ALLEN KATZ ORAL HISTORY

DOROTHY GOLDSTONE: So this is Dorothy Goldstone, and today is August 7th, 2013, and I am here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Allen Katz. And we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Allen Katz, do I have your permission to record this interview?

ALLEN KATZ: Absolutely.

DG: Well, thank you very much. Welcome. Could you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

AK: Well, actually, we know quite a bit about it. My mother and grandmother came 1:00from a little town called Gaysin, which is in the Ukraine, kind of halfway between Odessa and Kiev. They came to America in 1923. My grandmother lived to be 85 and died in 1945 at the age of eighty-five -- which makes it kind of interesting, 'cause there's a story there, too. She was born in 1860, which is when Lincoln was president of the United States. And she told me somewhere around 1945, before she passed way, that she could remember when she was ten years old -- which was my age at the time -- talking to her grandmother, who was eighty-five. Which meant that -- eighty-five -- if her grandmother was eighty-five in 1870, when she was ten, she was alive -- her grandmother was alive when Washington was president. So we have a connection of Yiddishkayt that 2:00goes from there. The thing that I remember most about that is that the two Yiddish words "paskudnyak [scoundrel]" and "bik [bull, ox]" -- which are not common words -- were curses that her grandmother shelled on her, and she then on me. Paskudnyak is a Polish word which means nogoodnik, effectively. Bik -- I never knew what a bik was, until I found out a number of years ago. There was an incident at the University of Pennsylvania where an Orthodox Jewish boy was studying and there were some black girls out on the street corner making a lot of noise. And he opened the window and he hollered, "You buffalos!" They tried to press charges. He pointed out that a buffalo was a -- the Yiddish word for it was bik, and that's what his grandmother used to call him. So I found out a bik is a water buffalo. Why that's a Yiddish curse, I've never understood. But that 3:00-- so, there are curses now that I've established that go back to when Washington was president that have been hurled at me through two generations -- four generations. (laughs) My father's family is from Romania. The only thing I can tell you about Romania -- Romanian Jews, particularly -- it was once pointed out to me that a Romanian Jew was someone who can get into a revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you. And that was pretty much my -- I tried to calm down that type A personality in myself, but it's still there. My mother was mostly responsible for my Yiddish education. Now, I mentioned earlier that my grandmother never learned a word of English even though she was in the country twenty-two years before she passed away. So I learned Yiddish from her, but it was what I'd refer to as a shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community] Yiddish. It was the Yiddish of the common people in the streets, and 4:00it's the Yiddish that's spoken most often in the United States -- or at least, was when the immigrants came over. My mother, though, insisted I get a Yiddish education from the Arbeter Ring -- the Workmen's Circle -- via the Wynnefield yidishe folkshul [Yiddish secular school]. Wynnefield was a section of Philadelphia that was pretty much a Yiddish ghetto, certainly after World War II, but even before that it was predominantly Jews and lots of temples. Fifty-Fourth Street, which was the main street, on Rosh Hashanah, you could walk from one end of the street to the other -- which was about ten, fifteen blocks -- there wasn't a single store open. Even the ones that weren't owned by Jews -- and there were few of those -- they were closed.

DG: Well, would you like to stay with that and just -- I'd like to go back to 5:00your home life, but you said you're into Wynnefield.

AK: Yeah.

DG: That's where your grandparents moved?

AK: No, no, no.

DG: Okay. Let's get to your grandparents here to America.

AK: Well, the only grandparent that came was my bobe [grandmother] -- my mother's mother. And she lived with us as far back as I can remember -- with my mother, father, brother, and myself. And she's the one who got me started speaking Yiddish. So I spoke Yiddish very early. But I started to point out that my mother sent me to this folkshul where the Yiddish there was totally different from the shtetl Yiddish -- it was what we called a tifn Yiddish, deep Yiddish, based more, I guess, on the High German than on anything else. But still, it's with Russian words, Polish words, Hebrew words all put together in a beautiful 6:00amalgam. But it stayed with me. I went to the folkshul from the time I was eight until the time I was fourteen -- so that's six years -- and even had connections with it after that. So there, we read all the great authors -- Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Avrom Reyzen, Heys Nun Bialik, Yud Lamed Peretz -- the great of the greats. And we learned a lot of the Yiddish songs, particularly the songs at the time -- recognize that when I was at ten in '45 and I started at eight, for two years I was there in the folkshul during World War II, and there were a lot of songs that we were taught that were based on the Holocaust in Europe, which had a significant impact on my life. Well, there were two things that negatively 7:00influenced me. One was the Holocaust and what we were taught about it -- the songs we learned about it. The other was -- back to my bobe again -- the stories she told about the pogroms in Russia when they were there. And particularly the fact that -- my Hebrew name is Avraham Shimon -- I'm named after two of my mother's brothers who were shot to death by a Cossack, one behind the other -- because one Cossack told the other he could kill two Jews with a single bullet, so he put one in front of the other and shot them, and I'm named after those two brothers.

DG: How old were you when your bobe told you that story?

AK: Oh, that was -- today, it would be considered child abuse -- at least verbal 8:00abuse, because those kind of stories shouldn't be told to kids who are six and seven and eight years old. But yeah -- and I got a lot of them every -- (laughs) -- at ten years, and I guess at about nine, or eight or nine years old, I was the babysitter for my bobe. (laughs) So I didn't need a babysitter -- I was her babysitter. And we would always run through the pictures she brought from the old country -- mostly pictures of the family -- her brothers, her sisters, her children. There were ten children that she had, my mother being one of them. And my bobe always used to say that -- not that she was treated badly, but she always said that one mother can take care of ten children, but ten children can't take of one mother. (laughs) And I think that's probably an accurate statement. It's hard to believe she was a philosopher. But back to the stories 9:00of the pogroms and then in the folkshul reading the various papers on Sunday -- the Yiddish papers -- the "Tog," the "Forverts," the "Morning Zhurnal" -- I don't even remember which one particularly had a lot of the news of the Holocaust, but they had a better handle on it than the "New York Times" or the "Washington Post."

DG: We'll come back to that. I'll give you a lot of time to talk about that. Let's stay, though, with the whole family mix. I love those stories about you and your bobe. In fact, I remember you saying something -- that you were going to say that you called it "bobe Yiddish" and --

AK: Yeah, we'll it's "bobe Yiddish," but it's --

DG: -- and "Peretz Yiddish"?

AK: It's really the Yiddish -- the shtetl Yiddish. It's the Yiddish that was spoken daily. All business was done in that Yiddish. It's the Yiddish that's 10:00spoken, I think, even today, even among the Orthodox. I have an interesting story there. I went to Forty-seventh Street Camera in New York City -- at one time was the place to go if you needed a camera or lenses or whatever -- and it was run by Orthodox Jews. And I walked up to the counter and I asked the sales guy in Yiddish -- told him what I wanted. And he looked at me, he said, "Far vunen kimstu?" -- "Where do you come from?" And I said, "From Philadelphia." And he said, "No, ersht [before, lit. "first"] Philadelphia." He couldn't believe that there was anybody who could speak Yiddish who wasn't from Europe or an Orthodox individual. So we had a lot of --

DG: That's a wonderful -- taking you back to your little shtetl called -- what was the name of -- Wynn--

AK: Wynnefield. Well, Wynnefield --

DG: Could you describe that?

