MIRIAM FORMAN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: Great. Okay, so, this is Christa Whitney and today is October 30th, 2013. I'm here in New York City with Miriam Forman and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

MIRIAM FORMAN:You do.

CW:Thank you. So, why don't we jump right in today.

MF:Okay. (laughs)

CW:We're mainly gonna be talking about your father. Can you start by telling me his name and where and when he was born?

MF:Well, his English name is Solomon Simon, Solomon R. Simon, (laughs) and he was born in Kalinkavichy, which is in White Russia, in 1896. When he came to 1:00this country, he chose July fourth as his birthday. Since you always have a holiday when you're Jewish, you have a holiday (laughs) connected with your birthday, and he wanted to be really American, so he chose July fourth.

CW:And you say his English name, can you --

MF:Right, his --

CW:-- explain about that?

MF:-- Yiddish name was Shloyme Simon, so when he came here, I g-- oh, it wasn't. No, no, it was Shloyme Shimonovich, and that got anglicized to Solomon Simon.

CW:Do you know if there -- if he's named after anyone, where he got his name?

MF:Oh, I have no idea. (laughs)

CW:Can you tell me what you know about his family background?

MF:Well, all I know is, really, partly what -- it was in his autobiography that he was, I think the -- I think he was the fourth or the fifth of eight. And 2:00supposedly, he walked very late, or he had trouble crawling, or --- so there was some thing. He was called the "sidun," he said, which is not a cripple, but something, like, connected to that word, which I never quite understood. But some of the stories -- his father was a shoemaker, because he has a beautiful story in his autobiography about how the -- his father refused to make shoes for the czarist army, at some peril. And other stories that he was a baker. So, maybe he was both. It's possible.

CW:Did he often talk about Europe, about the Old Country?

MF:Not often, no. He had a brother in -- who emigrated to Palestine instead of coming to the United States, but he was considerably younger than my father. And 3:00he didn't talk much about the family that stayed behind.

CW:Do you have a sense of what the town was like or any of -- the house or anything?

MF:They were very poor, very poor, and it was a poor shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community]. There weren't many rich people, from what I understood.

CW:And you mentioned he wanted, really wanted, to be American. What was his attitude towards America?

MF:He loved America. (laughs) He loved it. He couldn't believe the level of freedom he found here when he came. He couldn't believe how Jews could really live in a country that accepted them, where they would be accepted the way they were. It was marvelous for him; he just loved it. And when anyone criticized America, or if they became a communist, because -- there would be a better way to do it here, why communism -- he would scold them. I mean, but really hated 4:00the idea that anybody would compare the United States to Russia, which he thought was just the most horrible place (laughs) he knew of, and the czar was a terrible dictator, and that this would be, you know, ridiculous to do anything but embrace America.

CW:Yeah. Are there any particular stories or memories you have about -- that sort of demonstrate that --

MF:Um-hm.

CW:-- American, love of America?

MF:Well, some of the letters, actually, that my father wrote to my mother. He did enlist in the Army in 1916 or '17, maybe 1917, and I -- and he wrote, some of the letters that he wrote. There was talk about the country, they talked -- they each do. Interestingly, those letters, which he wrote in 1917, so he was only nineteen at the time. Is that right? Yeah, I guess.

CW:It was --

MF:He was born in --

CW:-- early twenties, right? Yeah.

MF:Yeah, maybe. And they were all in English, and my mother wrote back in English, which was also quite remarkable. And her English is quite good, very good, I would say.

CW:And now -- I mean, he had actually been running away from an army, in Russia.

MF:Right. (laughs)

CW:Right?

MF:(laughter) Right, I never thought of it that way, but you're right. Right, because the czarist army was one thing. This was a different army, and if you enlisted, you become a citizen. So, that was automatic at the time. So, that was part of his intention.

CW:Do you --

MF:And I think enlisting is a little different than being snatched up. (laughs)

CW:Right. Yeah, do you know, did he talk about sort of the story behind the czar's army and how that worked back then and why he left --

MF:No, but actually, now I'm thinking I do know something else about him, back in Europe. He was a yeshive-bokher [yeshiva student], and he was considered one of the feik [talented] ones, and was really marked to become a rabbi. I mean, that was the intention. He studied and -- so he was very, very grounded in Orthodoxy and the books and in study. He was very involved when he was there, which is very important, because when he came to this country, there was this complete transformation that he created for himself. He was very aware -- it was very self-consciously done, that he was rejecting the Orthodox aspect of his Judaism. Not his Judaism, not at all his Judaism, but definitely the Orthodox aspect.

CW:And what was his type of Judaism?

MF:Well, he was very secular. He was very much a secular Jew. There was no, in my lifetime, living in the house -- I left when I was eighteen, nineteen, but he -- there was no going to synagogue. There was no davening in the house, or there was no prayer of any kind. He really openly stated his belief that that was superstition, and people don't need a man up in heaven with a long white beard. Just -- that was the way he put it. And actually, there's a story about me in this, because I had a best friend, Rena, who lived -- was also -- her parents were part of this folks' group, secular Jews, and so they also didn't go to synagogue. So, when we were about ten, Rena and I had this discussion: How come other Jews go to synagogue and we never get to go to synagogue? Why don't we go 8:00to synagogue? And then, I understood you need tickets. So, I approached my father and I said, "You know, it's" -- it was Rosh Hashanah. I said, "Rena and I want to go to shul. Everybody's going to shul; we should go also." And he said, "We don't go. I'm not going, but if you want to go to shul, you take Rena and you walk over to the shul, and they'll let you in." And I said, "Well, we don't have tickets." He said, "No, two Jewish girls come to shul, you think they're not gonna let you in, that's ridiculous. You just go over to the shul." So, we walked a few blocks, it wasn't far, and we got there. And we said, We want to go in for the services. And he said, "Okay," he said, "but you have to go sit upstairs." And we said, Why do we have to sit upstairs? He said, "Well, the women sit upstairs; the men sit downstairs." And we each looked at each other and said, We're not going here at all, ever. (laughs) And we ran home, and I said to my father, "Listen to this, they told us to go sit upstairs." He said, "Did I tell you to go to shul?" He aid, "You wanted to go to shul, okay, that 9:00was it." So, that's --

CW:(laughs) So, what was Jewish about your home?

