DAVID SIMON ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is October 29th, 2013. I'm here in New York with Dovid Simon -- David Simon, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

DAVID SIMON: You certainly do.

CW:A sheynem dank [Thank you very much]. (laughs) So, why don't we jump right in. Today, we are here to talk about your father, a Yiddish writer. And can you start off by telling me his name and where and when he was born?

DS:Well he was -- he was born in Kalinkavichy, which is in White Russia -- in 1:00those days it was part of the Tsarist Empire. And his name, his original name was -- Shlomo Shimonovich. Was then Russianized. And he changed his name to Solomon Simon when he came here, because he hated the Russians, for good reasons since they were a bunch of terrible anti-Semites -- and especially in his day, maybe not today, hopefully, as much. And he kept this, the Shlomo part, in Yiddish, so his name in Yiddish, when he came here, was Shlomo Simon, and his name in English was Solomon Simon.

CW:Um-hm.

DS:And one of the family jokes is that here I am, David, and David is the son of Solomon, rather than the other way around.

CW:And do you know how he got his name? Is he named after anyone?

DS:No.

CW:Um-hm. What do you know about his family background?

DS:Well, his father was a shoemaker, his mother baked bagels. They lived in a tiny little one-room hut, in stark poverty. And he was one of, I believe, eight children. He's written an autobiography, in three volumes, in Yiddish, and the first volume is called "Vortslen," and it describes his childhood in great detail. He was the last, I think the youngest, and because he was the youngest, there was the lea-- he had the least food. And so, he was the smallest and he also had rickets. And was unable to walk until he was about five years old. All of this is described in his autobiography, which is also in English, called "Roots." And I think it -- it had a great deal to do with his personality. 3:00Because as a -- as a child, he had to live an inner life. Since he couldn't walk. And he would engage in fantasies about the world around him, and it's what led him into the insights and feelings that eventually culminated in his being a writer. I think it had a great deal to do to shape his character. That's a rather long answer to your question.

CW:No, we want long answers today. (laughs)

DS:(laughs)

CW:And do you have a sense of what the shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community] was like?

DS:A sense of what?

CW:What the town he was from was like?

DS:Well, Kalinkovichi was a Russian railroad hub, and in his day, it was quite small. It has since grown to have a population, I think, of several hundred thousand. But in his day, I think it was really just basically a kind of a -- a 4:00small rail station -- center. And there was a Yiddish shtetl, right nearby. Heavily wooded, I think. Some of this is described in his book. And he tells the story -- when he heard that I was studying Russian -- he hated the Russians, and didn't know why I -- I should be studying Russian at Cornell. He used to tell the story of the only Russian he could remember, because not only did the -- well, the Jews speak only Yiddish, the Russian peasants around them also spoke Yiddish. And the story he remembered was, standing apropos of the railroad station, standing for some reason in the railroad station as a small boy, and this Kazakh policeman, huge man with a -- with a stick, or a baton -- came over and knocked the hat off his head. And said in Russian, "Snimay shapku, zydovskay 5:00morda." Which means, "Take that cap off your head, you ugly Jewish mug." That's his recollection of the Russian language. And the Russians, for that matter.

CW:Wow.

DS:Apropos of Kalinkovichi, as a railroad station. (laughs)

CW:Right. Did he talk about it much?

DS:No, he ra-- very rarely talked about his life in Russia. He was forced to leave at an early age in order to escape the Russian Army and never went back. I never really heard stories about -- from him, about his parents or his siblings. He had a brother and sister who lived here in New York. And he had another brother in -- lived in Israel. And, I heard somewhere along the -- along the 6:00line, I guess from him, at some point, that one of his relatives in Russia became a Russian Army general. And that's -- he had difficulty keeping in touch with them because he was a very well-known anti-communist. And everything he said would be censored. Any food or money he sent would usually be taken away, it never got to his family. He never saw them again. And I think it was probably a tragedy lurking at the bottom of things. He -- but there's a good description of his father and mother and the life they led with him as -- and his life as a child in that first volume of his autobiography.

CW:Uh-hm. Yeah.

DS:And interesting enough, he called it "Vortslen." "Roots." Because these are the roots that underlie the tree that he grew into. The second volume continues 7:00the metaphor. It's called "Tsvygen," or "Branches." I tell a funny story about these two books. When they were translated, the publisher didn't want to translate "vortslen" as "roots," because he said, wha-- no one would know what it meant. And of course, there was this wonderful series that emerged shortly after, about the background of blacks in America, called "Roots." But at any rate, so the title in English became "My Jewish Roots," and "Tsvygen," instead of "Branches," got transmogrified into -- although maybe that's a bad word to use, it was changed into "In the Thicket," which refers to the biblical story of the ram whose horns were caught in the thicket when Moses was on Mount Sinai looking for God. I forget the details but it comes out of that story.

CW:Hm.

DS:So, "In the Thicket" refers to the fact that he left home and went off to study at various yeshivas, trained as a rabbi, in both Russia and Poland. And that's sort of the second half of his life story. And the third part, "Oyf eygene drokhim [On your own paths]," it was published in Yiddish but never in English. I could talk about that book later.

CW:Um-hm. Yeah.

DS:Long answers, you're getting long answers.

CW:That's great.

DS:(laughs)

CW:Now, he had -- he went to kheyder [traditional religious school], and then went to yeshiva, right? He had a traditional Jewish education.

DS:Yes, he was singled out as an unusually bright student. He was -- considered extraordinary, and from this poor Jewish family, I don't know who -- somebody must have funded it, and paid for it. He went off and into the graduating step 9:00by step, as a higher rungs of Jewish religious scholarship. Is what it was, Talmudic studies. He became, he was, actually a wonderful Talmudic scholar. All his life.

CW:Right. And can you explain, he came to America in 1913, can you explain why? You already mentioned --

DS:Yeah, yes, the story is told, in his second book, "Vortslen," I mean, "Tsvygen." He and his older brother were -- I'm sorry, the Russian Army never trusted the Jewish version of what the age of their boys were. At age eighteen, they were forcibly inducted into the Russian Army, where they very often never could survive. And so, the Jews used to hide the age of their boys. So, they 10:00would -- the Russian Army would send investigators and interviewers to interview the boys and determine their actual age. And his older brother was called, as close to eighteen, and Shlomo went along to accompany his brother. And in the course of the interview, having a lot of chutzpah built into him, my father made some snappy, sarcastic remarks about this whole process that he thought was ridiculous. And so, they asked who he was and his age, and he was about thirteen at that point or something. And they decided from the answers he was giving, and his smart-ass remarks, that he was really close to eighteen. So, at that point, having dug himself that hole, he realized he had to get out of it. And so, he 11:00left, fled from Russia, at about thirteen or fourteen, something in that area. And eventually -- on his own -- and eventually he found his way to New York City. And he was very lucky, as it turned out, because he got to New York City in 1913, and if he had waited any longer, the war would have co-- broken out, 1914, and he would never have been able to escape, and I wouldn't be here to answer your questions.

CW:Wow, yeah. And it was -- was it actually at Ellis Island when he changed his name? Do you know?

DS:I don't know.

CW:But around that time.

DS:I -- it may be. I don't know. I do know that his assigned birthday was the fourth of July. Because when they asked when you were born, he only knew the date under the Russian calendar or under the Jewish calendar. And he didn't know it under the American calendar. And so, they say, Well, what time of the year 12:00was it? And he said, "It was in the summer." So fine, if it's in the summer he was born on the fourth of July. My mother went through the same thing, and she was assigned Christmas Day.