AK: Wynnefield was like ancient Gaul, except it was only divided in two parts: 11:00the very rich and the very poor. And the very rich became very rich after World War II -- a lot of butchers who end up owning wholesale meat companies or whatever. Yiddish morals weren't very strong then. These were people who crossed an ocean, and they were gonna make the most of it. I lived in what I affectionately called "lower Wynnefield" -- these were laborers -- as my father was -- and stolyers -- carpenters, tailors -- shnayders. And in that part of the world that I lived in -- in that part of Wynnefield -- almost all of my friends -- my contemporaries -- were all first-generation Americans. So whoever's house I went to, it wasn't unusual to hear Yiddish spoken -- or at least English with 12:00a very, very heavy European, generally Slavic, accent. There's an interesting story there, too, that when I went to these houses, I got the impression that every kitchen was painted yellow. And the reason it was painted yellow -- or at least I thought -- was that they fried everything. And particularly the grivn [cracklings] -- when they made the grivn, the smoke from the frying, from the rendering of the fat, discolored all the paper, so it was all yellow. (laughs) But there was another thing, too, relative to the Yiddish. Because although very little Yiddish was spoken in the neighborhood -- at least not to the kids -- they were all trying -- it was a different world then, we all wanted to assimilate, and they certainly wanted their children to assimilate. I came to the conclusion when I went to school -- regular elementary school particularly 13:00-- that the teachers there spoke clear, concise English, well pronounced, well -- the grammar was excellent, the vocabulary was good -- and I came to the conclusion -- and it took me many years to learn differently -- I came to the conclusion that people who spoke well were intelligent people. Then I met some Englishmen who spoke beautiful English and were as dumb as the day is long, but they spoke beautiful English. So I was relieved of that misconception. But it was an easy one to make, because everybody around in the neighborhood -- all being immigrants -- some who were naturalized, some never became American citizens -- but they all had -- they tried to speak English, but the words were 14:00unclear, the grammar was incorrect. So it was very easy to come up with the idea that people who spoke English well were intelligent, clever people. As I said, I was proven wrong. The other things from the youth -- there were so many of us. Today, you come to neighborhoods and there are big houses and whatever. These were all row homes. And so on one block, there would be twenty kids. Although the average family -- they learned something in Europe, they learned not to have eight and ten and twelve children. These were not Orthodox Jews. In fact, most of the Jews who I came in contact with were cultural Jews, not religious Jews, and I consider myself the same. I love the culture of the people, I love the history of the people, I love the music, the poems, the stories, but I'm not 15:00very big on going to shul. I'm as bad as the rest of them. I go on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. (laughs)

DG: Well, can you describe the home you grew up in? What did it look like? Can you close your eyes and get yourself back into that space?

AK: Yeah. That space wasn't very big. It's easy to do. (laughs)

DG: Okay, go ahead.

AK: There was I guess what was called an air light, which means that if you opened the front door and opened the back door in the kitchen, the air went straight through -- there was no -- nothing came off from one side to the other. There were small rooms -- probably ten by twelve living room, ten by twelve dining room, and a kitchen that was about half that size -- and then a back door to a little plot of ground that was generally hung with clothesline. There were no automatic washers and dryers, so there was always clothes hanging out on the line, whether it was summer, winter, spring, or fall. The upstairs was the 16:00master bedroom -- which was my parents' -- was up front. My brother and I shared a room -- the middle room -- the middle bedroom -- we had two twin beds. And then the bobe was in the back room. So it was an interesting situation. There was never any money. As I said, my father was a laborer. He worked in a candy factory, shlepping a hundred pounds of sugar across factory floors. And it was always -- when my mother would go -- there were supermarkets, but we had no automobile, so they were out of the question -- but there was a little corner grocery store owned by Mr. Whittenberg. And Mr. Whittenberg would sell groceries and whatever my mother needed on the book -- he would write down the amount -- and when my father brought the paycheck on Friday night, she would go in and pay the balance on the book -- and always felt that he added an extra dollar. "He 17:00shouldn't have done that! I know added" -- who knew. But I -- (laughs) -- I guess he believed in present value of money theorem. But there's an interesting story I've got to tell you. Having grown up that way, it took me a long time to figure out that everybody didn't grow up that way. But I'm gonna shift forward now fifty years -- sixty years, maybe. I had taken up golf when I retired in Florida, and I had been playing for about six months, and I went to the pro shop and I said, "I'm gonna go out myself and practice." And our pro said, "There's a guy coming over from the Don CeSar," which is a big hotel on the beach. "Do you mind playing with him?" I said, "If he doesn't mind playing with me, I certainly don't mind playing with him." So we got to the first tee, and he introduced himself. I don't remember his name -- I remember there were three sticks after his name, so whoever he was, he was the third. And at the end of the first hole, 18:00he had scored a par -- he got a four -- and I had a six. And he said, "Don't worry, you'll do better on the next hole." I said, "No, that's as good as I get." He says, "What do you mean?" I said, "I've only been playing golf for about six months." He looked at me with a straight face and he said, "You mean your father never took you to his club when you were a kid?" Honest to God, that was -- I finally realized there were people like that. He wasn't being funny. Everybody he knew was that way. He had never -- he probably never played with a Jew in his life. But it was just -- I really wanted to tell him, no, he was too busy schlepping a hundred pounds of sugar across a factory floor. But I didn't have the heart. I said, "No, he never took me." (laughs) But unfortunately, that was one -- I had learned much sooner than that that there were people who led totally different lives.

DG: When was the first time that you really understood that there was another 19:00world where you were a minority?

AK: You know, it took a while, because growing up in that little shtetl-like part of the city, everybody -- we didn't know we were poor. I mean, nobody I knew went to camp. Summer, we played stickball with a broomstick. We'd go in the alley, steal somebody's broom, break off the broom part of it -- we had a bat. And then somebody would have a ball, and that was our summer fun. I never learned how to swim, either, because I was never in a camp. And there's a story there, too. But the -- (laughs) as you can notice, I'm kind of deficient in hair -- which doesn't bother me at all now, but when I was about forty-five and working -- and working as an engineer with a lot of younger engineers -- it 20:00occurred to me that I'd look better with a toupee so that I would at least appear younger. It wasn't a matter of vanity, it was a matter of not wanting to look like the young engineers' father. So I went up and got measured for it. And the barber, who was a specialist in hair pieces, was ama-- he said, "This looks terrific." He says, "I'll tell you, it's a material -- it's not real hair, it's fabric, but you'll be able to swim with it." And I said, "That's amazing!" He says, "Why?" I said, "I could never swim before." (laughs) He kind of looked at me, and I don't think he fully understood what I was saying, but it was true. I mean, the man tells me I'll be able to swim.

DG: (laughs) But back to your life. I love the idea that you didn't know that you were poor --

AK: No, we -- everybody was pretty much in the same boat. Well, no, that's not 21:00quite true. I knew kids who I went to school with -- elementary and junior high -- who lived in the upper part of Wynnefield, and --

DG: Were they Jewish, or not?

