BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT GIMBLETT ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney, and today is May 7th, 2013. I'm here in Warsaw with Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT GIMBLETT:You have my permission to record.

CW:Thank you. So, your family already has been presented to the family in various forms, but I'm wondering if you can just start by briefly telling me about your family background?

BKG:My parents were born in Poland. My father was born in Opatów in 1916 and my mother was born in Brześć nad Bugiem or Brisk in Yiddish, in about 1914. And they left Poland before the Holocaust. My mother left in 1929, my father in 1:001934, when he was seventeen years old, and they settled in Canada. And I was born during the war and I grew up in Toronto, in an immigrant neighborhood.

CW:Great. And what was the presence of the discussion of the Old Country, of Poland, in your home growing up?

BKG:Well, first of all, I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. I grew up surrounded by people who had been born and raised in Poland and also by people who had survived the Holocaust and come in the post-war years. So, I really grew up in a very intensely Jewish milieu of people with firsthand experience of having been born and raised in the inter-war years. And, as I say, some of them had survived the Holocaust. And there -- so, it was less about a grandchild interviewing grandparents about a remote world. It was more about living with people who were really part of that world. So, I wouldn't say that growing up 2:00there were conversa-- we just lived the life. It wasn't so much about talking about the old days or the Old Country. But when I was in university and I was doing graduate work, I became very interested in interviewing my parents and also the Toronto Jewish community. And that was an extraordinary experience, which began in 1967. And, as a result of that experience, I really became very interested and had many, many conversations, not only with my parents, but with many other people -- and then, really embarked on a professional track that was to take me to Yiddish and to East European culture and history, exhibitions, museums, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

CW:Yeah. What was the -- what were the languages in this community that you were 3:00growing up in?

BKG:Well, my parents were eager for me to speak English without an accent, and that was their greatest wish: that they should speak English without an accent. And my father was very proud of his Polish, which, of course, he spoke fluently. And you could say he was a native speaker of Polish and Yiddish, but also had Hebrew, German. So, in my home, English, Yiddish -- my grandparents, at least on my mother's side, didn't speak any English, so Yiddish was the only language we could communicate to them. And they always spoke Yiddish to their parents, so -- and -- but with their own friends, they tended to speak Polish and Yiddish, and it was a multilingual -- it was natural that people spoke lots of languages.

CW:Was -- did you have any contact with non-Jewish Polish immigrants when you were growing up?

BKG:Yes, my father had a wallpaper and paint store in an immigrant neighborhood 4:00in Toronto, on Roncesvalles Avenue. And the immigrants there were largely Polish and Ukrainian and not Jewish. And he spoke Polish and could understand and communicate in other Slavic languages all the time. And I can remember that when I was a kid, I used to help out in the store. And they once put a sign -- well, what happened was this: the Wallpaper and Paint Association would give you five dollars if you sent in a true story that they printed. And so, I sent in a true story that they printed. I won five dollars. So, what was the story? The story was that my father's assistant had put a sign in the window and it said, "Mówimy po polsku [Polish: We speak Polish], anachnu medabrim ivrit [Hebrew: we speak Hebrew], nous parlons Français [French: we speak French], mir redn yidish [Yiddish: we speak Yiddish], wir sprechen deutsh [German: we speak German]," and a little old lady came into the store and looked around and she said, "Anybody here speak English?" I got five bucks for that.

CW:Nice. (laughs) Obviously, it was something that you were living, as you said. But, as a child, did you -- what did you glean in terms of attitudes towards the land of Poland, sort of the space of Poland in memory of the -- of Jewish immigrants that you were growing up around?

BKG:I think people thought not in terms of Poland. They thought in terms of their hometown. So, I think growing up, I was aware of where my family came from, and it was their memories of where they had lived. And they hadn't lived all over Poland. They had lived in Opatów or they'd lived in Brest-Litovsk. So, I think that my sense of place had to do with where people -- the places that 6:00people thought of as home, and that meant the places they actually lived. So, it was very local. It wasn't so much about Poland, as such.

CW:What aspects of Jewish culture -- I mean, sorry, of Yiddish language, culture were present in your house, in the community?

BKG:Well, first of all, I was sent to Yiddish schools. I was sent to the Farband shule [secular Yiddish school], and then to the Peretz shule. And then, since none of these schools were really adequate -- and they were all after schools. They were four days a week plus Sunday, after normal public school. And then, finally, to the [Darcie?] Talmud Torah, which was definitely not a Yiddish school, but a more -- like, a modern -- well, modern is going too far. But, in any event, modern kheyder [traditional religious school], 'cause it had boys and girls in the same room. They had corporal punishment -- so, how modern could it be? So, I just lived in a very intensely Yiddish-speaking world. It was a 7:00language spoken on the street, a language spoken with other children, those who had come -- arrived recently from Europe. It was Yiddish-language schools, Yiddish theater, Yiddish with grandparents, primarily. And it wasn't until I was in graduate school that I encountered Yiddish -- really encountered a world of Yiddish culture in the sense of a real literary culture. Of course, in Yiddish language schools, we knew all about the classic Yiddish writers, but in a very -- I would say childish way, not in a way that could compare with what I discovered as an adult. So, that really was -- that was largely through my encounter with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and through the whole 8:00circle of people there, and then in graduate school and that kind of thing.

CW:Before we move on from your childhood, can you describe the streets, the home that you lived in? Did you live in one place or were you moving around?

BKG:I grew up in downtown Toronto, and up 'til about the age of five or six, lived in a single-family house. And then, from then until about the age of twelve, in a great big old house that was a kind of a double house with four stories that my grandmother bought. And all four of her sons lived there. Each of us had a floor, and there were two other, I think -- there must have been, all together, six apartments, more or less. And we occupied four and then the other two were rented out to other people. So, that meant that the family all 9:00lived together. And, in fact, when we moved to the suburbs, all four brothers moved together, and three of them lived on one street and one lived a block away. So, the four boys and their families lived -- really, basically lived together. The memories that I have that are most vivid are the ones from Cecil Street. That was the corner of Cecil Street and Ross Street in the downtown area, near the -- where the university is, near the public library, in the heart of the historic immigrant Jewish neighborhood. Not just Jewish, in fact. Historic immigrant neighborhood, but very, very, very Jewish. And there were shtiblekh [small Hasidic houses of prayer] up and down the road, up and down the street. There was a folks fareyn [people's association] to receive refugees. There was the moyshev-skeynim, the old age home, was next to it. The Farband shule was across the road. Peretz shule was a block down. The Kensington Market was around the corner. There were big synagogues at either end of the street. It 10:00was a really -- it was like Lower East Side, only after the war, in Canada. It was like the Lower East Side. And it was -- milk was still delivered by a horse -- a guy with a milk cart, with a horse -- in glass bottles that had a narrow neck so the cream would rise to the top and you could pour it off. And vegetables and fruits came 'round. A guy had a truck and drove it around. So, it was just a very Jewish place. And then, when I was about twelve, when my parents were worried about dating and about teenage years, they didn't think it was a good neighborhood for that. And so, we moved way up north to a suburb where -- at that time, the streets weren't paved, there was no grass on the lawn. The 11:00house wasn't finished. And it turns out that it became a very Jewish neighborhood, too, because a lot of people -- people tended to move together with their friends and family, so -- but it was a neighborhood that had a Conservative synagogue, Reform synagogue. It must have had Orthodox synagogues, too. But very different from growing up in the downtown part of Toronto.

CW:Did you go to shul?

BKG:I didn't go to shul -- I would say for the holidays. Basically, for the holidays. But otherwise, no.

CW:I just want to skip ahead here. What was your first trip to Poland?

BKG:Came to Poland for the first time in 1981. And I had been working for so long on subjects connected to Poland, I thought it was time for me to come. I 12:00had worked with Lucjan Dobroszycki at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. And Lucien was a survivor of the ghetto of Lodz. And then, after the war, he studied history at Warsaw University. And then, in 1968, the -- with the anti-Semitic campaign, he left Poland and came to the United States, to New York, and had almost no English. And the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research hired him to curate, to catalogue their collection of photography of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. And it was a collection, at that time, of close to fifteen thousand photographs. And so, when I came to New York, I was invited to work with him, and together with him to prepare an exhibition and a book, and then eventually we worked also on a film. But that -- what that meant for me was that, all of a sudden, relatively speaking, I had gone through fifteen thousand photographs and then culled them, and we'd come up with five hundred and gone 13:00through them many times. And so, I now had a huge, huge image bank of black and white photographs and I thought it was time to go to Poland. It wouldn't be the Poland I saw in those photographs, but I thought it was important to go, so I came in 1981.

CW:Can you tell me about your first impressions?

BKG:Well, it was very austere. It was communist Poland and it was the time of martial law, and it was very, very, very austere. Very grey and very paranoid. One had -- you had the feeling of paranoia, that you just -- it was -- for me, it was Dostoevsky's "Brothers Karamazov." Of, you know, being in a room and expecting there to be a very loud knock on the door and, you know, God knows what that would mean. It was black market money, it was no food in the stores. It was huge menus but nothing was available. It was -- there was a very good 14:00restaurant that actually could produce very good food, but for almost no money, which felt really bad. Didn't feel right. And it was a time, also, where when you made friends, those relationships were very precious. And you felt that every time that you met was important, that you didn't know what was going to happen next. So, those friendships and those meetings were -- they -- you had to -- you really had a sense that they mattered. There's nothing casual about them. They mattered. And I made some friends that are friends to this day, and -- were very kind and were themselves activists. They were in the opposition and they were activists in the renewal of Jewish life.

CW:Who were the people that you first met and how did you make contact with them?

