JORDAN KUTZIK ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney and today is July 24th -- 25th -- 24th --

JORDAN KUTZIK: Twenty-fourth.

CW:  -- 2013.  I'm here in Amherst, Massachusetts at the Yiddish Book Center with Jordan Kutzik, and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Jordan, I have your permission to record?

JK:  Yes.

CW:  Thanks.  So, I'd like to start with your family background.  Can you just start by telling me how and when your family came to this country?

JK:  Yeah, so my -- it's a little interesting, because I have kind of non-biological, semi-- not adopted, but my brother's grandparents -- I was close 1:00with them, as well.  So, in my mind, I have three sets of grandparents.  So, let me start with my parents' parents, my actual grandparents.  All four of them were born in the US, one in Philadelphia, one -- I believe either in Texas or moved to Texas before the age of one.  The other two, in New York City.  Their parents were all European born.  Three of the four of them grew up speaking Yiddish.  One grew up speaking English, the one who was in Texas.  And before that, one part of the family came from Vilna and had been in the city for a while.  The part -- my father's grandfather came from a town called Mogilyov in the Ukraine.  And that family had been klezmer musicians.  Maybe 2:00not exclusively klezmer, but they played Jewish weddings, they played with non-Jewish bands, Roma, Christians, party-type players for at least six or seven generations before then. 

CW:  Was there a particular instrument that was prevalent in the family, or --

JK:  I know my great-grandfather played violin.  I believe his father played violin, as well.  But other people in the family played winds.  So, clarinet, definitely.  I think there was a trombone in the mix.  We have some of their sheet music written out.  Some of it goes right to left, which I find really cool.  But I don't know -- my great-grandfather was named Leyb-slash-Lewis.  3:00Died in the '60s.  So, obviously, I never knew him.  But my father had very distinct memories of him.  My father, my grandfather, both worked as musicians at different times, but neither of them made -- became musicians as a full career.  So, depending on how you count either myself or my father, the first person in the line, and eight, nine, ten generations not to work as a professional musician.  The other side of the family -- my father's maternal grandfather came from Vilnius, and he's the one who had the -- kind of the craziest life of them all.  Just real quick, he comes to the US, I guess, right after the First World War and ends up in the army.  And he's at a big parade 4:00with General Pershing, who was the big general in the First World War.  And the exact sequence of events, I've heard it two or three different ways.  But somehow, Pershing is on a horse and gets attacked by a donkey that goes wild.  And my great-grandfather, apparently, calmed the donkey down, and Pershing said he saved his life.  And Pershing appointed him to be in his company, and basically be his assistant, which is a very odd role for someone fresh off the boat -- for Europe.  So, my great-grandfather comes from Vilna, ends up fighting in the kind of border raids between Pancho Villa's soldiers and the US Army and ends up being one of Pancho Villa's jailers, which is not something I'm 5:00particularly proud of.  But I know when I look at the famous picture of Pancho Villa that he's probably one of the guys in the back.  A little while later, he -- because there was a lot of nepotism in the civil service, Pershing got him appointed to be basically a constable in a town in New Jersey's -- name I should know, but I have completely forgotten.  And there was this labor strike and the Pinkertons came in and arrested the labor leaders.  And he, for the one time it happened in the United States in the 1920s, ordered the Pinkertons arrested and ordered the strikers released and ordered them to be able to resume the strike.  And (laughs) reinforcements came in from the state and he was given notice.  He basically had to leave.  He wasn't safe; they were going to come 6:00after him.  And he, with his daughter and his wife -- two daughters, his wife -- and I believe his wife would have been pregnant with my grandmother at this point -- fled to Texas.  So, that was that part of the family.  My mother's parents, one was a shoemaker.  He had young kids with him, and he -- I think his wife had already passed away.  And the story of how he met my great-grandmother is he was sitting on the front stoop in South Philadelphia.  And this would have been, like, 1915, 1916, thereabouts.  And the way she told it is that he looked like he had absolutely no control over the kids and was completely lost.  And he was a widower, of course.  And she says she felt sorry for him, so she married him.  And that's the way the story was told, at 7:00least.  She was the only one I almost met.  She lived until 1988, shortly before I was born.  My grandparents, two of them died when I was very young.  My mom's mom died when I was three.  My dad's father died when I was six, but he and I were very close and he's the one I heard a lot of Yiddish from growing up.  Songs.  I remember for years I was humming this song. (sings wordlessly) For years, I was humming this song.  I knew it was a Yiddish song that my grandfather had sung me, but I had never been able to find it.  Everyone I knew who knew Yiddish songs didn't recognize the melody.  Finally in, like, 2007, I'm on YouTube and I hear a recording.  (singing) "Afn veg shteyt a boym, 8:00shteyt er ayngeboygn.  Ale feygl funem boym zenen zikh tsefloygn. [By the road, stands a tree, it stands bent and alone.  All the birds of have flown away from the tree.]"  And I'm skipping way ahead, but the person singing the song was Efim Chorny, who I would meet in Vilnius the next year.  So, it kind of went full circle.  So, I remember that.  I remember I started playing violin when I was four years old.  And my grandfather was very ill with cancer, but he got a really big kick out of me playing the violin.  And, you know -- I was five years old.  I don't know how good I was, but I remember he'd teach me songs.  And one song was this really -- probably the most racist Yiddish song that's still performed, which is "Shiker iz a goy."  You know, "Gentile's Drunk."  But for some reason, I was taught this on the violin as a little kid.  And, you know, (sings wordlessly), (singing) "Trinken buz, fresn miz er, trinken miz er, 9:00vayl er iz a goy [Drinking booze, he must gorge himself, he must drink, because he is a Gentile]."  (sings wordlessly) I was pretty horrified when I was nine or ten years old and the song was actually explained to me, (laughs) but --

CW:  So, can you -- so, you were born and grew up in Philly, in Philadelphia.

JK:  Yeah.

CW:  Can you describe your home?  What, you know, it looked like.

JK:  Yeah, it was not an atypical home for the time and place, but kind of an atypical home for an -- American Jews in that I grew up in the city.  My neighborhood was and is very interesting.  It's a working-class neighborhood that has wealthier sections, mostly with professors and lesbians.  That's a very odd way to put it, but it's entirely accurate.  In the '60s and '70s, 10:00Philadelphia had a lot of red-lining and a lot of white flight kind of combined.  And Mount Airy, where I grew up, was the one place where the local realtors and the people living there got together and were able to reverse the red-lining and maintain a racially diverse neighborhood, which continues to this day.  And because of that, it attracted a lot of politically progressive people, lot of left-wing professors, lot of middle-class African Americans who wanted to live in a diverse neighborhood.  Lot of hippies or ex-hippies, and later on a lot of lesbians, and now just a lot of LGBT people in general.  So, 11:00I was very used to having a very -- group -- diverse -- of friends, both in the neighborhood and at school.  I went to a private school, but it was a private school that a lot of my -- a lot of people I knew living nearby went to.  So, that really affected how I saw the world growing up.  In terms of Jews, there were -- Jews seemed to be overrepresented, as they are in East Coast cities.  But it was not, by any means, majority Jewish or -- you know, people here and there.

CW:  And in -- can you describe -- I mean, first of all, who were the people in your home when you were growing up?

JK:  Yeah.  So, I have an older brother, but he's eighteen years older.  So, I was pretty much an only child growing up.  So, it was just my mom and my dad and I.

CW:  And what was -- can you describe, just generally, sort of the culture of your family?  What was important to the family?

JK:  Well, my -- I -- politics, especially with my father, both my parents, played a big role.  Even when I was a little kid, I was always aware of things going on politically.  I remember when I was -- I remember very distinctly my father explaining to me, when I was three years old, when Mandela was released from jail -- and showing me on the map, and I remember him absolutely hysterical when Rabin was assassinated.  And I remember going to all sorts of demonstrations when I was a little kid.  I was eight, we went to something with the public schools.  I was six, we went to this, I was twelve, I -- it was a pro-choice rally in Washington.  I must have gone to twenty anti-war demonstrations, first with my parents, then just on my own, taking -- when I was thirteen, fourteen, taking the train to New York, going with friends to D.C.  13:00So, politics were always omnipresent in my home.  My father increasingly played more and more klezmer music when I was growing up.  I started a klezmer band at the Jewish folkshul [secular Yiddish school] where I went.  So, he was always rehearsing klezmer music, so --

CW:  He started it or you started it?

JK:  He started it.

CW:  Yeah.

JK:  And he got a group of parents together of -- different people who could play music, and he led it for about twelve years.  So, from when I was about nine to, you know, past when I was out of the house, actually.  So, there was always klezmer music playing.  Him practicing --

CW:  What does he play?

JK:  Clarinet.  So, he's be playing on the clarinet, hour or two a day, 14:00klezmer music.  Jazz, as well.  He'd teach me klezmer tunes on the fiddle.  We always had Andy Statman and later on the Klezmatics and the Klezmer Conservatory Band playing.  He knew Hankus Netsky from high school, so he'd often play Hankus's music.  I met Hankus a few times as a kid.  So --

CW:  And --

JK:  -- klezmer was always omnipresent.  My dad really wanted me to go to KlezKamp when I was a kid, and I really regret that I never went.  When I was thirteen, fourteen years old, I just wasn't interested.  But he went very often.

CW:  And you had a -- there was a particular artist for you when you were a kid that you idolized, I think.

JK:  Yeah.  (laughter)

CW:  Can you talk about that?