AK: Oh, all Jewish. But as I say, their parents owned manufacturing plants, they owned major retail stores -- it was quite a group of people. And I remember kids at sixteen who got cars. I mean, I only knew two families on the whole street that had a car -- on our street. And these were kids at sixteen that were given cars. So there was a big dichotomy in Jews, even in the -- this is in the late '40s and '50s. Even then, it wasn't as bad as the '20s and '30s that I read about, where the German Jews who came here first were kind of aloof and apart 22:00from the Central European Jews who followed them. And as a matter of fact, there was a great story in Stephen Birmingham's "The Four Hundred," where he mentions that Diane Warburg -- the house of Warburg -- married Robert Sarnoff, the son of the chairman of the board of RCA, and the German Jewish newspaper in New York City had a headline that said, "Diane Warburg marries son of Russian radio operator." So even there, there was discrimination of German Jews against the European Jews. And I expect that David Sarnoff was such a person -- and what he accomplished -- that those who shunned him were much inferior to him. But getting back to the question you asked, I got to high school -- it was Overbrook High School, which is not famous for me being there, but it is for Wilt 23:00Chamberlain, who was the great basketball star -- he was at Overbrook. He actually was a freshman when I was a senior, and I got to meet him once. But that school was very unique in its time. Because it was a magnet school -- not for intelligence, but for backgrounds, because the neighborhoods it encompassed were black, Italian, Jewish. Jewish kids came from Wynnefield across the bridge to Overbrook, and we represented about fifty percent of the enrollment of the school -- which was pretty big. In my class -- there were A and B classes, so about eight hundred kids, nine hundred kids a year graduated -- if you say a thousand, there were almost four thousand kids, two thousand of which would have been Jewish. Twenty-five percent were black, and the rest were either Catholic, 24:00Protestant, Italian, whatever. So it was a real mix. And I learned at a very early age to learn to get along with these people. There were no gang wars -- nobody carried guns in the school, no cops roamed the hallways. About the most trouble you'd get into would be caught smoking somewhere and it was not allowed, or leaving the building to go get lunch across the street when you weren't allowed to leave the building. But we learned that there were people that were different, and it was a unique situation. There was another thing that I learned -- and I think this is kind of a chauvinistic attitude -- but I had always thought that the Jewish kids I knew were the smartest and the brightest in the class. And certainly in elementary and in junior high, that was probably the case. There were not a lot of non-Jewish kids. But in high school, it was a 25:00different story. And I learned real quickly, there were a lot of non-Jewish kids who were a hell of a lot brighter than us Jewish kids, and who didn't study as hard or whatever. But there was a lesson to be learned there, and it was a coming-of-age thing to recognize that some of the greatest minds in the world were not Jewish. True, many Nobel laureates were Jewish, and there is a high percentage of Jewish achievers intellectually, but I had to learn the hard way that the Jews were not the smartest people in the room all the time.

DG: When you say "learn the hard way," are you thinking of a specific incident?

AK: Well, I think, more specific people. I was fairly good at math, and I thought I was probably a whiz-bang math kid. And I didn't come close to winning the math prize. (UNCLEAR) kids were a lot better -- one of them was Armenian, 26:00the other was an Italian boy. And they did pretty well. Well, I think Bill Gates shows you that you don't have to be Jewish. (laughs)

DG: Right. But you were entering a new world, a bigger world.

AK: It was a new world. It was a bigger world. It was a world in which you had to recognize there were other people, they had other agendas, they were not in school to get grades -- high marks -- so that they could go on and become doctors and lawyers like their mothers wanted them to. It was time to learn. And I learned, too -- after that, I went to -- there was no money to go to college. First of all, again, all the kids I knew, nobody was able to go to college away from home -- which left three schools in the Philadelphia area: Temple University, Drexel -- which was then Drexel Institute of Technology, now Drexel 27:00University -- and the University of Pennsylvania. Well, U of P was out of the question. And when I graduated high school, it was a thousand-dollar-a-year tuition -- a little different than the sixty-five thousand it is today. (laughs) But Drexel, that I went to, was three hundred and fifty dollars for the year, which was just a little bit less than I paid for my first son's camp experience -- day camp for the summer. And also, it was a co-op school, so I could earn the money --- 'cause otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to go. Probably one of the reasons I became an engineer. And Temple, which -- where the majority of the Jewish kids went, to Temple University. And as Bill Cosby is fond of saying, "They could have gone anywhere; they chose Temple." In the case of my contemporaries, they could have gone anywhere if the money was there; they went 28:00to Temple because that's what they could afford to do. You went by subway. And coming up here today -- Amherst -- I drove by Amherst College and UMass, and I looked at those campuses, and I said, "Oh, my god." (laughs) What a difference from being in a city school.

DG: Well, we should move on. I'd love to stay with this part of your life, and I think we will take some time coming up about the folkshul before we leave, because I think you had some pretty intense experiences there -- especially for the fact that you were growing up right during the World War II, and I'd like it if you could first of all take us into folkshul from school. You walked there from regular school?

AK: Well, I walked home from school -- generally, you had to have some milk or cookies or something -- got my books, and then walked another six blocks to the 29:00folkshul, which was just a converted row house, actually. And in our class, there were, I think, twelve, fourteen kids.

DG: How old were they?

AK: All pretty much my age -- maybe six months older, six months younger. But it was -- there were so many in that age group, but, you know, there might have been one that was a year older, but that was about it.

DG: And you started at eight?

AK: I started at eight, yeah.