BKG:The two people that were -- the two people that I really formed the closest relationship with -- and that has endured until this day -- are Staszek or 15:00Stanisław and Monika Krajewski. And I'm trying to think how I met them. I think I met them initially through the mail, because Monica was photographing Jewish tombstones. I don't know, really, how we met. I don't know how we met. But then, I came to Poland and we got to know each other, and they also visited New York. And during that terrible period of austerity, I tried to send them whatever I could by way of books and other things. And we just -- we stayed in touch and we continue to be very good friends to this day.

CW:Want to go back a little bit to Yiddish, and the sort of -- I mean, YIVO is a very important place in terms of Yiddish culture in America, and many people have interesting reflections on the community that they found at YIVO. Who were 16:00the people that you encountered at YIVO and -- yeah.

BKG:Well, a very formative experience for me was a Zionist summer camp called Camp Kvutza, which was a Habonim Zionist summer camp. And the director of that summer camp was Mikhl Herzog, who, during the latter part of the time that I was there as a child -- and then, eventually, I directed the arts and crafts program. But he was writing his dissertation on the Yiddish dialects in northern -- northeastern Poland. And he was directed by Uriel Weinreich at Columbia, and then spent some time, maybe a year or so, in Israel, interviewing people there for the "Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazi Jewry" and stayed in the apartment of Chone Shmeruk, who was another great Yiddish scholar. And so, I had 17:00known Mikhl since I was a child, and so -- and I was very aware, of course, that he was interested in Yiddish, was working on Yiddish. And in 1967, when I was just beginning my PhD at Indiana University, in the very, very first semester, in the fall semester of '67, I was taking a course in fieldwork, in research methods, and the person teaching the course was Jerome Mintz. And Jerome Mintz had written his dissertation on legends among the Hassidim living in New York. And we all had to do some kind of a fieldwork project. And so, when he found out that I knew Yiddish, he said, "Well, why don't you do something, you know, with Yiddish?" And I thought, Okay, that sounds -- maybe we'll give it a try. And at the same time, I was taking a course in Russian folklore. And we had a textbook called "Russian Folklore" by Sokolov. It was a nice Soviet-era Russian folklore textbook, and I remember taking it home at Thanksgiving and sitting at the 18:00kitchen table and reading it, and then coming across a section on funeral customs: what you do when you -- when somebody dies. And I just -- I read it aloud. My mother was at the sink, my father was reading the newspaper at the table, and I read aloud. I said, "Listen to this. It says here that when a person dies -- this is the Russian folklore book -- when a person dies, you put a glass of water on the windowsill, open the window, put a little towel there so the soul can wash itself as it exits the window -- and dry itself." And I don't know if it was my mother, my father, said -- my father must have said, "Oh, that's what we did." And then it kind of dawned on me -- I thought, "Really? What else did you do?" And I realized that the -- everything I needed was there. So, I started to interview -- I started by interviewing my family, and then extended out, you know, in rings, out, out, out, out, out to the wider Jewish 19:00community in Toronto. And a fellow folklorist friend, Robert Klymasz, at that time, was at the Center for Folk Culture at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. And they were doing surveys of immigrant groups in Canada to see what folklore they had brought from the Old Country, what they retained, what new things developed. So, I contacted him and I said, "Would you like -- would you be interested in a survey of Yiddish folklore in Toronto?" He said, "Sure." And I called Mikhl around then, in the fall, and I said to him, "Guess what? I'm doing a project on Yiddish folklore for my fieldwork class and I think that it's going to work out I'm going to do a survey of Yiddish folklore in Toronto." And he said, "I'm sending you a round-trip ticket to New York and I want you to be here in two weeks." So, I went, and he brought me to YIVO and he took me to the 20:00home of Max Weinreich, who at that time was very old and who died shortly after. And Regina, his wife, was still alive. And he was, at that time, blind. She served tea in his study with glass-lined bookcases, with all of his library and his books. And he, Mikhl, took me to YIVO and I met Dina Abramowicz and Beatrice Weinreich and Chana Mlotek and that whole pantheon. And he took me down into the archive. This was in the Vanderbilt mansion at Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, when they were still there. And took me to the vault. And I had an image of it, of course, like a bank vault in a movie where they have bank robberies, this huge vault with this great big, huge -- you know, it looked to me like a gold door and, you know, opened it up, and inside was, I think, recordings of Sholem Aleichem reading and -- oh, whatever great, great treasures that require 21:00that they be secured in a vault. And he then, essentially, arranged that that summer I would come to New York, and I -- literally, I came to the summer program, which had already started, and I actually taught in the afternoon and went to Mordechai Schechter's Yiddish classes in the morning and sat in on Dan Miron's classes in Yiddish literature and just generally -- it was an incredible experience -- and decided to write my dissertation on traditional storytelling in the Toronto Jewish community, which emerged out of the survey, the Yiddish folklore survey that I had done for the Museum of Canadian Civilization. And that -- did a lot of the interviewing in Yiddish. And then, I got my first job as an assistant professor of anthropology and literature at the University of Texas in Austin in 1970, and found a way to apply for money to do a Yiddish 22:00folksong survey in New York City, and got the money from the National Endowment for the Arts, through YIVO, and was able to come to New York in '72. And then, it was at that point that I was working, on the one hand, on this Yiddish folksong survey -- and trying to record the complete repertoire of traditional Yiddish singers, and doing it as a YIVO project, but also helping to develop the Max Weinreich Center, teaching at the Max Weinreich Center, developing a whole battery of courses to deal with Yiddish folklore. And then, began to work with Lucjan Dobroszycky on the photograph collection and the development of the exhibition and the book. So, then, I found a way to stay on the East Coast, and that meant I got a job, actually, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, but lived in New York, and then eventually at NYU. So, basically, 23:00from 1972, was living in New York and able to continue to collaborate with YIVO. But YIVO's the key. YIVO's absolutely key. The key.

CW:What was the general attitude, presence of folklore in YIVO when you arrived there? Were there other people that -- I mean, you mentioned the -- some names. But was folklore already a central pillar of YIVO when you arrived there?

BKG:I think folklore had always been a very important subject for YIVO from its inception in 1925 in Vilna. And I think that -- and it was also very, very important to the "Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazi Jews." I think it was so highly valued because there was a high value placed on everyday people, ordinary people, their everyday lives, and the culture created by the masses -- 24:00so that not only was there a premium played on Yiddish literature, Yiddish theater -- what you'd call high culture -- but there was an incredible appreciation for folk culture. And that was true from the very, very beginning, because YIVO was always -- it was a people's university. It was always an institution that depended on a network of collectors, of amateur collectors, and that valued the Yiddish language as a language that was spoken. That meant that even though YIVO wanted to create a standard language, klal yidish, and a standard orthography, standard spelling, to, in essence, give YIVO the dignity that other languages had by having, if you will, a standard language, a literary language, it also valued, enormously, the richness of the language as regional dialects. And it valued the language as a language that was really, truly spoken. And it valued the artistry of the spoken language in the mouths of 25:00ordinary people. And they -- there was always -- folklore was largely part of the section on philology. So, there was a division which is very European between, if you will, spiritual culture and material culture -- spiritual culture meaning, essentially, folk beliefs, custom, language. That which doesn't necessarily express itself in a physical object. And material culture would be objects, architecture, dress, things of that kind. So, YIVO was actively collecting folklore. They had -- they developed a whole set of questionnaires. They published them in the "Yedies fun YIVO." They published them in the "Literarishe bleter," they sent them out as flyers. They even created a aspirantur [fellowship] program in the '30s for training a new generation of academics -- that is, providing them with something they could never get from a 26:00university. And quite a number of them were, themselves, folklor-- they -- so, they were interested in folklore. And Itzik Gottesman has written a very, very -- I think important book called -- I think he calls it "Defining the Jewish Nation" -- I have to check the title. But, in any event, it's really the story of the rule of folklore and of the collection and study of folklore in defining who East European Jews were and are -- and I think was always important to YIVO. It was about cultural creativity on a very, very large scale. And it was also about the unique creation of Jews in the very place where they lived. So, it was an affirmation. It's a -- it was a way of saying that Jews have lived in Eastern Europe and in Poland for millennia, and they have created something very unique here that could only have been created here, it -- the language, culture -- and 27:00that it was a collective creation. It wasn't only the creation of some brilliant, genius writers and artists. But it was, if you will, the genius of a people -- and that they created a language and they created a culture in that language, and that -- that was something to be cherished and to be treated with dignity and respect. And so, I think that folklore in the sense of the creativity of ordinary people in their everyday lives was something that was recognized from the very beginning as very important to the YIVO project.

CW:Yeah. Can you describe a little bit Max and Regina Weinreich?

