families, before the war?

AH:Holocaust survivors generally don't really speak about their experiences, I've found, unless there are very special circumstances. So, to answer that question, yes and no. It was -- their world permeated my world. So, I knew inherently, from stories about -- my father would tell stories about his father. 3:00There was an ongoing kind of a funny argument, not an argument, but a kind of a discussion in my family about where my artistic talents came from. My father insisted that it was from his father, who was a melamed [Jewish teacher in a traditional school] in the shtetl, who, although most of the year was a very Orthodox teacher of young children, as a melamed -- but every Purim, my grandfather, my father's father, apparently would put together a show for Purim, a purim=shpil, and dress up as Queen Esther and whatever. All the men would dress up and play out the roles and get drunk and do what they were supposed to do. And my father insisted that that was where my talent came from. My mother, on the other hand, insisted that the talent came from her mother. And her 4:00parents had a very different experience, also very infused in Yiddish but not Holocaust -- concentration camp Holocaust. They were a slave labor camp in Siberia. My grandfather was a typesetter who dealt with the black market in the labor camp and eventually bribed his way out. And I always heard the stories, but I can't point to a specific time or place where either one of my parents sat me down and said, "Here's the story of my mishpokhe [family]." It was just part of our milieu, it was part of my world. And they didn't speak English at home, with me. They spoke English. I mean, we all spoke English. My grandmother, who probably spoke the least, used to say, "I speak a perfect English!" (laughs) But 5:00they insisted on Yiddish being the language that I was taught growing up and that I spoke growing up. I actually didn't learn English till I started public school, in P.S. 95 in the Bronx. So, that brings me back a little bit to where we were. It was this enclave of Yiddishists. It was all the families that are still known for their Yiddish today: the Mlotkes, Zalmen Mlotek and Chana Mlotek and Yosl Mlotek, that was the Mlotek clan. They were related to the Gottliebs. There were the Gottesmans, Itzik Gottesman and his father [sic], Beyle [pronounces it Bella] Gottesman, famous poet. We were the three musketeers. The Fishmans. Shikl Fishman, David Fishman, Gella Fishman, so -- the Schaechters, Mordkhe Schaechter and Tsharne Schaechter and Binyumen Schaechter and Rukhl, and 6:00Tsirl, and Dobrish, Gitl, and Eydele. We were all -- we all grew up together. Dovidl Fishman, Itzikl Gottesman, and myself were the three mushketer-- di dray mushketern. We were the three musketeers. And they lived on Bainbridge Avenue, we lived on Sedgwick Avenue, a little whiles away, but we all grew up together. And there were the Fishmans, the Gottesmans, the Schaechters, the Mloteks, the Gottliebs, the Waletzkys, Josh Waletzky and Sid Waletzky, Tsirl. And the Hoffmans. I mean, we were part of this group that was very, very activist in terms of the Yiddish world.

CW:So, how did that play out in your home? What was -- what did -- yeah?

AH:Well, I guess -- (laughs) you say play out. That was normal, that was the -- normal.

CW:What did it look like, yeah?

AH:That was the norm. The way that it played out, I guess, in terms of this interview is that because my parents were such -- so dedicated to keeping the Yiddish culture alive, from the time I can remember myself being human and alive, I sang Yiddish songs and I heard Yiddish songs on the record player, and I heard comedy, Yiddish comedy, and I was taken to the Yiddish theater. And so, the culture that was still very strong at the time, although it was beginning to 8:00wane by then -- that was where the downfall really began, in the late '50s. The Yiddish was still very strong through the '20s, '30s, '40s, and into the late '50s. But after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there began this transition from Yiddish, which was now representing the Old Country, the slaughter of the Holocaust, the Old World -- to this new and exciting Israeli Hebrew "we are strong Jews" mentality. And so, kids didn't go to Yiddish schools anymore. They started going to Sunday Hebrew schools. They stopped learning Yiddish, they started learning Hebrew. And so, that transition started as the 9:00late '50s and '60s -- and certainly into the '70s and beyond. But we were still strong. I mean, there were still hundreds of Yiddish schools when I was growing up. There was the Sholem Aleichem Institute, there were the Peretz -- Yud Lamed Peretz, the Workmen's Circle, there was the Bund. I mean, there were just all these Yiddish organizations, and every organization had its own school system, and every school system had its own -- so, it was a world that was still thriving at the time, and that was what I was brought up in. So, my earliest memories are from the Yiddish theater and from the Yiddish radio and from the Yiddish albums, and Dzigan and Schumacher comedy, and all the Yiddish songs. And 10:00in our school, at Sholem Aleichem Folkshul -- and again, we were really one of the -- maybe the most -- core Yiddish activist group. There were a lot of Yiddish schools out there, but there was only one Fishman family, one Gottesman family, one Schaechter family, one Mlotek family, one Hoffman family. We were really the core -- the Waletzkys -- I mean, to this day, those are the names that still permeate the world of Yiddish. So, I feel very privileged to have grown up in this very, very cultured, secular -- for me, although there were some -- the Fishmans had the religious aspect. I'm trying to think who else. 11:00Really, nobody else at the time. Since then, several of the families have become more religious. But most of us were what they called the secular humanists. We were non-religious, but we knew so much about the faith. Our religion was the culture, and the material that came with that culture. So, Pesach, which -- probably one of my favorite Jewish holidays -- was a celebration, not only of the religious ritual, but the cultural folklore story of the Exodus. And it was enhanced by this incredibly rich Yiddish element that added -- took the Passover 12:00story and put it into a perspective of the world of Yiddish and the Holocaust and the partizane [partisan fighters] and the partizane -- (singing) "Zog nisht keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veyg [Never say that this is your final path]," that was a Passover song for us. So --

CW:So, how would you do the seders?

AH:Oh, we had our own hagode [the book of readings for the Passover seder]. We had the Yiddish hagode, the Pass-- the Sholem Aleichem hagode. I still have them at home and I still use them. For us, it was a mixture. It was this eclectic mix of the old religious tradition with the modern, secular, European tradition. And 13:00every holiday -- I mean, I know more about the religious celebrations than many of the religious people I know, but not because I'm religious, but because I grew up knowing all the stories, studying the Bible as folklore. To us, the Old Testament, the Bible, was folklore. These great stories. It was these amazing stories. And the Yiddish element of it -- considering the depth and richness of the Yiddish language and culture -- and my family -- my mother, obviously, to this day is professor of Yiddish at Columbia. All of these families brought to the equation this incredibly scholarly and intelligent analysis and 14:00understanding of the language, the culture, and its implications for our modern lives at the time.

