MICHAEL YASHINSKY ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:So, this is Christa Whitney, and today is June 5th, 2013.  I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center, with Michael Yashinsky -- is that how you say it?

MICHAEL YASHINSKY:  Yes.

CW:  And we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Michael, do I have your permission to record?

MY:  You do, yes.

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

MY:  Yes.  Well, I have one grandparent who's actually from the Old Country -- my paternal grandmother, Lillian Yashinsky, originally Lillian -- actually Leah -- Zorn, came from Brest-Litovsk -- Brisk -- in Poland, as a child in the '30s, 1:00before, you know, terrible, terrible things started happening, thankfully.  But, of course, many of her family died, still in Europe.  She was the only one of my grandparents that came from the Old Country.  The rest were born in America, but had parents who came from the Old Country, chiefly Poland and Russia.  Um, yeah.

CW:  Are there any family stories that have been passed down, like, through generations?

MY:  Yeah, for sure.  Let's see -- well, one I was -- was thinking about -- my -- this paternal grandmother, Lillian -- "Bobe [Grandmother]," we call her.  Her father, who would be my great-grandfather -- I've only heard stories about, but he died before I was born.  But my father knew him well, and he was just 2:00your typical immigrant, really -- never quite adjusted to the new world lifestyle.  I say new world, not American, cause they actually went to Windsor, Ontario, and not Detroit, where my family is from.  So that's where they went, 'cause America wasn't taking in immigrants then -- they had reached their quota -- so they went to Windsor, and my great-grandfather -- Zeyde [Grandfather] Lazer, they called him -- he was a fruit peddler, and would go house to house in Windsor, Ontario -- still with a horse, who I think was called Mary, strangely enough, because they were all Jews -- I don't know how she came to be called Mary, but I think that was the case -- and would sell fruit and vegetables door-to-door, and never learned to speak English, really.  My father, growing up, would have visits often with his zeyde, and they weren't really able to 3:00communicate.  My dad knew how to say "Vos makhstu [How are you]?"  So he would also say that to my great-grandfather, and conversation would basically end there.  Another thing about this man is that, in all the photographs of him, you can very plainly see a dent in his forehead, like an indentation in his forehead -- circular -- which is where his horse kicked him.  So that hoof left a permanent dent, and it's very visible in photos.  So I always look at photos of him and see my origins, really.  I see this very Old World, Old Country, Jewish man, and for -- I mean, in that -- in those images of him, are represented for me, kind of, my background, my history, yeah.

CW:  Hmm.  Can you tell me about the home you grew up in, in Detroit?

MY:  Yes.  My father grew up in a -- Orthodox home, and my mother grew up in a 4:00home, also Jewish, all -- all of my grandparents are Jewish -- but not at all religious.  Both in Oak Park, a suburb of Detroit, they grew up.  And my mom always says that, in order to marry my father, who grew up Orthodox, she had to convert -- which she didn't.  I mean, she was Jewish, but she had to sort of adopt a lifestyle that was not a part of her upbringing.  Although she was raised in a very Jewish home -- and she always stresses that -- that, although it wasn't a home of ritual, there was always -- she said Sunday, I think, particularly, was a day where my grandmother would play records, Jewish music, just loudly through the house, and the house was filled with this Jewish spirit, this Yiddishkayt, and she was raised by these secular Jews -- both actors, actually, my maternal grandparents, career actors in Detroit -- as a very 5:00culturally -- richly culturally Jewish person.  And, together, she and my father made a home, that, sort of -- they met in the middle, kind of.  A lot of culture, and we connected to our Jewishness a lot through that -- through music and, you know, using bits of Yiddish here and there, and food, obviously, but also ritual and religious observance.  And I attended day school.  They s-- they actually sent me, the fourth child -- I have three older brothers.  None of them went to day school -- they all went to public school, except for me, starting in first grade, they sent me off to day school, and people always asked them, why did you decide for the youngest, to finally send him?  And they say, I guess we just got wise in our old age.  They realized that it was truly important to have this intensive Jewish immersion as part of a schooling 6:00curriculum, which my brothers didn't receive.  So I'm very grateful for that, 'cause I feel I'm a much more -- well, I'm a -- I'm grateful f-- I mean, I feel I'm an informed, sort of grounded Jew, knowledgeable in Hebrew and in Tanakh, and Talmud, and I'm just -- I'm glad to have a Jew-- with all of this behind me, that I can build upon --

CW:  Um-hm.