CW:Funny. And do you -- do you have any sense of what your father's -- thought of America?

DS:He loved America. He was really -- he was really proud to be an American citizen. He became a citizen because, oddly enough, having escaped the Russian Army when he -- time it -- when war broke out here in 1917, he was at that point twenty, and went into the American Army. And became a citizen as a result of that. He was always proud of being a citizen, and he was always proud about paying taxes. He loved the country -- he thought that it was a greatest country in the world, because, look what he came from. And he used to tell us one little 13:00story -- he said, "You know, America and Russia are very different in one respect, you know." He'd say, "Well, what was it?" I'd heard this story many times. What was it, papa? He'd say, "Well, when it comes to building a railroad, both countries are terribly corrupt." He said, "The difference is, that in Russia, the railroad never gets built, and in the United States it does." (laughs) So, he was a realist about the country, but he loved it.

CW:Yeah.

DS:Very patriotic. And he always used to insist that the taxes had to be paid. That was one of the things I remember, and it was sort of inculcated in me.

CW:Yeah.

DS:It's funny, because I became a tax lawyer. Among other things. (laughs)

CW:Yeah. Do you -- did you ever hear anything about his early years as an immigrant? What that period was like?

DS:No, there was very little talk about that. We picked up bits and pieces of it. Some of his biography was published in a -- in a Yiddish -- "Jews in 14:00America," I think, and we later found some correspondence between him and my mother when they were courting. But he never really talked about that.

CW:Yeah.

DS:One of the things I wanted to bring to your attention, I'll do it later, is something he wrote about that that's quite interesting.

CW:Well, we can look at it now, sure.

DS:Well, okay. This -- this is the, an unpublished translation of part of "Oyf eygene drokhim." Which he -- was translated as "On my own narrow path." Subtitle: "A spiritual autobiography of a modern Jew." And bear in mind that when he came here, he had been trained to be an Orthodox rabbi. He lost his religion, I think, even before he came here. Many of the Jews in Eastern Europe 15:00and in Russia became -- turned towards socialism, and became radicals, or various degrees of socialists. And the whole world opened up before them at that point. They became partially secular. Some maintained their religion, some didn't. At some point, either then or after he arrived here, he lost his religion. And no longer believed in any of the rituals and ceremonies that he'd been trained in and knew so much about. And here in his -- "Oyf eygene drokhim," he writes about himself. I'll just read a little bit of it because it tells --

CW:Please.

DS:-- the very interesting transformation into a secular Jew who reveled in being an American, and in -- that to some extent was seduced by American materialism and the values that we have here, which are really, very, many ways 16:00very comfortable, nice way to live. So, he writes, "I left home when I was thirteen years old. For almost five years, I wandered from one Talmudic academy to another, and lived practically on a dole. At the age of eighteen, I arrived in the United States, and went through all the drudgery and privation of the immigrant. I began to earn a living at the age of thirty." He had managed to get through high school, in here, and learned the language and went through high school in about one year. And then, after various jobs as a house painter, a truck driver, you name it, he managed to get into dental college and become a dentist. That's why it took him till the age of thirty --

CW:And the army in there, too, somewhere.

DS:And the army in between, right, in 1917. "At the age of thirty-one, three years after my graduation from college" -- well, the college is a dental college, you know? He couldn't get into anything else. "I bought my own home. It 17:00was a great emotional experience. My own piece of land. And my own home. True, a small lot of ground. Twenty by a hundred. Not much of a backyard. There was room for one tree only. The garden in front had room for one peony" -- I planted that -- "and a space of two-by-two for the grass. But this piece of ground, and the home on it, were mine. I know, in relation to the cosmos, it was not even a dot of a dust particle. But for me, it was an anchorage. On this piece of ground, my home, this is where I would always find a spring of living waters. Every night, when I returned, my children were there waiting for me. I was no longer a bit of flotsam." Of flotsam? I think -- "I was like a tree, rooted deep in the earth. 18:00Yes, I know, even a tree dies, but death for me, just as for the tree, was not the reality. The sense of eternity was in being with my family. In my being wanted, in my family's need for me, and in my attachment and desire for my role and for the presence of the children. I told you that I often awo--" -- he's speaking to an interlocutor in this book, which is one of the clumsy things about the book. "I told you that I often awoke in the dead of the night and listened to the children's rhythmic breathing. I especially remember one pre-dawn hour. I stood as usual for quite a while in the hall, outside the doors of all the rooms, and listened to the living stillness of the house, and then went outside. I went to the garage, opened the car door, and sat on the front seat. I sat there motionless, holding my breath, and listening. The prattle, the laughter, the noise of the children, with whom I had gone to the beach the 19:00previous afternoon, was still lingering in the air. In the air of the car. Then, after a while, I was not surprised when I smelled the fragrant of her body." Now he goes on to talk about his love for my mother, and so forth. "Sitting down, I looked up at the house, and I saw through its thick brick walls, every stick of furniture, every piece of clothing, and the shelves with their books. I was even aware of each nail in the wall, on which the printings and the photographs were hanging. I looked at the house for quite a while, and then its real importance dawned on me. The house, and its fullness, was not a reflection of a microscopic spot of dust in the universe. Looking from a cosmic height, it might seem so. But this was not its true image. I could get the true image of the house only through the perspective of my eyes as I sat there on the bench. The house and 20:00its fullness, all of it, was an entity by itself. She" -- his wife -- "the children, the accumulated modest possessions. My steady hunger for her, and my delight in the children -- all these were a reflection, an actual emission of eternal, absolute reality." So, there you have him in full bloom as a secular Jew absorbed in the reality of life in America. And what a change from the way he was raised.

CW:Yeah.

DS:Also gives you a bit of the flavor of how he wrote.

CW:Yeah. And this is a -- this is a translation that he did by himself with maybe -- with someone that helped him?

DS:I think so. I -- he may have had some help. I didn't help him with this one; I did with some of the others. But not this one. He used to make occasional 21:00grammatical errors, and I don't hear them here, so I think somebody took his translation and then did a little tweaking. But basically, this is his. Yes, this is -- he became quite fluent in English.

CW:Yeah.

DS:His writing in English was really -- had the same intensity as it does in Yiddish. Although, I think the Yiddish was more beautiful.

CW:Your father was prolific, he wrote over two dozen books --

DS:Yes, that's right.

CW:-- and published over two dozen books.

DS:I think if you count the translations and whatnot, we're into the thirties.

CW:Yeah.

DS:Yeah.

CW:And across many genres, from --

DS:I'm sorry?

CW:Across many genres, too, from --

DS:Yes, that's correct.

CW:Can you talk about some of the subjects of his writing?

