HENRY DUNOW ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney, and today is June 5th, 2013. I'm here with Henry Dunow at the Yiddish Book Center. 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?

HENRY DUNOW:Yes, please.

CW:Thanks. So, why don't we jump right in and talk about your father. Um, can you just tell me his name, where and when he was born?

HD:Moshe Dluznowsky, born in 1903, in Tomaszów, Poland. We always thought that 1:00he was born in 1906, and, upon his death, as we were going through his papers, and ultimately donating his manuscripts and various other documents to the YIVO, it became clear that he was actually born in 1903. Why the three-year discrepancy, none of us know -- I was happy to learn that he therefore lived a little bit longer than we thought he had, and had died at the age of 74, rather than at the age of 71. But, yes, 1903, so he would be, approximately 110 years old if he were alive today.

CW:And, in your book, you write that your father did not talk about his life before the war very openly. What were you able to glean? Were there things that 2:00he was willing to talk about?

HD:Yeah, in veiled and general terms. If you asked him about his childhood home, he would say, "We didn't have a crust of bread to eat." His experiences during the war, he was not particularly specific about. I can reconstruct for you just the broad outlines of his life as I know them.

CW:Sure.

HD:He was born in an Orthodox home. There were six children in all; he was the youngest. He studied in yeshiva, and talme-toyre [Talmud Torah]. He had a 3:00traditional religious upbringing. He served in the Polish army, which he was fiercely proud of, for some reason. He always referenced that -- as a father, when he were kids, he often cooked for the family, and he would like to joke about how he was the best cook in the Polish army. So as a young man, I guess when he got out of the army, he moved to Paris, which I understand a great many young intellectuals from Eastern Europe -- intellectuals, artists, and so forth -- Paris was a real magnet destination in that era. So, he moved there in the early to mid-1920s, and really lived out his young adulthood in Paris, and was 4:00forever after a tremendous lover of French culture. I think that was probably a really wonderful, vivid time in his life. And that's when he began to write, and he wrote for a number of journals, newspapers, publication, all in the Yiddish language. And he had some family there, because two of his siblings from Tomaszów had also moved there. But perhaps because he was single, perhaps because he was a journalist and maybe had his ear to the ground, a little more 5:00than others may have, he I guess became aware of the Nazi menace before others did, and he was able to leave Paris, and went to North Africa, to Morocco, just months before the German occupation. The siblings that he left behind in Paris were deported to the camps and perished. He rode out much of the war in North Africa. He wrote stories and reports while in North Africa, and also took a great many really interesting photographs. And a certain amount of his fiction is also based in the Sephardic Jewish communities in Morocco. He was able to get 6:00into the States on a journalist visa, towards the latter part of the war, and he moved to New York and reconnected with a great many writer and artist friends from Paris, and supported himself, at first as a diamond cutter in the Diamond District. He met my mother, Bertha Klebenow, who was working as a secretary at "Zukunft," which is a Yiddish-language publication. And apparently proposed to her on their first date together, and they were married and before they lived on 7:00the Upper West Side, in a small apartment on West 71st Street, and at some point after that, my sister and then I came along, and we began our life as a family in New York in the '50s.

CW:Yeah. Did he -- I mean, because of his love of France, do you have a sense of what his life was like there? It's sort of a romantic idea, you know, Yiddish intelligentsia living in Paris.

HD:Yes, well, we've been left with a very romantic picture of it, and I have photographs of him that are, you know, extraordinary -- he looks like a Parisian gangster in this one photo, in a big fedora and a fancy suit, leaning up against a 1930s-style car. I'm told by surviving relatives -- we actually have -- half 8:00of my family are known as the "Frenchies," because the surviving part of my father's family came down to his sister-in-law, Khavele, who was married to his oldest brother, Avram. They lived in Paris and had four daughters. Avram was deported in the first days of the occupation. He was sent to the Vélodrome and then to Drancy, and then ultimately to Auschwitz, where he perished. But Chavilah, an extraordinary woman, who, um -- had one leg. She walked around on a wooden leg -- I think she'd lost it in a trolley-car accident as a younger 9:00woman. She managed, with her four daughters, to leave Paris, to hide out in the south of France, and then, ultimately to come to America with two of them, leaving two behind in France at the end of the war. So they're all Polish Jews, who -- but the four girls are -- girls -- they're now in their seventies and eighties -- my first cousins, but they all speak French with very florid accents. How did we get to this? You were asking me about, uh --

CW:About France, yeah.

HD:-- his life in Paris, yeah. Well, no, it certainly was a chapter of his life that he had a romantic feeling for, I know that. It's when he first was a 10:00writer, and he was, you know, a young ma-- a young single man around town in Paris. So I think that was a very vivid part of his life, yeah.

CW:Yeah, you can just see it. I'm just going to pause for one sec -- I wanna adjust one thing.

HD:Okey-doke.

CW:It's fine, but I just -- try to get a little more light.

HD:Oh, okay.

(pause)

CW:Great. So you mentioned that he, for his parnose [livelihood] was working in the diamond industry for a little while?

HD:Yes, when he first came here. I'm not sure how long that lasted, but as a 11:00little boy I was always fascinated to find his diamond cutting tools still in the front drawer of his desk, um --

CW:Yeah (laughs), and it's --

HD:We always used to joke about how daddy might have let a diamond or two slip into his pocket, but I don't know that that's (laughs) really the case or not, but that was a family legend.