DG: So that's nineteen-forty--

AK: Forty-three. Yeah. The effect of the folkshul -- first of all, the cultural aspect of it. As I mentioned, to have read Dubnow's "Geshikhte [History]" -- Dubnow was probably one of the great writers of Jewish history in Yiddish -- I learned a lot about -- which helped me -- when I went to history class in high school, I knew almost all the history that was being taught. Because as strange 30:00as it seems, the history of civilization and the history of the Jews pretty much track. Wherever the Jews were, this was the country or the place where things were happening -- from the time of the Jews in Spain, where Spain was the top of the heap, to where they moved to Germany, and Germany was the top, and then to Poland, where they -- it was -- and so the history of the Jewish people and the history of the -- of civilization are very much entwined. And I learned a lot of that in the folkshul. Of course, we read all of the -- as I mentioned before -- the great Yiddish authors. And poems and -- oh, there's another thing that came in very handy. We would have a -- there would be a oneg Shabbos once a month, on a Friday night. And those who financed the school -- because our tuitions were minimal -- but there were some very wealthy people from, again, upper 31:00Wynnefield, who had an interest not so much, I think, in Yiddish education, but in socialism. Why the ultra-rich were interested in supporting the Arbeter Ring -- the Workmen's Circle -- I'm never quite sure, but maybe it was conscience. But we would all have to prepare poems to recite, stories to tell, songs to sing. And I had -- from the time I was eight till, as I say, the time I was fourteen -- it was nothing for me to get up in front of an audience of fifty or sixty people and recite a poem. And I still think of some of those poems. I can still remember them. They generally had to do with the holidays. Like, Rosh Hashanah, a very short poem: "Nokh d'sude far kol nidre,/flegt mir bentshn dan der zeyde./Oyf mayn kepl flegt er legn/zayne dare hent di beyde./Tsugetulyet tsu 32:00der kitl,/fleg ikh tsitern un hern./Un d'zeydes khmarene oygn/flegn vern ful mit trern,/'Nu mayn kind, itst kum in shul mit./Got vet dir al dos guts shoyn gibn./Zay a guter, zay a frumer,/shraybt er on dir lang tsu lebn.' [After the meal before Kol Nidre,/we would pray followed by grandfather./He'd put both of his thin hands/on my head./Snuggled against his long white linen coat,/I would tremble and listen./And his cloudy eyes/would fill with tears, 'Well, my child, come with me to the synagogue now./God will give you all the best./Be good, observe Jewish law,/and he will inscribe you in the Book of Life.']." I could translate that, but -- now, here's a poem that I have not recited -- until now -- for -- (laughs) -- I was eight -- seventy years! And it comes through. You don't forget these things! They stay with you! And, you know, there are dozens -- now, a lot of times, I missed the -- oh, there was two poems. One -- I'll just give you the last lines, because I -- the lines that -- there's a poem about a young boy who goes to synagogue for Yom Kippur. "The khazenes heyzerik 33:00[cantor is hoarse]" -- it's winding down -- "shvakh iz der bas/a por tfiles mer/un di makhzer iz tsu [His bass notes are weak/just a few more prayers/and we're done with the prayer book]" -- the service is over. And then it's over, and he says, "Ikh shtey bay di oren ha-koydesh un trakht,/'Vos iz nokh erger ven di shul iz farmakht?'" -- "I stand by the holy ark and I think, 'What is worse than when the shul is closed?'" You know, these are powerful, powerful pictures for a young person to hear and listen. There's another one that, I think, got me -- I do some painting on the side -- I'm certainly not an artist, but I play at it -- but there was one line from a poem about a young boy who's seven years old -- "Zibn yor iz mir gevorn/un di mame zog ikh az kh'zol zayn -- hot gezogt,/'Nu mayn kind, zayt in kheyder,/zayt in kheyder, gey mayn kind./Genig af hulyet oyf 34:00der velt,/fray un gliklekh vi a [I'm seven now/and my mother tells me that I now need to -- she said,/'My child, go to heder,/you should be in heder, go, my child./Enough with messing around in the world,/free and happy like a] bird." And she goes on, basically telling him, "You've run around the world too long; it's time for you to go to kheyder [traditional religious school]." And he starts the next paragraph, "S'geven a vunderbarn frishn frimorgn, sheyne likhtik. Hobn shtraln zikh gegosn durkhn fenster un gefinklt oyfn rebn, oyfn sider, oyfn tish" -- it was a beautiful early morning; the "shtraln" are sunbeams -- sunbeams have come through the window -- "durkhn fenster" -- "un gefinklt," and shone on the rebe -- the rabbi -- the sider -- the prayer book, and the table. And I could picture that -- I could see -- almost like being in a synagogue or being in a Catholic church -- the beautiful stained windows and the 35:00shine coming through and sparkling. And you don't forget those things. On the negative side of the folkshul experience were reading all these atrocity stories about what was going on in Europe in World War II. It was in the papers and we discussed it. And we learned -- I think the most important song I learned -- well, two songs I learned -- were "Partizaner lid" -- "The Partisan Song" -- "Zog nisht keyn mol az d'geyst dem letstn veg,/fin himlen groyene farshteln bloye teg,/o, kumen vet di zun mit ir kayor/un s'vet a poyk ton undzer trot./Mir zaynen do." Basically saying that, don't ever think you're going on the last walk, because a day will come when the sun will shine and the world will feel the imprint of our footfalls on the ground. And another stanza from that, 36:00"Geshribn iz dos lid mit blut un nit mit blay/s'iz nisht kayn lid fun zumer feygelekh oyf der fray,/dos iz a lid fun tsvishn falendike vent,/dos lid geshribn mit neganes in der hent." "This song is written not with lead but with blood; it's not a song of summer birds flying; it's a song that was written by men, standing between -- "tsvishndike vent" [between walls] -- with fallen windows -- "neganes" -- grenades in their hands." So you got a very interesting picture. And that song was written in the Vilna Ghetto, but it was used as the theme for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, too. It was extremely powerful. And one other thing that was difficult. After the war -- in, say, 1946 -- I was now 37:00eleven years old -- there were Holocaust survivors who were coming to this country. And most of them couldn't get jobs. A few -- there were some who were teachers, who taught in the religious schools, Yiddish schools in Europe. The Arbeter Ring looked out for these people and brought them into the fold. And it was a very difficult situation for the students, because these were teachers who were accustomed to the children being eager to learn. And we were American kids. We had no problem. We didn't worry about anything. (laughs) We said -- and I remember -- to our, I guess, shame, forever -- we had one man, khaver [comrade] Tovayash, who was a refugee from Auschwitz, and he had lost his whole family -- he lost everybody in the war. But he got over, and then he was a teacher. And he 38:00would try to put all his emotion into whatever he was reading. And at one point, he stopped, and he said, "Mir ken nisht mernisht lernen!" -- "We can't learn anymore!" And everybody else goes, "Far vos?" -- "Why?" "Derfar vos perl kayt gum!" -- "Pearl is chewing gum!" Pearl was one of the pretty girls in the class, and she was chewing gum. And he was moved to deep emotion that somebody would be chewing gum while he was lecturing. And that's only part of the thing that -- it was very difficult to deal with. These people were so scarred -- they were so hurt. And I think the thing -- there was another khaver Gliksman, who also came -- so we had two of them, at least, while I was there. And they were -- I can't think of -- I can't find a word that describes how they felt about us American kids -- Jewish kids -- who were nonchalant, who didn't care -- when wonderful, 39:00wonderful kids who they had in Europe were all dead -- were killed in the Holocaust. These were kids who wanted to learn, who'd studied hard, and did everything. And we had every advantage in the world, and we didn't take advantage of it -- or at least they thought. So everything is a relative situation. I thought we were doing a pretty good job of keeping the culture going, and they thought we were not. But it's -- it was an experience that has stayed with me forever. I find I sometimes think in Yiddish, and I -- I don't use the language -- I don't talk to anybody or whatever, but the Holocaust part of it was -- has been ingrained in me. My wife and I are life members of the St. Petersburg Holocaust Museum -- my wife's been a docent there since it opened, 40:00she's been head of the docent council. We go to virtually all the -- we've met everybody from Elie Wiesel to the great artists -- some of these artists who -- one who started painting in Theresienstadt who still does work -- there's some phenomenal art that's being done now -- Judy Chicago -- their works are amazing. But they're tough. And, you know, the museum outreach is to kids in schools. It's required in Florida to teach the Holocaust -- it's a requirement -- and the museum supports that. These kids come through. But recognizing what they're showing -- what they're doing -- they won't allow any kids to come in below the sixth grade. So -- even that's young, eleven -- but the docents know what to emphasize and what not to. And there are certain exhibits, when they're there, 41:00they won't let kids go see. Theo Bielski -- they made the movie -- oh, my God --

DG: "Defiance." "Defiance"?