DS:Well, he started out -- writing, I think he did a -- he also wrote for some newspapers. He wrote for the "Tog-morgen-zhurnal," he wrote for some periodicals. He started out in the '20s, and I -- and I think he did various 22:00kinda literary essays to begin with. But then by the early '30s, he was well off into writing children's stories. This was part of his -- this was done for a purpose. He had this vision, as a secular Jew steeped in Jewish history -- and Jewish ethical values, and particularly focused on the lives of the prophets, and their cry for justice. For freeing the oppressed, dealing with the poor. That -- those were the values of Judaism that should be preserved. He didn't believe in any of the rituals. He thought those should be -- were no longer pertinent and should be discarded. Didn't believe in God. Was secular. So, he's 23:00-- he felt that it was important for the newly-arrived immigrants, basically from Eastern Europe, Russia, Poland, to have some way of continuing as secular Jews -- continuing with still being Jews. And he looked to the Yiddish language to achieve that. An illusion, as it turned out. But so, he wrote these books in Yiddish for children to read. And the theory that all -- that children of that generation would be learning Yiddish and reading this and learning the traditions, and what we've achieved over two thousand or more years of history would enable secular Judaism to flourish in America. That was the reason he wrote those. And some of them are -- "Shmerl nar," which was translated, with my help, as "The Wandering Beggar," didn't go out of print -- it was written in the 24:001930s, early 1930s in Yiddish. It was translated while I was just in college in the early '40s, and it stayed in print until fair -- some -- recently. The others are the -- "The Wise Men of Chelm," which in Yiddish is, has a much better title, -- "Khelmer hakhomim" -- no, I'm sorry, in Yiddish it's "Heldn fun khelm." "Heldn fun khelm," which is, transliterated, has its -- the ring to it in me, sarcastically, is, "The Heroes of Chelm." In English, "The Wise Men of Chelm." That one is still in print -- still, a lot of people I meet have read that book one time or another. And there's a second volume called "More Tales from Chelm." Those are written as children's books. And there were a whole bunch of others as well, "Roberts Ventures," "Kinder-yorn fun yidishe shrayber [Childhood years of Jewish writers]," "In di teg fun di ershte neviim [In the days of the early prophets]," all written as sort of educational material for 25:00Jewish children. And now, today, his eight grandchildren -- two of them are mine, my boys -- six of the eight have married gentiles. Which is a -- tells the story of what's happening to secular Jews in America. Not that I'm anything but secular. He became religious again. Am I wandering too far?

CW:Well, we'll get to that.

DS:Okay.

CW:We'll get to that.

DS:Anyway, the other genres after that were -- he started writing serious books about Israel, about Jewish philosophy, about Jewish traditions, written for adults.

CW:Yeah.

DS:And stopped writing children's books, I think, at some point, when I think he realized there were gonna be less and less children to read it.

CW:Hm. Yeah. Do you remember when he would write? Was there a particular time of 26:00day he preferred?

DS:Yes, I remember that very vividly. He had to earn a living as a dentist. He could not earn a living as a writer. He had enormous physical vitality. So, he would work as a dentist six days a week. Took off -- I'm trying to remember, maybe it was five days -- he took off Fridays, as I remember. Not Saturday. I'm not sure. But at any rate, he earned a living as a dentist, and so the question was, when was he going to do his writing? After dinner, he would sit down at his desk, and would write until two or three in the morning. And then, go to sleep, and wake up after maybe three, four hours, and go to work. And then, the only break in that would come from time to time when the rest of us would sit around, my mother and the -- my two sisters and I, and would listen to him reading aloud what he had written by hand in Yiddish the night before. It was a -- it really 27:00-- point of view of just physical achievement, it was quite remarkable. (laughs)

CW:Yeah. Would he ask your opinion ever? Or criticism from the family? What was the purpose?

DS:No, I don't think we were -- asked to do much more than applaud. (laughs). And we were -- we were young. I mean, I left home when I was sixteen to go to college, and never really returned except very briefly. So, I don't recall his ever asking opinions. Maybe he did. I just don't remember. Mimi might remember, she was there. She'll be here later today -- she was there, in a way -- came after me but stayed longer.

CW:Right. And so, he wrote longhand.

DS:Yes, he wrote longhand. And one of my aunts used to type it up in Yiddish. 28:00Aunt Marion, as I recall. Her name was originally Sara, she didn't like Sara, changed it to Marion. (laughs) She was the typist.

CW:Yeah. Do you remember what the desk looked like? What kind of pen he used? Anything like that? Details --

DS:Well, he -- in the front part of the house, we had this, as he says, twenty-by-forty plot. And it was one of these houses where one -- it was longer than it was wider, and so there was a front room, which I think may have been originally a porch. It was enclosed. And then, there was a living room next, and then there was next a dining room, and then next a kitchen, and then upstairs, three little bedrooms. So, he took the front of the house, which had windows around, and he converted it into his office. And he had -- a desk covered, as I 29:00remember, in white leather. Kind of a creamy white leather. I was always impressed with that as a child. And that's where he did his writing.

CW:Yeah.

DS:We also, I think, we used to sit at the dining room table. My mother had a lovely dining room table, she was very proud of it. I think my sister Judy has it now. (laughs) We liked that table.

CW:Yeah. Did he use any special pen or anything like that that you remember.

DS:No, I don't remember that.

CW:Yeah. So --

DS:I think he did have, as a matter of fact -- now that you mention it, I seem to remember a rather ornate-looking, handsome pen that somebody may have given him as a gift.

CW:Nice. And some he wrote every day at that --

DS:Just about, yes.

CW:Just about. Wow. Well, he would have to, with so many --

DS:I'm sorry?

CW:He would have to, with so many books that he wrote. (laughs) Yeah. And what was it like when he was writing. I mean, usually, maybe you were asleep, but did 30:00it change the space of the house in any way? Do you have any memories of interacting with him when he was writing?

DS:No, we just accepted that as the way things were supposed to be.

CW:Yeah. So --

DS:I mean, I had some other experiences with him, because he wanted me to be a writer. And so, we went through some elaborate business between him and me, over things that I was writing. I started at about age twelve. And he was a vigorous critic. To put it mildly. He had -- at that time, in those years, he was also a kind of mentor to Alfred Kazin, K-A-Z-I-N, who later became a very famous literary critic. Alfred was going through some agonies -- he was a young man, and he was busy writing his first book, which is -- I've forgotten, it's a 31:00famous book about American literary criticism. And nobody had ever heard of him. My father took him, somehow took him under his wing, and they had a very close, father-son kind of relationship, until it broke up as sort of like a fa-- the way a father and son might break up. Yeah.

CW:Yeah. So, did -- were there visitors to the home often?

DS:I'm sorry?

CW:Were there visitors to the home often?

DS:Well, it would have to be in times when he was, you know, days off. They had a close circle of friends. I don't remember very many literary friends. I'm sure he had some. The one I do seem to remember as a child was one named Niger, who I think was famous in his day. And of course, I remembered it because of the name, of the word. (laughs) And he also worked with -- someone else whose name I've 32:00forgotten. I have a book of his here about Jewish holidays. I seem to remember that gentleman. But I've forgotten his name. So, I didn't know that many of his friends. They -- we would meet a lot of his friends -- on occasion we also went up to Camp Boiberik, where we spent some time.

CW:Yeah. So your home, as -- that you described, that your father describes, was in Brooklyn, right?

DS:Yeah, that's correct.

CW:What neighborhood of Brooklyn?

DS:It was East Flatbush. 215 East Forty-Third Street. The center of the universe. (laughs)

CW:Can you describe the neighborhood?

DS:Well, it was a -- there were no huge apartment houses. They were one-story or 33:00two-story or maybe four-story houses at most. The population was mixed -- Jewish and Irish, pretty much. Even on our block, I think we were sort of mixed. There was an empty lot at one end, and you got to the other side, one side was Church Avenue, and the other side was, I think, Snyder Avenue. On Church Avenue, there was a little candy store, there was an empty lot, full of weeds. Or maybe --I think two empty lots, on both sides. So, I remember that neighborhood very vividly. That's where I stayed until I was sixteen and went off to college.

CW:Hm. You mentioned playing street games in the --

DS:Yes, we used to -- unlike today, the kids would go out on the street and we'd play stickball. We'd play stoopball, where you throw the ball against this -- 34:00there were stoops leading up to the houses, and you'd throw the ball against the steps of the stoops. If you could hit the point of the step, and it bounced in the air and you caught it, you got a certain number of points, or whatever it was. We'd play mumblety-peg, with kni-- with pocket knives. I think the most dangerous implement we ever saw was a homemade gun, which was made with a piece of wood with a rubber band and a piece of cardboard that you could let fly from the rubber band.