MF:Everything. It was the air. It was the water we drank, the air we breathed. It was totally Jewish. It was Yiddish. It was half Yiddish, half English; it was everything. My mother kept a kosher kitchen, kosher in her thinking in that we -- she never served milkhik [dairy foods] and fleyshik [meat dishes] at the same meal. She would never buy treyf [not kosher]. Pork or anything like that, absolutely never. As a matter of fact, once, my father told the story that he, by accident, went to a diner, and he ordered a western omelet, and then someone told him as he was eating it that it was ham in there and he had to throw -- he went into the bathroom and threw up, yeah. Because he co-- he just got nausea 10:00and threw up. It wasn't purposely; it just happened when they said that. So, that was -- it was everything we did. The holidays, we did all the yontoyvim [holidays] in the house. There was singing. There was Jewish songs. There was people coming and going, and everyone spoke Yiddish, and -- I went to shule [secular Yiddish school] my whole life. I went to the Shul Fuftsn. I went to mitlshul [high school]. I went to yidishe lerer seminar. I thought at one point maybe I'd be a Jewish teacher, Yiddish teacher. Didn't happen, but -- so, I couldn't be more Jewish. But it was just there. It wasn't anything to question or --

CW:How did you celebrate the yontoyvim secularly?

MF:They just were. We knew it was Rosh Hashanah. (laughs) Knew it was Rosh Hashanah so it was special. And my mother made honey cake, (laughs) and teyglekh 11:00[dough balls in honey] and tsimes [sweet dish with vegetables and/or meat]. (laughs) And sometimes we read together special things about yontev [holiday], and there was always songs, and it was connected to the shule, mostly, and to the Sholem Aleichem Shule. So, there were things that happened in shule that you brought home and then you talked about and s-- and people came over. It was always yontev in that way; people came over. My mother had very close family, actually. She had four sisters, and my aunt Yetta, for some of my childhood, lived very close by. And then, she moved, but that was my mother's one-year-older sister. So, she -- their family, you know, celebrated with us. You know, it was yontev.

CW:Can you tell me more about the food? What do you remember of the -- a favorite dish from your mother, (UNCLEAR)?

MF:Oh, my mother made terrific honey cake, which -- the recipe's unfortunately lost and we've been (laughs) searching for years to reproduce it. She also made 12:00wonderful sponge cake. She also made blintzes, cheese blintzes and meat blintzes. She made meat blintzes; I haven't been able to find those anywhere. Wonderful kreplekh [meat-filled dumplings]. I remember David, my brother David's first wife, Rhea, they never stopped talking about it (laughs) because once she came and I think she ate thirty kreplekh or something (laughs), and they took --

CW:What made them so wonderful?

MF:Well, kreplekh were this doughy outside, and this chopped meat inside. It was just very good, and you threw them in the soup, in the chicken soup. Oh, my mother made good chicken soup, too. Oh, and briskets. She made great brisket. She was a good cook; she was a very good cook.

CW:Did you learn from her?

MF:A little bit, yeah. Yeah, a little bit.

CW:So, what languages were you speaking at home?

MF:Well, my father often, or my mother o-- less often, but sometimes would speak to me in Yiddish and I always answered in English. And I think this was, in 13:00retrospect, this was not only a big mistake for me personally, but I think it was extremely painful to my father. And I regret that very much, that I didn't just answer him in Yiddish. He wanted it very much and he could never prevail. And I just wouldn't. And he knew I could, but I just wouldn't.

CW:Why do you say it was a mistake?

MF:For me personally? Well, I'd like to really be fluent in Yiddish now and I'm a little self-conscious about my (laughs) Yiddish, and it feels like a child's Yiddish, you know. It doesn't feel like a really mature, developed, intelligent person's Yiddish. So, that's too bad, because I would be able to.

CW:Were there any other languages other than English and Yiddish?

MF:Sometimes a little hebreish [Hebrew], and my mother was fluent in Hebrew. And so, they would occasionally -- maybe when they really didn't want me to 14:00understand (laughs), because Yiddish was a lost cause as far as that went. But there were no other languages. Certainly, my father would never speak Russian. He hated the idea of the Russian -- not that he hated the idea that David studied Russian, my brother -- and it was like, not a good language. And they never were involved in Poland, really, so.

CW:So, can you just tell me a little bit about the people in the home growing up?

MF:Well, I --

CW:Your parents.

MF:Yeah, well, I would say, when I was born, my mother was thirty-eight, my father was forty. They definitely did not think they were having more children. My mother told me many times I was an accident. Yes, (laughs) and I think it didn't -- this was not an accident that then inspired her maternal juices. 15:00(laughs) I mean, she was not pleased about this event, really. And she was never unkind, but it was not -- she was finished with having children. Partly, I think the issue was that she had really see-- saw herself as a modern woman. She call-- modern things that -- modern appealed to her enormously. And this was not modern to have another child when you're close to forty. I think, in those days, forty must have been, like, old to have babies, and it was just not the thing she wanted to do anymore. She was freed, freed up from babies. So, I think on that score. But she also -- she was -- she had her things she did, you know, activities, and that was a handicap to some degree. So, my father stepped in, really. He was very maternal -- and paternal, but very maternal -- and some of 16:00my earliest memories are of my mother sleeping late, hav-- either having a headache or just sleeping late, and my father carrying me downstairs for breakfast, and making breakfast. And he'd hold me in his arms, and he'd look out the window, and he'd say, "Oh, good morning, beautiful sky, blue sky, green trees, beautiful sun, good morning, I say to you all!" And it was just a wonderful -- and then he'd make breakfast. We'd have breakfast together. So, that's sort of the atmosphere, was the atmosphere in the house.

CW:Um-hm.

MF:And my sister -- David, my brother, moved out when I was four, but my sister describes my mother having me when she was eight, and my sister and her best friend, Thelma, who I do remember, sitting outside waiting for them to come home from the hospital, and really feeling like I was her baby. (laughs) So, I think 17:00she also took care of me a lot, at -- and that lasted for four years, actually till she was twelve, and then she sa-- Tess told me, and I don't remember this directly, but that she just walked away from me. She was finished with that part, (laughs) and she was going to be a teenager now, so, she wasn't that interested. So, I think that fo-- when I was four, there was a lot of loss, (laughs) and my mother was quite depressed about David leaving, and she was very quiet. The house was quiet and dark, and -- and my father was the light of my life. I mean, he was -- I was his mizinke [youngest daughter], and he had this very funny little ditty he made up for me, which was, "Minke kapimke, groyse drimke, royte gele flakern, minkes geblibn a knakerin [Miri kapiri, the big 18:00dreamer, red and yellow flames, leave Miri a clever one]," and then he would look at me and he'd say, "a 'knakerin' mit a nun tsi on a nun [a "knakerin" with a nun or without it]," (laughs) and that was the joke. (laughs) So, that was the -- that was his -- my feelings about him as a young child were enormously positive, and I was daddy's little girl, no question about it.