AK: "Defiance." Well, we met the Bielskis. In fact, Tuvia's grandson is next in line to be the head of the museum. And they live in Florida -- they come frequently. We had an excellent exhibit of theirs. So that's my folkshul experience, to a large extent.

DG: Well, on a different side of that era, I recall you talking a lot about how important the radio was for you.

AK: Oh! Well, don't forget, that was before television -- or, at least, it was before television for the masses, so there were -- (laughs) -- again, in upper Wynnefield, I know there were a few TV sets, but our world revolved around the 42:00radio. And of course, when my bobe was alive, that revolved around "fertsn hundert af a radio dayl" -- "fourteen hundred on your radio dial" -- the Yiddish station in Philadelphia, the only one we had. And there are two interesting stories there. (laughs) One is, a newscaster by the name of Nathan Fleisher, who was sponsored by (sings) "Hi-Hat Peanut Oil, Hi-Hat Peanut Oil" -- (laughs) -- I never forgot the song. But Fleisher was the Gabriel Heatter of Yiddish radio. He reported every day about the war in Europe -- as far as he was concerned, there was no war in the Pacific. And it was generally, "The Russians are advancing on the Russian front" -- that, we always knew. And we understood. The other thing that was kind of interesting -- (laughs) -- my bobe would listen to it, and of course, I sat at the radio and listened, too -- were the soap operas -- the 43:00Yiddish soap operas. "Tsures ba laytn [People's problems]" -- oh, my God. You know, it turns out, many, many years later, my wife and I became real theater nuts -- and particularly living downtown Philadelphia, after a while, we got to a lot of theaters, and I got to see a lot of Irish plays. And I came to the conclusion that these Irish playwrights had copied specifically from the Yiddish soap operas. The difference was, in the Yiddish soap opera, the husband was out of work, the daughter was going with a non-Jew, and the son had tuberculosis -- that was the Yiddish problem. The Irish, the husband was drunk, the daughter was pregnant, and the son was a nogoodnik. But basically, it was the same story. (laughs) And it was just the way things were. I just -- something just popped in 44:00my mind, and it's apropos of what we're doing here. It's a line from my bar mitzvah. I hadn't quite gotten to that yet, but in addition to the bar mitzvah -- which I was trained to do like you would train a pet monkey if he could read -- you don't know the Hebrew words, you memorize them, and you spit them out at the appropriate time. And I did that. I did the haftorah and the Torah. And in Orthodox synagogue, because only the Orthodox would take me, because I wasn't a member of a synagogue. (UNCLEAR) folkshuls, the principal taught me the haftorah, the Torah, and I did it there. But I also had -- we had a little party at my uncle's house to celebrate my bar mitzvah, and I gave a Yiddish speech. The entire speech was in Yiddish. And I will just -- I remember quite a bit of it, but there's one part that I want to give you. It says that basically, "Ikh 45:00vil dankn mayn tate-mame far alts vos zey hobn geton far mir -- un iberhoybt mayn mame -- far farshteln ikh zol geyn in folkshul take all finf tog a vokh -- itst bin ikh able" -- able? Oy oy oy! "Itst ken ikh redn tsu eykh in dem yidishn shprakh, di shprakh in velkhn milyonen yidishe dikhters, shriftshtelers, un firers fun undzer folk drekn oys zeyere gedankn un gefiln un barekhenen undzer kultur." It's a "Thank you to my mother and father -- and particularly my mother -- for insisting I go to the folkshul five days a week" -- this was the commercial they put in -- "but as a result, I am able now to speak to you in the Yiddish language, the language in which Jewish authors, playwrights, and leaders 46:00of our people -- "drikn oys" -- put out their thoughts and feelings, and enrich our culture." And that was true. That was exactly what Yiddish was. It was a way of communicating. But -- and again, remember, too, in those days, this was pre-- well, not by much, but my bar mitzvah was in May of 1948, Israel was in May of 1948. But I beat 'em by a week, I think. But the fact was, Yiddish was still the language of the Jewish people -- not Hebrew. And Hebrew began -- took over, and whatever. But one time I was -- a couple, I've been in Israel, but once I went to Mea Shearim, and I fit in very well. (laughs) They only spoke Yiddish, they wouldn't speak Hebrew. But at the time, in the -- certainly in the '30s, '40s, '50s, the majority of the work in Yiddish culture was in Yiddish, not in Hebrew. 47:00The great Hebrew poets hadn't come to -- they were there, I guess, but -- there were some great songs. Oh, one of the songs that we learned in the folkshul, "Ani ma'amim" -- "I believe." (sings) "Ani ma'amim, ani ma'amim, ani ma'amim." Oy, oy, oy. (sighs)

DG: Can you sing it for me?

AK: I can't sing at all. (laughs) Oy. No, singing is -- I'm almost a Johnny One Note, except I do a very good job of amplitude modulation -- not so much frequency. (laughs) But that's -- yeah, that's an interesting time.

DG: Now, you also, I think, went to some Yiddish theater.

AK: We went to the Yiddish theater -- with, again, the folkshul -- my parents had no money for that, I mean -- well, I had ten or eleven cents -- I remember, when it went to eleven cents, it killed me, but -- it was ten cents to go to the movie on Saturday, I had that, but -- we went to the Yiddish theater in New 48:00York. I saw quite a few of the greats. Molly Picon, Maurice Schwartz -- oh, God, I can't think of the others, but there were quite a few. Many of whom -- like Peter Lorre and -- oh, who else? There were several who made it to the big time in Hollywood, but got their start in Yiddish theater. But Yiddish theater was kind of neat. But not much of it existed in Philadelphia. We had to be taken to New York to see it.

DG: What did you like about it?

AK: The fact that I could understand what was going on. And the fact that it was -- Yiddish theater was done, again, for the hoi polloi -- for the common people. You didn't get the kind of Broadway theater that is sophisticated and has a 49:00great moral and interesting story -- this was slapstick humor if it was a comedy and was total pathos if it was a tragedy. And it was -- extremism in theater, I think, is interesting. And Yiddish theater was extreme. If it was funny, it was damn funny, and if it was sad, it was very sad. And there were no happy endings in the Yiddish theater.

DG: Now, your home -- would you say your home was a Jewish home?

AK: (sighs) Well, I -- if you define it -- well --

DG: You can define it.