CW:Yeah, and it was a Hasidic-run --

HD:Community --

CW:-- business, so --

HD:-- He was not Hasidic, but even later on, he still had a few friends down in the Diamond District, so that, if one of us, if -- needed a -- if he, if they bought us a graduation present or something like that, he would go see a buddy in the Diamond District, and no doubt get a special price on something.

CW:Nice. Um, what was his opinion of America?

HD:I'd say it was mixed, to be honest. I think he was very very grateful for the 12:00safe harbor that America offered him. I think he was very very grateful for the opportunity after the turbulence of the life he'd led, and the Holocaust that had essentially destroyed the world that he came from, that he was able to start over here. He was forty when he first arrived here, which is, you know, for a lot of men, especially a generation or two ago, not a moment where you might necessarily feel that you had the opportunity or the koykhes [strength] to start over. But he did. He met my mother, he solidified a writing career, had 13:00children, raised a family. He never, I would say, never assimilated in a significant way. I mean, he was unmistakably Old World to the end. He spoke English reasonably well, but always with a thick Yiddish accent, and he'd mix in some, you know, English, Yiddish, Polish, French -- little bit of everything. So I think he felt very grateful, for such a thing as America. On the other hand, I do remember very clearly his vehement opposition to the Vietnam War in the last years of his life. And his frankly virulent dislike of Lyndon Johnson, so I 14:00thi-- I wouldn't describe him as, you know, a great, great American booster, or a patriot of that sort. But I think he was grateful to this country for giving him an opportunity to survive the war and to start over.

CW:Yeah. Um, so, sometimes you --

HD:Could -- actually, Christa --

CW:-- yeah, sure --

HD:-- could I elaborate on that --

CW:-- of course --

HD:-- just a little bit, because -- and I'll talk about this a bit more when we talk a little bit about my own feelings growing up with a Yiddish writer as a father, and in a Yiddish-speaking home. When I say he didn't assimilate, I don't think he ever saw his primary identity -- even though he lived here almost for 15:00the full second half of his life -- as an American. I think America always felt somewhat "other" to him. Within the cocoon-like enclave of the world he inhabited on a daily basis, from our apartment on West 71st Street, down to East Broadway where the "Forward" building was, and hanging out with his various cronies, and so forth, I think he felt very comfortably ensconced in this world. But, to venture even slightly outside those boundaries would have been somewhat foreign to him. I used to think of various people in my family -- uncles, other 16:00relatives, as Americans. I thought of my mother as American. My father was not American. He wouldn't have identified himself as such, and I never thought of him primarily as American.

CW:Is there another identity that you, you know, when describing your father, would have used?

HD:Yeah, Jewishness was the central fact of his existence. Not a religious man, not an observant man, but deeply, deeply Jewish in his interests, his preoccupations, his sense of his place in the world -- not difficult to understand given what had happened in Europe, that he identified entirely with 17:00being Jewish, and with Yiddishkayt, with Yiddish culture, language, tradition, so forth.

CW:Um, can you describe what he looked like? Sometimes in your book you use the word, that he looked "ethnic," and I'm curious wh--

HD:Huh.

CW:-- what that means?

HD:Ethnic, huh -- no, I wouldn't say that, really. I mean, he was a distinctive little man. He, well -- he was little. I'm little, but he was seriously little, you know, barely over five feet tall, which, oddly, in his circle of friends, didn't really seem that small. They were all small men. And very handsome in a 18:00classic way, very dapper. I rarely saw him other than in a shirt and tie. And older, from my perspective as a child, I would -- one thing I always was aware of about my father was that he was so much older than everyone else's father. He was fifty when I was born, which, you know, is more typical now but certainly not typical in that generation. So, he wasn't somebody who, you know, blended into the -- fit into the mold of your standard American dad, not at all. 19:00Certainly not in his appearance, as well as in his outlook, he was -- he was different.

CW:Yeah. Um, what were his distinctive physical features?

HD:His distinctive physical features (laughs), okay. Well, let's see, he was a small man, uh, balding. I'm starting to look more and more like him, in fact, when I put on my glasses sometimes and I look in the mirror, I say, "That's Moysh." He had these wonderfully thick bushy eyebrows, which, I was -- as a child, found great comfort in rubbing my fingers against, as he would lay with 20:00me at night, as I was trying to fall asleep. Uh, I used to call it "bothering daddy's eyebrows." And it still makes me feel emotional to think of that sensation --- he was, um -- I'm sorry, I'm struggling to describe him physically, uh --

CW:No, this is -- you're doing --

HD:Yeah?

CW:-- a very great job.