CW:Who were the people that came to visit in the home? You said he had --

MF:Yeah, well we start with the family. It was my mother's sisters, who were two, all three, singles. Well, she had this older sister, she was married, but she was unhappily married. And as a matter of fact, the competition between them was very striking, because my mother became pregnant with my brother David, and I think four months later, my aunt Yetta became pregnant and had a son named David. So, they were those two Davids, first cousins. Then, (laughs) my mother got pregnant with my sister Judy, and my aunt got pregnant again at the same 19:00time, (laughs) and she had a boy, so his name was Morris. So, that was that pair. And then, my aunt Yetta had her third child before I was born. So, I had a five-year-older cousin, Danny, but so th-- she was in the house a lot, aunt Yetta, and then Marian and Celia and Rhea, the three -- or Becky. She had two names: either Rhea or Becky. They visited often; they were spinsters. And so, they were really frequently in the house. So, that was the family that visited. But then, all the people from the shule who they visited at least once or twice a week for lessons with my father, so they were his krayz [discussion group], his talmidim [students]. And they'd have -- come to the house, to study with my 20:00father. People in and out all the time. It was a noisy, bustling house, except when my father was busy in the office, then it got very quiet, and -- unless the family was visiting. So --

CW:Can you describe what the house looked like?

MF:Oh, yes. (laughs) It was a little detached on both sides, brick house in Brooklyn. It had a little stoop in the front that we used to play stoop ball on, actually, and a little garden in the front, and then a few steps up and then, it was like a railroad flat. So, you sort of walked from the front in, and the back was the kitchen, so it was the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, and then a little porch in the back, and then a little garden in the back -- in which, I don't know if David told this story, but he planted a rosebush, which I 21:00think Judy cut down. They had some fight or something (laughs) about it, and he was outraged. The relationship between Judy and David was interesting when he was still home, but then, even when he would come back home, Judy really looked up to David, but they didn't really get along. And the other thing about my sister was that she was very assertive. And if something came up with my father that she didn't want or didn't like, she would tell him, and they would fight, and I was very frightened by these fights. And I remember often pulling her aside and saying, "Judy, look, just do whatever you want; you don't have to fight for it, you know. Just do it anyway, even though he doesn't want you to do 22:00it, but don't challenge him like this, because you know, then you're just gonna fight." And she'd say, "No, I don't want to do it that way," you know, and I remember I was very meek in some way, very frightened of this anger. My father could be very angry at times. The other thing I remember about what went on in the house was that, when he came home from work, (laughs) he would come into the kitchen for dinner. So, he'd sit down at the table and my mother would put a dish in front of him, and then she was like -- the stove was like, over there, and she was -- the table was here, it wasn't a big kitchen, and then, she would go from the stove and let's say she'd put the meat down on the table, and then she'd go back to get the potatoes, and he would eat the meat. (laughs) By the time the potatoes came, the meat was gone. So then, he would eat the potatoes, then she'd go back for whatever else was coming (laughs) and bring -- so by the time she finished serving him, the plate was finished and empty, and he was finished. And then, he would get up -- and reading -- he was reading the whole time while he was eating. And then, he was always reading -- and then he got up 23:00and he went into -- most of the time that I remember, there was a table in the living room that was his desk. Then later, he set up an office in the basement, but it was basically in the middle of the house that he sat down at his desk. And that would be like, by this time, eight, nine o'clock, and he'd work till three, four o'clock in the morning on his writing. And then, he'd get up in the morning and he'd go to the office and he'd work a full day, come home, have dinner, and then sit at -- this he did every single day that I can remember that I was in the house. I don't ever remember my father spending any time -- unless he had meetings that, you know, that took him out of the house, or he had meetings that occurred in the house, but his general pattern was to work and then to do his writing, which is how he managed to have such a huge number of publications.

CW:What was he reading, papers or books?

MF:Well, he read the newspapers. And mostly Yiddish books, mostly Yiddish books, I think, although he was also very well read in other areas, but I don't remember specifically. I don't think I would've known so much about that. Oh, he -- sometimes, he helped me with my homework, that was the other thing we did in the evening.

CW:Yeah. Can you just describe a little bit about your parents' relationship? What was their relationship like?

MF:It was passionate, and passionate in all areas. That means passionate pleasure and passionate anger, (laughs) and so they had big fights. They would have big fights, and often -- there is a letter, actually. That letter, that one, one letter that my father had written when he was in the Army -- that was sort of when he was courting my mother -- where he cautions her to be realistic, 25:00particularly about money, because they're not gonna have a lot of money, and if she marries him she should be realistic, and that he knows that often she glosses over things like that and doesn't want to hear those kinds of concerns or -- and that it's very hard to talk to her about these things. That's all in this letter before they married. I would say those were two themes that followed them through their fifty years of marriage. I remember very clearly all the discussions about her wanting to re-cover the living room couch or put in new curtains or paint or redecorate in some way or buy some something for the house, and his arguing with her endlessly about how she's unrealistic about money and she doesn't like to look things straight in the face, and (laughs) that there's no talking to her. So, that, (laughs) that was all before they even got married. 26:00It was very clear that's where they were gonna go and that's where they went. And the other thing that I remember very clearly is that, at times, my mother was really not very demonstrative with her hugs and kisses and loving, and he would give -- go up from behind her and give her a big hug and talk about how she's such a cold fish. (laughs) And since her maiden name was Fisher, as a child, I was always intrigued with this, (laughs) that somehow, if she wasn't Fisher, she wouldn't be a cold fish. (laughs)

CW:And what's her family background?

MF:Oh, so, she comes from Riga. She came nine-- she was born in 1898. Like I said, she had these four sisters, and then there was this family adventure that the father came to America, one of these typical stories, and he forgot about them. And they, everyone in their town, started complaining, What happened to 27:00the father? And they decided that he had discovered some American lady or something. (laughs) And they were very poor, so they borrowed clothes from every -- all the neighbors, and they got all dressed up and got as pretty as they could, and they had a photograph taken, a picture taken of them. So, I have a picture of my great-grandmother, my grandmother, neither of whom I met -- they were all gone before I was born -- and my mother and her four sisters, and that picture was sent to America and his heart was moved, and he sent, I don't know now whether it was two hundred dollars or three hundred dollars or some large sum of money for them to come here. And then, they marched across Europe, so my grandmother and her little five girls starting -- Yetta was, yeah, eleven when they got here, but they must have started out at least a year or two before, 28:00'cause it took them a long time, and they, I guess, they were helped by things like HIAS or other organizations along the way, but there they were. There was five little girls and this woman, and without mon-- much means, and then they ended up in England in Southampton, and my aunt Yetta was sick or she got something, and they didn't allow them on the boat. So, I think they were stranded there for six months or something, and then they got on the boat, and then when they got to Ellis Island, again, my aunt Yetta had trachoma, which was one of the things that sends you back, but somehow, she got in anyway. That's the story. I don't know any more about the story than that, except that I do know that she had trouble with her eyes her whole life, and eventually got terrible glaucoma before she died. So, though I think there's probably some truth that she was vulnerable in that area of the eyes. But that's the only story I know, and all my grandparents died before I was born. So, I don't know 29:00any of them at all.

CW:Did you get any sense of what Riga was like?