CW:So, around the table or when you would gather, either in your own family or with all these other families, what was a typical conversation? I mean, were you discussing Yiddish literature and politics, or --

AH:Sure, like anybody else. I mean, our conversations were the same as any other family, except, I guess -- well, I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure. But, yes, the answer is yes. We spoke politics, we talked about literature, all the writers -- I mean, they were friends of ours. My mother knew Itzik Manger. My mother met Isaac Bashevis Singer. I didn't, but I met -- Avrom Sutzkever was a good friend of ours. Many great personalities in the world of Yiddish literature 15:00passed through our homes. In 1981, my mother and I wrote our first show together, which was the life -- it was called -- at the time, was called "A Rendezvous with God." Later, I renamed it "Reflections of a Lost Poet," "A randevu mit got," at the time, which was the life and works of Itzik Manger, one of the greatest Yiddish poets ever. Well, he was someone everybody knew. He passed through people's homes, and his was a very tragic story of a poet, and my mother and I put that into dramatic form, which I perform to this day. I mean, I've done it for -- '81, so what are we talking about? (laughs) Long time, 16:00thirty-two years. I -- and a matter of fact, I just did it two summers ago at the Montreal International Yiddish Festival. I hadn't done the Yiddish version in about twenty-five years. So, it's fascinating to be able to see a life cycle, not only of the art itself, the artist itself, the material itself, but also a life cycle of a piece and the performance of it. To approach a piece as a twenty-four-year-old is very different than approaching a piece as a fifty-year-old. Certainly, a life like Itzik Manger's. So, it's quite fascinating to -- for me, certainly, as an artist to be able to look at a life of work and -- but to get back to your question -- so, yes, the conversations in 17:00the home (laughter) were probably different than, I guess, your typical Jewish home because we were very active in a very specific cultural milieu.

CW:And you -- I mean, this, as you said, was the norm. Looking back, were there specific people who came through that you remember to this day as having a big impression on you?

AH:Sure. Theo Bikel. My mother had every single Theodore Bikel album that ever possibly could come out, and played them over and over. So, to me, Theo Bikel was an iconic figure. Imagine my delight when I met Theo Bikel and we became 18:00friends, to this day. Itzik Manger, we just mentioned Itzik Manger. The first Broadway show I ever saw was in 1963, I want to say, or '65, when they did "The Megillah of Itzik Manger" on Broadway. This was the Burstein family. It was Pesach Burstein and Lillian Lux, his wife. And Mike Burstyn, the great Mike Burstyn, who played the young Fastrigosso -- and I remember seeing it, and I knew that musical backwards and forwards. We had the album, it was on -- I could still sing you, probably, every lyric of every song. It was my favorite. That was my most beloved show. As a matter of fact, they're doing -- I think they're 19:00doing this year at the Folksbiene. In any event, Mike Burstyn became my idol. He was a young man at the time, we're going back quite a while now. He -- I think he was maybe twenty years old when he did the show. And we went to the show, and I -- I was a child. I was maybe, what, five or six. And I remember just sitting there, flabbergasted at seeing the people that I had heard on the album over and over and over and over and over, and there they were, live! And I begged my mother to go to the backstage door so I could get Mike's autograph. And I waited and waited, and eventually he came out and there he was, Mike Burstyn. I mean, I -- what? "Please, Mr. Burstyn, please can I have your autograph?" And he looked 20:00at me and said, "What's your name?" I said "Avremele." He said, "Avremele, what do you want to be when you grow up?" I said, "I want to be an actor, just like you." And he took my "Playbill" and he wrote, "Dear" -- "To Avremele, may you have a long and successful career." I don't remember the exact wording. "Love, Mike Burstyn." Well, I still have that. Now, Mike and I are friends. I've worked with Mike many times now, and so, in my early twenties, I worked with Mike for the first time, and I brought my "Playbill" and said, "Mike, you don't remember this, but this is a memory that is indelible, I mean that has just been entrenched in my soul for the rest of my life." And I showed him this "Playbill" and we laughed. I mean, it's -- to -- there were -- whether it was Dzigan and Shumacher, whether it was -- just the -- even Itzik Manger reading his own 21:00poetry -- and the dozens and dozens if not hundreds of others who kind of passed through our lives at the time. Yeah, quite an extraordinary and very unique period of time, and a very unique experience.

CW:Can you tell me a little about the Sholem Aleichem Yiddish Folkshul?

AH:Oh, sure. I can only speak to the one I went to, which was eyn un tsvantsik, which was twenty-one on Bainbridge Avenue, which, to this day, is still a center for Yiddish activity. (laughs) It was our second home. We grew up in the building. I mean, that -- really, when I think about my childhood, I think about Sholem Aleichem Yiddish Folkshul, eyn un tsvantsik. That's where I was, that's where I grew up. Bluma Lederhendler and Chava Goldstein, the principal, and all 22:00the teachers. And my mom was a teacher there. And I -- it was my childhood. I mean, I'm not sure -- it was buzzing with activity. We were constantly putting on shows that were written by my mother and the other mothers, and Malka Gottlieb would play the piano. And eventually Zalman was playing piano. I'll tell you a story about Zalman in a minute. But it -- there was a non-stop buzz of activity. Every day, every night, every weekend, seven days a week, it was 23:00always active. I grew up on that block, even though I lived several blocks away, I really grew up on Bainbridge Avenue. And we would hang out, either at the Fishmans or the Gottesmans or the Schaechters, 'cause they lived three houses, basically -- with one house in the middle. And the school was right down the block. So, here was the school, here were the Schaechters, here were the Gottesmans, here were the Fishmans. And we lived a few blocks away. So, it was constant. It was just constant creativity.

CW:In terms of the pedagogy, it wasn't religious. It was cultural, but you were learning history alts af yidish [entirely in Yiddish]?