BKG:Well, I only met them once, and I never got to meet Uriel. I was actually in San Francisco when he and Beatrice were there. But he died a year later, and I didn't have the opportunity to meet them. And that would have been in -- I was in San Francisco between -- I was there from 1965 to '67, and he died shortly 28:00after. So, I never got to meet them, but they -- that family was a dynasty and they were really revered. Very, very revered. And at -- Max Weinreich was a -- was at that point old and blind, but it was more like being in the presence of the Pope, you know? It was rather -- to be in his presence -- I can't even remember the conversation. I just know that what mattered was simply to be in his presence -- that mattered. And Regina, all I remember is tea. I -- you know, but I think what impressed me was that these were such dignified people, and I knew what an enormous achievement their lives meant. And I think that -- somebody very important to me in those years was Wolf Younin, who was a writer for the "Forward," and he had a Yiddish folklore column. So, he -- every week, 29:00in the "Forw--" he -- I think it was weekly, a weekly column, for "Fun folks moyl [From the mouth of the people]," or something like this -- which was a Yiddish folklore column. And he took me under his wing and -- in a sense, because very shortly after I met Max Weinreich, he died. But once I was in New York, Wolf was the one who got me the Yiddish typewriter. Wolf was the one that read the obituaries in the Yiddish "Forward" to see which Yiddish writers had died. And we would visit the widows so that I could buy the books to create my own Yiddish library. And so, the Yiddish library that I have, which is a very good Yiddish library -- I have from the, if you will, the estate of Yiddish writers who died. And I bought them from their widows, believe it or not. That's my Yiddish library. And that was thanks to Wolf. And so, I can't tell you how many apartments in the Bronx I visited and how many widows I visited. And I have some really wonderful, very, very wonderful books. And that was thanks to Wolf, 30:00and -- but other people -- you had asked about other people. So, of course, Chana and Yosl Mlotek, who are marvelous. Beatrice Weinreich, who passed away recently, who was also really a very inspiring person. Chana, who's still here, who's amazing. Totally amazing person, just marvelous. And I'm trying to think from the -- from that angle. But there were just others -- historians and linguists and other people that I knew, you know, primarily through YIVO.

CW:How much of your life at that time were you living af yidish [in Yiddish]?

BKG:Well, it's a good question. I think -- I'm trying to think to what extent I actually taught in Yiddish, and I just can't remember. But I do remember that I was in Paris and I was asked to lecture in a class in Yiddish studies, and I 31:00remember doing it in Yiddish. And I remember, also, that during the first couple of years that I was in New York, the -- YIVO used to have an annual banquet, and they had it at the -- which -- one of those big hotels. I'm trying to remember the name of the hotel. But very, very big, very fancy hotel, and it was af gedekte tishn, you know, covered tables, and the fact that it had tablecloths, that was what defined the event. And I was asked to give the keynote address in Yiddish, which was the most frightening thing I ever did. And I gave it, of course, on the Yiddish folksong. And, at the time, it was a rather, I would say, academic lecture, in Yiddish. My parents flew in from Toronto for this. I was absolutely scared out of my wits. Of course, it was all typed out and I -- you know, I read it -- there was no other way. And what I remember, which was, I think, really quite cruel is that the next day when I came to the office, to 32:00YIVO, in my little pigeonhole mailbox was an index card on which somebody had written my mistakes and corrected them. And I really thought that was terrible. I mean, on the one hand, I'm very -- you know, obviously, I would like to speak perfectly. But on the other hand -- and it was anonymous, you know? But clearly, for the people who were there, which was an older generation, to see someone -- at the time, I was in my twenties -- stand up and give essentially an academic lecture on the Yiddish folksong in Yiddish was a big deal. Wasn't perfect, but was still a big deal.

CW:Yeah. How much Yiddish do you use now?

BKG:Well, first of all, I am the only Yiddish speaker on the museum staff. So, 33:00in my exhibition team -- oh, I have one other person who works for us that can deal with Yiddish on a limited basis. She's good, but in terms of somebody who's here regular, full-time, I'm the only one. But then, I'm supported -- but with some very good Yiddish scholars that are teaching at Warsaw University. So, there are some really excellent, excellent Yiddish scholars, and we hire them to help us with very specific things. To help us with Old Yiddish, to help us -- Ewa Geller, for example, who's a wonderful resource. Monika Polit. So, there are Yiddish scholars that we work with, but in terms of being here on the floor, every single day, morning, noon, and night, I'm the only one. What that means for me -- pardon me -- is that I'm the one that watches out for Romanization of Yiddish. I'm the one that checks the Yiddish translations. I often do 34:00translations. I often have to read Yiddish material and make selection of what we should use. And, when Sam Kassow is here, we speak Yiddish. That's the best. His Yiddish is gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. I -- the -- one of the greatest joys is when Sam is here, we speak Yiddish to each other. And let me think, who else do I speak Yiddish to? Well, with -- Monica is here, I speak to her in Yiddish. With -- if Eva's around, I speak to her in Yiddish. If Ola Geller is here, I'll speak to her in Yiddish. If Anna Rozenfeld is here, we'll speak to each other in Yiddish. Let me think, who else do I speak to? Oh, yes, Rabbi Schudrich, I speak to him in Yiddish. I insist. Albert Stankowski's father, I speak to him in Yiddish. Let me think, who else? Who else? Who else do I speak to in Yiddish? Oh, yes, the Nissenbaum family. They speak German, but they don't 35:00speak Polish or English. The Nissenbaum family. I speak to them in Yiddish, and the brothers -- the sons of Mr. Nissenbaum speak a beautiful Yiddish. And who else do I speak to in Yiddish? Irene Pletka, one of our donors. We speak Yiddish to each other. She's a big Yiddish fan, and she learned Yiddish -- well, her father was a Bundist and she grew up speaking Yiddish, and she went to Yiddish schools. Now, let me think, who else? Who else? If I -- you know, if I see there are, like, religious people, Hasidim or whatever, I prefer -- or if I -- if -- anybody that I find, anybody who comes here, either a guest or living here -- who speaks Yiddish, we speak Yiddish, basically. That's the answer.

CW:Well, we should be speaking Yiddish, then. (laughs)

BKG:Far vos nisht [Why not]?

CW:We'll have to do another interview af yidish. (laughs) I don't know, I'm -- now I am -- I'm feeling like we should have started af yidish. When did you first hear about this museum, here? The Museum of the History of Jews in Poland?

BKG:I started hearing about it -- probably around 2000. But what I heard was so vague and so sketchy that it barely seemed like an idea, and it didn't seem like a real project. So, I just didn't pay attention, because I figured, given my interests, given that I'm a specialist in East European Jewish culture and in Yiddish, and given all the work that I'd done on Polish Jews, and given that I'm the child of Polish Jews, and given that I work on museums, how is it possible that such a project could be real and I would not know anything about it? I mean, I would surely know something about it. So, then, in 2002, I got a phone 37:00call from Jerzy Halberstadt, who really is a key figure in making this museum. He was a director of the museum between 1998 and 2011. So, about fifteen years. And it's -- I'm just going to close this door.

CW:Sure. Whoops. Sure. And --

BKG:So, in 2002, I got a phone call from Jerzy that he would be in New York and he'd be staying at the Polish consulate and would I meet with him? And he'd like to show me the plans for the museum. So, I met with him, and I then -- shortly thereafter -- or maybe even earlier than 2002, because in 2002, he called and asked for me to come to Warsaw and to evaluate the master plan for the exhibition and the outline of the historical program. So, it must have been before 2002. And, at the time, he was working very closely with Michael 38:00Steinlauf, who had apparently said to him that it would be a good idea, he should talk to me. So, we had met. He showed me the PowerPoint and explained the whole project. I thought it was very interesting, and then after that, in 2002, I came to Warsaw to evaluate the material and met with him and met with his team and wrote a report. And we stayed in touch after that and I participated in panels at Association for Jewish Studies and some other kind of symposia around the exhibition. And then, in 2005, the museum was established formally as an institution by the Association of the Historical Institute of Poland -- that was a private Jewish NGO established after the war, here in Poland, and it's the initiator with the project. And it, in 2005, succeeded in getting the city of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage to join it in a unique 39:00public-private partnership. And once it did that, it was possible to organize the international architectural competition, which is the first, I think -- still only one in Poland that was carried out successfully for a public building. And once the architectural competition was concluded and we knew who the architect was and what the nature of the building would be, in 2006, I began as program director of the core exhibition and then have been working on it since then.

CW:Yeah. I want to just -- I want to ask some questions about the museum, of course, but going back, I'm wondering how your collection, how your interviews with your family and with the Toronto Jewish community changed your conception, if at all, of Poland as a place?

BKG:Well, I would say that the only thing I knew, really, was in terms of 40:00first-hand experience was what I knew from my family. And I think that, through all of my interviews, the Poland before the Holocaust and the Poland of the Holocaust were two different Polands, and that -- because my direct family had not actually gone through the Holocaust -- but we lost a lot of our family in the Holocaust. But because they had never gone through the Holocaust, their memories were not filtered through it. But they knew and they -- and the tragedy of the Holocaust was very real to them. But their own direct experience was not filtered through the Holocaust. So, these were two quite different Polands. And my father and mother, both of their families left for economic reasons. That's why they left. They didn't leave because there was a pogrom or an anti-Semitic campaign. They left for economic reasons. And although -- and, of course, the 41:00whole country struggled economically. It was not -- it was the Great Depression. It was right after the -- you know, right after World War I, this territory was devastated. So, you're trying to rebuild the territory, and then you have a world economic depression. So, everybody suffered. There was a lot of emigration. There was a lot of Polish emigration, too. So, that Poland was the Poland of growing up here. And my mother was, I think, maybe thirteen or fourteen when she left. My father's seventeen. She led a more sheltered life, and his memories were fuller and more detailed. And they -- you know, he actually had a -- he had a good childhood. He actually had a good childhood. And, of course, I interviewed Holocaust survivors. Some of them were my relatives, some of them were people from the same town as my father, they were from the region. And I think those interviews -- they didn't change anything. 42:00They were just what I knew, and they -- also what I knew not only from interviews but just from being with people, you know? Just from living with people, without necessarily asking them any questions, but just knowing them as they are. So, I wouldn't say that anything really changed, 'cause I don't think I had -- I didn't have preconceptions. I just knew from knowing this milieu and from talking with them.

CW:So, once you arrived here and started working here, first of all, can you just explain what your role actually is, for people who are not familiar with the museum --

BKG:Sure.