MF:No, no. And when my son, actually, he in Europe was there, he was in Riga, and he told them, and they all did a big search in the archives to see if they could find his family registered, you know. So, but it never came to anything. They couldn't find -- I think she -- they needed to know my grandmother's, my mother's mother's maiden name or something, which wasn't Fisher. Fisher was the married name, so.

CW:Yeah. So, can you describe a little bit about the -- you were talking yesterday about the political atmosphere in the home. What was the -- your father, mother's political leaning?

MF:They were old-fashioned liberal Democrats. (laughs) My father, like I said, abhorred communism, and socialism wasn't far behind. He wasn't interested in that. He thought that this was a -- a democracy was the way to go, and he was -- there was a lot of talk about politics. But in my era, was -- so I was born in '36 so my first memories are of the war, in '41, '42. I was terrified of the war; I was terrified of Europe, what was happening in Europe. It was very clear in the house, and people coming and going and making reports all the time about what was happening, and -- it was a lot of talk about the war, that I remember, that was the politics.

CW:Do you remember the, the McCarthy era, what the -- I mean, your father as an anti-Communist --

MF:Right.

CW:-- what was his (UNCLEAR) --

MF:Right. Well, my brother-in-law, my sister married my brother-in-law who was a communist, and his family were communists, and there was a lot of fighting about it. But I don't remember my father approving of McCarthy. I don't think that was -- he was a McCarthy supporter. I think -- no, this wasn't justice, or it wasn't a way to do justice. (laughs) Justice was big. That was -- the attempt was that there should be justice in this world. In America, the -- it's very important that this be done. He didn't -- chasing communists out was not of interest to him. And it was -- the whole anti-Semitism attached to that was also very abhorrent.

CW:Yeah. Do you remember the Rosenbergs and the --

MF:Oh yeah, yeah, the Rosenbergs were a big talk in the house, and my brother-in-law was -- that was, particularly, because of my brother-in-law, if no other reason, you know. But I think he thought they were spies. I did think he thought they were spies. I do not believe, I can't believe, that he thought they should be executed, but --

CW:Your father?

MF:Yeah. I don't think he would've thought that. But.

CW:Yeah, yeah. Were there -- so, I want to talk about your trip with your parents.

MF:Oh yes, right.

CW:Yeah.

MF:Right. So actually, the trip was supposed to happen in 1947, but I got sick. Oh, well, that's the other thing about my childhood (laughs) I forgot. I was sick. (laughs) I was sick twice, very sick. I had rheumatic fever, and unfortunately, my mother's father had died of rheumatic fever. So, that was 33:00before I was born, but it made an indelible impression on my mother, and when I became sick with rheumatic fever, she was frantic, and quite hysterical, I think. And so, I was home from -- I missed one whole semester of school in grammar school, and I was confined (laughs) to bed upstairs, in their bedroom, which was a large, nice bedroom with actually, a porch off it. But I was isolated from the family and it was terrible, a terrible period for me. I think the first time I got rheumatic fever, I think I was seven or eight. So, actually, penicillin didn't come in until -- to the general public, I think, until 1945. So, in 1945, I would have been nine, and I think that was my second 34:00bout of rheumatic fever. So, I think that's when I got the penicillin, so then I was cured. But the first time was very frightening, because my mother was quite convinced I was (laughs) gonna die, and she was very frantic. And so then, in -- that was '45, but in '47, we were supposed to go to Israel, which wasn't yet Israel, but I got sick again with something I don't remember now. And they had -- oh, no, I got it wrong. I'm sorry. They were gonna go, not with me; I was supposed to go to Boiberik that summer. And Judy -- that was the story -- Judy, my sister, was told that, because I was gonna go to Boiberik and they were gonna go to Israel, that she had to be a counselor in Boiberik, and she didn't want 35:00that, because she already had a boyfriend who ended up being my brother-in-law, Milton. And so, then I got sick, and the trip was cancelled, and she was stuck (laughs) being a counselor, and she didn't like that at all, and that, I remember very clearly. So, that was a big argument in the house, and I -- so then, they didn't go. And in 1948, she married my brother-in-law. So then, they didn't go, that was in August. So, in 1949, then she was married, so there was no one to leave me with, and they took me with them. So, we flew from what was Idlewild Airport, (laughs) in a big plane. I think we stopped two or three times, and I think there were people my parents knew on the plane, but when we 36:00got to Israel, he was on his own; it wasn't with any group. And we went to his brother, who lived in Ra'anana, which was a little village outside of Tel Aviv, and he was a farmer, and he had chickens, and he made these tiles for the roofs. He made these clay tiles, which I found absolutely intriguing. And he had a very -- a very scary wife, (laughs) my aunt Khanke, and he had two children, Bentsi -- Bentsiyon, who was exactly my age, and Aviva, who was two or three years younger. Oh, I guess, to back up a little bit, in the house, the most -- I think the most unusual part of my childhood was the fact that there were no children in the house. There were no children in the house and there were no children in the family, and basically, there were no children among their friends, because 37:00everybody was older and all their children were more my brother and sister's generation. So, the only children I was friendly with, really, were the children, the friends I made at Boiberik and at shule. So, I had a best friend from shule, Rena, but she also was at Boiberik with me. And then, when I went to mitlshul, I met Phyllis, and she became my best friend, and she also was at Boiberik. So, (laughs) those were my two best friends, and then any other friends I had were all Boiberikaner. And so, when we went to Israel, getting back to that, these two cousins, it was so nice to be in a house where there were children growing up in that house. That was very nice. And then, we traveled all over the country. My father met Weizmann. I don't remember if he met Ben-Gurion personally, but he met all the writers, everybody who was there. 38:00He went all around and he wrote this book, "Medines yisroel un erets Yisroel [The nation of Israel and the land of Israel]," which really should be translated. My father had a theory about Zionism. Zionism upset him. He was not a Zionist. Which was very upsetting to me, actually, (laughs) because all my friends became Zionists, and Phyllis was a --- Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir, and she wanted to go to Israel, and I was out of it, that sort of put me out of it because I wasn't part of that; I didn't participate. So, that was -- and his thinking about Zionism was that it would be impossible, he thought, to establish a state that would adhere to truly ethical Jewish principles, that this would be 39:00impossible. That once you become a nation, that you are forced into positions that are against these principles. That he can't, could not, imagine how that would be done properly. And there was, at that time, a large movement, a Jabotinsky movement, that was looking to gather more territory, and he thought that was a good example of what would really do a Jewish state in, and I thought it was quite prophetic. I think what's in that book was very forward thinking, and the other thing that he described that was very distressing to him, because I have now read parts of this book, (laughs) was the fact that a lot of the villages, the Arabs, were chased out. They didn't just run away. And they were chased out, and besides that problem, he felt, even the ones who ran, just ran away, he couldn't believe that they were gonna run away and be happy (laughs) 40:00about having run away, that he felt that being encircled by Arabs, and then being encircled by angry Arabs who felt displaced, would become a very significant problem for Israel. So, those were his negative feelings about it. When we got there, though, (laughs) what I also remember is that he was ecstatic about the idea that this was all Jews, and that when we walked in the street, and the policemen were Jewish, and the army was all Jewish, and, all the shopkeepers, everyone, it was like he had come to some magical place that he never would have imagined could exist. So, that coexisted in him; there was a lot of conflict about this, that it coexisted with his negative feelings, and yet with these, with the joy, the real joy that he felt about coming where 41:00everyone spoke -- now that was the next problem (laughs) about Zionism -- where everyone spoke Hebrew. That was okay, but that they shouldn't have murdered Yiddish, which is what he felt they did, and that all the anger about Yiddish, he couldn't tolerate, because he was really a very strong Yiddishist. He really believed in Yiddishkayt and Yiddish belong together, and that you couldn't separate the two. So, the idea that they were -- that Yiddish was such an anathema in Israel at that point, really was very hateful to him. He didn't like that at all. And I remember hearing this story that, at one point, Ben-Gurion got up to speak in Yiddish and they booed him off the stage. They wouldn't let him speak in Yiddish, and everyone there spoke Yiddish. I mean, not everyone everyone. There were the Yemenite Jews, but they -- there were enough (laughs) Jews who understood and they wouldn't let him speak. So, there was a lot of 42:00turmoil around this.