HD:Okay, you know, he looked like most people's grandparents. That was my perspective on him, uh -- you know, in my book I describe a moment, you know, my father worked at home, my mother worked as a schoolteacher, so when one of the 21:00parents had to come to see us in school on open school day, it would always be my father who came, and would be standing around in the back of the classroom in his European garb, with the long trench coat and the fedora hat with these tall American moms towering above him, and the kids would whisper, "Who's that? Who's that?" "Oh, that's Henry's dad." "Wow." So yeah, he stood out in a crowd, I will say that. As I try to talk about him, it's daunting for me, because he was such a significant, larger-than-life figure for me throughout my childhood, and even, 22:00now, you know, long, long after his death. He's gone some 35 years now, and yet remains such a constant presence in my psyche. It troubles me no end that -- I was 24 when he died, and that he would have no knowledge whatsoever of the life I ended up making for myself. He, you know, doesn't know what I do for a living, or whom I'm married to, doesn't know my children, doesn't know where I live. So, it's an odd connection I have with him, in my mind, something that feels so deeply a part of who I am, and yet at the same time it does seem distant as 23:00well. But growing up I would say that I was both fiercely proud of him, fiercely proud to have a Yiddish writer as a father, and, at the same time, distinctly embarrassed by him. It was the 1950s, a very assimilationist era, and my family had this fresh-off-the-boat kind of feeling to it, and one didn't want to feel different. I think all immigrant families, all immigrant cultures wrestle with 24:00that conundrum, of both wanting to preserve one's identity, traditions, heritage, customs, rituals, holidays, language, so forth, but, at the same time wanting to fit in, to not be noticed, to not cultivate those differences. So that, for example, my name, Henry Dunow, is a changed name and I still am baffled that this happened, but my parents changed all of our names from Dloznowsky to Dunow when Esti, my sister, was born. And, although Esti and I 25:00grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home, and very much a Yiddish-centered home -- I mean, in addition to my father and his involvement in Yiddish literature and Yiddish culture, my mother was also a Yiddishist, you know, she attended the Workmen's Circle mitlshul [high school], and, in fact, had taught as a Yiddish shule [secular Yiddish school] teacher, and spoke, in fact, a superb Yiddish, and yet Yiddish became, as it did in so many of households of that era, the language that was spoken when you wanted to keep something from der kinder [the children], you red yidish [speak Yiddish] so that -- nonetheless, Esti and I picked up quite a bit, and -- and we do understand a fair amount of Yiddish, but 26:00it's painful to me that we weren't raised more forcefully to hold on to this language that was so precious to both of my parents. I've come back to Yiddish a couple of times as an adult, thinking that with the smattering of vocabulary and a little bit of an intuitive feel for the grammar, and so forth, that I have -- and I can haltingly read Yiddish -- that it would be relatively easy to learn it at least at a rudimentary level. It's not, or it wasn't for me. I took classes, one year, after work, at the Workmen's Circle -- lovely teacher, I wish I could remember his name -- and I discovered, like anything else, if you wanna get good 27:00at it, you have to work, you had to do the homework. And it wasn't enough to just show up at class once a week. I couldn't manage it, at that particular time. My sister, actually, and her daughter have more recently taken Yiddish classes, and I think it's worked out for Esti a little better than it has for me.

CW:Well, I definitely want to talk about that more. Um, I'd like to just talk a little bit about your father's writing --

HD:Yeah.

CW:-- and then go back to your home.

HD:Yeah.

CW:I mean, it's all connected of course, but sometime -- how often did he write, when did he write, you know?

HD:The constant sound in our home was my father's typewriter, his little 28:00portable Hermes Yiddish typewriter. It's quite an object -- I actually should have brought that with me, or at least a photograph of it -- it's a really cherished relic in our home now, 'cause I so, so associate it with my father. We grew up in a very small apartment, a one-bedroom apartment on West 71st Street; my sister and I shared a bedroom, my parents slept on a convertible sofa in the living room, which was also, de facto, my father's office. So he had a desk in the corner, and whatever was going on in the house at any given time, whether Esti and I were watching "Popeye the Sailor Man" on TV, or quarreling with each other, as brothers and sisters always used to do, there would be the sound of my father's clopping on the Yiddish typewriter. He would write with one finger, 29:00like this, and he was very, very fast. So when did he write? My feeling was he always was writing. There were no office hours observed. He was likely to be writing in the evening, as during the day. Just pecking away at that typewriter.

CW:And was his writing ever connected to the family? Did he ever read to you or share with you what he was working on?

HD:Not that often, really. With my mother, quite a bit, and she translated a lot of his work, so I think she was always very involved with his writing. Esti and 30:00I less so. Yeah, it was an aspect of my father that in fact felt somewhat remote to us. He was anything but distant. He was very involved with us and very available to us, and we essentially lived on top of each other in this tiny little apartment. But, you know, as you'd asked me before, he didn't talk very much about his past before coming to the States, and he didn't introduce us into his work that much either. You know, we'd become aware of some of his storylines 31:00from his work in fairly generalized ways. The problem being that neither Esti or I read Yiddish. Occasionally something would be translated, but just a very small percentage of his body of work was actually translated into English.

CW:Can you share what you know about what he wrote about, for someone who hasn't read it yet?