JK:  Yeah, so I was a violinist.  So, of course, Itzhak Perlman was god.  I absolutely adored Itzhak Perlman.  And my violin teacher and I and my parents 15:00went to see him in concert.  Was an outdoor arena, in the summer, and twenty minutes before it was supposed to start, we were all evacuated out because someone called a bomb threat.  And I was nine or ten years old, so I understood and I was a bit scared.  But we all went outside and they brought in the bomb-sniffing dogs and everything and tore the place apart, and after an hour and a half said there was no problem.  I was walking, actually, to talk to a police officer I saw standing there.  I just wanted to ask him when we'd go back in.  He said, "Real shortly."  And I see a car coming by, and this car's coming by and the window rolls down and it's Itzhak Perlman in the front seat.  I don't know what I was thinking.  I just ran up to him and shook his hand.  16:00(laughs) It was very cool.  He seemed a little surprised, but not the least bit upset.  And that was the -- in terms of music, the highlight of my childhood.  I shook Itzhak Perlman's hand.  Years and years later, I'm working at the Yiddish Book Center and I'm in a car with you, Christa, and Hankus Netsky.  And Hankus is, like, "Itzhak Perlman called, and do you want to hear the message and call him back?"  I'm, like, "What?"  And he was doing a CD with him, so I got to hear the voice message he left Hankus Netsky.  It was just pretty cool, as well.

CW:  And -- but you stopped playing music early on, right?

JK:  I stopped playing music -- I don't think I understood why at the time, but my heart wasn't in it after the age of about eleven.  And now I understand that -- maybe it's a -- ex post facto explanation, but my understanding of it now is 17:00that I couldn't read when I was a little kid.  I had real trouble reading.  I could write my name, and that was about it until I was about nine years old.  And from nine to -- nine and ten, I could barely read.  And then, I suddenly learned to read and surpassed most of my classmates.  And for a while, I was known pretty much for playing the violin, and I was beginning to fear that people thought I was an idiot savant and that I could only play the violin and not do anything else.  So, when I could read books and when I was doing things and kind of gained academic interest, I kind of gave up on the violin.  The other part of the story I should mention is that I convinced myself that I could become a professional baseball player if I put enough effort into that.  So, that also took away from violin.  But I went from playing quite a bit -- hour, 18:00hour and a half a day -- to lucky if my dad could get me to do twenty minutes.  So, from the age of twelve till today, I never improved on the violin.  And it's a real shame.  It's probably one of two or three things in my life I truly regret.

CW:  How -- can you describe the way that your family celebrated holidays and your participation in this -- in the shul you went to?

JK:  Yeah, so I went to the Jewish Children's folkshul from when I was about eight, and I was bar mitzvahed at thirteen.  I continued working there as an aide until I was about seventeen.  And it was a -- kind of a descendent of the Yiddish secular schools.  But by the time I came along, there was no more Yiddish being taught.  We had a lot of Yiddish songs, and public programs all 19:00had a song or something in Yiddish.  It was an interesting community.  When I first started, it was very much -- but very clearly anti-religious people, which I understood at a very young age and was kind of weirded out by at a young age.  By the time I left, it had really become a place for Jews who didn't fit in anywhere else.  Jews who were intermarried, African American Jews, lesbian couples with children, anti-Zionists, some combination of the above, and a few anti-religious people, as well, but not to the same extent it was.  And it always struck me as interesting -- the older I got, I realized that we were only celebrating half the holidays, it felt like.  Hanukkah was a big deal in my house.  You're a little kid, you want presents, light the candles, all that. 

CW:  How -- yeah, can you tell me how you celebrated it?

JK:  Yeah.  So, I got eight presents.  Typically, seven little presents and a big present.  But that was a big deal.  My poor Christian friends only got a bunch of presents under a tree one day.  I got eight days of presents.  That was a -- the big difference for me when I was real little.  But I liked lighting the menorah, and I learned the prayers the way my grandfather taught me.  "Brukh atoy adonoy elokheynu meylekh ha'olom, asher kideshanu vitzivanu lehadlikh ner shel khanike [Ashkenazi Hebrew: Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us and commanded us to light the Hanukkah candles]."  And then, when I went to folkshul, they corrected it and taught me the Sephardic pronunciation.  Yeah, and dreidel and all that.  I remember I was probably one of the few people -- learned the Yiddish rules to the dreidel as a little kid.  So, I knew "gants" was "whole" -- was the whole thing.  "Nul" was "nothing," and so on and so forth. 

CW:  And what were the other holidays?

JK:  The other big one in my house was Passover.  Passover was king.  I -- when I -- you asked me when I was eight what the biggest holiday was, I would have said Passover.  My mom is an incredible cook, and she really goes all out with matzo ball soup.  And I've been all over the world and I've only once had matzo ball soup as good as hers.

CW:  Can you describe it?

JK:  Yeah, she doesn't use too much salt.  That's the key, first of all.  Second key is you have to boil the matzo ball in the soup broth.  And third key is you have to use her recipe.  And that's the hard part.  (laughs) But she'll give it to me someday, and hopefully I'll be able to make soup half as good as hers.

CW:  What were the other special things about the way that you celebrated Pesach?

JK:  Oh, a big thing in my house was hiding the afikomen.  Myself and my mom's 22:00friends' kids and later on my cousin and different people would hide the afikomen.  Some year-- we always did one seder and a seder at another relative's house.  So, it was a big deal, who could hide the afikomen, who could get the five or ten dollars for finding the thing.  When I was a little older -- one year, there were a lot of little kids there and they said I was too old to hide the afikomen.  I was probably eleven, so -- I did -- was a little annoyed.  So, they said, You can hide the afikomen.  And they thought this would make me happier, but it actually upset me even more.  And I had a little devilish streak at this point, so I decided I'm going to tie the afikomen to a cat and have the cat run around, and put the cat upstairs.  The kids are looking and looking and looking and looking, looking and looking, can't find the 23:00afikomen.  Everywhere they look, can't find the afikomen.  All of a sudden, I see the cat -- runs right by the table with the afikomen on its back.  Nobody was happy about that one.  (laughs) It was a real wiseass thing to do.  But, you know,  I get a good laugh out of it now.

CW:  Yeah.  And can you describe your bar mitzvah?  What was a secular bar mitzvah?

JK:  Yeah.  So, a secular bar mitzvah -- the Jewish Children's folkshul, Philadelphia version, at least, was that everyone would study a topic in depth, and they'd give a sixty to ninety-minute presentation on it, usually with PowerPoints, and they'd study it intensively with a mentor.  And you have to 24:00realize, these are the children of academics.  So, the academics are all trying to outdo each other, so the children are all trying to outdo each other to make the parents happy.  Now, because I was like a little professor when I was a kid, this became a really, really, really big deal.  So, my parent-- so, I spent nine months in advance researching Jews in the American Civil War.  My parents and I went to Gettysburg and we went to Richmond and we went to a synagogue in Richmond that had an extensive archive.  And I remember to this day, there were letters in both Ladino and Yiddish, as well as German.  The -- but I couldn't read the languages, so I got some letters in English that a Jewish man in his fifties in the Confederate Army had written to his slave, to tell his wife about different things.  And the letters of the -- his slave, he 25:00was kind of, I guess, the head slave who was in charge of basically running the plantation, I suppose -- writes back to him.  So, I organized a dramatic reading of that letter.  I -- back then, eleven years ago, there was very, very little information about Jews in the American Civil War.  A few years after I wrote my bar mitzvah, in fact, someone wrote me saying they were writing a book on Jews in the American Civil War.  "Can you send me your sources?"  I was thirteen when I wrote this, but I had dug up really obscure things.  Now, there are several film documentaries and books.  But I was a little ahead of the time with the topic, and it was great.  And I'd love to see the film of me giving the talk.  It was quite a thing, not only because I was thirteen, but I was 26:00thirteen going on nine, physically.  I was a very little kid.  So, it was extremely impressive, having this little, little kid talking for an hour, hour and twenty minutes about the history of Jews in the American Civil War.  And I was fascinated by the topic.  I was kind of horrified of how important Jews were in the Confederacy.  And growing up in a household where Jewish -- being Jewish meant being a big human rights supporter, it was a hard thing for me to get my head around.  It was very important for me.  It was a very important lesson growing up. 

CW:  Look-- what were -- what was your exposure -- we talked a little bit about klezmer, but to Yiddish culture growing up?  Yiddish language, the Yiddish culture?

JK:  Well, lots of music.  When -- we had kind of a -- we had two singing 27:00teachers, and -- at the folkshul.  One did songs primarily in Yiddish, one did songs primarily in Hebrew and English.  So, I knew a lot of Yiddish songs when I was a little kid.  And I've always had a good memory for music, so I could sing them from top to bottom, even though I didn't know what all the words meant.  I knew what the songs meant.  And once I learned to read, I'd read the English translation, the transliteration.  One very distinct memory I have is that we had a Yom HaShoah program.  And that was the one -- we had a lot of elderly secular Jews who were in the local branch of the Workmen's Circle and another organization called the Sholem Aleichem Club would come.  We gave the -- we had a concert.  I was in third or fourth grade and we had to sing the "Yugnt-himen [Youth anthem]."  And I didn't have much of a voice, but somehow, 28:00I became the soloist for part of it, probably because I was the only guy in the group, maybe because I could pronounce the language pretty well.  But any case, we sang the song, and I was a bit petrified, because I kept thinking, Here are all these Holocaust survivors, and some of them probably heard it during the war, and if we screw up, they're going to be insulted and we'll ruin the whole thing.  Never mind we were singing for two minutes and thirty seconds and it was an hour and forty-minute thing or whatever.  But I thought the entire thing was going to go bad.  And I'm singing the song and this woman in the front aisle keeled over and fainted.  And me being eight years old, I assumed she had died.  She hadn't, but I was petrified.  And a little later, I talked to her husband and she was all right, but she had been in the Vilna Ghetto and she did remember that song from the Vilna Ghetto, and she hadn't heard it in a very long 29:00time.  And it was just too much, emotionally.  And that had a real impact on how I perceived the Yiddish language, how I perceived Yiddish songs.  And I remember when I was twelve or thirteen years old, looking for -- everywhere for information about Shmerke Kaczerginski.  I couldn't find anything online.  There was nothing online, and as I later learned, there's basically nothing in the English language anyway about him.  But I learned a few more of his songs and I found a picture of him.  I was kind of fascinated by this guy.  You know, I learn his song, and someone passes out, and -- I was fascinated by the idea of all the hell going on in the Vilna Ghetto, and here's this guy teaching children songs and helping to run a school at the same time he's organizing a partisan rebellion.  And when I was twelve, thirteen years old, this stuff absolutely amazed me.  And because of my interest in the Civil War, I had some 30:00interest in the military, as well, and I understood it's not an easy thing to just raise an army.  And I had a much better sense of it as a -- the significance of it than the typical ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen-year-old.  But that definitely heightened my interest in it, as well, pretty dramatically.  Also, around the same time -- my elementary school is very atypical, and from fourth grade on, we could take electives.  And one of the electives was a Holocaust class.  And I got special permission when I was eleven years old to take a Holocaust class.  And we met with several Holocaust survivors, and -- survivor from Auschwitz, someone who, I believe, had been a partisan in either Belorussia or the Ukraine.  So, I had it from several 31:00different angles.  So, from very, very early on, there was always a connection in my mind between the Holocaust and Yiddish.  And other than my grandfather and a great aunt, all the people I encountered speaking Yiddish, instead of just singing it, were Holocaust survivors.  So, to me, it was -- growing up, it was very much the language of Holocaust survivors.