AH:Alts af yidish. Alts af yidish. And you say it wasn't religious. I mean, we had Shabbos, we lit candles. I mean, there -- we celebrated the ceremonies, but 24:00it wasn't necessarily godly, if you can understand the distinction. It was spiritual, but it wasn't necessarily godly. It was about a cultural experience. It was about a historical faith, a cultural faith, which made it very special and very deep. I -- without giving away names -- but I was always struck, even as a child, at what I perceived as the hypocrisy of some of the religious people 25:00that I knew, 'cause they would talk the religion, but in their actions, they acted otherwise. Even things like -- they keep kosher at home. Very important. Don't mix the meat and the milk and dishes and -- and you can't -- "How dare you?" Because we didn't keep kosher. But that same person would show up at our house on Sundays to eat bacon. So, growing up, that was a very interesting kind of dichotomy and weird hypocrisy that I never quite understood. But from our perspective, Shabbos and khanike [Hanukkah] and rosheshone [Rosh Hashanah] and Yom Kippur and Pesach and every holiday, Purim, every story, every Biblical story, every religious story brought with it an entire world of creativity. I 26:00keep coming back to the idea of this creativity, because I think -- just in answering your questions, I mean, what really jumps out the most to me was the creativity of everyone around us, in Yiddish. It was a world of creation. And I think part of that was a result of the experience of the Holocaust, where everything was dying and being killed. And so, these people, or at least the ones who came out of that experience, were so entrenched and invested in rebirth and creating. So, that really influenced my life, certainly, but everyone in our 27:00little enclave -- the women: my mom and Malka Gottlieb and Tsiv Waletsky and Gella Fishman started their own little thing called "Oyfgang [Emergence]," and they were creating booklets and -- with artistic depictions and poetry that they were writing. Everyone was creating. Everyone was creative. Everyone was playing an instrument, everyone was writing, everyone was -- I was acting. But everyone was doing something, constantly. Mordkhe Schaechter was making a new Yiddish language. I mean, the -- Shikl Fishman was studying twenty-seven languages. He was a linguist of the highest order, and I guess Dovidl, his son, has continued. The Gottesmans -- Bella was a poet, and his father was a doctor. And he, of course, now works at the "Forverts." And it's just this -- Josh Waletzky, 28:00Academy Awards and documentaries. The Gottliebs with the piano, Zalmen with music, and Chana Mlotek with music, and Yosl Mlotek at the Arbeter Ring. I mean, it was a world. All of these people were there, always around us. It was just Harold Ostroff and Bernie Zumoff and just all these people were all there. And I was a kid, just growing up in the middle of it.

CW:So, tell me about your first foray into performing Yiddish on the stage.

AH:Well, it's -- I -- in my shows, I talk -- I kind of joke about how I was actually born acting, because I was born in the Royal Hospital, and it was a teaching hospital. So, there were actually twenty-five medical students present at my birth, learning how to perform a cesarean section. So, apparently after I 29:00was taken out and shown to the medical students, they all applauded and I took my first bow. (laughs) I don't ever remember not performing, but I guess if I had to quantify an actual event: when I was four years old, at the Sholem Aleichem on Bainbridge, they -- my mother apparently wrote a little show with -- I guess it was with the other ladies, with Malka, I think, writing the music, and -- maybe Gella helping her with the lyrics. I'm not sure exactly who all did it. But it was a little musical called "Alef avreyml." Needless to say, Avreyml was me. I was Avreyml -- Avi, Avreyml, Avrom, Avreym. And it was my first 30:00starring role, and it was just a cute little kid show that we did at the school. "Alef avreyml, gegangn in vald. Beyz hot a ber im gezen dortn bald [Alef Avreyml went into the forest. A mean bear soon caught sight of him]." And the bear says, "Myam myam myam, avreyml. Du bist aza zisinke, myam myam myam. Du bist aza gitinke, myam myam myam. Ikh ken dir ofesn [Yum yum yum, Avreyml. You're so sweet, yum yum yum. You're so good, yum yum yum. I could eat you up]." And, of course, Alef Avreyml beats the beyz ber and chops him up into little pieces and feeds him to all the other letters of the Yiddish alphabet. So, a show about food. What else is new? But that was my first real -- that's my first memory. There were a lot of purim-shpils. We played parts always. No matter what we did, 31:00from the time I can remember myself at the shul, we always played parts. There were always little performances. Singing songs and performing. But that's the first piece that I remember. When I was eight years old -- or when I was five or six, my parents took me to see "The Megillah of Itzik Manger." When I was about the same age, "Fiddler on the Roof" came out, and that, of course, was huge. That was a huge -- based on Sholem Aleichem! I mean, this was the pride of our people, that suddenly a show that was so Jewish (laughs) could be accepted by the mainstream in such a huge way and become so successful -- and obviously, 32:00subsequently, all over the world in so many languages. So, that -- Zero Mostel became another one of my idols. But by the time I was eight, "Fiddler" was now being done all over the country. And so, the community center on Hillman Avenue, right across the street from my public school, P.S. 95, decided to do an all-children's version of "Fiddler on the Roof" and I got to play Tevye. Now, who do you think was the music director? Zalmen Mlotek. So, Zalmen was playing piano for the "Fiddler" that I was doing when he was -- I don't know, I think he was sixteen at the time, and I was eight. And there we were, doing "Fiddler on the Roof." So, that was the world that I kind of came into as a performer. By 33:00the time I was ten, word had gotten out that there was this little kid in the Bronx who spoke fluent Yiddish and was an actor and wanted to be an actor. And that's when I got the first call from the Folksbiene, which, at the time, was probably the oldest and one of the most respected Yiddish theaters still around. By this point, 1968, the Yiddish theater had waned. The Yiddish culture had started to wane. And so, the Folksbiene was still there and they called me up and said, "We're doing this show called 'Bronx Express 1968' and there's a role for a young boy, and would you be willing to come and do it?" And, of course, I jumped at the opportunity. I was very excited. And I played Yosl Hungerstolz in 34:00this production -- and I brought lots of pictures and whatnot. Got my first "New York Times" review, my first "New York Post" review, all very positive. And it was a kind of a typical Yiddish melodrama with socialist overtones. It was [Osem Dimoff?], so it had that same kind of semi-socialist lefty bent that we all grew up with. I mean, that was the Arbeter Ring and the Bund. I mean, we were all kind of lefties. "Workers of the world unite" kind of thing. And this was a piece very much about that. A worker, a hard worker, a tailor in a sweatshop who takes the subway, the Bronx express, every day to work and back, and eventually 35:00thinks he's met -- we find out later that the whole thing is a dream, that he falls asleep and dreams this whole thing. But he meets a friend from the Old Country who's become very rich and successful, who convinces him to leave his family and go off to seek fame and wealth and riches and -- on Wall Street. And he does, and leaves his family behind. And then, I meet up with him in the subway, shining shoes, because now I've become the primary breadwinner of the family at the age of ten, and meet him in the subway, shining his shoes, and start crying. "Oy, tate, tate! Du kenst mikh nisht? Dos bin ikh, dayn zindele Yosele. Oy, tate, kim aheym, tate. Kim tsurik tsu dayn mishpokhe! [Oh, daddy, daddy! You don't recognize me? It's me, your son Yosele. Oh, daddy, come home, daddy. Come back to your family!]" And, of course, he wakes up and realizes the whole thing is a dream and goes back to his family. So, that was my first 36:00professional job. I mean, that was my first real job in the Yiddish theater, and that really started my career.