AK: (laughs) I can define it. I'll tell you this. For crystal -- we had crystal in the house. That is, for drinking soda or tea or water, we had shmetene glasses -- this was sour cream glasses. Sour cream came in glasses; when we finished the sour cream, that became our drinking glass. For drinking tea, the 50:00glasses were too thin; we used yortsayt [anniversary of death] glasses. We had a whole bunch of yortsayt glasses (laughs) that we would drink the tea with. That was not uncommon. I wasn't the only person in the world who drank tea through a sugar cube from a yortsayt glass. We had four sets of dishes: milkhik [dairy foods] and fleyshik [meat dishes] regular, and milkhik and fleyshik for Passover. And I think all of them together, you couldn't -- you'd have enough money, maybe, to buy one plate today of legitimate bone china. But they were there. The other thing we had was kosher meat, which allowed my mother to spend money she didn't have for more expensive meat. We had a bushel basket top. She'd lay the meat on, pour rock salt on it -- it would sit there for twenty-four 51:00hours -- and then cook the heck out of it until it was almost burnt. (laughs) That's why, today, I still have trouble eating steak. (laughs) I found it can be made to be a lot tastier. I'll tell you this, though -- the gefilte fish with the carp floating around in the bathtub -- I remember that. My mother made that. You have not seen anything until you see a live carp in your bathtub, swimming around. (laughs) I can still remember seeing that. And she made the -- I don't know what she did, because I wouldn't watch. (laughs) But it ended up being very good gefilte fish. The soup -- the chicken -- first of all, we would -- oh, I would go with my mother to the chicken store, which had a shoykhhet [ritual slaughterer] -- the shoykhet is the guy who chops the head off of the chicken and hangs 'em up so the blood drips in the right direction -- and pulls the 52:00feathers off -- and then we take it home and we boil this chicken to within an inch of its life. But we take from the chicken, chicken eggs -- unborn eggs -- which are not too all that good -- they're yellow -- and it's total cholesterol. I've always said that Jewish mothers probably destroy more Jews than Hitler did. You get the feeling -- (laughs) -- I mean this stuff was terribly -- the gribene [fried goose/chicken skin] -- but chicken eggs in the soup, and the soup was so thick with fat, it had a layer of a quarter of an inch of fat. But we survived. And so it was okay.

DG: Did you have Shabbos in your house?

AK: No. We had no religion -- no classical -- I'd say to me, Judaism was a cultural thing. It was who I was, it was who my people were, but I had no 53:00particular interest in the religiosity --

DG: Your parents didn't?

AK: No.

DG: How about your bobe?

AK: No. Well, they did the likht bentshn [candle blessing].

DG: What's that?

AK: Blessing of the candles with the head and the smoke in the face and the whole bit. Yeah, she did that. Oh, and there's a tradition -- and I believe -- I'm trying to remember the situation, but -- I think it's Rosh Hashanah, where you take a live chicken and hold it over the kid's head. Shlogn kapores, it's called. And you basically pass all the bad whatever from the child into the chicken, and -- (laughs) -- and then dispose of the chicken. Shlogn kapores.

DG: Can you remember that happening to you?

AK: Oh, yes.

DG: Could you describe that, please?

AK: (laughs) I remember standing there like an idiot, shaking, and my bobe is holding this chicken over my head and saying a prayer of some sort, and that was 54:00it. And I'm thinking, My god, I'm living in a nut house. (laughs) But that was the extent of the religion. That was something that -- but no, we never -- again, we couldn't afford to belong to a synagogue. That was a big part of it. So we never had a -- my father never made a living. He was not a good father to the extent that he was -- that's a bad statement, I shouldn't say that. I found out later that he was a severe dyslexic -- and that's before anybody knew what the term was. So he had -- I couldn't imagine why he would sit with a paper in front of him, reading a newspaper, and it would take him forever to turn the page, because he had difficulty reading -- and therefore could never have a job of any value, other than a laborer -- and that's what he did. And it was tough.

DG: Well, look, we've spent a lot of time in your childhood. Could you just take 55:00a minute to tell us where you are now --

AK: (laughs)

DG: -- or where you were just before you retired?

AK: Yes. Fortunately, I had a lot of mazl -- in terms of becoming an engineer, I worked for RCA, did some interesting work for them, and started a small company with some other people, which ended up doing very well. And then, thirty-three years ago, I went in business for myself as a manufacturer's rep in a very narrow field of instrumentation, predominantly for satellites and military vehicles, whatever. It was the golden years. I talk about Reagan as being the greatest president of the twentieth century. My wife hits me over the head when I say that, but he certainly helped me. As they said, Ronald Reagan never met a weapons system he didn't like, and that was probably true, and I was selling a 56:00lot of stuff to it. So we did pretty well for a while. And my favorite story to come out of that as to how well we did during the Reagan years was, a friend of mine -- a couple we met on our honeymoon at the Nevele in the Catskills -- many moons ago, in 1958 -- her father -- Sandy's father -- was one of the first Jews in big-time racing -- big-time meaning New York Racing Association, which was Belmont, Aqueduct, and Saratoga, where purses are big and the horses are bigger. And when he died, the stable went over to management by his son, and the whole family had a piece of it. And I had told Phil, our friend, that I was kind of interested in doing it if they were interested in having a partner (UNCLEAR). So they came, and he called, and he says, "We got a filly" -- a female horse -- 57:00"that we just got. If you want, you can have twenty-five percent of it." So he gave me the price for it. I said, "Okay." He said, "But it doesn't happen real quick. You put it in Rhoda's" -- in my wife's name -- "and it'll take several months before they vet this thing completely, because they're very careful not to have anybody connected with organized crime or whatever as an owner." So I said, "Fine." And it took a couple of months. And Phil calls me one day, and he says, "Congratulations, they approved your ownership, and you're now part owner of a horse." And I thanked him and whatever, and I hung up the phone, and I'm thinking, Boy, I wish my bobe were here. I could tell her -- because she used to tell me that my grandfather was a very important man in Gaysin -- he owned a horse. And I thought, Gee, now I own a horse. And I said, Oh, you know what my 58:00bobe would say to me? She'd say, "D'bist a nar! D'ferd hot gearbet far d'zeyde; du vest arbetn far d'ferd." "You're a fool! The horse worked for your grandfather; you're gonna work for the horse." And boy, was that correct. (laughs) By the time I was through with the horses, I could have put a horse through Harvard and it would have cost the same amount of money. (laughs) But it was fun while it lasted. And we got out of that pretty quick. (laughs) And I learned thoroughbred horse racing is not for the little Jewish boys. (laughs) It's a big game. But it gives you some idea of the fact that we did fairly well, and we now live in Florida, and have belonged to synagogues -- because there's a lot of social connections with the synagogue that -- when you come to -- it's kind of like, I think, when the immigrants left Europe, particularly after World War II, and came to America, they could start all over. It was a whole new life. 59:00Nobody knew them, nobody knew anything about them, nobody cared. But the same thing is true when you retire and move to Arizona, Florida, or wherever you go. It's a new life. Nobody knows who you are, nobody -- you're retired now, so they're not interested in making contacts -- that they can sell insurance or sell accounting services or whatever. People are -- you have an opportunity to meet and be with people -- particularly Jewish people -- who you like. And you don't have to join organizations, you don't have to -- it's a much freer thing. I find a lot of value in being retired. I'm still on two hundred milligrams of Zoloft a day -- (laughs) -- because I haven't dealt with -- I'm not working, and I've been out of -- I've not -- I've been retired since 1996, so that's seventeen years almost, and I'm still taking the Zoloft. (laughs) So I'll get over it.