CW:  Yeah.  And when did you start studying Yiddish?

JK:  So, can't remember if I was sixteen or seventeen, but it was one of the two.  I don't remember how it happened.  I was supposed to study Arabic.  And I was going through my -- all these books in the house.  I was going through, seeing if there were any Arabic textbooks, because we had accumulated so many 32:00language textbooks for different languages that mostly my dad would learn a little of and then switch to another language type of thing.  And I found a bunch of Yiddish books, and mostly children's readers.  A few books -- but it seemed interesting to me and I thought, oh, I should read Yiddish.  And about the same time, I became obsessed with the Holocaust.  You think I would've been earlier with everything -- happened, but it was really about the time I was sixteen, seventeen, I became the -- say, developed an unhealthy interest in it, you could say.  And I was reading about a particular mass killing in a Lithuanian town online, and there was an article online that said, "A full book-length description of the history of the town is available in" such-and-such a Yizkor book.  And that was the first time I heard the phrase 33:00Yizkor book.  I said, "Oh, I have to learn Yiddish to read these books."  So, I learned -- (laughs) started learning Yiddish, in my mind, to read Holocaust-related texts.  Primary sources -- I wanted to read Shmerke Kaczerginski's books.  So, I signed up to take a Yiddish class, and it met in the afternoon, one day a week after high school.  So, I take the subway from high school and go down and take the Yiddish class --

CW:  At the Workmen's Circle or --

JK:  At Gratz College in Philadelphia.  And was a continuing education class, and I was the only person under fifty in the class at any point -- so I was the outlier sophomore, junior in high school, whatever I was.  And I really, really enjoyed the language.  I liked the way it felt in my mouth, I liked speaking 34:00with a -- people I knew who knew Yiddish.  I liked the way the letters looked on the page.  And by the time I got anywhere with it, I had kind of lost most of my interest in the Holocaust.  I had this crazy idea when I was fifteen years old that I could solve the Holocaust like a math problem.  Like, if you put enough information into a machine, you'll get an answer.  And, of course, what I learned is the more you know, the less it makes sense, just with a lot of things in life.  Not only terrible things, but great things, as well.  Sometimes -- and what I really learned from Jewish culture -- very often the question is more important than the answer.  So, I became much more interested in Yiddish and kind of lost the interest in the Holocaust.  And around that 35:00time, I discovered that the Hasidic communities were still speaking Yiddish, which is very interesting to me.  And this was, coincidentally, the beginning of Facebook, when Facebook was -- when it was much easier to contact people you didn't know on Facebook.  And there were already a few Yiddish language groups on Facebook.  This would've been 2006.  So, I write a few things in my then pretty broken Yiddish on Facebook, and Arun Viswanath, one of Mordkhe Schaechter's grandchildren, contacts me.  I'm looking at the picture, looks like -- to me, looked like a Middle Eastern Jew wearing a kippah -- I later learned he's half Indian, half Ashkenazi -- writes me back in perfect Yiddish, and I apologize for my Yiddish being bad.  And that's how I kind of fell into the Yiddishist world, by him finding me on this group on Facebook.  And I 36:00started at Rutgers the following -- maybe a year and a half later, and I was close to where they were having their meetings.  And that's how I ended up from being fifteen and wanting to learn about the Holocaust to ending up in the Yiddishist world, in the very center of the Yiddishist world.

CW:  Yeah.  I want to come back to that, but before we get to that, I'm just -- looking back on your childhood and sort of your parents and grandparents and community, do you have a sense of what values and practices your parents were actively trying to pass on to you?

JK:  Yeah, because they were kind of different.  My mother is kind of a fearful agnostic.  She's not sure if God's real, but she kind of has a sense we need to do things a certain way or else, you know (laughs) -- not really bad 37:00things might happen, I don't want to make her sound too superstitious, but she really, at times, was uncomfortable with the whole folkshul way of things.  She felt it was kind of a fake version of a real thing.  My father felt the same way, but felt the same way about Reform and Conservative Judaism.  My father's idea was more along the lines of, If you're going to be religious, be Orthodox.  Follow all the rules.  And "I don't believe in any of that stuff, and some of the rules horrify me, so we're doing this instead."  Years later, I realize another thing with my father was the fact that he really is not -- he did not like the close connection between Zionism and the American Jewish synagogue experience, especially in Reform congregations.  He could not stand it and he didn't want me going to Hebrew school for that reason.  When I was a 38:00little kid, we would be driving around, whenever we hit a pothole, he'd yell Rizzo, who was a fascist mayor of Philadelphia.  It was around the '70s.  But occasionally, instead of cursing, he'd yell, "Zionists!"  And when I was a little kid, I actually thought the word Zionist was a curse word that you used when you didn't want to use a worse curse word.  So, when I was a little older, when I was eleven or twelve, my dad said once, "There are three things you can't be.  You can't be a racist, a murderer, or a Zionist."  I'm thinking to myself what in the -- so, I knew -- I didn't fully understand the relationship between synagogue and Zionism.  I didn't entirely know what Zionism was.  But I knew that was a primary reason why I was not going to Hebrew school.  And the 39:00folkshul [Yiddish secular school] was kind of the compromise in that environment.  In terms of values, both definitely wanted me to have an appreciation for the culture.  Both wanted me to know something about the religion.  But when I was older, I think both of them felt that if a little kid learns the Bible stories literally, it's kind of scary if you actually think about some of the things.  And there -- I mean, the Binding of Isaac's pretty freaky.  You know, a guy hears a voice to kill his son.  He starts to do it.  The voice says to stop it.  It's a -- yeah, it's not light stuff for a four, five, six-year-old.  But they wanted me -- they didn't want me to be ignorant of it.  They wanted me to know where we came from, where the family came from.  It was all -- they were very blunt.  When I was a little kid and I 40:00asked if we had family in other countries -- and they'd say, "We have family in Israel, but nowhere else because everyone was murdered."  And (laughs) was seven, eight, nine years old.  But nothing was ever hidden about it.  That's what happened and that's the way it was.  We had one rule at the dinner table growing up, which was no Holocaust at the dinner table.  We could discuss everything else, and we did discuss everything else.  Never the Holocaust at the dinner table, at least not when food was being served.

CW:  So, getting back to Rutgers, which you started to talk about, how -- what -- how did you find the Jewish community and culture there as compared to what you grew up with?

JK:  It was a complete and total culture shock, more than I could have ever imagined.  I knew it was gonna be a culture shock, but I had never really interacted with Jews who had gone to day schools.  And if you look at the 41:00American Jewish community demographically, they may be fifteen percent of the people, but they're -- eighty-five percent of the people actively participate in Jewish organizations.  And at Rutgers Hillel, they were ninety-eight percent.  And I didn't understand the culture and they didn't understand me.  And so, people were very friendly with me, in general.  (laughs) As long as political things didn't come up, people were always very friendly with me and very welcoming.  But there was -- with some people, an unhidden disdain, you know?  "This kid has no education.  He doesn't know anything.  He speaks Yiddish, but he doesn't -- he didn't come from the system we came from."  And there was a definite foreignness that I didn't understand.  And a lot of people came from a 42:00similar background.  Came once or twice and didn't come back, because it was just -- there was just such a -- not even a knowledge barrier about Judaism, but just the internal culture of the American Jewish day school community, and all these inside jokes about the United Synagogue Youth and different camps and different rabbis and different things.  I knew a little bit about Israeli history, but I didn't know -- I couldn't name particular generals from a particular war.  And it's -- a lot of those schools, they learned them the same way you'd learn about biblical characters.  So, culturally, I had a very -- (laughs) it was very strange.  But I decided from day one I was going to restart the Yiddish Club that Menachem Ejdelman, who I had known -- who I know from Yugntruf had started before.  And I just went in, walked in before I was even a student there and said, "I'm going to start the Yiddish club."  And I 43:00restarted the Yiddish club and ran it for almost four years.

CW:  Can you describe what Yugntruf is?