CW:-- development world? (laughs)

BKG:Sure. The museum's an education and cultural center, and a third of the usable space is dedicated to a core exhibition. And this is a multimedia 43:00narrative exhibition that will tell the story of a thousand years of Jewish life in the historic territory of Poland. And that means that it's the territory in any given period. It's post-war Poland, its borders -- inter-war year Poland, its borders -- the partitioned Poland of the nineteenth century. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was huge. In the period of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, would have included territories that are today Ukraine, Lithuania, Bialorussia, as well, of course, as Poland. And it's a story of a thousand years of continuous Jewish presence in this territory, and it's a story of Polish Jews more broadly, more widely speaking. My responsibility, as program director, is to lead the process of developing the exhibition and to lead it as a curatorial process, a design process, and visitor experience. And that means that I'm working with a very, very good team of experts -- of specialists, 44:00historians, scholars, sociologists -- people coming from different fields -- art history, literature -- and each gallery has several lead historians working on it. That means, in the medieval gallery, it might be one main person, but in the case of post-war years it's two main people. There might be more. And it's an academic team that is responsible for insuring that the narration is correct, the interpretation is good, that the facts are accurate, and that we have the best possible material, reflect the most recent and best research, and the most sophisticated historical thinking and a kind of critical historiography. So, that we get from these really senior people. So, Sam Kassow is one of our scholars, Barbara Engelking, Jacek Leociak for the Holocaust period, Stanisław Krajewski, Helena Datner for the postwar years. Marcin Wodziński and David Assaf and Sam Kassow for the nineteenth century. Adam Teller and several other 45:00scholars for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth period. Hanna Zaremska for the medieval period. And we work with a team that is made up of scholars from Israel, Poland, United States, and a whole support team around them. Then, there's a curatorial team that works day-to-day in finding good material and in basically really translating all of that scholarship -- helping us to translate it into an exhibition, from a curatorial point of view. Then we had a design team. We started out with the British design team Event Communications, and now we're working with a Polish design team, Nizio Design International. And then, we have a team that does nothing but -- it essentially gives assets, and licensing and copyright agreements and things of that kind. And then, there's a whole production team that produces interactivity and audiovisual presentations 46:00and that physically installs the exhibition inside the building itself. So, it's a huge, huge, huge team, and we have many managers that are managing many aspects of it. And my task as program director is to ensure that when all is said and done, this is a powerful, coherent, memorable, thought-provoking, and emotional experience. That's my task, to make sure that happens. I don't have to manage the whole process. There are other people who do that. And I don't have to do everything. But I have to make sure that when everything is -- when it's all said and done, that the final result is really, truly what it should be. And that's my job.

CW:Wow. You said that you didn't have preconceptions before -- really before doing the interviews with your community in Toronto. I'm wondering if you had 47:00preconceptions before embarking on this project about what it might -- about what Jewish culture in Poland is in the twenty-first century, looking back?

BKG:Well, I would say this -- I don't think I had pre-- like, this -- I would say I either didn't have any conception or I had conceptions but I didn't have what I would call preconceptions, 'cause preconception suggests that you had some crazy ideas and then you found out, you know, the truth. I don't -- it's not how I experience my, if you will, engagement with Poland before or after. I think I understood from the very beginning -- which is why I said yes -- that this was gonna be a very important project that could make a huge difference, and that it could make a huge difference for Poland and a huge difference for Jews, and hopefully for the visitors who can find themselves in the story in 48:00other ways. And what that means, essentially, is that the Holocaust has become so overwhelming in our consciousness and in our understanding of the history of Polish Jews for absolutely understandable reasons, because it is an all-defining event. It's absolutely cataclysmic. But it has essentially, I would say, really, truly overshadowed this thousand-year story. And it's one thing to do what most Holocaust museums, if not all Holocaust museums and exhibitions do, which is to place the Holocaust within a history of anti-Semitism and xenophobia, which means that the Holocaust is, if you will, the inevitable outcome: that if xenophobia goes far enough, if anti-Semitism goes far enough, then it's teleology. It drives towards the most extreme case, which is genocide. But that is not where the history of Polish Jews derives. That is, the Holocaust is not 49:00the inevitable outcome of the history of Polish Jews. It definitely -- it happened, but you would never or we would never tell the story of Polish Jews as a way of explaining the Holocaust. But the history of anti-Semitism is told as a way of explaining the Holocaust and genocide. So, that meant that we had an opportunity, if you will, to place the Holocaust within a very different narrative and, in so doing, to give it its proper place and, at the same time, to, if you will, recover the thousand-year history, and to do so in the very place where that story happened. And that seemed to me to be a very powerful thing to do. And it was powerful because it could reconnect Jews with their own history, which, in a sense, they had lost. They had lost it in several ways. 50:00They'd lost it because the world that the -- that is to say if you speak only of Polish Jews, approximately three million Polish Jews died, but also the entire world they created here died with them, in large measure. And the traces of it are fewer and fewer, the material traces. So, that, I would say -- to somehow recover that thousand-year history is a really major achievement for -- both for -- well, for Jews living here, for Jews living abroad, for Poles. It's part of their history, as well. And it was also a way to challenge the stereotype of Poland as being a place of unmitigated, unrelenting, eternal anti-Semitism. And the Holocaust certainly cemented that idea. And you don't have a thousand-year history and you don't become the biggest Jewish community in the world and you 51:00don't become a center of the Jewish world and you don't create a great civilization in a place that is one hundred percent, unmitigated anti-Semitism. Doesn't happen. So, you have to somehow -- we have to somehow communicate this thousand-year history in a way that puts -- that is the -- yeah, well, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It's the best moments, it's the worst moments, and to create a very, how can I say, to a very trusted zone for engaging with difficult issues across audiences. So, not just Polish people talking to each other, Jews talking to each other, but hopefully various groups talking across generations, talking across continents, talking across audiences, and I think for Poland today is a huge opportunity. There's great interest and there's an opportunity to really tell what we do, which is an integrated history, where Jews -- an integral part of the history of Poland, where the history of Poland is not 52:00complete without a history of Polish Jews and where, as my Polish colleagues like to say, the history of Jews is not complete without the history of, well, of Poland or of Polish Jews, let's put it that way. And we -- there's -- Poland has a long way to come. I just came back from Lublin and there's an interesting and very nice, actually, new exhibition at a place called Piwnica pod Fortuną in the old city, which is a small but very nice exhibition on the history of Lublin. And I visited it and I looked at the opening -- one of the very beautiful opening presentations called "The Golden Age," and I'm reading all about Catholics and I'm reading all about Protestants and other Christian denominations. And I think to myself, Where are the Jews? So, I ask somebody who works there and he said, "Well, it's about the golden age, about the golden age of Poland." I said, "Yes, but it was also the golden age of Polish Jews. It was 53:00Lublin. It was a place of -- the earliest Hebrew, Yiddish printed books. It was one of the largest Jewish communities in the commonwealth. It's a very, very important community." "Oh," he said. "We have a section on Jews." I said, "Where?" He said, "It's the very, very end." I said, "So, you mean it's a separate story?" "Well," he said, "I'm forty years old. I was educated -- I went to school under communism." He said, "And I left school stupid." He said, "I learned nothing." He said, "The history that they taught us, it's nothing." He said, "Not since the fall of communism could we tell our own history." He said, "It will take another generation to tell it in a way that can integrate the Jewish story." So, then I went to the very end of the exhibition. I wanted to see the so-called Jewish section. And, of course, it's first and foremost Holocaust. And it's Holocaust and it's a tallis, tefillin, a Torah scroll -- 54:00it's got a -- it's got some kind of a -- like, a PowerPoint kind of thing that gives more. The Lublin yeshiva -- I will say this: to their credit, there is a section. Because apparently, in the municipal museum, there's two sentences. So, we're already ahead of the game that there's actually a whole section, which means that they do think it's important and they have made a good faith effort to present, you know, the fullness of the story. And they had been very respectful of the Holocaust. So, you've got to give them points for that. The next step is for this to be an integral part of the whole story. And, of course, to the -- there's no reason why there can't be -- not separate, but focused, you know, presentation. But the idea that if you're going to present the whole country, you present everybody that's in the country and that one of the great prides of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the golden age was the historic diversity of this territory, and that it was home to many religions and many 55:00languages and many nationalities. One of them was Jewish. What happened to them? So, yeah, another generation. Well, I'm hoping next May, when we open, we might speed up the process.

CW:Great. So, speaking of -- as you already so eloquently introduced -- intercontinental dialogue and cross-cultural understanding, what has it been like to work with a team that -- composed of scholar-- of Polish scholars, of Israeli scholars, of American scholars to --

BKG:Well, I think the great -- like, this -- Israeli scholars and American scholars I know, and they're marvelous people and I've loved the opportunity to work with them -- I would say the American ones most of all. The Israeli ones, I've known but never worked with so closely. So, that was really a very good experience. But the great discovery were the Polish scholars because, since the 56:00fall of communism, there's a whole new generation of specialists in Jewish history and Jewish culture that were born and raised here and that studied here but also abroad. Have spent time at the Hebrew University, at Oxford. Spent time in New York. Fluent in English. They learned Jewish languages -- Hebrew, Yiddish. And they're very international in their outlook. They're well-traveled. They are in dialogue, they go to conferences, they're in touch with their colleagues in other places. They publish in English as well as in Polish. And they're sophisticated and thoughtful and conceptual and interpretative and critical. And they're able to do that because they were really formed in the post-communist period. That's not a luxury that people who studied and worked under communism could have. They had limited travel. They -- if they learned any 57:00language other than Polish, it was Russian. They had little if any opportunity to learn Yiddish or Hebrew. The straitjacket of Marxist theory meant that, to be safe, you either studied a very remote period that nobody cared about like the Middle Ages or God knows what, or you were very, very factual, so that you could somehow or other avoid getting into trouble by offering some kind of, you know, interpretation other than the accepted one. And that, I think, was a real straitjacket. So, what you got were actually some very, very useful scholarship that was archive-based. And Polish scholars have access to the Polish archives, which is a huge asset. And they know those archives better than anybody. So, they really bring real value to the larger project of Jewish history and scholarship because of that. And their work is very careful, very, very 58:00thorough, and very rich in the sources they use and in the way they're able to extrapolate from those sources to provide some kind of a picture of Jewish life, Jewish history. But it's this generation after the fall of communism that also works in the archives and hopefully can take the best of what that earlier generation did, but who also have all these other advantages. And so, working with them and seeing the rich, intellectual resources that we have right here, which I -- I do think I underestimated that when I first began working on the project, because I simply didn't know. But I found out, and they're really good. They're really good.