DG: Well, I'd like to talk a bit about what happened to you when you became a parent. Because you have children, right?

AK: Yes, I have three kids -- two boys and a daughter.

DG: And you have grandchildren?

AK: I have six wonderful grandchildren -- all grandchildren are wonderful. And when they come visit me in Florida, they have diplomatic immunity -- they can do any goddamn thing they want, and nobody touches them. (laughs)

DG: So maybe if you can roll back a little into time and remember that you grew up as a cultural Jew, and now, today, you're very committed to the Holocaust Museum -- you are very committed to something about passing on Judaism -- I guess, the Jewish world. Describe to me what you're committed about, and what 61:00happened with your raising of your kids? I'll just leave it wide open. Take the floor.

AK: It is kind of interesting, yes. Yes. Obviously, none of them went to a folkshul. (laughs) I know there are still a few around -- predominantly in New York, but there are still one or two in Philadelphia. But that was totally out of the question. I took them to a Reformed -- kids went to Reform Hebrew schools. The first time I went to a Reform service, I thought I was in a movie theater -- in fact, I was waiting for a movie -- I couldn't get over the idea, because the little interface I had with synagogues was always Orthodox. And primarily because the rabbi of the Orthodox synagogue, Rabbi Novoseller, in Wynnefield, came from the same town my mother did, so we could go in and he wouldn't say anything -- without being members. So I went -- that was my idea of 62:00what a synagogue was. And then I go to this Reform thing, and oh, my God. Anything can happen here. (laughs) But it was a different world. But the kids -- it's interesting, all three of our kids went to Hebrew school, went through their bar mitzvah. All three were confirmed. And my oldest went to Gratz College. Now, they're all on their own. They're married. The one who had the least interest in -- my middle son, who had the least interest, is now the most religious, and is -- I think predominantly because he married a young girl -- a young girl -- yeah, she's still young -- from Charleston, South Carolina, who was very much involved with Judaism, very much involved with synagogue -- because in the South, apparently, a lot of Jewish life in the cities of the 63:00South revolve around the synagogue. So she's brought him into the fold, and he goes all the time. Our daughter was on the board of the synagogue when they lived in Atlanta, and now they're in Wellesley, and she's pretty active in that synagogue. My oldest son, who went to Gratz College, has virtually no ties to Judaism. And again, I think his wife is part of that, too -- she's -- I don't think she's an agnostic, particularly, but -- well, right now, we're going through some problems. Andy, our oldest son, is fighting leukemia in the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, and it's been a tough battle. He's gonna overcome, he's gonna work it out, but Debbie, his wife, is -- I don't think she's an atheist now, I think she's learned prayer. I know I have. (pause) All 64:00right. Thanks. God bless him, he'll make it. Okay. Uh, yeah. So right now, we're happy in Florida. I don't play golf much better than I did the --

DG: Tell me about those grandkids.

AK: Oh, God. Well, I have one granddaughter, four grandsons, and two granddogs.

DG: (laughs) Would you say they're Jewish, those dogs?

AK: Oh, absolutely.

DG: And what are the qualities that make them Jewish?

AK: What are the qualities? They go to doggie day school, they go to doggie camp. (laughs)

DG: And they eat a lot?

AK: They eat a lot. My daughter goes every Saturday to Dunkin' Donuts and gets an egg and ham and whatever sandwich to feed the dog and he -- (laughs) -- Trixie is accustomed to that. My other granddog, she gets whatever she wants, too.

DG: You know, we haven't talked about food. Growing up, and even now, do you have -- oh, wait a second. You did talk about some great food when you were growing up. So today, are there any foods that your kids are craving? Are you passing down any particular foods? What are you passing down?

AK: One great thing: fried matzah or matzah brei, depending on where you come from -- the kids love that, I loved it. (coughs)

DG: Let's start again. Have some water. Let's take a moment, let's take a moment. Wait, wait, wait. Hold it, hold -- do you want some -- I have some Raisinets, do you --

AK: No, no. I'm fine.

DG: Okay. Let's take a minute, and we'll go back to the beginning of the question, okay? So, what I was asking about is whether you're passing down any foods to your family?

AK: Not really. We did not keep a kosher house or even try. Our daughter did. 66:00Right after she got married, for about three or four years, she kept a kosher house. If they brought in Chinese food, they ate on paper plates. (laughs) She was nuts about it at the beginning. We -- in Florida -- on Christmas Eve had a Hanukkah party for all the Jews that didn't have anywhere to go on Christmas Eve, and so we had them making all of the classical Hanukkah food -- the potato latkes and all that stuff -- and of course, then, we had corned beef, and pastrami -- the classic old Yiddish fare -- deli. And when the party was over, we had a lot of food left over. Well, we were going, for the week after Christmas, up to Lisa's home -- and at the time, she lived in Atlanta -- we were gonna drive up. And we brought all this food up, and she wouldn't take it. She wouldn't put it in the refrigerator. (laughs) And I said, "What do we do with 67:00it?" She says, "I don't care, dad, I'm not keeping it in the house." Oy. (laughs) So that was the end of that. So I went out and I made myself a sandwich in the garage, and -- (laughs) -- I think the rest we tossed. I don't -- or maybe we called somebody. I don't remember what happened to it. But she quickly outgrew that. But you said, growing up with food -- interesting situation. The first time I saw bacon -- first time -- was at four o'clock in the morning on a troop train going to Fort Knox, Kentucky for my first day in the Army of the United States. And I was so darn hungry. They hadn't -- they had a train at two o'clock in the afternoon at Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia, and at four in the morning, we still hadn't gotten anything to eat. I go in there, and there was what looked like scrambled eggs -- I wasn't sure they were -- and these strips of things that -- (laughs) -- I ate bacon and I loved it, because I hadn't seen it before. I got to see shrimp -- actually, while I was in the army. 68:00I had never seen a shrimp before, and I found they tasted pretty well. So that was my experience with -- oh, pork was another thing. I refused to eat anything that was pork -- although I found out later, bacon was, but I didn't know that at the time. (laughs) But my wife, who did not grow up in a kosher home, liked Chinese food, so she took us -- she and I went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and -- the wonton soup, egg roll, the usual -- and I said, "Boy, this is good." And she said, "Do you know what's in it?" And I said, "No, but it's good." And she says, "It's pork." I said, "It's what?!" And I wouldn't finish the rest of it. (laughs) I've learned. I'm pretty good with the -- yeah, I think the dietary laws in Judaism are one of the cultural aspects that are gonna fall off the -- it's -- I think what will stick is not what you can't eat 69:00-- that will go away, you'll be able to eat anything -- but what will stick will be the stuff that is truly Jewish. A hundred years from now, if you have somebody sitting in this seat and interviewing and ask them what their food is, they'll still say matzah brei, they'll still say chopped liver, they'll still say corned beef, pastrami. These things will never die. And they'll always be Jewish. And it's a cultural thing. But not eating ham, not eating bacon -- it's not worth fighting about anymore. Even in Israel, I've found I can buy. (laughs) So.

DG: What do you think Yiddish means to you today?