CW:Um-hm. What was -- what were your impressions, as a child, of Israel?

MF:Well, that was -- then that was the next (laughs) thing that would happen, is that people would approach me, and discovered I was an American girl, and an American Jewish girl, and here I was. Well, why are you gonna live in America? You shouldn't be living in America; you should come live with us. This is where Jews belong now. Now we have a state and a country, and you should come here. And I had a problem with this, (laughs) because in a way, I wanted -- that was very exciting. It was a wonderfully exciting country. It was different. It was very exotic to me, and I even had a boyfriend who was -- Shraga, I remember his name, (laughs) and he was -- he made a little piece, a mogn-dovid [Star of David], a silver mogn-dovid for me, which I (laughs) lost, unfortunately. And it was a -- it was a nice place. I wanted the -- I liked the idea, and of course, I 43:00had all these friends who were thinking of perhaps going and resettling, and my father was not happy about this idea at all. And I was not about to go against his feelings with this one. That was not what I was gonna do. So, it was, became a nuisance, in a way, wherever I went, that people kept saying, (laughs) Oh, you shouldn't be in America; you should be here; you should be here. But the country itself was marvelously exciting, and I remember it very well. That visit, I remember. The upsetting part of the visit were the DP camps, because they had taken in all these people and the country was full of DP camps, and we went to a lot of them, and they were very scary places. And the irony, I always felt how ironic it was that these people had been taken out of concentration camps, and here they ended up in something that looked to me like a concentration camp. Of course, it wasn't, but still, it was dirty and, and crowded and -- you know, 44:00until they got settled, they lived there for maybe a year or two, because this was already 1949, so, they had been there for a while. So, I remember that.

CW:Yeah. Do you remember your father's attitude, you know, through, from the late '40s through his death, about Israel? Did it change at all throughout his lifetime?

MF:No, I don't think so. I really don't think so. I think he be-- he was critical; he was critical. I don't think they could have satisfied him. (laughs)

CW:And can you explain the -- that book, just the title of that book, and what that --

MF:Um-hm.

CW:-- means, sort of?

MF:Well, I think his thinking was that a "medine" is a "nation. "Medines yisroel," that's the "nation of Israel," and "erets yisroel" is the "land of 45:00Israel." The land is of the people. The nation is its own entity, separate from the people. So, to be a really -- a Jewish nation, even if in the land of Israel, would be difficult. That's my understanding of it.

CW:Um-hm. Yeah. So, I want to go back and ask you about shule. Can you describe -- describe it?

MF:Yeah, I liked shule. Again, I think it's because there were children there my age. There were my age children, and that was the other thing with Boiberik, which was also my age children. Shule was -- our teacher was Khaver [Comrade] Shpitalnik, and (laughs) which, who we called Shpitz or Shpitzy. And he was a 46:00big, old Jewish man, and his Yiddish was great, (laughs) and I think I learned a lot of Yiddish in shule. I enjoyed shule very much. It was every day after school. It was -- how far -- about ten blocks or something from the house. So, I went there, I think, till I was twelve, and then I went to mitlshul, which was in Washington Irving High School in Manhattan. I went all by myself, no problem with the subway or anything, and then that was where I met Phyllis and we were there four years, and I also loved mitlshul.

CW:So who -- what was the pedagogy?

MF:Well, when you were little, there was a lot of stories and a lot of singing and a lot of games. The other teacher I think was Gella. I think Gella was the other -- Gella Schweid was her maiden name -- Gella, now Fishman. I think she 47:00was a teacher in Shul Fuftsn. So, I had her and she was very nice, very nice teacher. We learned to read and write. We learned script, writing script. I never learned how to write print, but only script. And a lot of songs, little books, and then there was the "Kinder Zhurnal," which my father was the editor of, which was sort of like "Highlights for Children" in Yiddish. So, there were little games and stories, and -- I liked that. It was only a couple of hours, I mean, so maybe it was two hours, tops. Maybe it wasn't every day; this I don't remember, if it was Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or it was every day. I don't remember. Every day sounds like a lot. I don't know if it was. Gella would know. (laughs)

CW:And was it all in Yiddish or parts of the day?

MF:It was all in Yiddish, yeah. It was all about Yiddish. It was in Yiddish, yeah.

CW:Yeah.

MF:And you learned history. There were subjects. You learned about history. You learned about the khumesh [Pentateuch]. There was a "Khumesh far kinder [Pentateuch for children]," which my father wrote, (laughs) and there was "Shmerl nar [Shmerl the fool]" and "Helden fun khelm [Heroes of Chelm]," those were all his books. There were other books, Yiddish books from other writers and I don't remember them right now, but --

CW:Yeah. So, your father actually wrote a lot of children's literature.

MF:Um-hm.

CW:Do you know why he was interested in that --

MF:He --

CW:-- genre?

MF:He loved children. He absolutely loved children, and he loved to tell stories. And he made up stories, and my son David remembers him making up stories about his missing finger, which he lost because he was a dentist holding the x-rays, but he never told that, (laughs) as the story wasn't interesting enough. He told about how it, what, got caught in some monster's mouth and got 49:00bitten off or (laughs) something like that. But he was -- he just loved to tell stories, to make up stories. The other thing my son David remembers about him is when he got his Yiddish typewriter that he got, which I also remember. That was about 1960, he got a Yiddish typewriter, and what David remembers, because he was ten when my father died, but from his younger childhood, he remembers how fast he managed to type with like, three, four fingers. Even with this missing finger, (laughs) somehow he managed, but it wasn't touch typing by any means. But he said he was as fast as anyone could possibly be -- that was his memory, anyway.