HD:Sure, and I have read some of it, or have a general familiarity with it. Always it had to do with Jewish life -- I mean, I don't know if that's a defining characteristic of Jewish writing, that it has to be about Jewish community, in my father's case it always was, as far as I know. And the settings 32:00varied. Some of his work would be set in a kind of traditional Sholem Aleichem-like Eastern European shtetl setting of an almost fairy-tale -- uh, folkloristic quality. Then he did write quite a bit about the Sephardic Jewish communities of North Africa, the mellah, as it was known. Those would be the Jewish ghettoes in the cities of Morocco. And then some of his work was set in 33:00France. And then a good amount of it was set in New York, in the refugee community and rooming houses of New York, in the period right after the war. He wrote novels, which were serialized -- I think almost all of them -- possibly all of them were serialized in the "Forverts," as well as published in book form. He wrote a good deal of journalism, often about travels, often about artists that he knew. He knew a great many painters, and one of the benefits of that was that the walls of our apartment, when I was growing up, were decorated 34:00literally from floor to ceiling -- almost comically, one painting on top of another on top of another -- with these wonderful, wonderful artists, who were friends of his, and, you know, sometimes someone would come to dinner and, instead of bringing a bottle of wine or a box of chocolates, they'd br-- (laughs) a canvas wrapped in a newspaper. Um, I'm sorr-- oh, so, where was I going with this, Christa? Remind me -- connect me, uh --

CW:Oh, we were -- you were just giving a sense of what he wrote about.

HD:Oh, yeah, s-- right. Um --

CW:Which I think, you sort of did --

HD:Right, yeah, no, okay -- I've got it, thank you.

CW:Um-hm.

HD:So he wrote novels, and he did some journalism. He wrote children's stories that were published in a variety of places, including an English-language children's magazine that Esti and I read all through our childhood, called "The 35:00World Over." And he wrote plays. He had a number of plays, produced, with the Folksbiene, both here in New York and also in locations like, Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv and Los Angeles. Um, and he --

CW:And Warsaw, too.

HD:And Warsaw, exactly, boy, you're (laughter) more well-versed -- I mean, he had the opportunity to work with some of the finest Yiddish actors of the day -- Maurice Schwartz and Joseph Buloff and Ida Kaminska and Zypora Spaisman are names that come to mind. The plays give some indication of his work. I'm a little more familiar with them because they've been translated. His play, "The Lonesome Ship," "Der aynzamene shif," is about a French sea captain, the captain 36:00of a freighter, who was able to rescue a number of Jewish refugees during the war. "The Eleventh Inheritor," which was produced at the Folksbiene, was set in a -- Upper West Side rooming house, with a number of various types living there. When one of the boarders passes away, the widely held rumor among the others was that he was secretly a millionaire hoarding great amounts of money, because he 37:00always got letters from stock brokerages and banks and financial outfits and so forth. But in his will he specifies that the door to his room is not to be opened until his brother, the 11th inheritor, arrives -- and sadly, as it turns out, he did not leave behind a vast fortune, but --

CW:Great. So, who were -- I mean, you've started to talk about this a little bit, but who were the people, the Yiddish poets and artists and actors, that would be in and out of your home, that you remember?

HD:Yeah, well, they entertained a lot, in our tiny little apartment, which was, 38:00both, for us as kids, for my sister and I, it was enchanting in a way, because it was such another world to see. That is to say, you know, Esti and I grew up in, you know, as just typical 1950s American kids by day, and then, by night -- I don't mean literally at night -- but the other side of our identity was this very flavorful European Yiddish home. So my parents would have parties, and you might find some of the theater people that I just mentioned, Maurice Schwartz, or Joseph Buloff, or David Opatoshu there. There would be painters like, Mané 39:00Katz and Chaim Gross, both great friends of my dad's. Other writers, -- Chaim Grade, Glatstein, various other friends. And there was a really special feeling to these evenings of a very unique, enclosed universe. Of course there was more Yiddish language and culture in New York in general in those days. I mean, you'd be walking along Broadway, and on any street corner, you'd hear Yiddish spoken. On any newsstand, you'd see the "Forward" and "Der Tog" being sold, as well as other Yiddish-language newspapers. You might exchange a few words of Yiddish 40:00with your dry cleaner or your grocer. I don't hear that any more in New York, and it's sad -- I mean, occasionally, you -- in the Diamond District, you might hear the Hasidim speaking some Yiddish to each other, but it doesn't have quite the same feeling to it. But, you know, with regard to, um --

CW:Were there any of these people that you connected with as a child, that stood out among the crowd -- any stories about those parties, do you remember?

HD:You know, it's hard to say. I was a little boy, and they would fuss over me as the cute little tot. They would cluck over both me and my sister, and -- but 41:00I always remember somebody once saying, "az sheyn vi a maydl," you know, that I was "as pretty as a little girl." But no, it was a very affectionate bunch, but I also felt, you know, somewhat peripheral there. My father and his cronies existed very much unto themselves, and had their feet so squarely in another world, that it was hard to really penetrate.

CW:Um-hm. So, in terms of the communication in your home, were you speaking English with your parents, in general?

HD:Yes.

CW:And then, as you said, they would switch into Yiddish.

HD:Yeah, they would occasionally speak Yiddish to us. But that was really the dividing line: English with the children, Yiddish to each other, with --

CW:And their friends.

HD:-- and their friends, yeah. With a certain amount of crossover. I mean, again, you asked about what these parties would be like -- so we'd be sitting around a vast dinner table, with food and wine flowing; the evenings would become progressively more and more raucous, and Yiddish was being spoken. And I'd pick up a little here or there, but, again, it was that dichotomy, for me, as a American child of, feeling both great affection and reverence for this world, and, at the same time, wanting no part of it, really. And feeling even 43:00vaguely embarrassed of it. This wasn't what life inside, you know, an "Ozzie and Harriet"-type American family should look like.