CW:And obviously, I mean, in the Yiddish theater world at that time, there were some of the big names still present --

AH:Sure.

CW:-- and you would have --

AH:Not -- the show that I did, it was the Folksbiene, which was kind of, I guess, considered -- at the time, it was considered kind of second tier, but they still had some of the bigger Yiddish theater stars, still working some, but -- the Ben Bonuses of the world, who I got to work with much later on. But, yes, I mean, you know, the Rechtzeits, Jack Rechtzeit was in my show and Tsipore Shpaysman, and there were all these people who were of that milieu and who were 37:00in that world. And they all came to see the show, and it was all part of that Yiddish world that was slowly disappearing.

CW:Did you have a sense -- when you say that world was disappearing, was that something that people were aware of, talked about, lamented at the time? (laughter)

AH:It's interesting. Over two hundred years ago, there was a Jewish historian who was recorded saying the following. I don't remember his name. But he basically said, "Within ten years, Yiddish will be dead." He, of course, is dead. Yiddish is still around. Yiddish is a very unique language, and its death has been prophesied for hundreds of years. It's a thousand years old, and for 38:00hundreds of years, they've been saying it's dying. Now, having said that, I think it will never die, but it is definitely on life support at the moment. And so, to answer your question more directly, I think there was an acceptance of the fact that there was a significant deterioration in the world within which we existed, which became much more pronounced within a decade or two. The difference between when I left the United States in 1969 for Israel -- I grew up 39:00in Israel, from '69 to '77. I came back in '77. By the time I came back in '77, 1980, when I graduated college, the change was dramatic. That ten-year period, that thirteen-year period between the late '60s and the early '80s was a very significant deterioration in the world of Yiddish culture and Yiddish language, because by that point, we had lost the schools. As long as we had schools and there were young people learning Yiddish, there was still a sense of life to it. But by the time the '80s rolled around, the schools were gone. What was left was 40:00a skeletal nothing. And the Yiddish theaters that had thrived were now basically gone. What was left was the Folksbiene, which was doing semi-amateur work, and a few die-hard Yiddish theater personalities who still could draw an audience of old people, Ben Bonus being the most significant, I think, at the time, here in the States. And so, I mean, it's fascinating. When I was in Israel, from '69 to '77, (laughs) Yiddish was in -- was not even part of my life. I mean, I shouldn't say that completely. Because I only spoke Yiddish and English when I 41:00got there at the age of eleven and the kids my age couldn't speak English yet -- they hadn't started learning English. They were only starting to learn English at the age of eleven or twelve. So, I couldn't communicate, 'cause I couldn't speak Hebrew. So, Yiddish was my only language to communicate with the older people. So, I got along famously with the old Holocaust survivor principal in my school. (laughs) I had great conversations in Yiddish. But until I learned Hebrew, I really didn't have the skills to communicate. Now, luckily, because of my Yiddish, Hebrew was easy. And obviously, there are so many shared words and structure. So, within six months, I was speaking fluent Hebrew. Within a year, I was doing theater. But not Yiddish. There was no Yiddish theater, really, there. 42:00There was no Yiddish world there. The only Yiddish I really remember from my Israel experience -- my mom tried to teach Yiddish in Israel, and on and off succeeded, but not a lot. But sometime in the mid-'70s, Dzigan -- one of his last hurrahs was to do a Yiddish television program for Israeli TV in Hebrew and Yiddish, where he was doing some of his old comedy routines. And my mom was involved in it in some capacity or other. So, I remember that. But really, there was no Yiddish at all for me. It was all Hebrew. It was Hebrew theater, children's theater, television, film. I had quite a career in Israel. By the time I graduated high school, in 1976, and by the time I left in '77, I had 43:00quite a career in Israel, and I was known. I mean, people knew me, I was recognized on the streets, I was on TV, I was -- people knew who I was. And then, I came back to the States in '77, because I just thought -- number one, I didn't want to go to the army. I was too much of a pacifist. And even though I was offered a position in the Israeli army theater, I thought, Okay, I can spend three years doing theater in the army, and then what? Continue my career here in Israel? I'm fluent in English. I'm an American. I can go back to the US and have a career in America. Why not do that? So, there I was, nineteen. I thought, All right, enough. So, I came back to the States and got my degree here in Florida, University of Miami, and then got a call from Ben Bonus, who had heard through 44:00the grapevine that that little boy from 1969 who did Yiddish theater at the Folksbiene was back in the United States and still spoke Yiddish and still doing theater. And he called me and said that he was putting together a production of a show called "The Bride" -- "The Blacksmith's Daughter," another Yiddish melodrama, whatever, and would I be willing to come and play the lead role? And I was, like, oh my God, sure! What a great opportunity. Right out of college and off to New York to play a lead role in a New York Yiddish theater program. And to my amazement, I arrive at the first day of rehearsal and Ben Bonus, who 45:00probably was close to eighty at the time, comes up to me and he says, "Avreyml, kh'vil mit dir redn, kim aher [Little Avi, I want to talk to you, come here]." "I want to talk to you." Says, "I've been thinking. I'm not sure that my audience is ready to see a show where I am not the star. So, I've decided that I will be playing the young man. And you, my friend, will play a small but very important role of the eighty-year-old bookseller." And there I was, twenty-two years old, playing an eighty-year-old bookseller while the eighty-year-old Ben Bonus was playing this young, twenty-year-old love interest. And, to me, that is what killed Yiddish theater. That's one of the reasons Yiddish theater, in its 46:00-- in that form died. Now, luckily, very shortly thereafter, because I did that show, I got a call from Moishe Rosenfeld, who had heard that I was in town. Now, I didn't know Moishe as a child, because he grew up in Montreal. But Zalman is a cousin. Zalman and Moishe are cousins. So, I guess Zalman was involved with this project, and they decide -- they were putting together something that I believe was probably the first modern revolution in Yiddish theater, which started off as a one-night tribute on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the "Forverts," at the Stevensville Hotel, in the Catskills. And what made it a revolution was that it was not new material, per se, but it was old material compiled in a modern 47:00way and performed and directed and created by a core group of young people, which, at the time, consisted of Moishe and myself and Eleanor Reissa and Phyllis Berk and -- I'm trying to think if Joanne Borts was in it then. I think she joined later. In any event, it was this little group of young people doing this old material in a very new way. And that one evening was so successful that it eventually evolved into what became the show the "Golden Land" -- "This Golden Land," "This Golden Land." So, suddenly, we were -- and that -- and by that point, Moishe had pulled out of the show and Bruce Adler replaced him. So, 48:00suddenly, I'm working with Bruce Adler, and Joanne Borts and Neva Small and Eleanor and -- I mean, it just -- it evolve into a much bigger thing. It ran a total of probably about four years, all over the country, and it really was, in many ways, a revolution. They just revived it, not that long ago. But it was unique and, with all due respect to the revival that just closed, they could never have what we had. And that's not to take away from the talent of the kids who just did it. But we were the real thing. Bruce Adler came from a family of Yiddish theater: Julius Adler and Henrietta Jacobson. He grew up on the lap of the greats. Yablokoff, Herman Yablokoff. I mean, he would tell me stories about 49:00Skulnik and -- (coughs) excuse me. So, suddenly, I was involved in this group of young Yiddish creators. And it was very exciting to be a part of it, and very unique. And, again, will never happen again, certainly not like that. It was an extraordinary experience. And one thing led to another. So, "The Golden Land" led to work with Mike Burstyn on a video, and then that led to "The Rise of David Levinsky," which, although that wasn't Yiddish, was based on the great Abraham Cahan and his novel of the same name. And that became the biggest Off-Broadway production of its time, which I starred in. And, again, one thing 50:00led to another, led to another. The Itzik Manger show. I mean, one thing -- and, thus, a career is made.