CW:Yeah. So, back to your father. You mentioned sort of the hours of the day that he wrote, but can you tell me more about -- do you remember what his desk looked like, or where in the house it was?

MF:There were papers and books all over the house. That was another source of 50:00great discussion between (laughs) my father and my mother. Between his cigars, and his ashes, and his papers, and his books, there was endless discussions. As a matter of fact, (laughs) he used to say, when he'd get very angry, sort of as a joke, "When I die, you should cremate me and spill my ashes all over the living room rug." (laughs) So, (laughs) that was a big discussion about his ashes and his cigars -- and pipe. At one point, he actually smoked a pipe, I think, too. But so, that, the -- but there wa-- it wasn't -- the desk hardly could be said to hold what he was doing there, and there was not enough room on any desk (laughs) for what he was doing.

CW:Yeah, and did he write longhand usually?

MF:Yes. Until he got the typewriter, that's what he did, yeah. I have a lot of manuscripts that he wrote in longhand.

CW:And at one point, he set up a library in the basement.

MF:Right, right, and -- it was big, I mean, all around. It was a big room. It was basically the foundation of the house. And yeah, he had a lot of books.

CW:You remember what language or anything they --

MF:Mostly Yiddish and Hebrew and English. I mean, those were his library. He had a good library; he had a very good library. He had a lot of Tanakh, and -- different editions of the Tanakh he had. I recently gave somebody a large Tanakh, was about fifteen volumes, of a very good Tanakh.

CW:And can you explain about the krayz and the talmidim and what that was about?

MF:Well, these were working-class people who loved learning. And so, I think 52:00they got involved first perhaps with the children, and liking the idea of having a yidishe shule, where their children would learn. But then, I think -- I don't know because it was before my time, whether this was my father's personality that drew people to him to want him to teach them, or it was just them who approached him. I don't think so. I think it was -- just sort of happened. These were the farvalter [manager] of the shule. These were the people who supported it and were interested in it, and they then became students of his. And it were -- big talk and discussion, and they respected his learning, which he was -- what brought him to America was -- I mean, what he brought with him when he came 53:00here was his whole background as a yeshiva student. So, and he continued studying all his life, so there was never an end to that.

CW:Um-hm. And towards the end, it seems, at least in his published works, that towards the end of his life, he became interested in the -- in traditional texts sort of anew. Did you have any sense of him -- his attitude towards religion, in his older years being different than earlier, anything?

MF:Yeah, I think there was a development. I think initially, his initial thinking was to reject all religion as superstition. And -- just stories for 54:00frightened people. A way of frightened people to get secure, basically, and they put this big father up in the sky and that was the mistake, (laughs) as far as he was concerned, and that was what he abandoned when he came here. He was very clear about that; he didn't need peyes [sidelocks] and tsitses [tassels on the prayer shawl or undergarments worn by Orthodox Jews] and all the -- those things anymore. He was finished with that. But I think the big tragedy of his life was that he saw that the next generation was not going to stick with what he believed in. That his ethic-- his need for humanist ethic -- ethic-- ethics, his need for, to live an ethical life as a Jewish man, was not going to be -- he 55:00couldn't send it on, there would be no continuity. And he saw that as partly from the reluctance of his own children, I think, to speak the language, and to become involved in some way in Judaism, in some deep profound way that he wanted them to. But partly, I think he just saw it as what was happening in general in the American Jewish community, and he started thinking, I think, because he did -- and my brother did say this exactly and the way my father would say it, that life is not hefker [amoral], and it's not without meaning. There is some plan; it's not magic. It's not anything written down like that, but there's some reason for it, and you need to accept that, and share that in your community. 56:00And so, he felt the lack of a community, and that was what happened. I mean, his Yiddish, the old Yiddishists were dying. They were not being replaced. The language was now finished. Between Europe dying and Israel not wanting it, there was no-- not gonna be any Yiddish. And so, there was nothing to hold them together, and, you needed to form some kind of new community that had some spiritual glue to it. But he never got there. It never happened for him. And I think it was quite tragic, actually, that he was very unhappy at the end of his life about this. Something very bad happened in our house with me, and my parents, when I was an adolescent. I behaved in a way that they found completely 57:00unacceptable. It was sexual, but it was -- sex, generally speaking, was unacceptable, (laughs) but this was really unacceptable, and my father was quite horrified actually, and it caused a terrible breach between him and me. But what it did for him, it -- I remember that Yom Kippur, because this all happened in the summer -- he went to the Lubavitcher in Borough Park, and he spent that whole weekend with them. And it was an attempt to somehow come -- make some sense of the fact that he could have such a disappointment in his life. And I don't think I, in looking back -- although at the time, I took it all on myself and that wasn't so good, but at -- I, looking back, I think this was greater than what my disappointment had caused. I think it was more about his own 58:00feeling that he hadn't achieved what he would have liked to have, and that he was getting old now, and that, you know, this was not good. But that was the only time that I remember him going back to that experience, the Orthodox experience, and I don't remember him ever thinking that he would become Orthodox again or something like that. He certainly was never gonna believe what he did originally in life, as -- from my perspective, that's how I understood it, anyway.

CW:Um-hm. So, for you as an adult, what -- once you left home, what role of your life -- what role, if any, did Yiddish have in your life?

MF:I guess no particular role. I couldn't say it had a role in my life. I loved 59:00it; I love it, the heymishness [coziness] of it. I think Yiddish actually is a marvelous (laughs) language, and it can express things you can't express in other languages, emotional things. So, in that sense, I guess it's sort of still my emotional home somewhere. Like, until we started thinking about this interview, frankly, I never realized, I think, how much Yiddish I had had in my life. I didn't think of it that way. I thought I grew up just in a -- in your sort of normal household, English-speaking household. It wasn't true; I grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household, but I never thought of it that way, and I never thought of how much Yiddish is in me. So, and we did, my first husband and I, 60:00Milton, we sent Danny, our oldest, to yidishe shule that there was there. I don't think he learned much there, but (laughs) -- and he went to Boiberik for, I think he said, four years. I asked him, but now I don't remember, four years. And my next son also went to Boiberik. As a matter of fact, they were there together, the three of them, one year. So, I was invested in Yiddish, but it didn't specifically have a role in my life.

CW:What was your father like as a grandfather?

MF:Oh, he was wonderful. (laughs) Everyone should have such a wonderful grandfather. Yes, he was absolutely wonderful. And he loved them; he really loved them. And again, was telling stories, and you know, taking them -- they stayed at their house quite often, for overnights and weekends. And they would 61:00visit quite a lot.

CW:Is there any articulable way (laughs) of -- that having a Yiddish writer as a father has impacted you, in that identity as your -- as your father?