CW:One thing that you write is that you never wanted to grow up to be your dad, and you kind of wanted to be a different type of father than your father was, in a way. Can you just des--

HD:In some ways, yeah.

CW:-- can you describe what he was like as a father?

HD:Yeah, absolutely. Well, he was a very, very loving father, and I -- as a child and abidingly ever after, have very, very deep love for him. He was wonderful with kids; very, very playful, very comical. He used to make up, you 44:00know, spontaneous stories about various characters that he invented. And he wasn't above getting down on his hands and knees and playing. Very, very affectionate, very caring. But at the same time -- and certainly this was truer of that generation of fathers than it might be of the current generation -- he was also somebody who quite often was lost in his preoccupations, whether it was his work and the world of Yiddish, or his anxieties and obsessions. He was a 45:00very, very anxious man. He could magnify small things into great, great worries. And -- you know, it -- he saw me as parents do, in a certain light, and, as a reflection of his own dreams in life. And I think, in some ways, it was difficult for him to take me in, in terms of who I am, both as a little boy, and then later in life, as a young adult, we had some more significant conflicts. 46:00But, you know, what I wrote about in my book "The Way Home" was that one aspect of an American boyhood that certainly interested me, and that my father had no patience for whatsoever, was sports, which he considered narishkayt, foolishness. And that's okay. I found my way to sports on my own, without my dad. I learned how to play ball; I learned how to be a sports fan, so forth. And I'm not a sports fanatic, but at that time, as it still is today -- it seemed 47:00like a real vehicle to belonging in the world of America, and in an American boyhood. So as a kid, I became a fanatic Yankee fan and I worshipped the Yankee gods of those days, Mickey Mantle and so on. And my dad had absolutely no way of fathoming this. This was just beyond foolishness to him. It was one thing to play sports, where maybe at least you're getting (laughs) some exercise. But the idea of rooting for a sports team, wasting time, watching a baseball game, was completely, completely foreign to him. So the occasion for my book came up when 48:00I became a father myself years later. And like my dad, I -- circumstances had it that I, too, was an older father. I was forty when my kids were born, which even in my generation is a little later than for many. And, you said that I had written in the book that I wanted to be a different kind of dad. Well, yes, in some ways -- I mean, in most ways, in the most significant ways, I wanted to be the kind of father that Moysh was for me. I wanted to be able to offer that kind of gentle and loving fathering. But I also wanted to be able to connect with my son in terms of what his interests were, rather than imposing my own upon him. 49:00So, when Max became interested in Little League, I summoned up my courage and decided that I would coach him in Little League. And it was a great experience for me, in so many ways, but one of the things that I had to take note of, just from the very start of that experience, was how much I found myself thinking about my dad. In the way that, being a parent, of course, reconnects you with your own parents, and your own experience of them, well -- well, certainly, this did. And, you know, of course, Moysh was anything but Little League coach material. That would've been the last (laughs) thing in the world he'd have 50:00found himself doing. So yeah, so that experience with Max in Little League opened up for me a lot of thoughts and feelings and reconnections with my dad, that I was able to write about in the book.

CW:Were there things that you did that -- what were the things you did together? As a family, or just you and your father? Were there outings or activities that you did together?

HD:Yeah, um, we, um -- what did we do together? That's a good question. Well, Moysh would often take me down to his haunts on the Lower East Side. He took me on a number of occasions to visit the "Forwards" building and to hang out in the 51:00dairy cafeteria on the corner. We would go away quite a bit on the weekends up to Connecticut, to visit with my mother's family and her father, my grandpa Max. We went to museums quite often. We went to the theater quite a bit. We'd go on family vacations from time to time.

CW:Yiddish theater or English theater?

HD:We did go to a fair amount of Yiddish theater, and also English theater as well. And I do have some vivid memories of Yiddish theater. Again, I didn't understand that much, but I certainly can remember the intense emotional quality 52:00of some of the Yiddish theater that I saw. You know, I don't know, it's so interesting, when I think back on my own childhood, and I measure it against the kind of activity-driven parenting that we all do now -- we didn't do that much. We spent time at home. We'd go out to the Chinese restaurant -- that was a big event for us. Or we'd go to the movies. It was a fairly cloistered existence -- a happy one, but you know, somewhat contained and routine.

CW:And, did you celebrate the Jewish holidays? Was that part of what you did?

HD:We did. Yeah, we did. We weren't members of the synagogue. I was bar mitzvahed in a Reconstructionist shul -- perhaps we were members of the synagogue during that period of time, but, you know, we weren't a family who regularly attended shul. And yet there was a -- those traditions were venerated. I did go to Hebrew school. I went to a Yiddish shule, as a young boy, and then as an adolescent I went to a Hebrew school, and learned some Hebrew, and was bar mitzvahed. But, again, I wouldn't describe us as a religious or an observant 54:00family. We were very invested in cultural Yiddishkayt. We had a seder, and, uh --

CW:What was your seder like?

HD:The seder would be a mix of material from the Hebrew Haggadah, as well as quite a bit of material from a Yiddish Haggadah. I guess it was the Workmen's Circle Yiddish Haggadah. We would say the four questions in Yiddish. We would sing, uh, "Der partizaner lid [The partisan song]," as well as, uh, Negro spirituals. Most of the songs from the Haggadah we sang in Yiddish, not in Hebrew.