JK:  Yeah, so "Yugntruf" means "Call to Yiddish" -- a Call to Yiddish -- Call to Youth in Yiddish.  I'm speaking too fast.  And it's an organization of people from a diverse background, mostly young people but we really say the young and the young at heart.  The people just want to get together and speak Yiddish and find ways to use Yiddish in the world and create a space for Yiddish to exist.  And my timing was very fortunate.  And 2007, the board, who were 44:00people mostly in their forties and fifties, resigned and handed over the reins to a group of people who, at that point, were sixteen to twenty-five years old.  We jokingly call it the youth coup.  It wasn't a coup, it was a mutually agreed transfer.  But right as Arun got in touch with me was within months of when this happened.  So, because I had a lot of organizing experience doing political things, working in the Boy Scouts, and because I was very opinionated and knew a lot about the history and -- of secular Yiddish culture and Yiddish culture and things that some of them didn't know, they decided that I should be on the board.  And my Yiddish wasn't quite up to snuff, so I didn't say too much during meetings.  But it really did help my Yiddish, help being one of 45:00seven or eight people participating in -- two-hour long meeting about very detailed things and budgets in Yiddish.  And it felt very surreal, because here I was, being nineteen years old, speaking a language that, three years later, I thought was all but dead with a bunch of young people talking about actuary tables and talk-- doing it in Yiddish.  It was -- I had several moments that I'm like -- I felt like I fell into a little parallel universe.  And the -- they were very warm and welcoming group of people.  I'd meet someone and you start speaking Yiddish, it's like you've known them for five years and they just kind of trust you.  And I've had that experience throughout the Yiddish-speaking world, even with many Hasidic Jews.  But that was very 46:00welcoming to me, and I made a lot of friends.  And once I had friends, it just became an actual thing.  We spoke in Yiddish and I took the train into New York once a month or so, and that was it.  It just became a normal thing.  And I describe this to people, I say, "Oh, I have Yiddish-speaking friends."  They assume I meant Holocaust survivors that I had befriended at an old age home or something.  I mean, no, this one's in high school and this one's starting college.  And it was a very interesting time for me, because I was just away from home for the first time.  And I'm discovering this new world I didn't know, and also trying to make sense of the Jewish community at Hillel, as well as make sense of just general college life.  So, it was a time where I felt like I could really blend into new communities.  And because of that, I fit in 47:00real well.  For a variety of reasons, the main one just being people finishing college and getting jobs, the number of people on our board kept shrinking and shrinking.  And I ended up -- now we're down to three people.  We definite -- we desperately need to expand it again, just starting next year.  But in the beginning, it was nine, ten people.  And we organized -- our main event is Yidish Vokh, which is Yiddish Week.  It's a week of volunteer-led programming in an encampment at a -- resort is -- sounds wrong, but is kind of -- a Jewish retreat center is a better term.  It's now outside of Baltimore.  Originally, we were in New York State in different -- in two different places.  And we have people from all over the world come.  People in their twenties and thirties are 48:00our main demographic that we target, as well as their kids.  But also, people in their nineties, people in their fifties and sixties, the children of the people running the organization now, and the people in their twenties and thirties now all come, and it feels like a small town.  People are very friendly.  It's -- it -- you start to -- once your Yiddish is good enough, you start to forget you're speaking Yiddish, because it would just be -- I imagine it would be like what a Catskill-type resort was like in the types of things, except it's a bit more intellectual.  There are a lot of lectures on the history of a Jewish museum in Lithuania, 1945 to 1947.  But you also get yoga and tango and knitting and stuff like that.  Sports were a big part of it.  49:00Where we are now, there isn't as much room for athletics, but I remember having a really good time explaining the rules of baseball to someone and -- from Russia, in Yiddish, and realizing I didn't have words for any of that stuff.  What do I call this?  What's an outfielder in Yiddish?  Der vos khap der bol vayter aroys vi di mentshn vos shteyen bay di bases [The one who catches the ball out past the guys standing at the bases]?  I mean, what do you even say?  So, we had a lot of -- a lot of fun with things like that.  And our other big activity is running events on college campuses we call "Yiddish breaks."  So, we'll arrange with people on a campus interested in hosting us, and we'll plan a series of events over Shabbos, like a Shabbaton where -- all events that don't 50:00need electricity, Friday night into Saturday.  And we'll have either activities in Yiddish, which often times have little to nothing to do with Yiddish -- so, a lecture on Einsteinian physics, lecture on the history of basketball, and then we'll have lectures in English about Yiddish culture, or someone will do -- learn a -- really basic Yiddish in ninety minutes, different things like that.  And me being me, I always gave a talk on the sociolinguistics of Yiddish in the twenty-first century.  And it was great.  It's a great environment, it attracts all sorts of interesting people.  One thing about the Yiddish world is if -- it's almost a guarantee, if someone walks through the front door, they'll be an interesting person.  And not just Yiddish-wise.  Just in terms of life 51:00in general.  I've learned all sorts of interesting things from these people.

CW:  So, linguistics, how did you get -- I mean, obviously you became interested in studying Yiddish at a young age.  But at Rutgers, how did you -- and before, what was this interest in sociolinguistics?

JK:  Very interesting, and it's one of the few things that I can give a very concrete answer.  I went to a very interesting high school.  It was a public school, but it was a magnet school that was basically you took a test and they took the best students from all over the city.  And unlike Stuyvesant in New York, which is very white and mostly wealthy, this was as diverse a school as you can imagine.  It was twenty-five percent black, maybe twenty-eight percent Asian.  Depending on the year, between twenty-eight and thirty percent white.  52:00We had children who were homeless and we had the children of millionaires running for mayor and everything in between.  It was a unique experience, and the reason I mention that is it goes back to central -- the first time I met people from homes speaking lots and lots of languages -- one of my good friends my first two years was -- grew up in Chinatown, so he spoke Cantonese.  A -- my immediate classes, I knew people who spoke Albanian, Aramaic, Chinese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Spanish, Thai, Cambodian, Japanese, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam.  I can go on and on, but I -- it just became really -- I had never known there were so many languages.  I just became absolutely fascinated with it.  And my ninth grade English class, I had maybe the best teacher I ever had 53:00in any class ever -- was John McElhaney, and -- life-changing experience for me.  And we read this book about a boy in the 1670s or 1680s who was born into a -- English family outside of Pittsburgh, was stolen by a -- by Lenape Indians and grew up with them for seven or eight years and then was sto-- was discovered and brought back.  And after he relearned English, he kept trying to find people to speak Lenape with.  And he explains in detail how much he feels he's losing by not being able to speak Lenape, and the culture and the language -- and everyone is angry with him and wants to forget about his life with the Lenape and the beauty of the language.  And that's when I really began thinking 54:00about what is a language and what do you lose when you lose a language?  Lenape had a particular significance to me because, in the Boy Scouts, the local Philadelphia area troops would always teach the kids five or six words in Lenape as kind of secret code words for orienteering type things.  So, we learned a few words that we knew -- this was a language people spoke here before the Lenape were kicked out, all the way to Ohio, basically.  I never thought more about that, but all of a sudden, here's a book about the significance of the same language.  At the same time, I start thinking about Yiddish and the significance of Yiddish.  And that's when I became interested in sociolinguistics and thinking about the role of language and the role of language and culture, and the significance of it.  And also, being in a school 55:00with so many immigrants, I felt like I was missing something profound in my own life, not knowing the language my ancestors spoke, which I would not have felt in another school or even in an American Jewish day school, where everyone would have been more or less from the same background.  So, it was definitely -- when I was fifteen, I became interested in sociolinguistics.

CW:  And then, can you talk -- explain how you came to your project with Hasidic Yiddish and -- in that community?

JK:  So, I was looking at all the projects that were going on with Yiddish, and there was a lot, a lot, a lot of stuff with literature.  And I enjoy reading books a lot.  I enjoy reading Yiddish literature, but my chops as a literary 56:00scholar, my instincts for it, just aren't there.  I'm never gonna be a first-rate literature scholar, and I'm not as interested in it academically.  I read a book and I can kind of tell -- I understand it, I put aside -- I move on to something else.  I'm never gonna write a Ph.D. about a work of literature.  But between that and very hard linguistics like the phonology of the "oy" versus "ey" sound in Lithuanian Yiddish, or "Sabes" versus "Shabbos" versus -- stuff like that.  Lots of stuff going on with that.  But there was very little going on with how people were using Yiddish in the 21st century out of the Yiddishist world.  And to me, it was kind of amazing.  You have between 150 and 200,000 people around the world speaking this language and the scholars studying the 57:00language have very little to do with them.  So, I became immediately interested, and the -- how the language was being used, what it meant to the people who were using it, why they were still using it.  Why was it that you had people who were growing up in New York State who could only speak Yiddish in the twenty-first century?  What did they know about the history of Yiddish and the greater Yiddish-speaking world?  And eventually, I worked on -- I worked on a -- an independent study with Dr. Jeffrey Shandler about the history of Hasidic Yiddish in America, and specifically how the Yiddish of immigrants who came before the Second World War probably influenced it, and how you can look at the 58:00two literary languages and see the influences.  Later on, I did a much bigger study on children's literature and the history of children's publishing in Yiddish by Hasidic communities in New York State from 1950 all the way up to 2008.

CW:  Do you remember the first time you went to a Hasidic community?