MY:  -- which I'll do for the rest of my life.

CW:  What were the -- were there any particular holidays or rituals that -- that were your favorites, growing up?

MY:  Yeah, I'd say probably decorating the sukkah comes instantly to mind.  Our sukkah was Baroque in its decoration.  It was -- not an inch was bare, and 7:00not covered with some, mostly bizarre, decorations.  We wouldn't just go for the fruits and flowers and all of that, but action figures -- which we actually called "mentshn [people]."  They were our little mentshn, were our action figures -- the little wrestlers and superheroes, and they would be dangling all over from the skakh [green branches used to cover the sukkah], and Disney characters, the wicked witch, and He-Man -- all sorts were dangling.  And then -- it's just quite a bizarre thing -- and we have a huge box of them, we bring out every year.  So every year we meet those mentshn on the ceiling of our -- well, not ceiling -- on the -- like, dangling from the foliage of our sukkah, and it's very much our own.  It's unique.  I guess it sort of represents our Jewishness, which is one very mixed with, you know, American, secular lifestyle, 8:00and -- but also, you know, richly Jewish as well.  It's sort of a -- an American -- very American kind of Yiddishkayt.

CW:  Um-hm.  What were the Yiddish words that were being used sometimes in your home?

MY:  Lots.  And, again, sort of mixed with American, you know, English.  So it's sort of a hybrid, like, you know, at night, it would say "Go shluffy," not "Gey shlofn [Go to sleep]," or something, but "Go shluffy," which is kind of this -- hm -- combination.  Things like that, I mean, you'd hear them peppering our speech all the time, and -- especially from my grandmother, Liz -- Elizabeth, maiden name Elkin, Weiss -- my mother's mother, who is deeply -- she's still with us, and she is, like, a Yiddishist, actually.  She's been to 9:00the National Yiddish Book Center, and before I came here, she told me I would have the time of my life here, because she did, and it was just such a positive experience for her, being surrounded by these Yiddish books -- as she is in her own house, actually.  Books line her walls -- of Yiddish and Jewish history, and Holocaust history.  I've always --

CW:  Have you --

MY:  -- yeah.

CW:  No, no, go ahead.

MY:  Well, I've always just been amazed at the way she preserves and sort of consumes knowledge of our people.  It's very important to her.  I actually found this quote when I was going through books in her library, as I often do.  It's -- it was about Yiddish theater, the book, and she has a lot about that, cause she is an actress, and interested in acting and theater, and it was describing how Jews in the Old Country didn't just go to Yiddish melodramas and operettas -- silly farces, things like that -- but would go to Yiddish 10:00translations of Ibsen and Chekhov, and it describes how the Jews became these avid, avid consumers and producers of culture.  It said the Jews in this time -- this was what I really liked -- became -- oh, they were more like Goethe's Faust, who desired a monopoly of knowledge, than Marlowe's Barabas, who desired monopoly of wealth.  And I liked that, cause it's, like, the Gentiles have gotten it wrong, sort of, about the Jews -- that it's not that we crave money and power -- we crave knowledge, and we crave culture and learning, and that's what defines us, more than anything else.  And I feel that when I enter her home, surrounded by these books.

CW:  Hm, yeah.  When you were growing up, were there aspects -- maybe a 11:00particular work of art that -- of Jewish culture -- that was important to you?