CW:Was music a presence in your home growing up? Yiddish music? Classical music?

HD:Somewhat, you know, I wouldn't say strongly so, other than the failure of piano lessons to take hold either for me or my sister. But, uh, yeah, um --

CW:What about Shabbos? Did you mark it, or do anything special on Friday nights?

HD:No, I don't think so. I mean, I have many, many memories of the Shabbos candles being lit, but in a regular way? No. No, we were not observant in that way.

CW:For you, were there parts of Jewish culture that were particularly 56:00interesting or meaningful as a child?

HD:Hmm. Well yes, I was interested in the folkloric aspects of Eastern European culture. You know, the shtetl tales, the "Wise Men of Chelm" -- that sort of thing always had a very romantic hold on my imagination. The idea of a vanished world -- that held my imagination in a real way.

CW:Um-hm. Um, can you say something about your mother and her family background, 57:00before we talk about other things?

HD:Sure. My mother came to America as a little girl, which in my mind is what qualified her as an American, as opposed to my father, who came here after the war, and who seemed unredeemedly Old World. My mother came over in the 1920s. Her father, Max Klebenow, and his two brothers went into business here. Their 58:00business involved collecting stale bread from bakeries at the end of the day, and they worked to develop a way of turning those breadcrumbs into kibble, to dog food. So, that was the beginning of a family business. They developed and patented a formula for dog food that was eventually sold to the A&P supermarket chain. And that family business then divided in a number of ways, as the next generation came about, and my grandfather, Max, grandpa Max, went into, of all 59:00things, the cow feed business in upstate New York, supplying cow feed -- I guess that's not a huge leap from dog feed -- to the dairy farms of Dutchess County, which, interestingly, is where I live now, in Dutchess County, New York. And this, you know, kind of humble, grassroots Jewish family business did fairly well. I think it's pretty much what put me through college. And so that's my heritage on that side of the family --

CW:And she was a teacher?

HD:Yes, you know, she grew up in the Workmen's Circle organization and went to 60:00mitlshul, and studied with some of the great lererin [teachers] there. And, you know, was actually very well-connected, in that particular orbit. She taught in a Workmen's Circle shule for a number of years. Uh, in fact she was my first teacher. And then went on and worked in the New York public school system as a reading specialist for many years.

CW:What was your parents' relationship like?

HD:Hm. Well, they were in it for the long run. They were married a great many years. They, I would say, had a very loving, supportive marriage. At the same 61:00time, it's fair to say that they fought quite a bit, as well. My father was an impossibly stubborn man, and my mother had a temper, so you put those two things together, and you get some explosive moments. But they were very, very, very devoted to each other. My mother was very, very proud of Moysh, and the work that he did, and the world that he inhabited. In fact, we all were. I mean, if I were to try to describe the contours of our family life, it's fair to say that everything was centered around Moyshe Dluznowsky. He was the proud centerpiece 62:00of our family reality. We identified ourselves as, in my mother's case, "Dluznovskis vayb [Dluznowsky's wife]," and in the children's case, we were the very proud children of someone who we thought of as a important artist, and important not just in the sense of contributing something new to the world, but important in terms of being a somewhat rare relic of a world that -- even then, 63:00you know, back in the 1950s and '60s -- was beginning to vanish. So we had a very clear sense of our father as someone to be cherished. And as a family, we drew a lot of our identity and, frankly, sense of our own specialness -- specialness being, you know, sometimes an unattractive word. It wasn't that we felt superior in any way, God knows, but that we had a certain tradition to uphold and take pride in. And my father represented that.

CW:Yeah, earlier you talked about his central identity being Jewish --

HD:Yeah.

CW:What aspects of Jewish culture were -- were those -- how did that play out in terms of what was important to him? Did he talk about that with you? About what was important to him about being Jewish?

HD:Yeah, again, these were not the sort of things that were spelled out any too carefully. This was, you know -- if I think back to my early childhood, we're really just talking -- a small number of years after the war. So, I think that a lot of his -- the message that he conveyed to us about our Jewish identity, 65:00frankly, was a somewhat fearful message. That Jews were not really safe in the world, and for that reason, it was important, in so many ways, both literally and figuratively, to stay close to home, to not get involved in other people's issues, to not leave the fold in any way. The world was a scary place. I know that my father al-- you know, to his dying day had tremendous fear about 66:00government in general. Which I think was one of the reasons he took so much issue with the war in Vietnam in later years. But I think the aspects of Yiddishkayt that became important for all of us, had to do with a certain set of ethical beliefs, a certain way of behaving around each other, a certain sense of family values, a kind of humor, and characteristic yidishe [Yiddish] warmth that 67:00was meaningful for all of us.

CW:Um, what did you learn from him?