CW:Yeah. Can you des-- you've already described what your house was like physically. But what was the -- what was Jewish about your home?

DS:What was what?

CW:What was Jewish about your home?

DS:Well, I think -- (laughs) -- the one thing that comes to mind was the cooking. (laughs) My mother's cooking was very Jewish. It wasn't -- it wasn't 35:00kosher, because neither my mother nor my father were religious, but it was kosher-style. We wouldn't have butter on the table when there was meat. We didn't eat pork. We didn't eat shellfish. But not out of religious scruples, but really out of habit. I remember when I used to visit my father at his dental office, which was seven blocks away on Utica Avenue. He'd take me out for lunch and we'd go to a Chinese restaurant. And we'd eat pork. And then, he used to particularly like wes-- something called a western sandwich. Which was egg mixed with pork. Or bacon, rather, I think egg mixed with bacon. So, I said to him once, sort of kidding him, I said, "Papa, you're -- you're eating bacon in that sandwich." And he'd say, "Dovidl, that's ridiculous," he said. "If I like it, it can't be bacon." (laughs) So, we had a sense of humor about it. But I don't 36:00remember, there was -- of course, there was a library downstairs in the basement. A most elaborate Jewish library. With a lot of Talmudic materials. Very great resources. As a matter of fact, after he died, I donated it to a local synagogue. But it was a very elaborate library, mostly -- about a good half of it in Yiddish and the other half in English. He was a man of the book. And he trained me to read. When I was a child, I was into reading, I was rather isolated -- by that. And I used to have a library card that was stuffed with entries, and was reading at the rate of -- sometimes at the rate of a book a day. That's a -- and writing. That's what I was supposed to be doing.

CW:Right.

DS:So, that was in a sense, Yiddish. And my bar mitzvah, so-called -- I never set foot in a synagogue until I was in my twenties. My bar mitzvah conti-- 37:00consisted of an assignment that my father gave me to do, to research the prophet Amos, I think it was, Amos. And so, I did a term paper as it were, at age thirteen, of, I don't know, thirty pages or so about the prophet Amos, with his writings, and various scientific discoveries about that age, and how he fit into it, and so forth and so forth. And my father then invited a number of his friends to come to the house and I presented him with this thesis I had written. And we then celebrated with my mother's honey cake, lekach [sponge cake]. And some bronfn [liquor], some whiskey for the adults, not for me. And that was my bar mitzvah. Which was part of his thinking of how Jewish traditions should be maintained. And so, as a result, I and my sister Judy, and my older sister -- my 38:00sister Judy is five years younger than me, and Mimi, who's all of twelve years younger than me. All three of us speak Yiddish. All three of us went to a Yiddish school; it was the Sholem Aleichem Folks Institut. It had night class -- night schools for children around the city. And so, I went to Shul Fuftsn, with -- I forget the name of the teacher, but it made an impression. I went to -- went in the day to public school, and at night to Shul Fuftsn. I had to walk, I think some ten blocks or something to get to Shul Fuftsn, and on the way, there were a number of candy stores that had these little machines that you operate to, I forget what, slot machines, where you propel various balls around, get prizes. I remember rocking those machines. That's my big memory of going to Shul 39:00Fuftsn. (laughs) But I did learn Yiddish. I learned to read it, and to speak it, although never to my father's satisfaction.

CW:Hm.

DS:And he even went to -- there was even a Jewish high school in Manhattan. Also run by the Sholem Aleichem Folks Institut. And a summer camp called Boiberik, which was, also was run by them, and my father at one point was the president of this thing.

CW:Right.

DS:So --

CW:Well, I wanna go back and ask --

DS:Anyway, I'm wandering.

CW:-- before we get on to that --

DS:Yeah. (laughs)

CW:That's fine. About -- a little bit about the food, the Jewish food, a little more.

DS:A little bit about?

CW:The food.

DS:Oh, the food!

CW:(laughs) So, what --

DS:Well, my mother was a good cook, although I think the food was -- it was destined to interfere with longevity. She cooked -- one of the things she loved to cook and was really very good at was a tsimes [sweet dish with vegetables 40:00and/or meat], and I've never seen an English translation of it that really fits, but I guess if you know what a tsimes is, you know what it is. It's made of carrots, and it's a stew, usually with some beef in it. And uh, knaidlach [dumplings], and it takes a -- to do it properly, it takes several days of various cooking and blending and stewing and whatnot. That was one of her dishes. She was very good with cakes. She had a honey cake that she loved to make. It had a nice, thick crust I used to -- it was considered impolite to eat all the crust, which was one of the things I liked to do. She made some other kinds of cake, and cookies, and chicken -- oh, and then veal chops that were heavily breaded. And then gefilte fish, of course, and -- stuffed derma, which in Yiddish is kishke [tripe]. Kishke is stuffed with the filling that is full of 41:00fat, and particularly delicious and unhealthy. And with the -- she also did -- the onion, not the onions, the chicken fat, I forget the word for the chicken fat --

CW:Gribenes [fried goose or chicken skin]?

DS:Schmaltz.

CW:Schmaltz, yeah.

DS:Schmaltz, which is just solid chicken fat with some little stuff thrown into it. And then, sometimes fried pieces of chicken mixed in with the schmaltz. And you can think of what that can do to you if you eat enough it. (laughs) And my father, in fact, died of a heart attack. He had his first heart attack in 1969, and then died of his second in 1970. And the fact that he had -- he never, I never saw him exercising. And it was -- living on this kind of food is enough to finish anybody off.

CW:Right.

DS:Am I talking too fast?

CW:No.

DS:It was part of his enormous physical vitality. It was not -- the food was not 42:00healthy, but it was delicious.

CW:Yeah.

DS:Oh, he used to say about me, he says, "Vegn a yidishe kop, dovidl, veys ikh nisht, az du host es. Ober a yidishe boykh? Yo."

CW:Can you translate that, too?

DS:Yeah, he said, "I'm not sure you have a Yiddish head," he said, "but you certainly have a Yiddish stomach." (laughs)

CW:And you did celebrate at least Passover?

DS:Yes, we celebrated Passover every year. And I don't remember celebrating any other Yiddish holiday. He was aware of all of them. And as I say, he coauthored a book, or helped a book that was published about the Jewish holidays, and I can't remember the name of the author, although I have it back here somewhere. But he knew all of that, of course. He was very learned. But the only holiday was Passover. And I think he viewed that as a celebration of freedom, with its 43:00own values that were not necessarily embedded in -- in out-- outworn customs. So, we would gather, the whole -- our whole family, and then my mother's sisters. And one sister, one of my mother's sisters, had two boy -- had three boys, and they would all be there, my cousins. And some friends, and so on. And my mother had a long table that expanded. And the way the Haggadah was that was -- my father -- we'd first read the whole thing in English, and then after we'd read it in English, he would then read the entire thing in Hebrew, and there were one of my -- my father's brother-in-law, husband of my mother's sister, Uncle Ben, also could do that. And so, the two of them, reading the Haggadah at 44:00breakneck speed in Hebrew, was a race to see who could read it faster. And that was true at (laughs) every one of our Pesachs. But the values of the Passover ceremony were there and were explained, and he used Rabbi Kaplan's book, 'cause the -- what do you call that, the movement, the Kaplan -- Reconstruction. He thought that the values of the Reconstruction Movement made sense. The notion that Judaism had to adapt itself to current values and current times, and that they had done that periodically over all the centuries. I think he used that even in the days when he was totally secular.