JK:  Yeah, it was a very strange experience.  So, Facebook, like a lot of things in the Yiddish world, was my entry point.  I was posting to different random Jewish groups in Yiddish, "Do you understand Yiddish?"  One day, a Hasidic man writes me back, and picture is -- a picture just from the news of a guy at a protest.  Not an angry face, but a picture I knew was definitely not the real picture.  And I begin communicating with this guy in English.  At it 59:00be-- he -- became very clear that -- he's not only a closet intellectual, but had read -- has read more widely about more things than just about anyone I've known, but entirely at his local branch of the New York Public Library.  Or not the local branch, but two branches down, where no one would see him walking in.  And I knew him as Ari.  So, I'm writing with Ari and I'm writing and writing and writing.  Months go by.  Finally, I talk to him on the phone, he invites me -- I explain my project, he invites me over for Shabbos.  He's -- I guess he had just turned eighteen, so he's living with his parents and all his younger siblings.  He invites me over his house, and I was a little -- (laughs) you know, this is odd.  But I decide to go.  Before he picks -- before I meet 60:00him, he says, "By the way, my name isn't Ari.  I've" -- tells me his real name, and he sends me a picture of what he really looks like and so on and so forth.  And I meet him and I meet his friends, who are all Jews who grew up in Borough Park, mostly sixteen to nineteen at that point, who were questioning their community and ways of life.  And it was fascinating, it was an entry point.  But from them, I went on and met people who weren't questioning the Hasidic way of life.  So, I meet someone who is on the outside, and then I'd meet the cousin that wasn't on the outside, and then I'd meet their cousin who wasn't on the outside, and all of a sudden, I'm in the middle of the community.  One thing I didn't understand is how important dressing and looking the part was in the beginning.  I showed up wearing a green suit for Shabbos.  And we went to the Bobover tish [gathering around the Hasidic rebbe, lit. "table"] I believe it was the -- Forty-fifth Street?  I remember it was the Forty-fifth or 61:00Forty-eighth Street group.  They had just split at this point.  In any case, I walk in and we go up on the bleachers.  And they have these bleachers going high: twelve, fourteen, sixteen layers -- I crawl up, this guy says in Yiddish, "Who is this Gentile walking around with these terrible clothing?"  I turn to him, I say, "Reb yid, zayt mir moykhl, ober farshtey yedes vort vos er zugt," you know?  "Sorry, mister, but I understand every word you're saying."  The guy almost fell off the bench -- fell off the (laughs) -- it was wild.  So, then, I had a small crowd around me, asking me questions and interrogating me.  And after that, I knew to dress in a way that they'd know I wasn't -- they 62:00wouldn't know I wasn't one of them at fifty yards, but only at five yards.  So, I put on a suit, I'd wear a yarmulke.  I'd look more Modern Orthodox.  One time, I was talking to a rabbi.  In the middle of it, he grabbed me and feels me here to see if I have tsitses [tassels on the prayer shawl or undergarment worn by Orthodox Jews] on, and I didn't, so -- but telling -- telling the truth, and you talk to anyone and any -- at any length, I always told people exactly what I was doing, and they were usually very surprised to find out that someone was studying Yiddish in the university.  "The university batsolt ir tsu shtudirn indz?"  "The university teaches you to study -- pays you to study us?  Wow!"  So, they were a bit -- they couldn't quite understand why they 63:00were an interest.  But there was a lot less of a -- people felt a lot less threatened than I would have expected.  And whenever I go -- whenever I'm in a place with a Hasidic community, I always go to the Hasidic community.  So, I was in London, I went to Stamford Hill.  I just wandered around for hours and hours, went to different stores, talked to people.  I went to Mea Shearim and people told me, You can't just wander around Mea Shearim.  There -- it's not like the United States or England.  You can't just walk -- I said, "People are people everywhere.  If they really start throwing stones at me, I'll run."  And mind you, these are people from Borough Park warning me this.  These are not like random American Jews who don't know anything about it.  So, I'm walking around, I go to the stores, and what's very interesting there is whenever I bought children's books in the US -- never once got an interrogation or complaint.  I bought children's books in Israel, the question was always, 64:00"Who are you buying the books for?"  And that was the one time I ever lied to people looking for materials.  I said that I had Orthodox cousins that I was buying the books for, because otherwise they wouldn't have sold me the books.  That was the only white lie I ever told doing any of this.  But I walked all over Mea Shearim talking to people in Yiddish, interviewing them about their feelings -- I mean, not interviewing, but talking to them about their feelings about Yiddish and Hebrew and their identity.  I ended up in this little corner of -- well, I -- almost like a courtyard, completely lost.  It's about four in the afternoon, and I don't know where I'm going.  I'm -- I don't want to go towards people's apartments.  I want to head more towards, like, a commercial area.  And the commercial area's actually a little bit outside of the neighborhood.  So, I'm really off the beaten path, and this little boy comes up to me and he looks like a ghost from Lithuania.  He's dressed in, specifically, 65:00Litvish clothing, and he's yelling at me in Hebrew.  Really nasty-sounding.  Don't have a clue what he's saying.  He's like eight years old.  I said, "Redt mit mir yidish [Speak Yiddish with me]!"  And he looks at me, he says, "Ir redt yidish [You speak Yiddish]?"  "Yo, avade [Yes, of course]."  And he turns to me, he says, "Aza greysn koved tsu trefn mit a goy vos redt yidish!  Such an honor to meet a Gentile who speaks Yiddish."  It's, like, whoa!  Okay.  So, that was the funniest interaction I've ever had in one of these communities.  But whether I -- after doing it a few times in different places, I -- I feel very comfortable just walking in and talking to people.  And if people don't want to talk to me, they don't.  And most people don't.  Most people kind of 66:00skirt away.  One trick I've learned: you can't talk to women if you're a man, obviously.  I should -- I guess it's not obvious if you don't know the community, but that's just not possible.  But in terms of talking to men, very often you don't want to talk to one man by himself, because it'll look to people like you have business with him and maybe he actually knows you, and that can look bad.  But if you talk to a group of people, it's a lot less threatening.  So, if you see four or five guys walking down the street, especially young men between twenty and thirty and start talking to them, yeah.  If someone comes up to them speaking Yiddish, they're generally curious to find out why you speak Yiddish and what your business is.  And that's been true, whether it's been Kiryas Joel or Williamsburg or Borough Park or London or Mea Shearim.

CW:  What did -- I mean, to talk about the language for a moment, what -- I 67:00mean, how did your Yiddish that you had learned from the Yiddishist community change when you got into the Hasidic community?

JK:  Well, it's very, very different.  It's -- totally different dialect.  The grammar that's taught in college Yiddish classes is a very idealized literary form that never really existed, but exists -- and as a spoken language was -- existed as a standard written form.  And it's understandable to Hasidic Jews, but it sounds very old-fashioned.  There -- also a lot of vocabulary differences.  The Hungarian, Polish Yiddish they speak has a lot of different words than the words that are recommended in standard Yiddish, a lot of words that are closer to modern German.  They also have -- well, in the United States, a very large amount of English that's crept in and replaced the native Yiddish words.  So, unless someone's -- unless someone in Borough Park has read 68:00old Yiddish books, their word for "sidewalk" is going to be "saydvak."  It won't be "trotuar."  So, you just have -- there's no books that explain these nuances.  You just have to learn them and stumble your way across.  And there are weird misunderstandings sometimes.  There are a few words that I only learned as curse words in literary Yiddish that are used totally normally in their Yiddish, and vice-versa.  And there are things that just mean different things, that are just words they don't know because they were never words that were used in Hungary, and they were only used in a corner of Lithuania.  But if you look in Weinreich's textbook, they give you the word "almer" for closet.  So, I was learning Yiddish, I said "'Almer,' that's interesting.  It's like 'armario' in Spanish, that's cool."  And I go to use it in Borough Park, and 69:00the word they use is "closet," and if they don't use "closet" they use the word "shafe," which is also a Yiddish word for closet, but a different one.  So, it was just a matter of experimenting and finding these things out and asking questions and -- there also native Yiddish words from Eastern Europe that are used in Israel by Hasidic Jews that are never used in the United States and vice-versa.  And they're both words that I'd know just from knowing the language.  But they -- unless they've lived in both places, they don't know them.  So, it's a matter of just kind of experimenting as you go.  But it's very different than Spanish, where I can look up in a book and it will tell you whether a certain word is used in Ecuador -- I, one time, was told by a friend about a court translation gig where he had to describe the trunk of a car.  And 70:00they used a particular word in Honduras he didn't know.  So, the guy was going on and on and on, something about a car.  He didn't realize he was talking about the trunk.  There are dictionaries for that in Spanish.  You don't -- you have very, very, very little in terms of Yiddish to lead you, except for actually interacting with people, which is good, but it's more work.  It makes it more difficult.

CW:  Well, I want to talk for a minute now about some of your travel, and if we have time we can come back, because there are other questions I want to ask about that work. But, in particular, I want to talk about your time -- your first -- visit to Vilna.

JK:  Yeah.

CW:  Vilna was obviously something you knew about from your self-described obsession with the Holocaust, and also family connections.  But what was your 71:00first impression of the city?