CW:Have there been difficult, challenging moments where -- of misunderstanding 59:00about expectations from American Jews about this -- about Polish culture or vice-versa?

BKG:Well, I would say that, still, you know, if you were to go online and look at any of the articles that have been written about the museum and have appeared in the American press, and especially the American Jewish press -- the comments, I would say eighty percent, ninety percent of the comments are terrible. They're really terrible. Poland, a cesspool of anti-Semitism. That -- I'm thinking "Tablet." Look at "Tablet," look at the comments. They're really terrible. And they're absolutely emotional. They are emotional and they're understandable in the sense that very often they're coming from people whose family suffered terribly and whose only experience is these terrible stories, which are true 60:00stories. There's no doubt they're true stories, and they are -- and they're terrible. They are terrible. But they have nothing else to work with, and what it's -- what happens is that, because these stories are so terrible and they touch so close to home and they're from their own families and their grandparents and their parents, et cetera, anytime there's the slightest indication in the news of anything, of anti-Semitic nature, for them it's complete validation of their perception of Poland as, quote, a cesspool of anti-Semitism. And it was just today in "Tablet" -- very good article criticizing a very widely-reported survey of Polish youth, suggesting they are anti-Semitic because they -- let's see, said forty-four percent said they wouldn't like to have a Jewish neighbor and a certain number wouldn't like to have a Jewish partner. Do a survey of American Jews and ask how many of them would be happy if their child married a non-Jew. Try it, you know? And I'm not 61:00talking about -- I mean, I'm talking about people who'd be as strongly identified as Jews as these individuals are as Poles, and ask them how they would feel. I think you'd get a -- even higher rate of nos. Even much higher. Much higher, you know? Because that's -- and also, if you're asking somebody who's fourteen years old, I don't know what it means, you know? They ask these young kids, or -- and you're asking, "Would you like to have a Jew for a neighbor?" They never met one. So, I don't know -- you know, essentially, this is a really nice answer, because it was reported in the "Times" and elsewhere, and it doesn't give a real picture, I don't think. There are other surveys that would give a better picture. But because Poland is so identified with anti-Semitism, there's a fundamental assumption that it's the worst -- now, in fact, anti-Semitism -- and the surveys show that France is much worse. Malmö in 62:00Sweden is unbelievably much worse. UK's worse. Germany -- Poland, really, in terms -- if you look at Europe today and you really were to look at the surveys, Poland's looking pretty good. But the impression -- overwhelming, overwhelming. There was a terrible letter from -- and I hear the same thing all the time -- from somebody in response to Tad Taube's piece, I think, and I can't remember exactly -- it was published in a few places. But it said something I've heard for the last six, seven years. It said, "Why would you build such a museum in Poland? You should build it in Tel Aviv or New York. There are no Jews in Poland, and the government wants to have it because they want to make tourist money," and just all the cynicism, you know? All the bad faith. So, I would say we have quite a steep mountain to climb in terms of American Jews. But people who said they would never come to Poland are coming, and they're having experiences that are utterly transformative they could never have predicted. And 63:00it's just one after the other. It's one by one by one. And I think that March of the Living is also on a path that will enlarge the experience and will start with our museum, hopefully -- at least they did that this year. And they have some people that lead them that are really enlightened. Eli Rubenstein in Toronto, who's responsible for March of the Living in Canada and also internationally for their education program. He has, for years and years and years, been trying to really make March of the Living a much more open --

M:(UNCLEAR)

BKG:Okay, thanks (UNCLEAR).

M:(UNCLEAR)

BKG:Thank you -- to make March of the Living a much -- Eli Rubenstein in Toronto has been making a very big effort to enlarge the perspective of March of the Living, and for that -- for those groups to have experiences that go beyond the Holocaust and that definitely, definitely engage them with Poland today, which is not the Poland that they think it is, based on what some people have called 64:00death trips. And we think, also, with the Israeli groups -- going to be able to make some inroads. That's our hope.

CW:What about the other way around, with Polish reactions to American Jews with -- yourself in this position -- as building a museum here in Poland as an American Jew yourself, how does that feel?

BKG:Well, I think that -- I -- let me put it this way. I think that -- and I hope we've overcome some expectations. I think one of the fears on the part of the Polish public and also probably the Polish officials is -- they have a fear that maybe we'll create a bad impression, that the people come to the museum and 65:00feel ashamed, that Poland will look bad. That it'll be a museum of anti-Semitism. But I think that the more and more they know about the museum, the more and more they know that that's absolutely not the case. Absolutely not the case. And it's very important for us that all of our visitors, our Polish visitors included, actually feel at home in the museum and feel that they can find themselves in the story and that it is their story, as well, and not just the story of some exotic group that doesn't live here anymore. So, that's very important to us. I think that -- in my opinion, the best ambassadors for Poland will be Jewish visitors who come, who see the exhibition, and whose vision, whose perspective on this history and on contemporary Poland is really -- it really changes -- and who leave, and who go abroad and they communicate it to other people. They're the best ambassadors. (clears throat) Excuse me. And I'm 66:00the first one. I am the first one. I think that if I -- if someone like myself is able to communicate the story that we want to tell and why it matters and why it's credible, I think it's more convincing than if it were to come from the foreign ministry or from the state or from, you know, marketing of tourism or whatever, that it's -- that what makes it -- what makes the story most credible is when those whose perceptions start out most negative -- I don't consider myself to have started with negative perceptions. I come from a different place. But fundamentally, Jews abroad, especially North American Jews, but also elsewhere -- Australia, South Africa, Israel -- if they have a -- they -- I 67:00would say overwhelmingly, their perception of Poland is negative. And I think, in the world, Poland is perceived as anti-Semitic, and it has -- gets a bad rap. It has a spoiled identity. And it has and it will always live with the material traces of a genocide that was carried out here. They didn't carry it out. They didn't start it, they didn't bring it, but it was carried out here. This is the epicenter of the genocide. It was carried out on this land. This land is absolutely scarred with that genocide. And in the public perception, there's not a clear distinction made between the Germans that carried out the genocide and the Poland where the genocide was carried out. And that's why Obama's comment about the Polish death camps was -- and that sort of language is so absolutely appalling to Poland and to people living in Poland, and why comments, which I have heard from others, particularly American Jews, that the Poles were worse 68:00than the Germans -- I hear that all the time, and I'm thinking to myself which history are you thinking of, exactly? And I know where it's coming from. It's coming from, especially, post-war violence, like Yalta. It's also coming from betrayals during the war and terrible violence that, in fact, that some Poles inflicted. But when I -- you know, when I hear that, I think to myself that this story is so much bigger and that somehow providing a really credible challenge to that very emotional and very un-thought-through condemnation of Poland, that's really important to do. So, on the Polish side, the fear is that those perceptions, that stigma, that spoiled identity will get reinforced because the 69:00story of Jews, if you will -- if anything could reinforce it, it has to do with -- it has -- the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust is -- it reinforces it. So, if we're able, somehow, to intervene in that perception and to put those very dark chapters in this history within a much wider perspective, we can do a huge service. But there is the fear, there is an uneasiness and a fear that Poland will come across in a bad light. But it won't, I promise you. It will not.

CW:I know from some things you've written and some talks that you've given since your involvement in the museum that you have really been an advocate for Yiddish within the museum project and the collections. How has Yiddish played out in this project?