CW:Yeah. Was there -- you mentioned that your father was a staunch anti-communist. Was there a political atmosphere in your home?

DS:Yes, we used to discuss politics all the time. We were avid followers of Roosevelt. We'd sit glued to the radio every time he spoke. He was virtually a saint. We didn't really know in those days about how he had ignored -- well, it hadn't come about yet, how he had ignored the Holocaust, that came later. And my father, I think, turned against the communists -- I think at about the time of the Kronstadt rebellion. Which is I think about 1920 or 1921, something like that. When the sailors on the Kronstadt were brutally wiped out, in effect, by the communists when they were claiming they needed more food, or something like that. You can look it up, I don't -- and he used to write pieces in the Jewish press about the horrors of communism and what they were doing. And the oppression of the Jews that was still taking place.

CW:Right. Yeah.

DS:It helped me get a Top Secret clearance when I was in Army Intelligence, because he had this reputation.

CW:Right. And he wrote for the "Morgen-zhurnal," and the --

DS:"Tog-morgen-zhurnal."

CW:And the "Tog-morgen-zhurnal," which --

DS:I think originally you're right, originally it was just the "Morgen-zhurnal," and then I think it merged with "Der Tog." At first, they were two separate newspapers, right.

CW:Right. And that was sort of the more traditional of the Yiddish papers at the time.

DS:Yes, it was the more cons-- it was the -- it was like the "New York Times" of the Jewish papers, and the "Forverts" was more like the "Daily News." So, he didn't really particularly like the "Forverts," except that on weekends, the "Forverts" used to publish lithograph photographs, sort of brown section, an inner section, of a lot of photographs, and we used to get that and look at the pictures. In Yiddish, of course. It's now published in English as well, as you know.

CW:Right. And so, did you -- do you remember reading the newspaper at home, and is that part of what happened --

DS:No, I don't, I don't remember that.

CW:But the radio more.

DS:In terms of the radio, there were some Jewish programs. I guess I must have listened to some of them. I remember, I still remember, (singing) "Marshak's Malted Milk iz gut far kleyne kinder. Marshak's Malted Milk, bum bum bum bum bum bum." (laughs)

CW:That's great.

DS:"Iz gut far kleyne kinder," for those who don't understand, it means it's good for little children. (laughs)

CW:(laughs) I underst-- can you sort of describe what your father looked like?

DS:He was about five feet tall. I'm -- I got to be six-two and a half, oddly 48:00enough. And actually, there is a description of him, which is not bad, where -- I have it here somewhere. Written by someone else, so I don't have to, I don't have to use hi-- let -- where is that -- oh dear. I guess I didn't bring it in; it must be in the other room. Well, he was -- he was short and stocky. I don't seem to have -- wait a minute. Is it here?

CW:Those are photos, I think.

DS:No, not here. He was short and stocky, he had a mustache. He smoked a pipe, until he developed cancer of the hands. And then, he had a large head. In a way, 49:00almost kind of dwarf-like. Very intense personality. You really weren't aware of what he looked like, because he came across with such energy, and mental, as well as physical power, kind of radiated from him. He would take over a room, and it wasn't as if he was obstructing anybody, people would love to listen to him. And of course, his patients, he used to talk -- lecture them on Talmudic topics when they had cotton stuffed in their mouths so they couldn't even speak back. He was a -- he was a force.

CW:Yeah. Did -- can you describe his dental office? Did you go there ever?

DS:Yes, he had a -- he was very proud of the fact that he had two chairs, not one. And he had an assistant named Leon Singer, who was a young dentist who came 50:00and joined him, I think about 1940. And there was a backroom, which was a laboratory where they would make the various dentures and artificial teeth and whatnot. And it was run by a man named Volpe. V-O-L-P-E. And I remember him. And as a matter of fact, I met Volpe's grandson, not -- about a year or two ago, by accident. I heard the name Volpe, and I said, "Did you happen to have any relative who was once a dental technician?" And he said, "Oh yes," he said, "that was my grandfather." There are not that many Volpes in this world. So, that little backroom office, and it -- to get to the office, it was at the corner of Church and Utica. It was south -- I guess it was the southwest corner. You had to walk up a long flight of stairs, and it was on the second floor. I still see that in my dreams. Then, you walk through a long hallway. And on one 51:00side, there was the -- Volpe's dental lab, and then you entered into the reception room, and a place where a secretary sat to take appointments and whatnot. And the two rooms with that dental equipment. My father was an unusual dentist. He had an enor-- first of all, I think he was a very good dentist. But he had an enormous clientele. He had a Rolodex with a huge number of names, and I think part of the reason was that if somebody didn't have any money, he wouldn't charge them. Or would charge the bare minimum. One of the -- one of his patients was a fellow named Kallem. I remember, K-A-L-L-E-M. And there's a picture behind me, a drawing, made by Kallem. Kallem was a -- did a lot of the drawings for the cover of the "New York Times Magazine" section. And as an artist, while he was this well-known artist, he didn't have any money. So, my 52:00father used to do all his dental work in return for portraits. And there was a portrait of my mother, there was a portrait of me, a portrait of my two sisters. There was this etching of my father. Every one of them represented a denture, or another tooth, or what have you. So, he practiced what he preached. He believed in those ideals of -- and in -- was very much involved in the politics that we heard in the house.

CW:Right.

DS:He was a staunch Democrat. A great admirer of Roosevelt. And I guess that's about as much as I remember.

CW:And this was in the Depression. Do you have memories of the Depression, what --

DS:Yes, I do. My biggest memory, this is the early '30s, about 1931 or so. The height of the Depression. I was all of seven years old. And my big memory was 53:00that I had an allowance. I think it was, I seem to think a nickel a day, but that sounds like too much. Maybe it was a nickel a week. And nobody else had an allowance. My father was -- was prosperous all through the Depression. He never saved any money. He used to spend it either by making charitable contributions, mostly to the Sholem Aleichem Folks Institut, or by buying books. But we lived well. He was -- he never, as far as I know, was always comfortable. I think in the -- 1929, he made some kind of investment in real estate which went kaflooey. So, he was never wealthy, but he was always comfortable. And on the other hand, he couldn't afford to send us to college. I went to Cornell on scholarships, and my sisters went to Brooklyn College, which was -- cost, I think, little to nothing. So, he was not somebody who was concerned about money or finances. He 54:00just worked hard and managed to support his family while he was writing all these books at the same time.

CW:Wow. So, you alluded to, before, his sort of expectation, desire for you to become a writer.

DS:Yes.

CW:Can you tell me about how that played out for you?

DS:Well, there was no question that I was supposed to be the next great American Jewish author, Jewish American author. I was a -- it was instilled in me that that was my role in life. And I started writing -- well, I started writing, I guess when I was about ten or eleven. Some of these little short stories I did were published in the various juvenile magazines, I did some poetry, I became the editor of the high school, of the "Erasmian," which was a high school publication. Or an editor, I don't know if I was the editor. Maybe an editor. He 55:00had my books -- I have them here -- bound up in bindings, my writings. And he even had Alfred Kazin review one of them. He wrote a little introduction about this budding author. And that was my -- and he used to go over this material with me, and he trained me to write with continuity, to understand about the inner meaning of words, and how words can be used to shape feelings, and how words have to connect about continuity, about character, about imagery, all of these things. And I took to it. I was, I -- but then when I got to college, it all broke apart. One college professor read one of my stories and sniffed, turned up his nose at it. And that finished me off. But I think I was ready to 56:00break with what I was supposed to be doing. I went through a typical teenage rebellion. And maybe I'm still recovering from it. (laughs)

CW:Right. And did you actually read his children's literature when you yourself were a child?