JK:  My first impression of the city was, honestly, how did I end up here, which -- I should preface it by saying I wasn't supposed to go to Vilna.  I thought about it and I decided it would be too upsetting, and I didn't want to go.  I mean, I'm not a little kid.  I'm twenty years old, but I decided, no, no, no, no, put it -- put it aside.  I applied to the Tel Aviv summer program.  I was going to go there, and it was canceled because of a labor strike.  And my choice was either spend like four thousand dollars and go to New York -- I've been to New York a million times -- or go to Vilnius.  I said, "Go to Vilnius."  But I knew it was going to be difficult for me, emotionally.  I was kind of expecting that.  And I'm jet-lagged, and we land, 72:00and we get in a taxi.  And I'm with three other American girls who are in the program.  And the girl sitting next to me thought we were going to die in the taxi, because their way of driving there is very different than our way of driving.  People say they're bad drivers.  They're not bad drivers.  They're better drivers than I -- than we are.  They're just -- have a different idea of what safety is, is a diplomatic way of putting it.  So, when we get out -- and we're at these -- I don't remember where we went first, but probably straight to the military barracks, I imagine.  And we're at -- and we're at --

CW:  Can you explain why you went to the military barracks?  (laughs)

JK:  Yeah.  The -- that's where we were sleeping.  We were housed in military barracks.  I believe they were an officers' training center.  Not bad housing at all, but it was kind of odd, going through a security checkpoint to get in 73:00every day, and living somewhere where you have all these soldiers around and you don't have a language in common with them.  And not -- it was the first time I'd ever lived somewhere where I didn't speak the language.  So, that alone was kind of intimidating.  And I was afraid -- what happens if I get lost and I can't find my way back and no one can understand me, and so on and so forth.  In town -- the city's beautiful.  I had no idea it was gonna be that beautiful.  I knew what the old Jewish quarter looked like, but all the photos I had of it were right before and right after, and a lot of things had been bombed.  The photos were in black and white, so I'm walking around the area which used to be the ghetto but is now, really, the -- nicest areas of the city 74:00now.  It is a beautiful -- it's this really old town that looks -- the architecture looks more like it's from Italy than you'd expect of Eastern Europe.  We were pretty close to there, where we were sleeping to where we had classes.  So, the parts of the city that weren't so nice, we had no reason to end up in them.  And very Soviet and post-Soviet construction in a lot of the cities.  It was very hot.  (laughs) I remember thinking this is supposed -- I thought it would be cold and -- I hadn't done much research.  I had only known I was going for about five weeks, because the other program was cancelled, and I kind of just showed up.  And my parents, very fortuitously, had bought me a camera before I left and said, "There'll be things you'll want to record."  And 75:00the first day of a tour, we meet Fania Brantsovsky.  This little woman comes out and -- librarian of the Book Center, and starts giving --

CW:  At the Yiddish Institute.

JK:  -- of the -- sorry.  (laughter) No, not the librarian here.  The librarian of the Yiddish Institute.  And she's giving this tour and it was like walking around with a time machine.  It was just amazing.  And she shows us buildings and talks about what she remembered of her youth and what the buildings were and her school, and it was just amazing.  So, I would pull out my camera and ask her if I can film.  She's, like, "Yeah, sure," and I spend the rest of the trip hiding behind my camera and getting everything on film.  76:00So, when I got to know people better -- I had been on the trip later, they'd say, "Oh, you're the one with the camera."  I recorded eight or nine hours of it.  It was -- amazing experience and, for me, emotionally exhausting.  I'd get up in the morning, study Yiddish literature for two or three hours, and we'd go around in the afternoon and see where some of the same people lived.  And then, we'd see where some of the same people were murdered.  And, at the same time, I'm meeting all these incredible young people from around the world studying Yiddish for different reasons.  So, in the evening, I'm socializing with them.  So, it felt like socializing with young people who were really cool and Yiddish scholars, and then in the morning it's Yiddish literature, and then in the afternoon it's Holocaust and -- (laughs) back and forth.  I don't know 77:00why, but I was -- well, I do know why.  I got salmonella in the middle of the trip, so that -- for the rest of the trip, I was very physically weak, so I think that partially clouds my memory of it.  It was an absolutely life-changing experience being there.  I kind of felt like -- at the time, I was really interested in Yiddish and liked it.  But I became really committed to it ideologically after having been in Lithuania.  I remember talking to Fania one afternoon, and Fania was giving me finer points of grammar, and she was basically teaching someone else the alphabet at the same time.  And I remember thinking, This must be so heartbreaking for her.  She went to a very sophisticated high school in Yiddish, in this city, and there are very few 78:00people left who speak the language there, and people are coming and she has to teach them the alphabet and remind them the difference between two different letters that looks similar.  And I said, "What do you think of this?"  And she said, "I'm so honored that people come here to listen to me."  My God, people should be doing (laughs) a lot more than that, but that's what I was there for.  I was there, and luckily I had the camera, so I had hours and hours and hours and hours of recordings.  And very strenuously over the next year, I put them all online with subtitles.  And very proud to say that people from all over the world have been watching and commenting, and Fania's -- is happy they're up, and it's great.  It's a great thing, but it's no replacement for 79:00the actual thing, which is going there and meeting with people.  I took going to Ponar a lot harder than I thought I would.  I made a very strange and purposeful decision in the beginning to never look at the calendar.  I decided if I knew what was going to happen the next day, I'd always dread it.  And some days, I'd overhear what we were going to do.  But I actually got on the bus going to Ponar not knowing we were going to Ponar till we got off the bus.

CW:  Can you describe what Ponar is?

JK:  Yeah, Ponar is the site -- was originally a resort town, about ten kilometers outside of the city center, where about a hundred thousand people were murdered, and the majority of them Jews, towards the end of the ghetto period, and then, when the ghetto was finally liquidated.  So, much of -- the 80:00families of people, including myself, who have relatives who came with -- from Lithuania were murdered there.  I know my grandfather's siblings and their children were sort of -- my great-grandfather's siblings and their children were certainly murdered there.  And you walk down the woods -- it's a beautiful, beautiful place, and scenic woods.  And there's a very odd, unnatural pit. And the pit is where they put people and shot them by the thousands, and then brought in people to burn their bodies and start it over again.  And we're there with someone -- I should -- I won't mention his name, but a lot of people know who he was, whose parents survived the war but whose older brother was killed there.  And he's there with his son.  And it was very -- was very 81:00surreal.  There's a Sutzkever poem I knew at the time.  I don't think I can recite the whole thing, but "the blade of grass from Yiddish Institute."  And Sutzkever in the '80s gets a letter from this woman, and she sends a blade of grass.  And Sutzkever imagines the thoughts of all the people who had died there, encapsulated in this blade, and the children being made to play violin by the devil, this incredible -- the letters of the alphabet burning as the children are -- bodies are being burned.  And I remember thinking, I need to get a blade of grass.  I need to ask someone for permission.  Who has the moral authority to give -- for me -- permission to take the grass.  Such a 82:00strange idea, to ask for permission.  So, I ask Fania for permission.  Who else has permission?  I said, "Would it be okay if I take a few pieces of grass from Ponar?"  She's, "Yeah."  She very nonchalantly pulls the grass out and hands it to me and smiles.  So, I -- and so, I took the grass.  And, yeah, it was -- I took it a lot harder than I thought I would.  I thought having talked to people who had been there and concentration camp survivors and my -- I didn't even talk about my third set of grandparents who were Holocaust survivors in the interview.  But I thought being there -- I thought being there would be like -- would not be so hard, but it was absolutely crushing.  It was absolutely crushing.

CW:  Can you talk a little bit about the students that were there and some of 83:00the people you met?  I know you've stayed in touch with some of them.

JK:  Yeah, I've never participated in something where I've stayed in touch with so many people five years later, which is really special.  We'll start from east to west.  So, there were two very sweet girls from Russia, were both musicians.  And I remember the first night we were there, I was exhausted and kind of out of it and jet-lagged, and I hear them singing "Afn veg shteyt a boym" with thick Russian accents.  I was absolutely blown away, because I'd never met anyone else who knew this song, in my life.  And all of a sudden -- are these two girls from St. Petersburg singing "Afn veyg shteyt a boym" -- I was, like, "Whoa!  I'm not crazy.  This song did exist.  My grandfather did 84:00sing the song to me."  Then, in Lithuania, there were three or four Lithuanians in the program.  Two of them, I ended up getting to know very well over the subsequent years.  One became a very close friend of mine for reasons completely unrelated to Yiddish.  Another is at the Medem Library in Lithuania.

CW:  In Paris.

JK:  In Paris.  What?  I'm thinking three steps ahead.  She was -- she moved to Paris a year and a half later and has been working at the Medem Library.  There are a few people from France, there are a few people from England.  I visited one -- my roommate in Vilnius was from London, and he hosted me in London when I was there two years later.  And Ross Perlin, who I assume will be 85:00interviewed for this project -- some point down the line -- he's just fantastically interesting person.  We really hit it off, because he researches endangered languages and is a real prominent advocate for the speakers of endangered languages and the inherent worth of languages that are spoken by just a few people.  And we both really got a kick out of each other, because I saw someone I hoped to be four or five years down the road, and he saw more idealistic version of who he had been when he was younger.  I was twenty, but I had just turned twenty.  I was a very young twenty, emotionally.  So, I was like a kid compared to a lot of people.  I've aged a lot in the past five years and, of course, I met you.  And you were the first person I ever met at the 86:00Book Center.  You had a Book Center shirt, which was the most stylish Yiddish shirt I've ever seen.  And I met Pauline Katz, which went back to a very funny story at the Workmen's Circle that I'm not going to tell, but she had heard about me at the Workmen's Circle.  And there was -- we'll say there was a misunderstanding that got corrected when I went to their convention.  So, it felt like a lot of people I didn't know, but somehow knew because I had a lot of things in common with people's experiences and the reasons they were there.  And coming from Rutgers and from a Jewish community where I felt very much like someone who comes from a parallel universe, all of a sudden I'm -- from people with a lot of the same background, a lot of the same ideas.  And it was really 87:00special.  And I feel that, other than the language itself, that's a big part of what people get at these Yiddish cultural events and pro-- and festivals.  Not only the formal academic things, but also Yiddish Week and Yiddish Farm, KlezKanada, is the real building of a community.  And people can debate for hours about the -- what the community is and the significance of the community.  But I really -- I really felt like I was coming home to something I didn't even know was there.

CW:  Jordan, I'm going to stop for one sec, just to put the other card in, 'cause I have about fifteen more minutes of questions and we only have nine minutes on here, so --

JK:  Didn't mean to make you cry.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:  So, about -- to -- we were talking about your experience in -- at the 88:00Vilnius Yiddish Institute.  What impact did that trip have on sort of your understanding of Yiddish and your own identity?