BKG:Well -- so, first of all, it's our approach to language in general, and I'm 70:00very passionate about language. And one of my fields is socio-linguistics, ethnography of communication, and so language, I -- how can I say? I think we have a very thoughtful approach to language. So, first of all, our languages of communication are Polish and English. Polish is the language of the country, English as the lingua franca and the language that would give us most access to most visitors. However, to have had an exhibition that was entirely in Polish and English would -- is unthinkable to me. Unthinkable. And one of the big messages of the exhibition is that it's telling a story in a place that was culturally and linguistically diverse. And one of the best ways to communicate that telegraphically is through language. And there was huge pressure on us to 71:00include Hebrew as a language of communication. So, you can imagine, three languages of communication. You'd have a whole and completely whole exhibition that was nothing but text, and I said to my-- and I said to them, "Well, listen, I don't understand. What's with the Hebrew?" "Well, Israeli visitors, you know, will feel more comfortable. And Hebrew because it's the Jewish national language." And I thought, But wait a minute. What language did these Polish Jews speak? If you're going to have Hebrew, then you're going to have Yiddish. Because, after all, why wouldn't you present this exhibition in the language that the people that you're presenting spoke?" And they didn't -- but for the most part, they didn't speak Hebrew. They had Hebrew, Hebrew Aramaic. They had religious texts, they had Zionists, but the Zionists spoke Polish, so -- in large measure. So, wait a minute, we're gonna have four languages? Well, that was untenable. Even three was untenable. And we -- the whole approach to the exhibition is to tell the story in the first person as much as possible, which 72:00-- that means is -- to quote from primary sources. To quote from memoirs, letters, diaries, biographies, from legal documents, contracts, whatever. But to, essentially, bring the primary sources forward, select them, curate them, and let them do the work, and to have -- to depend as little as possible on what we write ourselves. So, of course, we have, if you will, like continuity, and we have historical commentary, and, you know, we have to have something. But we reduce that to a minimum and we bring forward the sources. Well, once you bring forward the sources, what language are the sources in? And we use a process we call layering, which is to say a hierarchy of communication, which means that anything that we think is really top-level message should be twenty words or less and it should be a quotation. And it should be big letters, high up, and un-- you can't miss it. You certainly can't miss it. And those layer one 73:00quotations are always, always in the original language. And guess what the original languages are? So, they're -- in the medieval period, it's essentially Latin, Polish, Czech -- let me think. There might be, like, a little tiny bit of Yiddish. Just a tiny bit, because it's too early. But once we get to the other periods, there's more and more Yiddish. And by the time you get to the intra-war years, there's lots of Yiddish. And actually, the -- there's -- and there's a fair amount of Yiddish -- the Holocaust, and there's some in post-war. And there's some, a fair amount -- but inter-war years, especially. So, they -- and there's plenty of Hebrew, especially -- Hebrew, especially, in the medieval period. (mic scratching) Sorry -- there's lots of Hebrew, especially in the medieval period. So, it's a very multilingual exhibition, and Yiddish is very 74:00fully and beautifully represented. We have a section in the inter-war years on Vilna as the capital, spiritual capital of Yiddish land, of Yiddish. Tłomackie 13 is the headquarters of the PEN Club and Yiddish writers, publishers, editors. We have a press wall that has lots of Yiddish newspapers, as well as Polish and Hebrew. We have an area dedicated to theater and film in Yiddish as well as in Polish, little bit in Hebrew. We have a beautiful interactivity of "Haynt," with the real Yiddish pages, "Literarishe bleter," with real Yiddish pages, of "Landkentenish," the touring magazine, Jewish touring magazine, which was both in Polish and Yiddish. It was " Krajoznawstwo" and then "Landkentenish" -- "Know Your Country, Know Your Land" guidebook. For Vilna, we present both the non-Jewish Polish version and the Jewish Yiddish version and compare how they 75:00deal with the same sites. What else do we have in Yiddish? Well, for Vilna we have "Yung-Vilne," we have the poets, we have excerpts of poetry. We do a beautiful, beautiful interactivity to introduce visitors to modern Yiddish literature by having them read a passage and then, as they read it and it gets translated, the Yiddish letters form a micrographic portrait of the author. It's going to be fantastic. Absolutely fabulous. But they have to read it. Oh, yes, and they -- and the Yiddish is there. The full Yiddish is there. But then, we had a very nice technique where you can pull down a kind of a loop that translates it as you go, and as you do, the Yiddish letters all migrate and they form a portrait out of the actual letters of the actual words and the actual writing of, I think, seven or eight -- I can't remember how many Yiddish writers -- it's very nice. In the Holocaust gallery, we narrate much of the Warsaw 76:00Ghetto story through two diaries: Czerniaków's diary in Polish -- he was head of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków -- and Emanuel Ringelblum's diary in Yiddish. And we actually include the original Polish and the original Yiddish and then translation, and they -- these two voices accompany the visitor through the Warsaw Ghetto part of the exhibition. And we use the diaries from the YIVO autobiography contest, and we have ones in Hebrew and in Yiddish and in Polish. So, I think probably there's -- probably no major exhibition on a Jewish subject anywhere, major exhibition, long-term exhibition that will represent Yiddish as fully and as beautifully as this exhibition. And everybody seems to be with the program.

CW:Sh'koyekh [Well done]. (laughs) I'm -- I -- earlier just sort of threw this 77:00label at you as American Jew, but I want to talk for a minute --

BKG:Can I -- I am Canadian --

CW:Yes.

BKG:-- incidentally.

CW:Yes.

BKG:The -- I'm Canadian and American and Polish. I have Polish citizenship, too.

CW:I actually wanted to particularly talk about your Polish citizenship. How did that come about?

BKG:Well, I had actually wanted to be a -- become a Polish citizen for a very long time. And it was just -- I wouldn't say I was lazy, but I was just thinking to myself, Oh my God, it's such a rigmarole, how do you do it? Didn't know how to -- basically, fundamentally, I wanted to become a Polish citizen and I didn't know how. And so, I just let it go and I thought, well, someday, you know, one day, one day. And then, when I was here, the opportunity arose. And there's a -- I managed to hire a company that specializes in dealing with expats and people like that. And they said it's not so difficult, because when they found out that 78:00my parents were born and raised here and they were Polish citizens, I actually am a Polish citizen. And what I knew to do was to confirm it. And I had to confirm it through my -- and we did it through my father, because Brest-Litovsk now is in Belarus, so it was easier to do it through my father than Opatów. And I had all their papers. So, I had to gather the papers together and they had to go through the various steps. And it was -- so, once I had -- somebody would do it for me and knew how to do it, and I could do it here and not do it in the United States and have to go through the consulate and do it by myself -- and I knew that it was a confirmation of a citizenship that was mine already, by virtue of my parents, there was something enormously appealing about it. So, we did it, and the day that it was approved -- and it was actually approved by the wojewod-- [Polish: county official] here in Warsaw, just a block, two blocks 79:00away. And I got the paper, and it was a very -- just ordinary A4 paper with a stamp and the information. And I brought it to the office, then, I think, the next day or couple days later, the whole team made me a surprise party. And they went ahead, they -- it was very clever. They must have gone online. They found my signature, they found a photograph somewhere. They faked a Polish ID. They made a fake Polish ID. They took it to a baker who had a digital printer to print icing, and they made me, like, a humongous Polish ID cake with my picture, my signature -- with everything that's like a real Polish ID. Put four big sparklers in it. And I had no idea it was going to happen. I arrive, the lights are out, the sparklers are going. There are bouquets of flowers. There's a beautiful book, gift, that's in simple Polish that I'd be able to read by a very wonderful graphic -- Polish graphic designer. And Staszek Krajewski, who I've 80:00known since the late '70s was there 'cause he's on my team, and he made a beautiful speech. And I think what really was most moving to me was how much it meant to my colleagues, how much it meant to them. And then, it took another year, almost, to get a passport because all the names didn't match, all the documents. But I finally got the passport in January, I think. I picked it up in January this year and traveled on it a month later to Moscow. And I traveled with my colleagues, and we all had Polish passports, including me. And when I had to fill out the little visa form or whatever it is when you land, the landing document, it asked for nationality and it has a -- hey, wait a minute. Ordinarily, I'd write USA, 'cause I normally travel on an American passport. And I wrote down Poland. And that was sort of an amazing experience. And so, first off, I felt like I was part of the deal, although I'm often reminded by one of my colleagues, "Basia, I know you're a Polish citizen, but you may not 81:00understand that" -- X, Y, and Z, 'cause clearly, it's not the same thing as being born and raised here. But it was really -- it was a good experience. Wonderful experience.

CW:Yeah. What has been the reaction of your family, friends, in -- of your involvement in this project?