MF:Well, in a funny way, my father was a celebrity in a funny way, and -- but he wasn't really a celebrity. (laughs) So, he never made it to celebrity status, but he was almost a celebrity, so that made a difference, because when I went around -- that was the other thing -- they didn't -- because here I was, late in life child, and the mizinke and they didn't know about babysitters. There was no such thing as a babysitter. I guess when my -- once my sister married for sure, 62:00there wasn't gonna be anyone taking care of me in the house, so I got shlepped around everywhere. Every meeting they went to, I went to. Every occasion -- I mean, things that absolutely bored me to death, just totally bored me. But everywhere I went, I was doctor Simon's daughter, and so, that was something. (laughs) Even at Boiberik, I was a little something, not as much because there were other celebrities in Boiberik, too, (laughs) so didn't -- I didn't have that -- I wasn't that unique there. But so, it -- I liked it. I liked having him as a -- I liked his stories, but as my son David has reminded me, I did not read his books, even the children's books. I was very rebellious. I mean, my father was a big figure and it was very hard to always -- you know, I was meek, and yet somehow I managed, and even with my meekness, to make sure that he knew that he 63:00couldn't push me around. (laughs) I was -- yeah, I -- I didn't want to do what they wanted me to do. And so, it was -- that created a lot of problems. I was the little girl with the curl: when she was good, she was very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid. (laughs) That was told to me many times, and I always had a pisk [grimace], which was not a good thing to have a pisk. You have, you know --

CW:Can you explain --

MF:-- pisk?

CW:-- what that is?

MF:Pisk is a big mouth, that's a kid who opens their mouth and says things you don't want them to be saying, that's a big mouth. A kid with a big mouth is a pisk.

CW:So, what -- do you remember any of the events that -- were they Sholem Aleichem Folks Institute?

MF:Well there's the big institute. I showed you the picture. Did we scan that? Yeah.

CW:No, not yet.

MF:Oh okay, but yeah, that was his fiftieth birthday and they had a big party. I 64:00was ten. There's no other child in the room. (laughs) And everybody came, all the farvalter from all the shules came, and there was a big banquet. There were a lot of banquets. I don't know, they seemed to like banquets, so there were a lot of those that I went to. They were extremely boring. And meetings, I don't know, meetings and visits to people's houses I didn't know. The other thing that was unique about (laughs) my childhood was, when I was really young, my mother went to Florida. My mother -- that's the other thing. My mother was the driver in the family, which is interesting because I am now the driver. I always want to drive; I love driving the car. But my mother was the driver. My father had a license which he renewed religiously because he thought it was terrific 65:00identification, but if he ever got in a car, (laughs) it would be dangerous because I don't think he knew how to drive at all. But he would sit in the passenger seat and read, and my mother would drive. So, that was -- big memories I have. But the other thing is, my mother would, I think, escape (laughs) in the winter and she went to Florida with her friends. She drove the car to Florida with her friends. She had these friends -- three, four women friends, they all got in the car -- and me, and we drove to Florida, and many trips, this I remember. There were many trips to Florida. We had to stay in motels. I remember (laughs) the first time I saw an African-American person and I asked her about this pumpernickel man. That got told for many years that I had called him a pumpernickel man, (laughs) which says something about where we lived, I guess. It was an all-white neighborhood. But yeah, so the trips to Florida I remember, 66:00and what wa-- what did you ask me? I think I lost sight of the question. (laughs)

CW:Oh, I was -- what was I asking? I was asking about the -- hold on. I'll get it, one second. Sorry, I got into this, the Florida thing, (laughter) so I've forgotten where I was going. But I was -- (laughs) -- hold on one second, I'll find it. Oh, we were talking about what events you went to, what you were shlepped to.

MF:Oh, where I was at shule, the shule things. No, just --that was it. And then, they had -- sometimes they had these fayerungs [celebrations] in the shule, the -- itself, in Shul Fuftsn. So, they had little dinners and things. I think then, some other children came. Rena came.

CW:Yeah. Do you remember in shule, the refugees, you know, that coming into the 67:00-- to America? Any contact with refugees that --

MF:No, I don't know that. Did they? I hadn't heard --

CW:Some.

MF:-- of that. Really?

CW:Yeah.

MF:Uh-huh. Maybe they went to the Bronx. The Bronx shules were, I always thought, were very different than the Brooklyn shule, the Shul Fuftsn. And I think there was another shule in Brooklyn, I don't remember the number, but -- and I think Gella sometimes was involved in the Bronx, but she taught, I'm pretty sure she taught, in our Shul Fuftsn.

CW:Um-hm.

MF:She was my father's daughter. She was his adopted daughter, Gella. She loved him, and she loved Yiddish and she spoke beautiful Yiddish to him, and he was so delighted (laughs) with her. Yeah, he was special to her and she was special to him, very much so.

CW:Yeah. So, as an adult, have you -- you mentioned you've read parts of some of 68:00his books. Sort of when did that come up? What, how, and why did you return to his writings?

MF:So, it's interesting, because I think that when the Jewish holidays come, I have trouble, because I want something, and I don't want anything religious. I haven't -- I'm totally atheistic in my thinking and totally uninterested in religion, as such, but my Judaism calls to me on the Jewish holidays. I used to have what I thought of as my yontev psychosis, particularly (laughs) around Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Pesach wasn't a problem because I'd make a seder. So, it was mo-- mainly Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The rest of the holidays, I didn't care about. So, I used to have this, what I called -- so I got into the habit, then I decided, Well, I don't need -- I don't need organized religion to 69:00mark the day. And I should mark it my own way, and because it is Rosh Hashanah and that's important to me that it's a Jewish holiday, and so, I would read something Yiddish. And so, that's how I started going through some of my father's books that I had not read before. And so, I have two rituals now that I -- on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. One is, I've -- I take a four-mile walk, and the other is that I spend the day reading through his books. And that's very, very satisfying, and I like it, that's -- really works for me. And so, I, I'm happy about that.

CW:What do you think of his writing, reading it now?