JK:  It seem-- it seemed much more important to me after that.  It went from being something I saw as interesting and rewarding to something I felt I had almost a moral duty to try and help along.  I felt like I was -- after going there and not trying to at least teach people about the language and the culture and the history, that I was somehow failing people.  And what was very important for me, growing up -- like a lot of American Jews, the Holocaust had overshadowed everything.  And we got plenty of Holocaust stuff on that trip.  89:00It got overwhelming at times.  But we also got a lot about people's lives.  Fania would give these tours and talk about how she remembered the pretty pathetic Jewish zoo that was there and -- when she was in fourth or fifth grades and the -- and the different Jewish political things, and she really made it a living world for people.  And I got the sense -- and I -- it's only grown with the years that this constant obsession with the Holocaust, which wasn't only my own but is really a communal American Jewish obsession, for understandable reasons, loses -- with that process, you lose track of who these people were.  And you not only lose track of who they were.  You lose track of who the people before them were and who the people before them were and the people before them were, and you end up with about four years overshadowing a thousand years of 90:00history.  And knowing the language and having insight into the culture and having had an -- opportunities to learn about it, that people in a generation will not be able to have.  I realized how important it was to do what I could to get people interested in it, to try and bring it back onto the Jewish -- into the Jewish agenda, to make resources available for people to learn it, try and build a bit of a community around it. 

CW:  I'm -- your interest in interviewing -- I mean, you talked about sort of how you had that camera and just started recording.  Did you continue recording 91:00people in Yiddish things?  And sort of how did that interest develop?

JK:  Very little.  I wish I had done a lot more.  I had lots and lots of conversations with people.  As soon as word got around Philadelphia that I was learning Yiddish, anyone who knew my parents or knew someone I knew in high school or -- people kept presenting me with their grandparents or great-aunt.  And I'd be in random places, and people would be, like, Can you just pick up the phone and talk to my aunt in Yiddish for twenty minutes?  And I'd do it.  I never once said no.  And people talked to me about everything you can imagine.  Sometimes it was mundane things.  One woman complained to me in Yiddish for a half hour about the TV show "The O.C."  And she -- her 92:00granddaughter was watching it and she was angry about it, and she didn't like it.  And other people would tell me things that happened to them during the Holocaust that they had never told their own children, that they -- one woman told me something, and she said, "I just want -- as -- that someone should know."  That's one hell of a responsibility, you know?  And I interviewed a -- the few people I formally sat down and interviewed were people I -- were helping do genealogical stuff for.  So, I'd -- someone would find me and, "Can you do -- can you interview my father?  And I want to get his life history," and things like that.  But I didn't do anywhere as much of it as I would have liked until I got to the Book Center, when I really got to do it.

CW:  So, can you talk about the fellowship program that you've now been in for two years here and what you've been working on?

JK:  It's been an amazing experience.  I came here without really a clue of what I'd be doing.  The fellowship's a one-year program where fellows run programming here at the center.  But what you do is really dependent upon what you get assigned to do.  And I had -- I had no idea what I'd be assigned to do.  So, I was hoping that -- to do oral history or something with the books.  That's what I -- were the two projects I actually even knew about.  And I had read a little bit about something to do with reel-to-reel recordings from Montreal.  I didn't even know what a reel-to-reel tape was, besides the fact that they had existed before the cassette.  That's about all I knew.  And 94:00Aaron told me I'd be assigned to this, and played this little snippet of Chaim Grade giving a talk.  And I hear this booming voice and the most beautiful Yiddish I've ever heard, turning into what sounded to me like an old-time preacher from the South, preaching about something.  But he's talking about the importance of Yiddish literature and its significance in Jewish history.  And I was just blown away.  And I was, like, "What am I supposed to do with this?"  He said, "Your job is to get it all online."  And I said, "Where is it now?"  He said, "It's on tapes in Montreal."  I went home that night and I said, "Oh my God, how am I gonna learn to do this?"  And I began reading everything I could find on tape digitization.  Very luckily, the next day, they told me I 95:00was not the one who was going to be digitizing the tapes.  I was a lot more relieved.  But my job has been reading a hand-written ledger, a massive ledger, hundreds and hundreds of pages, picking out the important recordings that were from this -- the Jewish Public Library of Montreal, getting them digitized, writing in the titles in Yiddish and English and putting them online.  And it's a -- it's a long process.  I've gotten up about a third of the recordings, and that's been two years.  It's -- but what I did to kind of make things more interesting, and also to -- just because I thought it was the right thing to do, I put the most important recordings up first and got them digitized first, as 96:00well as special requests from scholars who were working on certain things.  So, of course, me being me, my first interest was to find a -- something to do with the Vilna Ghetto.  So, I knew there'd be recordings of Sutzkever because I knew he had been there.  I had absolutely no idea there'd be a recording of Shmerke Kaczerginski, and Shmerke Kaczerginski -- quickly tell the rest of the story -- he and Sutzkever escaped the ghetto.  They survived, miraculously, in the forest for a while.  Kaczerginski ends up moving to Argentina and dies within a few years in a plane crash.  And, they -- it seems like the guy lived longer, because he wrote hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of memoirs.  Probably eight hundred pages of memoirs in the span of a few years.  But he died in 1954.  So, it never occurred to me that he would have been in Montreal, 97:00giving a talk.  But sure enough, I'm looking at the log and number forty-one in the log, which I saw at the end of the first day, was "Shmerke katsherginski redt iber vilner geto.  Shmerke Kaczerginski on the Vilna Ghetto."  I'm like, "Whoa!"  So, we got that digitized, and I got it back.  And in the intermediate time, we had gone to Montreal and we had interviewed a man named Dovid Botvinik -- I interviewed him in Yiddish -- who is the father of someone I know from Philadelphia who's involved in Yugntruf and whose children are in Yugntruf.  So, I know three generations of that family, and Dovid Botvinik, David Botwinik was a music prodigy as a child in Vilna and was a cantor as a child, and had a very interesting life in his own right.  And what I didn't 98:00know is he was one of the few people who managed to escape from the Vilna Ghetto in the early portion of the ghetto.  And after the war, he became the person who wrote down Shmerke Kaczerginski's music for him and did the musical notations.  Shmerke Kaczerginski not only wrote his own songs, he was the most important recorder of Holocaust songs.  A lot of songs from ghettos and concentration camps we have are from Shmerke Kaczerginski and David Botwinik was his right-hand person for a lot of this person -- lot of this time.  And I told him that we have a recording of Kaczerginski.  He said, "I knew he came here."  He said, "I never knew there was a recording."  So, I was able to get him the recording.  We put it on CD for him, and that was -- that was magical, 99:00just to be able to facilitate some of -- this is someone whose close friend had died, at that point, fifty-nine years earlier.  And here we have a recording of it from sixty years ago.  That's -- that was, for me, knowing who Kaczerginski was since I was eight years old, that was a -- that was a magical thing, to be able to do that.  If there's one thing I'll remember in eighty years -- if I'm alive then -- or seventy years, of being in this place, that -- that'll be it.  That -- that was something.

CW:  I'd like to ask -- just some questions about Yiddish in general.  You've worked here at the Book Center for a couple of years, and obviously are also very involved in Yugntruf.  What do you see as the role of Yiddish organizations in transmitting Yiddish language and culture?

JK:  It's tough, because it depends on the organization.  It dep-- and they all define the roles very differently.  So, starting with the Book Center, vast majority of people come to the Book Center don't know Yiddish and they'll never learn Yiddish.  However, the primary mission of the organization was and largely remains maintaining collections of books in the Yiddish language, and making them available.  So, on the one hand, most of the people visiting will never learn the language.  On the other hand, really -- there's a really strong need to get people to be able to learn the language, to access the materials.  However, there's no ideological drive at the Book Center to speak Yiddish.  We really don't speak much Yiddish among each other.  Kind of -- I try to arrange for one day a week to be -- this is going to be Yiddish language lunch, but 101:00couldn't really keep it up.  So, that's very -- that's the complete opposite from Yugntruf, where we'll speak Yiddish even when it gets inconvenient.  Like, we're having a finance-related meeting in Yiddish.  And it would be easier for everyone to just explain the tax status and stuff like that, or calculating numbers in English.  But we don't, because there's an ideological sense that every conversation in Yiddish is -- means the language is more alive.  And then, you have organizations that are kind of in the middle of -- somewhere in between.  And then you have organizations that want to give people a sense of Yiddish culture and the history of Yiddish-speaking people -- but don't really 102:00do anything with the language.  So, you have the whole range.  I think one thing that the Yiddish organizations need to do more of is advocate for Yiddish within the American Jewish establishment.  There's this very specific, almost impenetrable American Jewish mainstream that does not touch Yiddish, and is -- decided fifty years ago they have no interest or time for it.  And I think things have changed politically, generationally, culturally for a whole variety of reasons that it could be brought back in, not as -- not by any means as a replacement for Hebrew or Zionism or anything else, but just as something else in the mix.  I think that would do a lot of good in expanding the reach of the language.  I think that the Hasidic community, within a generation's -- we -- going to become a major part of American Jewry.  They're going to go from being 103:00seen as something -- being on the fringe to being just, by sheer numbers alone, a major part of the picture.  And with that, Yiddish is, again, going to become seen as being more important, just by sheer demographic force.  In a generation, thirty percent of the Jewish children in New York City are going to be speaking Yiddish.  So, there's no getting around that in terms of importance.  But in terms of what organizations should do in terms of identity, I think more thinking of Jews as something more than just a religious group or just potential supporters of the State of Israel.  Jews have an ethnic history, they have a religious history, a political history, an art -- there's art history, there's cultural history, there's literary history.  There's a lot 104:00more there.  Aaron Lansky is really trying to wage that fight on an intellectual level.  But we need more people to do that.  And I spent a lot of time thinking about the most effective way to do that, as well.