MY:  Hm, yes.  I'd say one thing that really turned me on to not just Jewish learning and Jewish culture, but really Yiddish literature -- modern Yiddish literature -- is the book "Di brider ashkenazi [The brothers Ashkenazi]" by Yud Yud Singer, I. J. Singer, the elder brother of Bashevis.  And I discovered that book when I was -- the summer before my senior year of college at Harvard, I went to England to research in county archives and in the British Library, a thesis about milkmaids in the nineteenth century in England.  So sort of unrelated.  But I was staying at this student dormitory in London, in Bloomsbury, and in a box of books -- it was sort of a lending library -- you 12:00didn't -- I mean, you just sort of wrote your name and took the book, and then brought it back.  In one of the boxes, yet to be shelved, I think, it was that book.  And I saw it, and it was a photograph of a Yiddish theater production -- theatrical adaptation of the novel -- it was, like, an old man with his daughter, and the old man was very wise and with a beard, and there were candles -- and I thought, Wow, this really looks like something interesting.  And I read it, and I didn't finish reading it when I left England, and I actually forgot to return it to the library, so it's still in my collection, and I do sort of feel bad about that, but I also feel like, in a way, entitled to it.  Like this book is kind of my yerushe, my inheritance, as a Jew.  I mean, receiving this was kind of like --

CW:  Bashert [Meant to be].

MY:  Yeah, bashert, exactly, because it really turned me on to Yiddish literature, which I now consume a lot of, and love.  And that was the first example of it that I've read, and my very favorite, and one of my favorite novels of all.

CW:  What do you like about it?

MY:  I'd say -- well, on the one hand, the Yiddishkayt, and the -- the feeling for the Jews of that time in Europe, the sort of social observations that you get, because that's not a world that I've ever seen, and that I'll ever see -- and no one will ever see, because it's -- it'll never be the same and was, you know, destroyed.  But you can see it in novels like that, that have such a clear human eye for what was happening in the world around them, as they wrote.  And to read it is like being back there, and that's a wonderful thing to me.  With all of its beauty, but also all of its ugliness -- you get a lot of that in I. J. Singer, Jews treating each other horribly.  But that was the 14:00reality.  It wasn't, you know, a perfect, idyllic shtetl life like you'd see in a musical or something.  Also I'd say the brothers -- the brother relationships, because, of course, I grew up with brothers, so that was fun for me.  And one of my brothers is actually named Simcha Meyer, who is the protagonist brother of "Di brider ashkenazi."  He's nothing like the Simcha Meyer of the novel, though, thankfully.  But that was cool.  Simcha Meyer is an old name in my family.  My father's father is Simcha Meyer, so there's a lot of Simcha Meyers now, including in Israel, 'cause, like, every family there that's related to my family seems to have a Simcha Meyer.  I have relatives in Israel, yeah.

CW:  Yeah.  So, you s-- you mentioned that this book sort of allowed you to discover Yiddish literature.  What was your knowledge of Yiddish prior to 15:00discovering this book, first of all?

MY:  Yes, well, I had gotten a lot from my grandmother -- this grandmother, Elizabeth Elkin Weiss, that I talk about, my mother's mother, who is a speaker of Yiddish, and I saw some of the films in her home -- Yiddish films -- but nothing in the way of formal training, which I regret -- that my day school education, first through twelfth grade, didn't include any Yiddish, really, in any formal kind of way.  Maybe a song here and there, but it was Hebrew everyday.  And that's a pity, I think.  So, yeah, not as much exposure to Yiddish as I would've liked, in the way of real, rigorous learning.  And I think that's something that really could've been done in my school, but 16:00wasn't.  I mean, obviously, you have other Jewish ethnicities represented, but perhaps you could have a Yiddish class and a Ladino class, and, if there came speakers of other Jewish languages, then maybe you'd have an independent study of that, but integrating those into a curriculum of a Jewish day school, I think, would be a really positive thing.

CW:  Hm.  Well, I know that you actually can read some -- some Yiddish, and Ladino, now.