MF:So (pauses) -- what I'm reading, what I choose to read is like, "Medines 70:00yisroel un erets yisroel." They're interesting books. Literarily, I don't -- I can't say what I think of them. I think I don't know enough about Yiddish literature to put it in a context, so I couldn't say. They're thoughtful. They're very thoughtful, and worth reading. You know, but I couldn't critique them really. Oh, I forgot to mention: When my father died, my uncle Binyomin, who was still alive, his younger brother in Israel, had collected all his letters that my father had written to Binyomin over the years. My father was a --enormous letter writer. He wrote to everybody, long, long letters to everybody. And so, he sent them to -- back to me, the letters, and I have a collection of letters that started I think in 1923 or something, when Binyomin 71:00went to Palestine and settled in a kibbutz. And they go till 1970 when my father died. The last group of letters, the 1960 to 1970, is when he had the typewriter, so I'm able to read those letters. The letters before 1960, I cannot read. So, I have copies of all the letters and I've put the originals in -- YIVO has them archived. But these letters, I think, are -- would be a fascinating historical document to be read, but I don't know who can (laughs) read this handwriting. But -- because I did actually have some of them translated, the early ones that I knew were early, but I -- oh, that's the other thing: I can't tell the dates because he always uses Hebrew dates. So, it's -- I can't identify 72:00exactly when they were written, but I did find some from the '20s and had, I think, three or four of them translated. And they're very -- some of them are just about the family and that kind of thing, but some of them are very, very interesting, in terms of his description of his -- he -- it's funny. Even with his non-Zionist persuasions, he idealized the settlement movement, the then-settle-- not the settlement movement, the kibbutz and rebuilding the land and that whole thing. And my uncle, it seems, at one point did want to come to this country and resettle, and my father was very strongly discouraging of that, because here, although this is a wonderful country, everybody's chasing the buck. That's all there is, is money, money, money, and it's very hard to live an 73:00eydl [noble] life. This is very hard -- here, but there, where you are, in Israel, in the land of Israel, you -- this is a wonderful place, and you should stay there, and you have a purpose, and that's very good. So, he believed in building the land and having a place that was for Jews, and so, he was a little, you know, here and there about this. So, he di-- so those letters though, I don't -- I have them, you know. I'll show them to you, and they could be put in the archives also.

CW:Um-hm. Was there any time when he wrote to you. that he would have written you letters?

MF:I have one letter, actually, that was written to me, my brother, and my sister, a letter that was written early in 1970. He died in November, '70. This 74:00was written in the spring of '70, describing the party that he wanted us to make for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. And it is a truly hilarious letter, because (laughs) he has, like, "Ikh vil az du zolst makhn a simkhe [I want you to have a party]," and then he has, in parentheses, "fayerung," and then he has (laughs) in parentheses, in Yiddish letters, "party," (laughs) un-parentheses. And so, he goes through the whole letter like this, where every time he came to a Hebrew word or a word he imagined we wouldn't understand, where he transliterates it and then he translates it, and it -- it is truly a very funny letter. He wasn't meaning to be funny, either. (laughs) So, yeah, he wrote 75:00letters; he liked to write us letters. And there were some letters also that I found that were going in Hebrew to his niece and nephew in Israel. So, that came back to me because my uncle sent them back.

CW:Um-hm. Yeah. What about, you know, the -- just, there's one thing about analyzing his writing literarily, but for you personally, what is the experience of reading his --

MF:Oh, I like to read his writing, very much, yes, very much. I feel very connected to it. Because you do, when you read somebody's writing, you know them, you, and then, so I know him doubly. I know him from that perspective, the intellectual perspective, and then from what I knew of him.

CW:And he used to read to you when you were a kid, right?

MF:Oh, well, that's the other thing. Yes, I mean, he would sit you down and read to you, and it didn't matter who you were. (laughs) It didn't matter whether you 76:00could understand it or not. And he just needed an audience all the time. That was part of, I think, my rebelling, about my challenging his wish for me to read his books, to actually read them, because he was already reading them to me. I didn't (laughs) want to be re-- I didn't want to read them anymore. I had other things I would prefer to read, yeah. So --

CW:Some of his -- the translations of his works have stayed in print for a long time. Do you have any idea about how they've held up and why they've held up?

MF:Well, we still get royalties on the -- well, not "The Wandering Beggar" because that's now in the public domain, because the copyright ran out, but the -- and I think "The Wandering Beggar" is his most wonderful book. Although he wrote a book, "Roberts ventures [Robert's adventures]," which I translated the first par-- chapter, and I think just the first chapter would make a wonderful children's book, but -- it's not in my capability, but I think it is really a terrific book. It's a wonderful little adventure of a little boy who lands -- 77:00who lives across from the elevated subway, and he's just a child, but then he ge-- sees the trains coming and going and he decides that he'll crawl out of his window. It was a totally impossible story (laughs); it couldn't possibly happen -- and go up and he manages to get on the platform and everything, and it's a big adventure, and so, and that's the first story. The other stories in the book aren't so good, but the first story is very good. And then, he wrote the "Kinder yorn fun yidishe shrayber [Childhood years of a Yiddish writer]," which I think is -- and two volumes of that, and I think that would be a very, very good book for kids to read and to translate, probably. Yeah, but his children's books, I think, read really ve-- really, really well. The philosophic books are good too. I mean, he's -- he raises a lot of questions, the whole question of Orthodoxy versus non-Orthodox thinking. There's a lot of important books I think that he wrote.

CW:Um-hm. When you look at sort of the Jewish intellectual world today, do you see anyone sort of carrying on his legacy? Do you --

MF:Oh, that's interesting. I read a book by David Grossman describing his -- I don't know if it's a memoir. I think it's a memoir, "In This Land," or -- I forgot the name of it.

CW:"To the End of the Land," probably?

MF:Something --

CW:His son? Or -- there's the one, "To the End of the Land," which is about his son who's in the army in Israel, but I don't know if that's him.

MF:No, no, it wasn't. It was about his growing up, and his growing up in his house is almost identical. I really related to it in terms of, somehow, trying for the adults to transmit this intellectual heritage to the next generation and 79:00how they were doing that. It is really similar to what I felt was happening in our house. And it was funny, because it's all Hebrew, because they didn't speak any -- this had nothing to do with Yiddish at all; this was all Hebrew. I think his father even was a sabre [Jew born and raised in Palestine/Israel], maybe; I don't know. But they were in Israel a long time, and so, this is not about Yiddish, but it's the same flavor. You have this exact same flavor of the atmosphere.

CW:Can you describe what that atmosphere is? What were they trying --

MF:Very intellectual. It was very intellectually oriented. Very much about ideas; again, about justice, the ideas of justice, about a just society. How do you live with people; how does it function, the distribution of wealth; these whole economic things. I mean, things like that. And the importance of -- the 80:00importance of the taking care of people in a community in a society, and how to do that in a way that is -- that works properly. This was just all ideas, and then ideas about what is the meaning of life, you know, and why are -- what are we striving for and what makes a really meaningful life. What are our values? So, it was all in there, and I, that was -- my house was full of this all the time. I was -- there was nothing alien about sitting down and discussing the deepest, (laughs) most profound things that there are to discuss.

CW:Yeah. Well, I -- I want to give a little time so that we can maybe read some things that you have.

MF:Okay.

CW:But before we do that, I just want to ask one more question that -- how has 81:00Yiddish language affected your identity?

MF:The Yiddish is just -- it is a part of me in some way that is not visible. It's -- I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question. It's a dimension, a sort of added dimension to my character, I guess, that -- but I don't know how I would put that into words, what that dimension is.

[END OF INTERVIEW]