DS:Yes. Yes. I read, we read, "Shmerl nar," and "Di heldn fun khelm," and "Mer mayses fun khelm [More stories from Chelm]" and "Roberts ventures [Robert's Adventures]," and -- I'm not sure whether I read "Kinder-yorn," but I may have. I just got several volumes of "Kinder-yorn" sent to me by the -- as a gift from the National Yiddish Book Center, and started reading with the thought that it might be something to translate. But I haven't gotten past Sholem Aleichem, was the first one listed. I really should be reading more of them.

CW:Yeah.

DS:So, I don't remember too much of what I read. I was reading an enormous 57:00amount in English. Not that much in Yiddish. My next encounter with reading a book in Yiddish, a serious book, was, oddly enough, a story told in a book I wrote about when I was in Korea in the army, 1945, 1946. On occupation duty. After, right after the war. My father sent me Sholem Asch's "Kidush hashem [sanctification of God, lit. "the name"]." And for some reason, at that point I just felt I want-- I was so isolated from home. I felt I would like to read a Yiddish book, so I took it, I took the book he sent me, and I read it. I had no difficulty reading it. And then, the rest of the story is interesting because I was -- as a Russian interpreter, I was stationed on the 38th parallel and was meeting Russian officers who were also stationed there. And one of them turned out to be Jewish. And he was telling me that he would love to get his hands on a 58:00Yiddish book, and that the Soviet authorities would not allow them to be distributed. So, I gave him my copy of "Kidush hashem" and he was very grateful. But that's odd, because I basically wasn't reading Yiddish.

CW:But you were speaking Yiddish, growing up, in the home, right?

DS:Yes, we spoke Yiddish at home, and when pop and momma didn't want the kids to understand what they were saying, they spoke Hebrew. And my father also knew Aramaic, as part of his Talmudic background.

CW:Yeah. So, I'd like to just change for a few minutes, and ask you about your mother. Where's her family from?

DS:My mother was born in Riga. Latvia, I believe. And she was bor-- she was one of five girls. And I think next to the youngest, I'm not sure. I think next to 59:00the youngest. I think Celia was younger. And they immigrated with their mother, from Riga, when my mother was about three, I believe. So, my mother was born in 1897, so it would be about 1900. And what happened was -- the story is -- there's a picture that I have here somewhere that tells the whole story. This picture. This is -- this is my mother, and her mother, and her grandmother, and the five girls. And the -- let's see, one, two, three -- yeah, four, five. I guess this one is my mother. I think. And this picture is one of the reasons I'm 60:00here, oddly enough. Because they came over, not with the grandmother, but with their mother, on the understanding that as soon as -- I'm sorry, back up. My grandfather -- my mother's father -- came over first, with the understanding that he was gonna earn enough money to bring the rest of them over. And he became a furrier, which paid pretty well in those days, and the word got around that he was having an affair with the head of the furrier's union. I mean, with the wife of the head of the furrier's union. And my mother, who's sitting back in Riga -- I'm sorry, my grandmother, who was sitting back in Riga, heard this story. So, she took the five girls and her mother off to a photographer, and the 61:00picture included the youngest, which is this one, who was born after my grandfather had left. And sent it to him. And the story goes that he saw the picture and he wept. (laughs) And then, brought them all over. I guess they forgot about the affair he was conducting. And we in our family, we had this picture sitting around. My sisters have it in theirs as well.

CW:Yeah. So, he sent, she sent --

DS:So, the picture, they say, was sent to my grandfather, and that's what resulted in the family being brought over here, and my mother then met my father, I guess around 1916 or 1917. My mother was a -- she proudly used to say that she was an anarchist. Although, I think she was really something like a philosophical anarchist, but she didn't say that, she said, "I'm an anarchist." 62:00And she said she believed in free love. "But not for me," she said. "Not for me." (laughs) And I used to argue with her. I said, "Mama, how would the world be, if -- if there were no -- no police, no governments, no structure, I mean, it would be terrible, wouldn't it?" And she said -- she used to look at me and said, "You really think, Dovid, that it would be worse than it is now?" (laughs). So, but she was absolutely opposed to religion. I don't know where that came from, but she was just totally hostile to any sign of religion. And of course, my father was a socialist. An idealistic socialist. And they met around 1916, I think. She would have been, at that point, nineteen years old. And they had a romance that blossomed while he was in the army, and we have correspondence back and forth, a good deal of it. She must have saved his 63:00letters. Written while he was in the army. And they were written, oddly enough, in English, not in Yiddish, because my father had been -- was stationed on an island right off Westchester, I forget the name of it, in a censorship unit. He was there because of his Yiddish. They would censor all the Yiddish letters that went from the soldiers to make sure army -- soldiers writing in Yiddish to make sure there were no secrets being taken away. So, every letter had to pass through his unit, and he didn't want his correspondence from my mother to be seen by his buddies. So, it would be seen by an English unit somewhere else. So, he wrote in English, and she wrote in English. And it's kind of amusing in places, because he corrects her English. He was very eager to learn about English, and he writes a good deal about poverty, about how it's no sin to be 64:00poor but it's better not to be. And his plans for the future and how he plans to raise himself out of poverty and what he means for the future. He was a man who was -- he was bedeviled by the contrast between his success in this -- in America's secular world, and his ideals for the Jewish community, which weren't coming into fruition. And he felt that his life had been a failure because he hadn't achieved what he wanted to achieve. His children were failures for the same reason. Yet, at the same time, he took pride in our achievements and in his own. It was a -- he -- my mother, in this book, she says, this is his -- "Kluge hent [Smart hands]," his last published book, published by mother, posthumously 65:00in 1973. She has a little introduction, in Yiddish -- "In andenk fun mayn shloyme, vos ikh hob gehat di slikhe tsu zayn zayn lebns-bagleyterin iber fuftsik yorn. Zayn dinamish zunikn perzenlekhkayt hot gelozn zayn [In memory of my Shloime, whose life partner I had the honor of being for over fifty years. His dynamic, bright personality allowed his]" -- I'm not sure the Hebrew words either. "Zayn taneyim" -- oh, his pupils, yes. "Nit nor oyf undzer kinder [Not only on our kids]" -- oh, that's his mark, his -- "nit nor uf undzer kinder, un eyniklekh, nor oykh oyf a sakh fun zayne talmidim un bklal oyf a groyser tsol 66:00leyeners. Ven es vert shver oyfn gemit, nem ikh aroys zaynem a seyfer, leyen oystsugn un es dakht zikh mir az shloyme zitst lebn mir un er hot taynes [not only on our children and grandchildren, but also on many of his students and in general, on a large number of readers. When I feel down, I take down one of his books, read a portion, and it feels as if Shloime is sitting next to me and he is]" -- this is the point I wanted to read -- "un er hot taynes tsu der velt [and he is complaining about the world]." And it seems to me that Shlomo's sitting next to me, and is complaining to the world. "Es iz shver tsu banemen az aza broyzike, shturemdike mentsh vos hot gevolt iberkern a velt iz mer nito [It's hard to take that such a passionate, stormy person who wanted to turn the world upside-down is no longer here]." And that -- that little description of him stormy, angry, trying to overturn the world. And this is how he viewed 67:00himself. And it never succeeded. And he writes about that in his books. Now, the interesting thing I wanted to mention about -- may I go on a little bit about this book?