HD:Oh my God, that's a big question. Um -- hmm. Well, I learned how important a father is in a child's life. I've tried to emulate him myself in my own role as a father with my two kids who are now young adults. I learned how important a 68:00sense of humor is in family life. I've inherited some of his stubbornness, both for good and bad. I inherited his reverence for literature and the written word. Uh, I think it's no accident that, although I'm not a writer myself by profession, I do make my living working with writers, as a literary agent, I take care of writers, which seems to be no accident. I learned something about 69:00self-belief. My father was a man who, despite, you know, a number of serious hardships and challenges that he went through in his life, and as did so many in his generation, had a tremendous ability to persevere, and to believe in himself. He was a small man who took up a great space in the world. He was not, uh, cowed by many things. So -- I actually use him as a kind of mantra sometimes in my own life if I'm feeling intimidated by a situation, either in my 70:00professional life, or whatever, I will remind myself whose son I am, and I'll get an image of my father in my mind, and that's very bracing for me. So I learned something of strength and how to be strong, from him.

CW:Having returned and read some of his writings as an adult, what do you notice as an adult reader of this writer of a different generation?

HD:Um-hm. Well, you know, I had an experience of coming to more of an assessment 71:00of my father's work when I was younger. You know, in college -- right after college, I had notions myself of being a writer. I was very interested in contemporary literature, and so forth. And I wanted, at that time, to try to finally penetrate, get a glimpse behind the fortress wall, of my father's writing, and what that was all about. Because, again, the large body of it was always unavailable to me. So I did try to do that. And, you know, I've found 72:00that a lot of his works seem somewhat sentimental to me, not as modern as some of the writers I was reading in English at that time -- contemporary writers. And yet I discovered at the same time how much I admired it in other ways for its rich storytelling qualities, its sense of place, the characters who honestly sometimes seemed a little formulaic -- quite often in the stories, the Jews were 73:00the righteous ones, the Gentiles, the more conniving or corrupted characters. So there was something a little black-and-white or even simplistic about the work, it seemed to me. And yet now, when I step back from, you know, a greater perspective, and I look at the body of my father's work, I realize, you know, what an extraordinary accomplishment it was for this man, with very little education, very humble origins, to live through the world turbulence that he had been through, and yet to find a way, and make a life as a writer who wrote, you 74:00know, maybe a dozen books, four or five stage plays, reams of children's literature and journalism. So I'm very, very proud of his legacy, of who he was during his lifetime and what he's left behind. I regret terribly that I didn't have a greater opportunity to have a relationship with him as an adult. I was in my early 20s when he died, and I think our relationship would have gotten more rich as the years went by. So that's obviously not something you can correct, 75:00but that's a continuing source of sadness for me, that we didn't have more time.

CW:Do you think there's an audience for his writing now?

HD:You know, that's a question I've asked myself a great many times, because, well, I work in publishing, and I have for the last 30 years. And, boy, I mean, it's tough enough to get the new young writers that I work with now to find a way for their work to get published, so -- and, you know, the publishing industry right now is a very commercial enterprise. So, you know, through mainstream publishing channels, no, I don't think there would really be a way to bring back the work of Moshe Dluznowsky, but through organizations like the 76:00National Yiddish Book Center, I do hold out hope that there might be some opportunities to unveil his work and rekindle it, in some ways, either in Yiddish -- I don't know how many Yiddish readers we have at this point -- or through some sort of translation program. That would be very, very exciting.

CW:You know, your father was sort of an example of this international Yiddish cultural network. I was reading that he was published on multiple continents, you know --

HD:Yeah.

CW:-- from Lodz to New York, Buenos Aires to Australia --

HD:Now -- you know, a great amount of my father's work was serialized in newspapers and zhurnaln, journals, magazines, so forth -- and there wasn't a day 77:00of the week where something didn't come in the mail. And I had a phenomenal stamp collection as a kid, because he would always give me the stamps. And his work was published in Yiddish-language publications in the most bizarre places: Mexico, South America, Israel of course, all across Europe. And so -- yes, in a funny way, he had a international audience. And these newspapers would arrive, and I reme-- a daily activity in the house -- I remember coming home from school, day after day, and finding my father at the kitchen table, with a bottle of mucilage, you know, that sort of orange airplane glue, and these school 78:00composition notebooks. And he'd be cutting out clippings from the Yiddish newspapers and pasting (laughs) them into these notebooks. And we have rows and rows, shelf upon shelf, of these composition notebooks, each containing clippings of my father's work. So, those are a real touchstone for me.

CW:Looking back at this now, and as a literary agent, you know -- what does your perspective add to, or how is it different than how you saw him as a child, if at all?

HD:Hmm. Yeah, well, in all the years I've spent working with writers as an agent, I have a much clearer and less romanticized notion of what a writer's 79:00life actually is. As opposed to when I was a young man and an aspiring author myself, and I had, you know, a much more glorious picture of what a writer's life is. So, you know, from where I stand now, it -- I can see the amount of struggle and persistence that was required of my dad, or of anyone who made their life as a writer. And for that reason, when I think back to that constant daily clopping at the typewriter, you know, amidst all the tumult of our family life, it's just all the more remarkable and admirable to me that he maintained 80:00that. You know, let's be clear, he never made a great deal of money as a writer -- how could you, as a Yiddish writer? But he stuck with it, you know. That was very much at the core of his identity. He was a shrayber [writer], a yidishe shrayber [Yiddish writer], and I know he felt proud of the work he did, and we did as well.

CW:What is, then, important for you to pass to your children of this yikhes [ancestry]?