BKG:Well, my father -- I was involved in the project when my father was still alive, and I think he was very excited about it. I would love to think what it would be like for him to actually be here and, you know, be here for the opening next May, the grand opening in May 2014. But I know that he thought it was a great idea. He was very excited about it, was very happy that I was doing it. And I think he was very -- he came 'round -- when I first started -- when I came 82:00to Poland in 1981, I asked him to come with me and he wouldn't. He just said, "They can all go to hell." He was really negative. And that came to me as a surprise, because his memories of growing up here were overwhelmingly positive, you know, other than pov-- not, well, poverty -- they were actually, basically, middle class. But other than -- the contrast, if you will, between the conditions of his childhood and the life that he was living in Canada, which is huge. But basically, his memory was very positive -- so I couldn't understand exactly why he was so negative. But about seven or eight years later, he somehow or other turned around and said he wanted to come. So, then I brought him -- (clears throat) pardon me, I brought him and I brought my mother. And he was very anxious, very nervous. Didn't want to spend more than fifteen minutes in the town. It was -- he was really -- it had been -- he had left in 1916. I think we came back in '88. So, pardon me, he'd left in 1934. He came back in '88. So, 83:00sixty years or so, or more. He hadn't been back, he didn't know what he would find. Nobody's left, and also, there's no trace -- there was a -- virtually, the cemetery was -- the tombstones were gone, the synagogue was gone. It was, you know, very -- quite sad. And then, we came back -- I brought him back again in 1995, because I was teaching in Krakow, in the summer school, with Jan Gross and Steve Zipperstein. It was part of an NYU summer in Krakow, and I -- whenever I traveled and I would be somewhere for more than a few days, I brought my parents. They were great to travel with, wonderful. And I lived in New York, they lived in Toronto. We don't get to spend time together. So, I thought it would be nice. So, I got an apartment, we all lived together, and I brought them to my classes and my students learned how to do interviewing. Everybody -- all my students learned how to do interviewing on my parents. So, they were very -- and they were very cooperative, very patient. By that time, in 1995, my father 84:00had been painting for five years. So, now -- and I had said to him -- and my mother used to always invite people to the house, serve tea and cookies, and encourage my father to go around the house and tell the stories of all the paintings. And I said, "You know? This is really quite arduous. I'm going to hire a professional photographer. He's going to make slides, he's going to make prints, and you can put the slides in a tray and go anywhere you like, and you show the slides and tell your stories. And, okay, so we did that. And I said, "He's gonna make prints." And he had -- little photo album that -- just a little tiny one with pages. And he filled it up with the photographs and he took it with him this time to Opatów. And this time, he ran around the town buttonholing people and saying, "You see? This synagogue was there and the mikvah [pool for ritual immersion] was there and the butcher was there, and this was there. Does anybody remember?" And one young man took an interest and said, "You know what? My grandmother, she was alive before the war. Come to our place. I'll call her." And they lived in a place much like he did, like two rooms, basically. Tiny. Right up on the market square. Got his grandmother to come and 85:00they brought out the soft drinks and pretzels and they -- the whole family turned up, and that was the beginning of a relationship with this young guy who kept in touch with him for years. Even came to Toronto, I think, to visit. And this young guy followed my father's sort of -- whatever he was doing. His paintings, his shows, his this, that, and the other. And he convinced the county chief that they should exhibit my father's paintings in Opatów, in the powiat -- in the county house. And I said, "Well, honestly, you know, they're original paintings. You don't have a gallery, you don't have a museum. We can't exhibit original paintings, but," I said, "we're going to be at the Krakow Festival. We'll come and visit Opatów, and how 'bout we'll -- I'll make a PowerPoint for my father and I'll put the slide-- I'll project the images and he'll tell the 86:00stories." They said, "Okay, but the county chief wants to meet with you." So, we came, and first of all, we had to have a meeting with the county chief -- was like a big, long table, and the county chief and my father sat opposite each other like this. There was orange organza along the table, and the pretzels and the chips and tea and coffee and soft drinks. And then, lined up on either side of the county chief were his officials, and lined up on either side of my father was his family. And the conversation was about getting this exhibition. And we said, "Well, whatever." So, then we went downstairs into their main hall for the talk. And the church had put posters up all around the town, it had announced it at the mass. And it was a full house. And it was grandparents with their children and it was an absolutely full house, with standing room only and people standing in the hall. And my father, you know, told all his stories in Polish and, you know, "Witam [Polish: Hello]." And then, he started out and just told 87:00the stories in Polish, and they gave him a standing ovation, and they -- gifts. It was the thousandth anniversary of the church. I mean, there's a beautiful album of the church from the thousandth anniversary, and then they had a beautiful dinner reception in a kind of a restaurant -- kind of, I would say, beer garden restaurant, very nice. Very, very nice. Very lovely. And then, I realized that one of their most proud achievements was that the person in charge of the geological survey created a geological survey museum. Essentially, it's all the equipment you can't use anymore. So, instead of throwing it out, they made a museum out of it. They also had some really old things. But they -- so, they made a -- what they called a geo-- not a geodesic but some kind of a geological survey museum with old survey equipment. And then, I gave a look and I see they have an enormous printer, because they print maps. They have a huge printer. I said, "You know what we're gonna do? I have and I can make huge TIFFs 88:00that -- you could print a bulletin board. You could print a whole wall with these TIFFs, you know, 150-meg TIFFs. Huge TIFFs. You've got a printer and you can print high -- you can make high quality prints. Big." I said, "How 'bout I will prepare for you however many images you want. I'll organize them, I'll write you all the captions. I'll write all the text panels, and my museum in Warsaw will help you with fonts, with translation, with editing. Right kind of paper, with the printing, et cetera. And you'll make your own exhibition, and you can keep the prints and you can do whatever you want with them afterwards." So, they said, "Okay." So, we did. We did. And the museum here helped and we went there a couple of times, and people from here went there. They came here, and then they had a big opening with a ribbon cutting and with a program with local musicians playing Jewish music. And the mayor presented my father with a 89:00facsimile of his mother's marriage certificate from the municipal archive. And they made speeches and there was a formal ribbon cutting with the county chief and my father. And anyway, one of the people from our museum went earlier to the exhibition. She said, "Barbara, I just want to warn you." She said, "It's not the way we would do an exhibition." She said, "It's more like a Polish wedding." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, it's potted palms and it's blue and white organza, and it's" -- I said, "Well, you know what? This is their exhibition and it's -- they're -- it is a kind of a vernacular style of installation, is -- which is a way of showing value and respect. And I think it's fine. I think it's just fine." And the potted palms, it was so nineteenth century, you know? So -- it was so pre-war. I thought it was -- and actually, I thought it was great. I thought it was great. So, very, very nice, and my father 90:00gave a tour and people asked him questions and they gave him flowers and it was really, really fabulous. Then, I get an email that the high school teacher, who's an art teacher and an artist herself -- and her husband is also an artist, and he did the restoration of the paintings in the cathedral, in the church for the thousandth anniversary -- that she had organized a competition for her high school art students. They should go around the town and they should either paint or draw or photograph the places my father had painted. What do they look like today? And that there would be a winner of the competition. And then, in October, I got a message -- around October 23rd or so, and the message said that on October 22nd or somewhere around that date that the church had held a special mass to commemorate the day -- the days, actually, on which all the Jews of 91:00Opatów had been deported to Treblinka, which was the first time ever. They'd never, ever, ever had that day on the calendar, and most people in the town didn't even know that anything had happened on that day, and it -- never been commemorated, it had never been noted. Nobody ever knew anything. And they -- the church organized the mass and they had -- they lit blue and white candles, they had high school students reading testimony from witnesses. They played Jewish music, and then they had the -- announced the winners of the contest. And I thought that was just extraordinary, just totally amazing. And it was -- for me, it represented the best of what this museum can do, which I call constructive engagement -- that this was a situation where they valued my father -- they actually tried to make him an honorary citizen. And my father said, "What do you mean an honorary citizen of the town? I am already a citizen of the town." I said, "But, no, no, no, you understand, it's not honorary in the sense 92:00that you weren't and are now honorary. It's distinguished, special. Very good, special." And I think that there are very few families in that town today that are -- that have prewar history with the town. Most people came from somewhere else, which is the story of postwar Poland, because there's such huge dislocation -- of people having been dislocated and relocated. And so, it means that there's very little memory, and virtually -- almost no memory at all of the Jewish presence in the town. And there were ten thousand people in the town when my father left, and sixty-five hundred of them were Jews. And in two days, they were gone. And so, his -- the idea that his memories were unfiltered by the Holocaust, the idea that he could remember so much about that town to which they had no access, and he did it in words and images was so appreciated, so -- they -- you had the feeling that they -- they felt like they had just simply stumbled 93:00on a treasure, an absolute treasure, and a person who -- from who, his firsthand experience -- he was seventeen when he left, and he was -- he really -- his memory was just incredible. Really, totally incredible. And I'd like to say I didn't come from a family of rabbis or Warsaw intellectuals or lawyers and doctors. I came from -- my father's family -- my grandfather was a -- sold leather and fittings to shoemakers. My father apprenticed to a shoemaker, he apprenticed to an electrician. He was a housepainter. He had a paint store. He went through seven grades of public school in Poland and through kheyder, and that's it. So, everything he knows, he taught himself. He's a completely self-taught -- he's the original do-it-yourself guy, totally, one hundred percent. But he's like a genius of -- an extraordinary ordinary person. Absolutely extraordinary. And that's my specialty, the extraordinary ordinary person, 'cause I just have total faith and conviction in the creativity of so-called ordinary people and total and utter conviction in the capacity to be 94:00creative 'til the end of your days. If you're blessed with decent health and a memory and what you need, that -- to the day you die -- he died when he was ninety-three, and he was creative until the very day he died. And I believe human beings have that capacity, but they have to be supported to really -- to bring it out, and -- but any event, the idea that he could be so meaningful to the people who live there and that through his work of memory for them, on their behalf, that they could come to their own way, in their own time -- of dealing with the Jewish past of their town and do it in their own way, I think that's -- for me, that is the gold standard. That is the best, the absolute best. And I'd like to think this museum could -- basically, that that's the model this museum offers. Because Holocaust museums learn -- help you to learn from the worst case and the worst examples. That's the -- I mean, obviously, there are some 95:00wonderful -- you also learn from heroes. You learn from the Polish Righteous. You learn from people who are heroic beyond any imagination. But that actually, in some ways, unfort-- well, fortunately or unfortunately is a footnote to the genocide which is really a story of evil. First and foremost, massive story of evil. And there's another way -- there's -- there are other ways of coming to grips with that story, and I have a lot of faith in -- I have -- I come to this project and I come to Poland with a presumption of good faith, that fundamentally our visitors -- I expect our visitors to be people of good faith. People who come curious, interested, sincere, genuine, and that if we start from a position of good faith, then people will find their own way to come to grips 96:00with really, really difficult subjects, and that there's plenty of opportunities for them to come to it through the painful path. So, through Jedwabne, through Kielce, through Treblinka, through the worst, worst, worst moments in their history. They haven't had that many opportunities to come to those terrible moments through the approach that I think this museum offers, and I think through the experience with my father. It's a very different path, but it can -- I think we need more than one path. We need more than one way. And I think we have to have faith in our visitors. I really -- I think that we can get -- I think we can achieve more with greater depth, greater resonance. Or at least, let me put it this way -- we can offer an alternative. That's what I think we can do.

CW:I have two more questions, but I'm wondering if, Agnieszka, you have a question?

AGNIESZKA ILWICKA:No, but -- yeah, I do, actually. (laughs) You almost made me cry by your story. Thank you very much for telling this. (laughs) I became so emotional because it's a big deal. But I just want to ask you, are you happy in Poland?