CW:So, what -- how come your family went to Israel at that time?

AH:(laughs) I never quite got the exact story from my dad. I think it was a combination of a lot of different things: 1969 in the Bronx was a very bad time. The late '60s in general were not a great time in the US There were -- lot of social upheaval. The Civil Rights acts had been enacted. There were all these problems in the slums. The Bronx was burning. I mean, literally burning. Lindsay, Mayor Lindsay at the time had, with very good intentions -- had created these projects for people to live in -- that if people didn't have homes, he 51:00built these enormous projects. The unintended consequence was that people burned their homes so that they could move into the projects, 'cause then they were homeless and they didn't have a home, so they could move -- so, the Bronx was burning, literally. Crime was up. There was a garbage strike, I remember, in '69. I mean, it was -- it stunk. Literally, physically -- I mean, just -- it was not a good time. My father had built an enormously successful business, and he decided that he had had enough. And at the age -- the tender age of forty-two, he basically sold his business and retired. Now, he had discovered by the mid-'60s that he had surviving relatives: two sisters who had survived the war 52:00and lived in Israel. Now, his brother, my uncle, was actually in the business with him. So, we grew up together. And here's an example of religious versus not. My uncle was very religious, and his family was very religious. And ours was not. And it was a very interesting kind of dichotomy of worlds. My cousins have gone on to become great rabbis in Israel. They don't know me. I'm not Jewish enough for them. (laughter) I'm too Jewish for everybody else, but not Jewish enough for them. So, my father, I think, decided, in 1969, that enough was enough, and he sold his business and retired at a young age and moved us to Israel so he could be with his sisters. And his brother eventually moved, too. 53:00So, it was a move. My mother was not happy about it. It took her a long time to really build a life for herself in Israel. And for me, it was heaven. Growing up in Israel as a teenager was the best of all worlds. So, I was very pleased, and -- but again, by 1977 -- I graduated high school in '76. By 1977, I felt like I had reached my ceiling in Israel, and that I needed to come back.

CW:There's this -- I mean, there's a lot of talk of Yiddish in Israel at that time as being officially or sort of quasi-officially banned and sort of -- was really suppressed. Did you feel that, coming from this Yiddish svive 54:00[environment] to Israel?

AH:I guess I have -- I have to answer that in two ways. I was young, so I don't really know what the adult world's take on it was. From my perspective, Yiddish was just not encouraged. The old European Yiddish speakers were there, obviously, in great numbers, and they spoke Yiddish. But from a national perspective, there was no encouragement of Yiddish. There was no promotion of 55:00Yiddish, either as a culture, as a language, or in any other way. And I guess unofficially, just from a cultural perspective, growing up as a young person in Israel, you kind of looked at these old guys, these old people speaking Yiddish, who came out of the Holocaust, and kind of thought, oh, man, they were all slaughtered and they didn't fight and they didn't stand up, and why didn't they fight? That was the Israeli perspective. Here you had a whole generation of young people, especially coming out of 1967 and the Six-Day War, where suddenly Israel was this enormous militaristic Goliath -- David that beat Goliath, this incredible army, and strength, and no one will ever -- never again! And so, the 56:00old Yiddish world was frowned upon and looked at as something less than perfect. Israel was perfect, Israelis were perfect. And so, it was a very interesting dichotomy for me, certainly, growing up in the world of Yiddish, to suddenly be in a world that was so not.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:So, just to start with the most theoretical, I guess, what is your take on the idea of cultural revival?