MY:  Yeah.  I took this fascinating class in college, called "Jewish languages and literatures" -- it was in the literature department -- taught by Professor Marc Shell, who -- I think his first language was Yiddish, growing up in Montreal, and his second was French, and then he learned English -- he taught it, but every week was a different Jewish language, and a guest lecturer would come in.  So Ruth Wisse did the Yiddish one, of course, and there were all 17:00sorts of bizarre ones -- Judeo-Malayalam, Jews in India spoke, and -- so, yeah, that was really exciting for me, and there was a Ladino unit.  For my final project in that class, I actually wrote a translation of a poem in Ladino, a poem by a guy -- I just found it deep in the library -- Widener, at Harvard -- by a Holocaust survivor named Moshe Ha-Elion, from Salonika, in Greece.  And he wrote, after his experience, a long, sort of epic poem in Ladino about the Holocaust, called "En los Kampos de la Muerte -- In the Death Camps."

CW:  Fields of death, yeah.

MY:  Yeah, right, so I wrote a translation of that, and I was able to, using my 18:00Hebrew and my Spanish, which I had taken and the dictionary (laughs) -- yeah.

CW:  So what role do these -- do these, at least three Jewish languages that you're familiar with, and more -- play in your life, and your own Jewish identity?

MY:  Yeah, well I'd say, in terms of the languages, I connect most to the art that's been produced in those languages, and that's something that fascinates me as a person who does theater -- I work now as a director for an opera company -- the Detroit Opera House.  And at Harvard, I was able to participate in a production of -- in Yiddish -- it was a night of scenes from Yiddish dramas, called "Di gantse velt iz a teater -- The whole world is a theater" -- and we did scenes from various Yiddish dramas, and I was Levy Yitzchok in a scene from 19:00"Grine felder -- Green fields" -- and Khonen in a scene from "Der dibek [The Dybbuk]."  And that was really amazing, especially being Khonen, who is the spirit that -- well, he's a young man, but then he dies and becomes a spirit, who infiltrates the body of Leah, the bride, because they're never to be together, but theirs was a match that was sort of made in heaven, so -- and I love that play.  I read it, and I loved being in it, and there's certain things in it that really resonate with me, and also in terms of my Jewish identity.  For example, there's the line -- it's the rabbi, and, well he's sort of a negative figure, but I like this line that he speaks.  The Rabbi Azriel, who's doing the, sort of, exorcism of Leah, trying to get the spirit of Khonen out 20:00from her, the dybbuk out, and he says, "Leave the body of this woman, so that a living branch of the eternal tree of Israel will not wither and die."  And I like that very much.  Of course, I love Yiddish just because -- and Jewish culture and religion -- just because it's a part of me, and I enjoy it, and it's what really interests me, but I also -- I mean, like any Jew who has a deep feeling for it, have a deeper connection to it, and almost mystical connection, kind of.  And, like Cleopatra in "Antony and Cleopatra" says, "I have immortal longings in me."  I mean, I wish for the Jewish people to go on, as we have gone on, through any trouble and travail, and I wish that I should not be a branch of this eternal tree of Israel that will wither and die by forgetting, or 21:00by not creating a Jewish home of my own, ultimately, and raising Jewish children.  That, I think, would be a betrayal, and would be a branch, which is me -- you know, an offshoot, a twig of this tree, that has broken off and now is ended.  And I should like to do my bit in contributing to this -- the continuity of this people, that I feel must -- must happen, yeah.  And will.

CW:  Yeah.  Was that play the one that Debra Caplan --

MY:  She did --

CW:  -- directed?  Yeah?

MY:  -- yeah, she directed it, as, you know, a grad student at Harvard.  And I don't know if she's probably been involved here --

CW:  Yeah, yeah.  She went to Hampshire, yeah.  Well, I --

MY:  Yeah, she was great.

CW:  -- I want to just ask, briefly, about your experience living abroad, and 22:00sort of how that changed your sense of -- of yourself, your own Jewish identity, this exposure to German culture.