CW:  How does -- I mean, how do you see Yiddish as part of your own identity, your own Jewish identity?

JK:  It is most of my Jewish identity.  I didn't grow up with the religion.  I learned a lot about it, and there are a lot of things that I like.  I like the questioning aspects of it.  I like, generally speaking, when it's not being distorted, there's a decent ethical tradition, even if the understanding of ethical mores when the religion was formed two thousand years ago don't jive well with the ethical understanding of mores today.  Even with things where you 105:00can tell times were really different, it was definitely trying to move people in the right direction.  But there are a lot of things I don't like about the religion and I'm really uncomfortable with.  So, if it were the typical American Jewish mold and it's just the religion, or -- I'd be out.  So, Yiddish culture, a sense of an ethnic heritage, a sense of this as the language that my family spoke for a thousand years, memories of hearing the language growing up, of matzo ball soup, things like that -- it's the same as being a third or fourth generation Italian American or any other white hyphenated American, except I can't go back to the Old Country as much.  I can go to Lithuania, but that's a very different experience than someone who can go to Ireland or Milan or Greece 106:00or whatever.  And there's Israel, but that's a -- that's a story in and of itself.

CW:  So, what do -- do you have a -- goals or a mission in terms of Yiddish going forward into the next phase of your life?

JK:  If you'd asked me when I was twenty-one, it would be to get more children speaking the language.  Now that I'm a little -- see things through a bit of a wider lens, it's more getting people to appreciate the history, to learn about it, to become literate in the culture, and really reaching out to people on their level.  Some people, the most they'll ever do with it is read a book in translation, watch a film, and learn to cook a few recipes.  Other people will 107:00learn the language fluently and raise their kids in it.  There's the -- there's a wide continuum.  But I see that it brings a lot of meaning to people's lives for different reasons and it's something that unifies people that are otherwise divided, that can bring -- that can bring people together who wouldn't come together.  And I think that there's a lot in the culture that's just genuinely good and that should be there and -- in the mix of all the different things going on in the world.  So, the way I felt going back in high school, I felt like I was the one that was missing out not having a -- not having another language.  There's a lot that I felt was missing that I don't feel was missing, and I know that there are thousands and thousands of people who would have the 108:00similar experience if they lucked into it the same way I did.  So, I feel it's valuable.  In terms of an ideological thing, the language surviving, I have a bit of that.  But I'm not as concerned of it -- about it as I used to be in terms of numbers.  I -- the culture that you can only reach through the language is more interesting to me.  But in order to reach it, you have to give people the tool, which is the language itself.

CW:  Do you think there's a Yiddish revival?

JK:  That's a hard question to answer, and some signs yes and some signs say no.  There's a very small revival in terms of people speaking it as a mother tongue, in that there are a few hundred people being raised around the world, speaking as their first language, whose parents did not speak it as their first 109:00language.  But if you look at the bulk of the speakers at -- in terms of Hasidic Jews today, it never went away.  It just continued.  So, in the strict sense of a revival with most of the population, no.  In terms of a cultural renaissance of lots of people getting interested in the culture, yeah, there's a definite cultural renaissance.  It seems to have started in the '70s and '80s with the music, and extended further into the arts, and the language itself, and even a bit in literature, both in Yiddish and English.  I know when I decided and made the insane decision that we were going to publish another issue of the Yugntruf zhurnal [journal] I had no idea if we'd get any submissions.  I 110:00thought, It's an experiment, and I thought, It'll take months for the submissions to come in.  People have to write them.  Next week, I have thirty submissions in my inbox.  What happened?  I look, I realize these are all things these people had been writing before.  They didn't write them for this journ-- this magazine.  They didn't write them for another magazine.  They were just writing them: native Yiddish-speaking kids in Israel, Yiddish students in the United States, for -- there are all these people writing in Yiddish.  I didn't know.  Lot of the material wasn't particularly good.  Some of it was pretty good.  But just the fact that it was being written, I don't know whether that's a revival or a continuation, but it's certainly a renaissance.  There's certainly more there than there was.  The fact that we had a ten-year-old girl 111:00write a really good story that won our writing contest and we had a twenty-five-year-old ex-khosid write poems -- and they didn't write them for us.  These were just things that had been written.  And when I decided to revive the journal, I thought, I'm going to convince people to write in Yiddish.  Well, I was very pleasantly surprised that nobody needed convincing.  It was being done.  I was a bit of a fool.  What -- what do you they need me for?  I'm just providing a venue.  It's much better.  So, I can -- just that little niche of people writing literature in Yiddish, there's certainly a renaissance -- so, there are certainly things -- like other things -- I look at things like Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird, and you got incredibly sophisticated music with political ideologies that seem like they've been revived from the '20s and '30s, both seriously and not so seriously, at times.  112:00And it feels like a renaissance, but it might have some elements of a revival.  I don't know.  Dr. Shandler and I talk a lot about this.  We used to -- I -- he came up with the idea of post-vernacular Yiddish.  So, I very often joke with him, "So, I talk to a khosid [Hasidic Jew].  Is it post-vernacular or vernacular?  And does it depend on how much English he knows?  And what about when I'm doing actuary tables, and what about if I just call someone a 'schmuck'?"  And we go on and on with all these different scenarios and try and map out -- I mean, finally it's like there's no hard and fast rule.  It's just a -- it -- a descriptive term --

CW:  Right.

JK:  -- and I feel the same way, kind of, about revival and renaissance.  There's a point where it doesn't matter exactly, the semantics of what's going on.  The fact is, something's going on there, and it may be small but it's very 113:00-- it's at a very high level at times, and it's of extreme cultural importance.

CW:  Yeah.  Well, learning a language is a pretty big commitment.

JK:  Um-hm.

CW:  What would you say to someone who's thinking about starting to learn Yiddish?  Why should they do it and what's your advice?

JK:  Why should they do it?  I mean, it depends who they are, I think, why they should do it.  It's just interesting.  There are just -- the people that you can access with Yiddish, even at this late date, it's worth just to -- just speaking with Holocaust survivors and their children.  If you have interest in the Hasidic community, to understand Hasidic life, it's just essential to know 114:00Yiddish and to know their Yiddish.  In terms of the literature, there's very little of it that's available in English.  Unless you can read Hebrew or Russian, there's very -- even those languages, there's, relatively speaking, not much available.  And there is some -- something about reading writers in the original language.  Sholem Aleichem -- reading him in English, it's like Bialik said, it -- it's like kissing a bride through a veil.  It's just -- doesn't have the same impact.  There's something in the language itself that causes you to think differently, to question things.  Sometimes, when I'm thinking about something and I can't get anywhere, I'll switch to thinking in Yiddish in my mind and I'll come up with a solution.  It's -- came as a language of debating 115:00minutiae in the Talmud, and you have that singsong rhythm.  Da-da-da, da-da-da, "and if I were to do this, then I would do this, then I would do that," da-da-da-da-da-da.  There is -- there's something -- it has a certain cultural viewpoint that I haven't encountered elsewhere.  I've encountered very watered-down portrayals of it in English, but I -- it -- you can't contain it in another medium.  It just doesn't survive when it's transferred.  Not every single thing written in Yiddish, but the very particularly Jewish things, they just don't transfer.  And to be able to access that, you need to know the language.  Plus, it's just a -- it's -- it's a lot of fun to speak, it's a lot of fun to speak a language that not many people can understand.  It's very good 116:00for children.  If you're walking down the street and they say something really stupid you don't want other people to hear.  There're all sorts of reasons for learning a minority language in general, not just for Yiddish, that are cool.

CW:  And -- and what advice would you have?

JK:  Advice?  Learn to speak it.  Just don't learn to read it.  People in the US, the way it's taught, the goal's always to learn to speak it.  But lot of Israelis and Europeans kind of learn it like Latin, to read texts, which is good, but I don't think you can translate literature unless you can speak the words in your mouth.  Espec-- you hear dialogue, you need to be able to repeat it and hear the sounds in your mouth.  "Vuhin geysti?"  "Gey ikh ariber."  You need the rhythm of the language to be able to translate it.  "Where are you 117:00going?"  "I'm crossing the street."  Or, "I'm crossing over."  Or it could be in a metaphysical sense, "I'm going through."  And you have to play with all these different things.  Someone told me -- I met a very nice graduate student from Israel, and she told me she was going to be translating something.  And I started speaking to her in Yiddish and she couldn't speak Yiddish.  And she told me she can read it fine but she can't speak it at all.  I'm, like, "Then you can't" -- you could translate Holocaust testimony, but you couldn't translate a novel.  You need to be able to have the words in your mouth.  So, definitely learn to speak.  In terms of pure pedagogy, I find talking to myself very helpful when I'm learning languages.  Lot of people are uncomfortable 118:00doing it, but especially for learning a Jewish language, it's a very important thing to do.  You need to have arguments with yourself in your head.  Why am I learning this language?  Is this a sane thing to do?  Oh, it's fine.  "Far vos lern ikh zikh yidish [Why am I learning Yiddish]?"  "Far vos nisht [Why not]?"  You know?  You go on and on and on in your head with it, and that's fun.  I also find speaking to animals a lot of fun.  My cat understands Yiddish.  And my cat doesn't like me, so she hears Yiddish, she kind of -- (meows) but you go on from there.  One time I was telling a bunch of people why I learned Yiddish, and I -- "Who do you speak Yiddish with?"  "Itster?  Mitn kats."  "Oh, ver iz reb kats?"  "Right now?  With my cats."  "Oh, who's Mr. Katz?"  "Well, no, not" -- and I mean the actual cat.

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

JK:  Oh, nishto farvus [you're welcome].

CW:  Thanks for taking the time to talk with the -- with me and with the 119:00Yiddish Book Center.

JK:  Um-hm.

[END OF INTERVIEW]