BKG:Yes. I love being here. I really do. And I think, how can I say -- I feel very connected to my family and my family story. And being here is a way to be very close to it. And I can't imagine doing this project anywhere else. I can't imagine living in New York and doing it here. I can't imagine this exhibition or this museum having the power and the potential that it can have if it were anywhere else. And I think that -- well, first of all, just in general, when I 98:00work on a project, I like to have a task, a place, and a time that all come together. So, I don't want to be somewhere else and work on this project. I want to be here and I want to work on it. And I want to live it and feel it and breathe it, and get as close to this subject as I can by living it, so it's not an experience exclusively from books, documents, archive, and talking, but it's a li-- that somehow, there's a dimension of it that is lived and felt. And I think that it's the only way to -- how can I say? And I'll tell you, the challenge for me, in fact, is I understand my Jewish visitors. This I understand. But to understand Polish visitors, this is the adventure. This is 99:00the challenge. And I'll never understand them in the way that my colleagues do, but I sure as -- I sure won't understand them if I don't live here. The closest I can get is by living here. But I also want to understand my Polish Jewish visitors, my -- the Jew-- the visitors that -- say, Jews living in Poland today, 'cause they're a huge opportunity, as well. I think that -- I think this museum can also be a support for the renewal of Jewish life in Poland today. That's really important. Really important. And I think so because it's a public statement that is fearless. It's -- this is a museum, this is an exhibition inside a glass box, inside a building that is transparent, luminous, reflective, made of glass. And I think to put this exhibition in this fabulous glass building and to be so public and to stand strong and tall and say, "This is our 100:00story, and we want to share it with you and Poland and with the world," it's a huge statement. And considering the postwar story -- the postwar story's the story of many, many people who were afraid to be known as Poles who helped Jews, to be identified as Jewish. There was huge fear of anti-Semitism. There was huge pressure to assimilate. And given that postwar story, given the genocide, given immigration, given assimilation, given the hiding of Jewishness, given the hiding of the Polish Righteous, the idea that one could be so public, so out there, and do so in good faith, that's a huge, huge, huge achievement. And I think that -- and I would hope that it would support the renewal of Jewish life, that it would validate the people who are here and who stayed here and who are 101:00still here, and who are not afraid to be and who are even proud to be Jewish and are willing to say so. And it might encourage others who had some questions about the matter to feel comfortable and feel also they had a resource to draw on, because there is a huge -- there's a missing generation. There's at least maybe -- missing two generations. And that means that individuals who discover -- and often quite late in life -- that they had Jewish birth parents or that they had Jewish grandparents and never knew it, and who -- for whom this is meaningful. This is now meaningful. They want to do something about it. Where do they look? Their parents can't tell them a thing. Their grandparents aren't alive. Where do they go? They will go, I would say, laterally to their Jewish peers in Israel or America. But they can't go deep into the tradition, if you 102:00will, and the history and the heritage of Polish Jews that lived here and made a world here and created a civilization here. And I'd like to think that the museum can actually give them a huge treasure box, a legacy of a world and a civilization that was created here that is theirs, is their own, and that they should be able to draw on it. And I think that -- and something to be proud of and something to have access to. So, yes, of course, contemporary Jewish life in the United States, in Canada, in Israel. Of course, Jewish religious life. Of course, everything. But also, this huge history, this huge heritage. And I think it can really -- it can be a great resource, because it's a way of knowing who you are. But I think that Jews around the world don't have access to it either, in large measure. So, I think it can be a great resource in terms of Jewish 103:00continuity, which obviously is something I'm very interested in. And I'm very interested in it here, as well as elsewhere. And I wonder how many -- I've often thought -- and we're thinking -- we have the idea to create an interactivity that starts with the question, "Did you ever wonder if you had Jewish roots?" And it -- I don't know where it will go. It might go something like this: "Would you like to find out? Here's what you can do. And what would you do? How would you feel if you were to discover that you had Jewish roots? What would you do about it? Would you be happy about it? Would you -- would it be meaningful to you? Would you care? Who would you tell, if anybody?" I have no idea where we'll go with it. But what prompts it is that shortly after the fall of communism, Staszek Krajewski and, I think -- and some colleagues, but certainly, he was the 104:00main one -- created a Jewish hotline. And they had a poster and we're going to show it in the exhibition. And the poster, it's something to the effect of, "Do you think you're Jewish and is it a problem?" Something to that effect. "Would you like to talk to somebody about it? Call the hotline between four and six on Tuesdays." I don't know, I'm making it up. I'm making it up. But there is, really, truly -- there is a leaflet, truly, that says, "If you think you have a problem with being Jewish, call us." And they called it the hotline, and it had a phone number and it had when you could call. And I think Stasha took most of the calls. And I have to -- we have to interview him, find out what did people ask and what did he say? But we thought -- I thought to myself, what would it be like to ask a version of that question today? Because what's so interesting is that there is -- on the one hand, there are people who have this feeling, don't 105:00know what to do with it. And there is also a kind of anti-Semitic aspect of it, which is anybody that you want to discredit, you essentially accuse them of having Jewish roots, or -- you either accuse them and they don't have any or you discover they do and use -- you hold it against them. So, it's got this double -- it's got this sort of double valance. But I think it could be quite interesting, because there are so many -- one of the things that Rabbi Schudrich says when people ask him how many Jews there are in Poland -- he says, "Look, I don't know how many there are. All I know is that the number is increasing." And then, others have said it's the only country they know where the number of Jews goes up and the birthrate doesn't. And, of course, immigration isn't even, you know, on the table. So, the current figure for individuals who can -- who either identify themselves as Jewish but -- more or less is somewhere between seven and 106:00eight thousand, which is actually higher than estimates earlier. But that doesn't mean that there are actually more. It means that more individuals have somehow or other found out. Essentially, what it is is a kind of de-assimilation process. Process of discovering a Jewish relative and thinking that it's important, or acknowledging it or finding it meaningful, even if it doesn't get filled with any content. And simply, the only thing there is is the knowledge that somebody in one's family is or was Jewish. So, quite interesting. Oh wait, did you have another question?

CW:(laughs) I don't know if it's even possible for you to think this way, but can you think -- do you know what your next project is gonna be?

BKG:Well, it's a good question, you know? I've been living here now five years, 107:00full-time. It seems like an eye blink. I think if I were younger, it would seem like a long time. But now, it just seems like no time at all. And I don't even think about leaving, 'cause it's hard for me to imagine not being here. But then, of course, in the moment you go home, you're home and everything else seems like it's a zillion years away. So, it's very hard to imagine. I've even fantasized of buying the apartment I'm living in and having it as a pied-à-terre and being able to just come back whenever I want. But I have no idea if that's really me. I just don't know what's ahead. I really don't know what's ahead. I think that this museum will have a life of its own, this exhibition will have a life of its own. I think it's going to be in very good hands. I have a wonderful team. Some of the key people on this team are, in 108:00fact, going to be responsible for the exhibition at the museum. I'll go home and, I think, basically I'm gonna write. I'll write, I'll do consulting, I'll try to maintain a connection with this museum and this project. I -- at the moment, I think I want to consolidate what I've learned from this and write about it, basically, is what I want to do.

CW:Great. Do you have any advice to future visitors to this museum?

BKG:Yes, allow enough time. I hope the museum will issue all tickets that are -- that all tickets should be forty-eight hours. That would be number one, and that you should be able to buy a ticket that's good for unlimited visiting for a week or for a month, something like that. In other words, I think that -- I would say -- my advice would be the following. Plan to spend a few days in Warsaw, because 109:00by and large, people have treated Warsaw as a fly-by. In other words, land at the airport and go immediately on the train to Krakow or Auschwitz. Visit -- maybe visit Kazimierz and either go home or move on to Majdanek or Belzec or some other death camp. So, I'd say the first thing is plan to spend a few days in Warsaw, number one. Number two, plan to -- plan at least a day at the Warsaw Ghetto monument site and the environs, and within the museum. And allow yourself another day to either come back to the museum or enjoy the city. Visit the old -- visit stare miasto, nowe miasto [Polish: old city, new city], but plan to come back. Make another visit. Because it's -- it'll be very rewarding. There are cultural programs, there are educational programs. There's temporary exhibitions. There'll be guided tours of the building. There'll be walking tours 110:00of the neighborhood, and there's the exhibition itself. And I would say that I think the ideal way to visit the exhibition would be to first visit as a walkthrough. So, to spend, let's say, two hours, two and a half hours to get a feel for the entire exhibition, and then to come back to the part that you most want to explore. That, for me, would be the ideal way. And maybe you'd come for the whole day and do the walkthrough in the morning, have -- nice lunch in our cafeteria, which hopefully will be kosher. I'm working on it. And then, the afternoon, go back to the one gallery you most want to really spend time in. Might be the edge of war years, maybe it's postwar, maybe it's Holocaust. Maybe it'll be the nineteenth century, maybe you'll surprise yourself and you might like to spend it in the eighteenth century, which is going to be stunningly beautiful. It's dedicated to the sort of story of a Jewish town. Or maybe you had no idea that the first five hundred years of this story in the first gallery 111:00could be so interesting, you know? So, that's what I would advise.

CW:Hey, well, a sheynem dank, thank you so much --

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

CW:-- for taking the time and --

BKG:And do you have any other -- did you have any other questions? No.

CW:(laughs) Okay, and di kumedike mol af yidish [the next time in Yiddish]. (laughs)

BKG:Mir ken redn af yidish, far vos nisht [we can speak in Yiddish, why not]?

CW:Thank you for taking the time to, in such a busy time, to speak with me and the Yiddish Book Center.

BKG:Well, it's a pleasure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]