AH:From the Yiddish perspective? Well, this brings me back to what we kind of discussed earlier, which is the prophecy of the death of Yiddish for hundreds of years. Yiddish, I think, has an incredibly unique ability, like the phoenix, to 57:00rise from its own ashes, literally and figuratively. The Holocaust was obviously an incredibly devastating blow to the world of Yiddish. I mean, you lose six million Yiddish speakers, and it was almost fatal and almost -- and I don't use that word lightly, I mean, because for most practical purposes, Yiddish died along with the six million. It took several decades for that to kind of find 58:00itself, but by the '80s, Yiddish was all but dead. And then, out of those ashes, came "The Golden Land." Out of those ashes came a show that I did with my mother for Joseph Papp called "Songs of Paradise," "Lider fun gan-eydn," which was the second modern revolution in Yiddish theater: all young people, all new material based on Itzik Manger, but all new approach, "Saturday Night Live" style in Yiddish work. And it was very successful at the Public Theater, and I'm hoping to bring it back. The klezmer revival, which happened around that same time. So, my mother has been teaching Yiddish at Columbia for twenty-odd years. And what 59:00you find in the academic world is that, you know, when she started twenty-odd years ago, twenty-eight years ago, she had six kids in her class. Now she's got twenty, thirty, forty. There is this constant renewal of the pool of interest, certainly in the academic world, and very slowly in the theatrical milieu. Now you've got the New Yiddish Rep and you've got -- the Folksbiene is still around, of course. It's the only one left. But you have a relatively live Yiddish theater scene -- Yiddish world in Montreal. Yiddishpiel in Israel has suddenly kind of gotten its legs. There is Yiddish theater in Poland. Ironically, I think 60:00at the time that I met them, back in the '90s, there were only three Jews in an entire company of Yiddish theater actors. But when I talked to the director of the National Yiddish Theater of Poland, his take was that Poland suffered culturally with the loss of the Jews of Poland in the Holocaust, and that Yiddish culture was necessary for Polish culture to revive itself. And so, I find it fascinating. In Germany now, there is some revival of Yiddish, of the 61:00Yiddish world. In Russia, certainly, there's still Yiddish speakers. Yiddish is still spoken. And again, ironically, Yiddish lives in the Orthodox Jewish community, but they have very little interest in the cultural aspect. To them, Yiddish is not the holy tongue, so they can use it in day-to-day business and life. You know, Hasidish. But what we are now starting to see is those young people in the Orthodox community who, like other young people in every 62:00community, tend to rebel and leave where they've come from. So, now you have these young, Orthodox rebels coming out of that world with their Yiddish intact and looking for outlets, whether it's Yiddish film -- there are now all these modern independent feature films in Yiddish that are showing up at festivals, whether from Israel or Europe or America. All these kind of rebellious Yiddish theater groups in New York, whether it's the New Yiddish Rep or -- there are one or two other little groups that are doing Yiddish. So, once again, just to kind of tie this up, this rebirth seems to be a function of the Yiddish language and 63:00culture throughout history. Obviously, at different points in history, it's taken different forms, and coming from a much richer world, where there were fifty Yiddish newspapers and countless Yiddish publication houses and writers, and it's all dwindled down to this tiny little grain of survival, and -- but yet, that seed continues to throw offshoots and branches. And I'm fascinated by people like Shane Baker. I don't know if you know Shane, but to me, he is the ultimate Yiddish revival: some gentile from the Midwest who fell in love with 64:00the language and has become maybe one of its greatest proponents and scholars. His Yiddish is incredibly beautiful. I mean, I'm stunned every time I speak to him. I mean, his Yiddish probably surpasses mine substantially. And here he is, doing Yiddish theater, and finding an outlet. So, yeah, I mean, I guess that's a long answer to a short question.

CW:(laughs) It's okay. And what do you see as the role of -- that performing artists play or don't in this -- in the transmission of Yiddish culture?

AH:I think that without it, we don't have a chance. And again, not to take away from the work that Aaron does at the National Yiddish Book Center, which is a 65:00miracle, truly. I mean, I remember when he started, and I thought really? Collecting Yiddish books? All right, good luck. (laughter) And that has now become a multimillion dollar, international institution. So, yasher-koyekh [bravo]. I mean, it's -- that's amazing. But I still wonder how you go from the academic to the popular -- to the mainstream. Is it really going to be a situation where teenagers, Jewish or non-Jewish, go running to the National Yiddish Book Center to look for a book in Yiddish? Yeah, I don't know that I see 66:00that yet. But music and theater and dance and poetry and the arts, performing arts in general -- film, television, whatever -- are the tool best suited to reach the mainstream audience. And so, then the question remains, what do you bring them in order to bring them in? I'm an optimist by nature. So, I tend to see the glass as half full. And I'm encouraged. In 1994, I wrote my first show, 67:00my first show of my trilogy, which was "Too Jewish," and it had a lot of Yiddish in it, and it was very successful and won many awards all over the country and was on National Public Television and has been seen by millions of people. And it had a lot of Yiddish in it. It wasn't all in Yiddish. It was in English. But it had a lot of Yiddish in it. And I'm not gonna say I was the first, because there were many before me who did things like that. But I was very -- I am very encouraged to see that in the seventeen years or eighteen years since, so many others have followed that lead and have been successful. "A Jew Grows in Brooklyn," my dear friend Jake Ehrenreich. I wrote my show in his apartment, in 68:00the Village. He watched me write my show. And for ten years, he would always say to me, "You know, I should write a show, too!" And I'd go, "Yeah, you really should. You have a very unique story." Well, ten years later or thirteen, twelve years later, he did, and called it "A Jew Grows in Brooklyn," and it was very successful, and continues to find success all over the country. And there's a lot of Yiddish in that. "Old Jews Telling Jokes" is Off-Broadway right now, and it's been running for quite a while. It's not Yiddish, but it's a Yiddish mentality, it's a Yiddish style. They're jokes, but that's part of what -- millennium shmillennium. I mean, that's why I wore this t-shirt today, because 69:00this, kind of in a nutshell, tells the story. The millennium. Big deal. You know what I'm saying? Yiddish has always had this incredible ability to take the most important, significant experiences, tragedies, and laugh at itself. Sholem Aleichem was a genius. Peretz was a genius. All these writers. Chaim Grade. I just did -- not that long ago, I did a production of "The Quarrel," which is based on "My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner." It's brilliant. Isaac Bashevis Singer, I do a show -- my mother wrote a show that I've worked with her on for several years, about the life and works of Isaac Bashevis Singer. I mean, there is genius in this world of Yiddish that has been lost, in a generation. 70:00Literally in a generation, which is unheard of. We still do Shakespeare, but we don't do Bashevis Singer. If you ask your typical Jew today, walking down the street in Boca Raton, "Do you know who Isaac Bashevis Singer was?" -- chances are they'll say either, "Sounds familiar" or "No, not really," or "Did he invent the sewing machine?" You know what I'm saying? I mean, but here's a guy who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979. Not that long ago. And yet, we have forgotten. Our children don't know. The Jewish children don't know. And that, to me, is the real tragedy here -- is that we have let an entire generation go by 71:00that has been denied the treasure of our culture. And that, to me, is a great tragedy. But through the performing arts, we can reignite an interest in this and start to bring it back.

CW:And you have kids.

AH:I have two children.

CW:Yeah?

AH:Yes.

CW:So, when -- I mean, they were growing up with a Yiddish actor. What did you consciously or maybe not consciously try to pass on to them?