MY:  Yeah, well, the decision to learn German was sort of a conflicted one, 'cause I wanted to learn a new language in college, and I tried Russian, but -- sort of as an attempt to connect to my ancestors, of course, many of whom came from Russia -- but I ended up thinking, you know, not so much literature that I love by Jews is actually written in Russian, and my ancestors -- the ones who came from Russia -- didn't even speak Russian.  They came over speaking only Yiddish.  Most of them, I would say.  So I wanted to learn something else, and I thought German would be useful, both to my opera work, and something that 23:00would connect me to the history of Jews and Jewish literature.  Because -- well, and I told my parents this, saying -- 'cause they had, you know, doubts about my learning German, for whatever reason -- and I said, well, don't you know, many of the greatest Jewish thinkers and writers wrote in German, were German or Austrian -- Freud, Einstein, Herzl, Kafka -- and these are people that I want to be able to read in their original language.  So I learned German, went to Vienna, to work at an opera house, called the Theater an der Wien, and being there was very interesting, in terms of connecting to my Jewish identity.  I -- there was one worker at the opera house -- one person who was employed there, who -- I mean, you met -- you heard different perspectives on 24:00Jews from Austrians, and this guy, he was not very sensitive -- I don't think he knew I was a Jew, but he would talk about -- he was talking about Israel one day, and said, "Don't you know, the Israelis are doing the same things that, you know, the Germans did to them, and it's just happening all over again."  This was -- of course, it's not the same thing, and, you know, you'd think they would -- a person who grew up in Austria, in Vienna, a place that has a history like that, would be a bit more sensitive.  But there was another person there, who knew I was a Jew, and all the time would talk about the Jewish history of Vienna, in which she was very interested, though she was not Jewish.  She was actually from East Germany, but she loved telling me about the history of the place, and the Jewish people who lived there, and I very much appreciated what she told me.  She told me about the Heldenplatz, one day, which was -- the great square in Vienna, where Hitler came in and gave a speech to the Austrians, 25:00who gathered there to hear him and cheer him on, as he announced his plan to annex Austria, and, you know, eventually do other things.  And they cheered him on and applauded, and there's clips of that, that I can see, and I watched some.  And, of course, it shows people even gathered, climbing up atop this equestrian statue that's in the middle of the Heldenplatz, to see Hitler better.  And later, that week, I was just walking around Vienna, as I did, just exploring it, by foot, and came upon this square, and saw the equestrian statue, and I think it took me a while, but I realized that that was the very square that I saw on those YouTube videos and that she was talking about.  So that was 26:00pretty intense for me, 'cause I was going about this summer, having a gay old time, sort of blithely enjoying Vienna and what it had to offer culturally and culinarily, and then to come upon this part of it, in which I could sense and feel the tragedies that had happened there, and the sort of -- almost hear the echoes of Jewish footsteps that no longer could be heard in those streets, and realized that this once was an extremely Jewish city, brimming with Jews, culturally-minded Jews who contributed so much to the cultural life of the city, and it's just not there anymore.  And I came upon later a quote in the Jewish Museum in Vienna, which I didn't very much like -- there was a weird exhibit 27:00there that was all about stereotypes, but sort of presenting them in a very irreverent way, and there was a wall of Jewish noses, little sculptures of Jewish noses -- I don't know quite what the point of it was, and it was next to a dance clip of Josephine Baker, the Black dancer who worked in Paris, doing her African dance sauvage, or savage dance, and it was just sort of these stereotypes, but I didn't think it all made sense, really.  But there was one quote that I saw, in a different part of the museum, called, "How can you expect to" -- well, "What sort of culture can you expect from a place where you can count the number of Jews on your hands?"  And I thought that was interesting, I think, just coming from that perspective on Vienna, especially, where Jewish culture and contributions meant so much to the city, and, without that, what a place would become -- almost a sort of empty shell, or -- so, that was a -- it 28:00was a very interesting summer, and very -- I enjoyed it, but it was also, I don't know, a lot of tensions for me in being in Europe for the first time, and Central Europe, as it was my first in Europe.  But, uh, you know.

CW:  Yeah.  Well, unfortunately, I have to let you go, as we are in the middle of Tent, but a hartsikn dank, thank you --

MY:  Yes.

CW:  -- for taking a little bit of time to --

MY:  You're welcome.

CW:  -- talk with me, and with the Yiddish Book Center.

MY:  Thank you very much.

[END OF INTERVIEW]