HD:Well, I regret, of course, that my children will never know Moysh directly, nor he they. One of my motivations in writing a book -- let's put it this way, I 81:00wrote a book about coaching my son in Little League. How I got from there to a book that is at least half devoted to stories about my father is this: he's the most vivid character in my life. And I knew, on some level, that I really only had one story that I wanted to tell, if I were ever to be a writer. So, this book in general, but in particular the aspect of it that has to do with Moysh, just snuck up on me unaware. And, it felt very powerful, for me, to get it on 82:00paper. Um, both in a cathartic way, I suppose, in terms of, uh, readdressing and healing any wounds that might have remained between me and my father at the end of his life. But also, so important to me to bring him back to life for my children. So, I never had any real concern about the publication experience, or how many copies the book sold, or anything like that, because I always was able to say, at the very least, Max and Maddie will have this book, so that they'll know their grandpa, Moysh. So, it's been very important for me to be able to connect them to that world, to whatever extent that I possibly can. They went to 83:00a Yiddish shule, to the West Side Yiddish Shule in Manhattan, when they were little, and then they were bar and bat mitzvahed in a Reconstructionist schoo-- shul, in upstate New York where we live now in Woodstock, New York, really a wonderful place. And, in addition to their usu-- the usual Torah duties, as part of their b'nai mitzvah, they -- twins, incidentally, so they observed that occasion together -- they performed, they sang "Oyfn pripetshik [On the hearth]" and "Tumbalalayka [Play the balalaika]," and it was, by far, the most beautiful, 84:00and meaningful, and deeply moving aspect of that day for the two of them -- to hear the two of them singing in Yiddish. And I was very grateful to them for having the openness and curiosity and sympathy to find out about this man who was their grandfather. I was very grateful to my wife, who is not Jewish, but who has been so generous in embracing a tradition not her own, and allowing our children to be exposed to it in the way that they have. So, I feel reasonably 85:00satisfied with the job I've done, in that regard. My kids don't speak Yiddish. I don't speak Yiddish. But they have a pretty decent feel for the world that my father represents and wrote about. I don't feel like they're strangers, in that sense, nor would they be strangers to him if, in some magical way, they were able to meet. There are constant jokes in my family about Moysh, and some of the things he used to say. Which is odd, because my wife never met him, um, my kids 86:00certainly never met him, and yet Moysh is a very real presence in our family life, and I'm happy for that.

CW:Would you be willing to share a joke, or (laughs)?

HD:Oh, sure, I mean, it's just some of the expressions that he would, you know -- often, in Yiddish, I mean, my father used to curse constantly -- in Yiddish, in French, in Polish, in Russian, whatever. And often in a combination of all of those. So, my kids are fond of the expression "Gey kakn oyfn yam [Go shit in the sea]," which they, as five-year-olds, would use, to hilarious effect. My father was somebody who never liked to admit to being happy or content. He was more 87:00(laughs) comfortable expressing his -- his anxiety or misery, so in the rare occasions that he let his guard down and appeared to be enjoying himself, we would say to him this m-- Esti and I: "Daddy, you're in a good mood." And he would say (laughs), "A good mood? If a dog vud lek me, it would die." If a dog would lick me, lek me, it -- it would die. So, my kids often quote him on that.

CW:Oops, we just lost your microphone (laughs) --

HD:Oops.

CW:There (UNCLEAR) -- I just have one more question for you (UNCLEAR) (laughs).

HD:Thanks.

CW:So he lives on in the language in your family, in a way.

HD:Yeah, you know, he does. He does. I don't know, you know, we'll say an informal kaddish for him on his yortsayt [anniversary of death], and I always 88:00have a comforting feeling of his presence -- not in a mystical sense, not in a spiritual or ghostly sense, but just in a comforting sense of connectedness. I still very much feel his person as a part of my character. And in some odd way, I think, both my children and wife know him.

CW:Well, I'd just like to close by asking you if there's anything else you want the world to know about your father.

HD:Huh. Well, yeah, he was a man of great intensity, and great passion, and great humor. He had, I think, a very rich life. It could have been a little longer than it was, but he certainly didn't lack for, uh, experiences. I don't know that I've -- feel a need for the world to know him more. I mean, of course, 90:00as any writer would, and as any son of a writer would -- I would -- it would be very exciting if the world knew his work, his writing, more than it does. The state of Yiddish being what it is, I don't know how likely that is. I think I actually feel content with the feelings I just described to you a moment ago, which is that in some very personal and intimate way, he continues to be a part of my life, certainly -- I mean, I think of him constantly, it's extraordinary how much of a central part of my psyche he occupies. It's safe to say not a day 91:00goes by that I don't think about him or reference him. So I'm at peace with my connection to him, and, as I said before, the loved ones in my life -- my sister, her children, my wife, my children, our broader family -- you know, his nieces and nephews who still remember their loving and playful uncle Moysh -- he's still very much there. He left a strong impression. He was not in any way a 92:00forgettable person. He left his mark. So, I feel -- I feel good with that.

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

HD:A hartsikn dank to you, thank you.

CW:Thank you very much for taking this time, and sharing all of these -- about your father, and your own experiences, and sharing it with me, and also with the Yiddish Book Center.

HD:Great. Thank you, Christa.

CW:Thanks.

[END OF INTERVIEW]