AH:Well, unfortunately, I gave up speaking Yiddish to them in a very short time. I did. I started off with the best of intentions. They were born and I spoke 72:00only Yiddish to them. I figured they'll get English from their mother, they'll get English from the world, but only I can give them Yiddish. And it became a burden. So, unfortunately, neither of my two children actually speak Yiddish. But, because I am so involved in the world of Yiddish, they have, through osmosis -- and not unlike myself, growing up in a world where it was around, they have acquired a sensibility of the Yiddish milieu. And although they don't speak the language right now -- and perhaps someday they will choose to learn it 73:00themselves -- and we're all guilty of that. My mother is professor of Yiddish at Columbia, she didn't speak Yiddish to them. I mean, we're all guilty of it. We tend to follow the path of least resistance. And English is the language spoken, and so that becomes the easiest way to communicate. But they also have grown up with my shows, constantly, ad nauseum. They've grown up with the music that I've listened to and the songs that I've sung, Yiddish songs. So, they have an intimate familiarity with the culture and the world. And when they were younger, I read them stories, translations of stories from that world, whether it was Bashevis Singer or Sholem Aleichem. I've always made it a point to at least 74:00familiarize them with some of the culture. But I'm guilty.

CW:So, I mean, you've touched on this, but what do you see as the future of Yiddish?

AH:(sighs) Oy, I thought we weren't going to talk about the kids. I -- it's -- I'm -- it's hard for me to really effectively say what I think about the future, 'cause it could go in any of a dozen different ways. And it could take anywhere 75:00from five, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years to get there. I, like I said earlier, I'm encouraged by the fact that, from a creative perspective, there is more going on today in the world of Yiddish than probably at any time since the '70s. The '70s really -- the '70s and the '80s -- I'm going to say the '80s, 'cause I was in Israel during the '70s. But the '80s, 76:00when I came back to the States in '77, back to New York in 1980, Yiddish was dead. For all practical purposes, Yiddish was basically dead -- from a cultural perspective. And so, with "The Golden Land" and "Levinsky" and "Songs of Paradise" and all the myriad others that have come around that I'm not mentioning -- I don't want to sound like I'm the only one who's ever done anything in Yiddish -- and the Folksbiene shows and Zalman and Moishe's work, "Those Were the Days" and "On Second Avenue" and all these little things that have come along, I find that now, as we are in this twenty-first -- the second decade of the twenty-first century, which seems so unbelievable to me that I'm that old, (laughter) I'm encouraged.

CW:Yeah.

AH:I don't want to sound pessimistic. I mean, I think that the fact that I get a call from David Mandelbaum saying, "I'm doing 'Waiting for Godot' in Yiddish. Can you come and be in it?" That would have been unimaginable to me thirty years ago. To know that Shane Baker is doing "The Big Bupkis" is encouraging to me. To read about these little groups around the world that are finding a Yiddish outlet of one kind or another is encouraging to me. But to go from there to some grandiose statement of the survival of Yiddish and the future of Yiddish in some significant mainstream form, that's a big jump. It's taken us sixty, almost 78:00seventy years to lose what we had. Let's say forty-five years, if you want to go to the '80s from the '40s. From '45 to '85 is forty years that it took us to go from what was a peak -- and even that was really down from the peak of the 1880s. When you think of Warsaw in the 1880s and the turn of the century into the 1900s, that was a center of Yiddish creativity. By the time you got to the 79:001940s, even, it wasn't that anymore. But it was still enormous and substantial. Twelve million Yiddish speakers in a Europe this size. So, it took forty years to go from that to this. And now here we are, thirty-odd years later from the 1980s, '90s, thousands, and now the middle of the teens, and we're still nowhere near where we were any time leading up to the '40s. So, it will take decades, probably way beyond my lifetime, and probably beyond yours to come back to the 80:00kind of Yiddish, the thriving Yiddish culture that once existed and no longer exists, which is the reason for me sitting in front of your camera right now, because Lansky wants to memorialize what is left, just in case. And kudos to that. But I'm hopeful. Again, I think Yiddish has this unique ability to survive, like the Jews. Now, having said that, Ladino has never really 81:00resurrected. Ladino once was the Yiddish of the Jewish Sephardic world. And it exists in music and the few groups that sing Ladino songs. But the culture has died, and I don't see where that is coming back. I'm not really familiar with that world, and I'm sure there are those in that world who would probably disagree with me. Gerald Edery, I know, is very strong in that milieu. But I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that there will always be someone who will find the genius of Yiddish and want to show it to somebody else. And that somebody else may want 82:00to show it to somebody else who shows it to somebody else, and slowly it evolves. I wish the leaders of the Jewish community, your Mortimer Zuckermans and your Bronfmans, all these great philanthropists, your Spielbergs -- this enormously powerful and wealthy -- your UJAs and your Hadassahs and your WIZO and your -- I wish -- I wish that they could sit down and see how devastating 83:00the loss of Yiddish has been to our culture, and that in response to that, they would create a significant effort to reinstall the Yiddish cultural milieu if not necessarily the language, although why not the language? If you can learn Hebrew, you can learn Yiddish. I mean, there's no reason kids can't learn two languages at Sunday school, especially since they're closely related and use the same alphabet. But if nothing else, to create a very significant educational 84:00effort to inform the next generation, 'cause we've lost a generation. But there is another -- there's always another generation, to educate them in this treasure, to give them the benefits of this lost treasure of Yiddish culture, and that can only come from the top. I mean, we performers can sing our songs and do our little shows, and we'll affect twenty people, fifty people, a hundred people. I did a show yesterday -- no, day before yesterday in Union, New Jersey, and there were 250 people. And then, four weeks ago, I performed at a condo, and there were twelve hundred people there. Yes, I can touch twelve hundred people 85:00at a time. Great. But they're not running out to study Yiddish. They were touched. Great. And maybe they told somebody and maybe one of them will go to a yidish-vinkl [Yiddish group], or five of them will go see a Yiddish movie. But to make a significant change, it has to come from the top, and it has to be funded and it has to be conscious, and it has to be thought out, and it has to be educational from this age on. I'm who I am today because Yiddish was my first language, and I was brought up in the world of Yiddish language and culture. Nobody knows who Sholem Aleichem is. Nobody knows who Yud Lamed Peretz is, or Chaim Grade or Itzik Manger or Isaac Bashevis Singer or Avrom Sutzkever or -- on 86:00and on and on and on and on. So, an entire generation of Jews is growing up without this knowledge and without the benefits of its riches and that, to me, is a crime. And that's the question. You ask about the future of Yiddish. That will be the ultimate question. If the leaders of the community, of the Jewish community and Israel decide -- and the Jewish community in Europe and the Jewish community in America and the Jewish community in South America that still has a Yiddish-speaking community -- if they all get together and say, "Hey, what have we done? We have to bring this back before it's gone forever," then, yeah. Then, fifty years from now, you and I will be very old. I might be dead. But at least 87:00then, the conversation could be very different.