CW:Sure. Yeah, please.

DS:This book, "Kluge hent," as I said, it was published posthumously by my mother in 1973. It was originally published in "Der tog-morgen-zhurnal" in installments, the way Dickens used to write in installments, so that each chapter that stops leaves you hanging, looking for what's gonna come next. Much the way some of the series today, like "Homeland," for example, is written the same way, so that when you get to the end of the hour, you're hungry to ha-- everybody's in trouble, what's gonna happen next? Very much in the style of that. But the -- under the surface of this book, there's something very interesting about my father. There are two characters, essentially, in this book. One is a very li-- it's written, set in Moldavia, in about 1780, in the 68:00Jewish communities around the Black Sea. And it tells the story of a brilliant rabbi who succeeds, finally after many, many difficulties and whatnot, raising himself up and becoming a great scholar. But he's a very, to put it bluntly, a liberal rabbi. He takes the portions of the Talmud that are about justice, about fairness, about equality, and he uses those Talmudic materials in his life. And particularly in dealing with a wayward stepson, who seems almost like a golem, like an -- almost a retarded something or other. He can't do his prayers, he can't read -- an exceptionally gifted artist, however. And there's the reconciliation between the two of them is at the heart of this book. And the adventures they go through, which are kind of exciting, as I say. "Perils of Pauline" in every chapter. The -- those two personalities, the -- and the -- and 69:00the child of the boy, who is incidentally, physically, enormously powerful, in addition to having these great talents that have been submerged and brought to the surface. Those are the two facets of my father's personality. In those two characters. And so, I took this book, that my mother had given me, in 1973, and she wrote, in this inscription: To Michael, Debbie and David -- those are my, Michael is my then three-year-old son, and Debbie my then-wife, neither of whom know Yiddish -- In memory of Father, which could enrich your life and make it more meaningful. Mother, April 29, 1973. I took this book, when she gave it to me, and I put it on a library shelf. And I never got around to reading it until Susie's mother was passing away, six years ago. And we were sitting there with her mother at home, she wasn't in pain. Waiting for her to pass away. Of old age, and what had happened to her, without suffering. And I suddenly remembered 70:00this book. So, I read the book, while I was sitting there, found it fascinating. I saw all the aspects of my father that were in this book. And the exciting story that it tells. My mother at one point said she thought that -- he thought this was his best book. And I said, "This book should be translated." So, lo and behold, I have translated it. And here it is -- this is so funny, how the world changes. Yeah. Here it is, on Amazon, eBook available on Kindle. (laughs) I translated the, the "Kluge hent," which is talking about the boy, how gifted he was. The boy with the golden hands. And it shouldn't just say "an adventure story," I will have to change that. It should say "a Jewish adventure story." Because it's steeped in Judaism, and in the life of the Jews at the time. My father had a very idealistic view of the life of the Jews in those days, and how 71:00they treated their poor, and how they protected them and sheltered them. How they viewed their obligations of justice and fairness, imbued in the Jewish shtetl as he saw it. And that's one of the reasons that he hated -- what's his name, Sing-- Singer?

CW:Bashevis?

DS:Ah?

CW:Bashevis?

DS:Yeah, Isaac Bashevis Singer. He thought that his depictions of this lustful sexual life in the shtetl was total nonsense. And he also didn't think very much of "Fiddler on the Roof," for some similar reasons. He had a very idealized view of what Jewish life in the shtetl was like. In poverty. And he wanted to keep those values alive -- in Jewish culture here in America, and that failed.

CW:I'd like to ask you about translating his work.

DS:Yeah.

CW:When you -- when did that start, and how did it come about?

DS:Well, it started when I was, I think, sixteen. I was -- I had just entered Cornell. I was somewhat precocious. And he was working on translating "The Wandering Beggar," "Shmerl nar," which is a lovely legend about a simpleton, and the magic things that emerge from his being a simpleton. Something like a movie that was later done that seemed to echo some of that book, and maybe was stolen from it, I can't remember the name of the movie. At any rate, it's a lovely, lovely tale. I think in some ways, the best children's thing he wrote. And it was, I think, the first. And so, this is 1941, 1940, so maybe the summer of 1941, I guess. Before Pearl Harbor. Sitting with my father, at the dining room table, going over -- doing a translation. He would -- we would read the Yiddish 73:00together, he would tell me about the sensitivity in the Yiddish, the inner meaning, is it wro-- the rhythms, the quality of what was there in the Yiddish, because his Yiddish was beautiful. And then, we together would formulate -- we'd try to formulate something like that in English. He used to say to me, of course this was politically very incorrect, he used to say to me, "Dovidl," he used to say, "translations -- translations are like women," he said. "They're either faithful, or beautiful, but never both." (laughs) The point was that you can't have a literal translation. You've got to somehow recreate the beauty without being stuck with the particular words. And so, we struggled with that, and we together did the translation of "Shmerl nar," which became "The Wandering 74:00Beggar" in English. It's a beggar who wanders about, who was -- seemed to be a total, totally lost and yet, some wonderful things happen out of his simplicity at every turn. And then, finally ends up in a very tragic way with a pogrom against Jews, which he somehow heads off through his simplicity. And then, we did -- the Chelm stories that I mentioned earlier. Also the same way. And I still have very fond memories of doing that, and now, I did this one. "The Boy with the Golden Hand," I did that. Susie is a practicing psychotherapist. So, while she was with her patients, I had been by that time pretty much ret-- this started, I'd say, six years ago -- pretty much retired. And I had time on my hands while she was with her patients. I would sit at my computer, and I would 75:00do a page or two at a time. And my whole object in doing it was to make it readable, to make it flow, and capture the spirit of what I was translating, but not necessarily the exact words. A lot of it is very difficult to translate, because a good deal of it is Talmudic material. Half in Hebrew, half in English. And I kind of finessed those. Because I don't know the Hebrew. But I think the translation reads. And a number of people who have read it have actually -- a plug for the book -- a number of people who have read it liked it. Including, of all people, Susie's nine-year-old daughter, who's very precocious, and at one point, she saw this manuscript that I was -- that I had when I had finished it in manuscript form. She said, "What's that," and I explained, and she said, "I'd like to read it." So, she took it home, and then her parents told us afterwards that she hid under the covers to read it all night. She wouldn't leave it alone. And so, then I said to her, I said, "Savi" -- her name's Savi, Savannah -- I said, "Savi, can you do a review of the book?" She said, "What do you mean by a 76:00review?" I said -- she said, "You mean a book report?" I said, "Yes, a book report." So, she did one, on one page, describing it very beautifully, and how she reacted to it. It's a little bit -- the book is very old-fashioned. It's a little bit in the vein of a legend. And it -- it's intergenerational. It can be read by young, I don't think they all -- nine-year-olds, they have to be quite as smart as Savi, but maybe eleven and twelve. And then, on by adults, just the way Louis Stevenson's book, what is it, "Venture Island," is it? Or something? Louis Stevenson --

CW:"Treasure Island"? Treasure, right?

DS:Huh? What?

CW:"Treasure Island"?

DS:"Treasure Island." Yeah. "Treasure Island" could be read by anybody. It's in that style. And so, I'm still hoping that somebody will someday be interested in it. I think it's sold about four copies on Amazon so far, three bucks a copy, end the plug. (laughs)

CW:(laughs) So, Susie's granddaughter --

DS:Pardon?

CW:Susie's granddaughter, Savi?