AK: Yiddish or Yiddishkayt? Yiddish, of course, to me, is the language, and it's a language that I would love to see sustained and grow. And I know it is in some 70:00colleges now. I've read some in the "Pakn Treger" here of some of the places that I never thought Yiddish would be taught. I even know of some non-Jews who are taking Yiddish. But as a language, until we get entertainment in Yiddish -- oh, I've got a funny story about that. Our son -- the one who's ill -- is a patent attorney. And he did some work for a group, the Friars Club in New York. And they had decided that they were going to put on a show for the benefit of retired comedians or whatever. And they had gotten Whoopi Goldberg interested in doing it. And the opening -- I'm going through quickly this, but -- after a while, it was decided, she would do the opening scene. She would tell jokes in Yiddish to a black audience and see if she could make it funny. And they decided that was a great idea. So someone said, "Well, how are we going to get Whoopi 71:00Goldberg to tell Yiddish jokes?" Well, they thought about it, and they said, "Well, we can get her to read it, but who's going to teach her pronunciation?" My son raises his hand, he says, "My dad will." (laughs) So I was set to teach Whoopi Goldberg how to pronounce Yiddish words and Yiddish jokes. Unfortunately, it never happened. The money behind it -- who was going to put up the money -- for whatever reason backed out. And it never came to pass. But I was really looking forward to that opportunity.

DG: You'll have to put it on your to-do list.

AK: Yeah. By the way, Andy has also been involved in doing the patent or copyright work or whatever for a Yiddish Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There are more Rock and Roll Yiddishkayts than one would think -- you know, besides Bob Dylan and the guy from Kiss and -- I don't know all of them, but there are 72:00apparently quite a few.

DG: Well, that was what I was going to actually ask you -- that -- you know, how are you keeping up with Yiddish? Do you use the internet? Radio? Literature? It sounds like you're very hooked in. Tell me about it.

AK: Well, of course, there's all the Yiddish that goes through the Holocaust Museum. There are the Yiddish books -- I read, I think -- between my wife and I, I don't think there's a book on the Holocaust in the last ten years that we haven't read. And some of them are phenomenal books. They're not historical -- there was one called "The Book of Names" -- and they would -- this group of survivors -- to remember the names of those who perished, made up songs. And they sang these names -- songs. It was a great book. There are so many. There were so many. But I read virtually everything that comes out. My wife screens 73:00some of them, because she'll generally read them first, but -- yeah, I read a lot. These are all in English. I read the "Pakn Treger" when it comes. I even sometimes try to read the Yiddish, but it's difficult. It would take me a half hour to go through a paragraph, but -- we do that. I certainly -- I have a number of Yiddish music recordings. We go over, every once and a while, to the East Coast to Florida, and let me tell you, it's a totally different world than the West Coast, but there are a lot more yidlekh [Jews] on the East Coast. We go over there in their festival market -- their flea market kind of thing -- and they sell Yiddish CDs. And so I buy quite a few of them. But my favorite now is not by a Yid, but by a guy named Mandy Patinkin, who did a phenomenal album in Yiddish, taking both Yiddish songs and singing them and taking songs like "Take 74:00Me Out to the Ballgame" and translating them into Yiddish -- and they're just phenomenal. I could listen to that record over and over and over and over again. And that's Yiddishkayt. That's something -- and that's where Yiddish will come in. Somebody would listen to that -- I think I played it for my kids, and they said, What's he saying, dad? And I'll translate it for 'em. And if enough of that was done -- if -- you know, people will go to things that are pleasant. Education for some is something they seek, but for others, it's work. But give 'em -- you know, let me entertain you kind of thing -- that's really what sells.

DG: We're unfortunately starting to get toward the end of our time, and I want to leave some time for your wonderful gift here. But, so I want to ask you something -- a few goodies, and one of really something -- how do you think 75:00Yiddish has influenced, if at all, your own sense of identity, and perhaps influenced your sense of Jewishness?

AK: Well, I think any Jew who says he doesn't have anxieties about being Jewish would not be telling the truth. I think that it's in-bred in you if you grow up with the -- the amount of anti-Semitism that exists in the world today is unbelievable. Truly, it's covert in the United States -- you don't see the nasty things that you'll see in France -- in parts of France today -- or Sweden has become terrible -- Norway doesn't even have any Jews anymore. There's always the feeling of insecurity. And no matter how secure you are, you can have millions, and if you're Jewish, I think it's a -- it's passed on in the genetic structure. 76:00You have to have a certain sense of insecurity and concern. Guilt is not a Jewish thing. I know that's the joke, but that's not really the thing. I think if there's anything that is common to most Jews, if they choose to admit it, is a sense of, I'm still a stranger in a strange land. And that's something we deal with. We all deal with it in different ways. Most of us ignore it, but it's there. I don't know any -- from the standpoint of Jewishkayt, there's always the sense of rooting for the underdog, there's the sense of charity, of giving to causes, of trying to do the right thing. Not all the -- I mean, you know, for every -- there was a book called "Tough Jews," written by Richard Cohen, who 77:00talked about all the Jewish murderers -- in the Mafia in New York in the thirties -- these were not good guys. But Abe Reles used to go to synagogue every Friday night, (laughs) even though he killed somebody on Friday morning. So there are good and bad in all of us, but I think for the most part the Jewish trait, the Jewish mentality, is to try to do good, to try to do the right thing, to try to be fair. And I know that's been my thinking, and as my kids have grown up, I take pride in the fact that they have done what they do honestly, and without damage or hurting. And I know this: they never heard at our table, at dinner when they were growing up who we cheated today, and how much we took this guy for, and what we could've done there. We didn't have those kind of conversations. There was nothing like that going on. And I think some of the 78:00time when -- a great rabbi, Rabbi Nachman, Bialystock. Bialystock? No. It was another town in Poland, but Rabbi Nachman I remember. He said we all have the children that we deserve, and I had that cut out and put on -- my wife did -- cut out and put on the refrigerator. We had it. And we truly believe that: you have the children you deserve. If you pay attention and lead them the path they should go, it generally works, particularly in Yiddishkayt.

DG: Those are beautiful words.

AK: Thank you.

DG: Maybe you could leave us with your favorite Yiddish word or phrase or song.

AK: Oh, I gave them to you already. They're my favorite, paskudnyak and bik. What could be nicer words than that? You do, "Bik di [You ox]!" "Bist a paskudnyak [You're a nogoodnik]!" You could almost -- you could -- you don't even have to know what the word means! You know what it is. (laughter) So --

DG: Okay. And what advice do you have for future generations?

AK: I hope, I truly hope that they -- the generations that come, my grandchildren and those that come after, remember their heritage, remember where they came from, what they've been through as a group, as a people, from the days of Moses to the present day, that everything that they've gone through and whatever, and don't give up. I know there's -- mixed marriages are fifty percent the wrong way, or right way, I guess, depending on your point of view, but Judaism is more than a religion. It's much more. It's a culture, and it's a culture that has to be maintained forever. And I think as long as there are good 80:00people in the world it will be, and if Judaism dies the world may not be far behind. And I hope kids realize that.

DG: Allen Katz, thank you so much.

AK: You're welcome.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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