CW:Yeah. Well, thinking about future generations and aspiring artists, do you have an eytse? Do you have advice for this generation?

AH:Tsi ikh hob an eytse [Do I have advice]? I -- never give up. Never stop learning. Never stop looking. Never stop exploring. Never stop trying. You don't always succeed. Nothing is perfect. But you keep trying. There is an enormous amount of inspiration to be had from our past. So, to the young people who may see this someday, I would say the National Yiddish Book Center has the past. 88:00(laughs) All the books. All the stories. All the folklore, all -- and the music. If not there, then it's here at FAU. Florida Atlantic University has, I think, the largest music -- Jewish music archive in the world, and I know they work with Aaron, in conjunction. I was on the advisory board here, the Jewish Sound Archive, at some point. Just don't ever be afraid to keep going and keep looking and keep trying. And -- I'm always amazed that there is an audience for almost 89:00every form of artistic expression. Shakespeare is still performed. Is it as popular as it once was? No. And yet, you have Shakespeare everywhere. Opera is everywhere. You don't necessarily understand what you're hearing when you go to the opera, or even when you go to Shakespeare. The Shakespearean English, although I understand it because I've studied it -- and even I sometimes sit there going, "Okay, I get the gist, but I'm not quite sure exactly what they meant." My daughter just did a production of "Hamlet," which was beautiful. Very contemporary, done specifically for the purpose of educating high school 90:00students. So, it was like "Hamlet" the action movie, ninety-minute "Hamlet." Tarell Alvin McCraney directed and adapted it. So, my advice, my eytse, is: S'ken nisht shatn [It can't hurt], (laughs) s'ken nisht shatn, to just keep trying, to keep looking, to keep exploring. I'm always fascinated when people send me links to YouTube videos of somebody singing a Yiddish song. They've just discovered "Oyfn pripetshik [By the hearth]," and this is like the greatest discovery they've ever made, and now they want to sing it. And the Yiddish is 91:00usually not good, and sometimes flat-out wrong. (laughs) But yet, there's such an enthusiastic excitement about their performance of it, because it's, "Look what I've discovered! (pronounced with strong American accent) Oyfn pripetshok, brant a fayol [By the hearth, a fire burns]!" I mean, it's like, what are they saying? It doesn't matter, because they're so excited by it. I mean, I'm encouraged by that, and I think that is our salvation at this point, because I don't know what else will be. Those of us who are really the last of the Mohicans, and there aren't many of us -- there's Mike Burstyn, there's me. Bruce 92:00Adler passed away several years ago. Eleanor Reissa is still left. There are some of the younger -- who kind of got in on the tail end, the Joanne Bortses and that group. And there are these younger people: Shane and Alan Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson and Hy Wolfe and the New York bunch. David Mandelbaum. And the Folksbiene, still doing their thing. I'm -- I love some of these young Folksbiene kids. Daniella Rabbani is brilliant, she's beautiful, and she sings beautifully, and her Yiddish is lovely. Even though she's learning it all phonetically, it's beautiful, so -- and some of the other younger people, who I don't know. But those of us who are truly still here from that world, from that 93:00thriving world, we won't be here for that much longer. I hope to live a good few decades yet. But I know my time is limited, certainly on a global scale. And so, the future lies with you and those who come after you. And embrace it. Just embrace it and find what speaks to you and follow it, and try to find new ways to tell it. I'd like to see more film. I have a funny feeling that maybe that will ultimately be the root within which the revival gains momentum, because it's such a huge medium in terms of its ability to reach a wider audience. TV is 94:00great, but I don't see TV embracing Yiddish anytime soon. I'm always amazed -- when I did my "Too Jewish" show in New York, fifty thousand people came to see it, which was huge. I came to Florida and did it. Eighty thousand people came to see it. I've done it all over the country and a few hundred thousand people came to see it. In one night, on channel thirteen, it was in over ten million homes in the tri-state area. So, TV has an enormous reach. Film, as well. So, is it possible for a movie to be made that could somehow jump the track and become 95:00successful in a more mainstream way? Maybe. Maybe. There's a wonderful project that I'm -- maybe I need to spend more time to see if I can make it happen. There's a beautiful novel called "Hungry Hearts" by Francine Prose. It's a stunningly beautiful novel. And it's trilingual. It's English -- it's written in English, but it has Yiddish and it has Spanish. And I wonder whether something like that, in an independent film, could somehow cross that boundary? Make it a musical and make it exciting and young. And it is. I mean, that's what it is. 96:00But it needs to be funded, and it's certainly a multi-million-dollar project. It's international, would have to go to South America to shoot. It's huge. But it could be done for probably ten million dollars. That's the kind of project that I could see someday crossing over. Or find a Jewish -- Adam Levine, from Maroon 5, right, is the adorable, loved pop icon. Let him discover Yiddish music and make his take on "Oyfn pripetshik," you know what I'm saying? That would 97:00make the difference. And once again, that comes back to the leaders of the community, the leaders of the world Jewish community reaching out to -- if I had an enormous amount of money, I would commission Adam to do an album of Yiddish songs. Whatever he wants, any way he wants. "Here are songs to choose from, pick your tunes, do them your way, but it has to be in Yiddish, and a translation if you like. Do an A-side and a B-side. The English version and the Yiddish version, or mix 'em up." You know what I'm saying? Find a way, because God knows my kids -- my daughters are eighteen and fourteen. I hear them listening to music, and sometimes it's got Spanish in it and sometimes it's rap and you can't 98:00understand anything anyway, or -- I mean, whatever it is, there's no reason my fourteen-year-old, who's in love with Adam Levine, shouldn't be able to hear him sing "Oyfn pripetshik" in his way -- or some other song. Obviously, it could be anything. So, I'm encouraged. Yeah, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. There's a future. There's always a future.

CW:Well, a hartsikn dank [Thank you very much].

AH:Nishto far vos [You're welcome].

CW:Thank you very much for --

AH:Yeah, mir hobn gedarft redn a bisl mer yidish [we should have spoken a bit more Yiddish]. (laughter) Ober s'iz a bisl shverer far mir tsu redn yidish un trakhtn azelkhe gedankn [But it's a little difficult for me to express these thoughts in Yiddish].

CW:Yo [Right].

AH:Yeah.

CW:A tsveytn intervyu [A second interview].

AH:Yo, a tsveytn mol [Yes, next time].

CW:(laughs) Thanks for sharing, also, with the Yiddish Book Center and with me.

AH:Sure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]