DS:Yeah, she read it. I have her book review here, if you --

CW:Sweet. Why do you think his books stayed in print so long? Why --

DS:Well, there was no advertising, it was Behrman Publishing House, which publishes Jewish books in English. They now are pretty much focused, I think, on religious texts. They weren't interested in my -- he said, "We don't publish novels anymore." So, they don't promote these books, but they have found their way into the synagogues, and into the day schools, and for children. At some point, I heard the story, I don't remember, I may have heard this from my father, that "Shmerl nar," "The Wandering Beggar" -- which as I say is 78:00about this simpleton, who does these amazing things that happen to him. Worth reading, it's really a lovely little book. It got a very good review in the "New York Times" book review section -- had found its way into a school for retarded children. And they read the book and loved it. So, I think, by word of mouth, these books have somehow stayed alive. People did -- oh, they haven't sold a lot, but every year, they keep selling, because the word of mouth. And at one point, I got a call -- this was about a year or two ago. Somebody up in Maine, who was affiliated with a little semi-amateur, semi-professional theater group called the Acorn Productions or something, in -- what's the main town in Maine, I forget the --

CW:Portland?

DS:Portland, I guess. And he wanted to know whether I was the David Simon who 79:00was listed as having done -- helped in the translation of "The Wandering Beggar." And I was. He had somehow located me, I don't know how he did it. And he wanted to know about -- get copyright clearance, or approval, and my sisters and I gave the approval, and he produced, he and the Acorn people, he wrote it. They produced a play based on "The Wandering Beggar," two years ago, which ran for a week or so up in Portland, Maine. They invited my sisters and me, and the whole family for that matter, anyone who wanted to come, went up there, and we were feted at a banquet dinner in honor of us, and we went to the show, and it was really done very beautifully. So, I asked him, "How come you wanted to do this? Where did this come from?" He said he remembered when he was a young child, in some kind of a Jewish day school somewhere, having these stories read to him, one at a time, and he never forgot them. And that's why the books have sta-- managed to stay alive.

CW:Yeah. Not all Yiddish literature stands up to time, so it's pretty -- it's 80:00interesting, there's something about it.

DS:It's extraordinary. Yeah, there is. The children's books. I think, his philosophical books and -- he wrote a book about --he went to Israel, and he wrote a book called the "Medinas yisroel un erets yisroel" -- "Kingdom of Israel, or Land of Israel." And he'd been horrified by some cartoons of -- that showed rabbis riding on a tank with machine guns, and he thought that what's happening in Israel in some ways was a total perversion of Jewish ideals and Jewish culture that had been preserved over thousands of years and was being lost. And that what, yes, that there was another side to Israel as well. But that that side, the militaristic side, like everybody else could see it, was not something worth having. But there was something being very, very wary of, 81:00although of course, it's necessary, but that -- so, he wrote a whole book on that subject, which I haven't read.

CW:Hm. Yeah. (laughs) Do you -- has his work changed for you over time, as you've read his work at different times of your life?

DS:Has his worth?

CW:Has his work, and worth --

DS:Oh, work?

CW:-- as a writer changed for you over time?

DS:Well, yes, I guess so. When I was a child, it was hero worship. He was the hero of our family. He would do nothing wrong -- he was, you know, the perfectionist self. And everything he wrote was a piece of great literature. Since then, of his autobiography for example, which I read again, fairly recently -- the two that are in English, the "Vortslen" and "Tsvygen," I read 82:00them as "Roots," "My Jewish Roots" and "In the Thicket." The first volume is very touching, his childhood. The second volume, about his life as a Talmudic student, then blending into socialism, and all the debates they had about socialism among the adolescents in Russia at that time. It's ki-- it's dated. And similarly, I started reading, as I said earlier today, I started reading, "Kinder-yorn fun yidishe shrayber." The Sholem Aleichem story that it starts with is not too impressive. It's okay, but nothing that great. I -- there was something else. Oh, "Roberts Ventures," "Robert's Adventures in New York City." The first story, about how this child crawls onto the elevated track, in the subway, the elevated subway in New York City, and stops all 83:00traffic in New York City is a very lovely, gripping, beautiful story in itself. But then I thought, so I thought, Oh, this is a great book to translate, but then when I got to the second story and the third story in Yiddish -- in Engl-- in Yiddish, reading them in Yiddish, I didn't like them that much. So yes, I mean, he wasn't as godlike as I thought he was when I was a child. But nevertheless, I think I have much more insight into him as a human being, and I've been able to deal better with the ambivalent feelings that I had growing up. I was really -- I had a difficult time growing up, and I think partly it was because of my relationship with my father. I went to some therapy on that. And it sort of helped. So, I -- I mean, for example, that when they saw me off at the train station, when I went into the army, I was nineteen, and he said to me 84:00at the train station, in Grand Central I guess. I went off to Fort Niagara to be inducted. He said, "Be a good soldier." Now this is from a socialist. But this was, you know, a war of survival. And yet, looking back, and thinking about it, as a parent, I'm thinking to myself, What must he and my mother have felt, when their oldest, their first-born son, was going off at age nineteen into the war, maybe never to return? I didn't feel that at the time, but now I can understand what they must have gone through. I was the apple of my -- you know, the apple of my father's eye. I mean, I was -- in a Yiddish family, the ben yoches, the first-born son, took precedence over anything and everything. And my poor sisters suffered through that, unfairly. As Mimi, I'm sure, will tell you in 85:00some detail. (laughs) It really wasn't right. But I have a much better insight now that I've lived the life I've lived, into what it must have been like for them as immigrants, who came here with nothing, and had to learn a whole new culture, a new language, a whole new way of living. And here, I was the first American. And what that must have meant to them.

CW:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd like to sort of end this chapter of our --

DS:Yeah.

CW:-- multi-interview session here, by asking, sort of, how has having this Yiddish writer as a father left -- impacted your own sense of Jewish identity, as an adult?

DS:Well, Yiddishkayt. I don't like to use the word Judaism. Yiddishkayt, as my 86:00father viewed it when I was raised, has been very much a part of me all my life. I've always had an enormous pride, pride in being Jewish. I sort of think of myself -- it's very arrogant -- I think of myself as a Jewish prince. I've succeeded in a lot of things in life, and I view it all as part of my Jewish personality. It's a shame for me that my two sons, really, really know nothing to speak of about Judaism, which is really my failure, in a way. And as Susie points out, my wife, points out, that in today's world, the only way really of maintaining a connection with Judaism is -- Yiddishkayt doesn't do it. Jewish ethos, Jewish values, Jewish concepts and principles are not enough to maintain a Jewish identity. You probably have to have some kind of a link to some form of 87:00organized religion. But -- which I never had. My father used to tell me that I was his failure, because he became religious at the end, in a rather vague, theistic way. He taught the values of the Talmud and the -- and the Tanakh, and the Neviim, Prophets, to a group of followers that he had in the cellar of his house, who all attended his funeral in a large mass of people who were -- who adored him. But, he felt I was -- he said if I had, if he had changed earlier, he said, "I would have been different." He figured I was malleable. (laughs) And maybe he was right. So, but still, I think the hope that -- my hope is that some of the good things that were in my father have survived in me. I still dream of him. He's a part of me. He's a part of what I'm made of. And my mother too, for 88:00that matter. My mother was a brilliant woman. And a very sensitive, caring woman. She was in some ways very neurotic, but still, she silently and quietly behind the scenes played a very large part with all of us. I -- did that answer the question? I guess it does.

CW:Yes, it did. Well, a sheynem dank.

DS:It was nice talking to you, dear.

CW:You too. (laughs) And we'll pause for now.

[END OF INTERVIEW]