JOE ESSELIN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: So, this is Christa Whitney. And today is November 15th, 2013. I'm here in Chicago, Illinois with Joe Esselin, Yosl Esselin. 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?

JOE ESSELIN: Yes, indeed.

CW:Thank you. Well, I -- as I said, we can -- I'm gonna through my questions and then if you want to add something in, an artifact, feel free.

JE:Okay, I'm ready.

CW:Great. So, today, obviously we'll be mainly talking about your father, the carpenter poet. And to start off, can you tell me when and where he was born?

JE:Yes. He was born in a shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community], part of Chernigov, which is alongside the river Desna that's a tributary of the Dnieper. But his birth date was the third week in April of 1889, which happens to have been the same week that Charlie Chaplin was born, and Adolf Hitler. So, I don't know what can you make of that, but it's an interesting coincidence.

CW:Do you have a sense of what this shtetl looked like in your mind?

JE:I don't have a good picture of the shtetl, but I have a vivid idea of what their home was like. It was -- had an earthen floor, and it was one large room, 2:00but for a family of two parents, a grandparent, and at least four siblings, maybe five. I'm not sure of the number. That was -- that was a small place for a household of that size. And the only main artifact in the home was this long stone oven, which was the source of heat in the wintertime, and was where all the cooking was done, and where they all slept. They each had a place on that stone oven. The bedding was straw. And as I understand it, the childhood of my 3:00father was very much a basis for the way he lived his life, with that early exposure to privation. His mother was an interesting woman. She was Tzivia Wilenchik, and a very lively, spirited woman from what my father has told me about her.

CW:That's why she was married off, right?

JE:Yes. Because she was noticed by her parents as being all too friendly with the shkotsim [non-Jewish boys, lit. "insolent person"], and so they decided --

CW:Non-Jewish boys.

JE:Non-Jewish boys. And so, they decided to deal with that. They married her off 4:00to an alter bokher, that is, an older man, unmarried bachelor. And so, the marriage took place. And the several children emerged. His father, Yosl Serebrenik, was a cattle dealer. And also very religious. And my father tells me that his father was very myopic, so that he w-- his father was very observant. And my father had to go with him to shul every day, because his father needed somebody to guide him through the prayer book. And it's something that he hated, 5:00because what he would prefer to have done was to roam the prairie, the plains of the Ukraine, and to swim in the Desna. But perforce he had to go along with his father, whose life came to a sudden end. He had a prize bull that he would bring to the neighbor peasants to breed their cows. And this one time, the bull somehow got loose from its holdings and charged him, and my grandfather, being so myopic, didn't see the rush until it was too late, and the -- he was 6:00instantly killed by the bull's attack. My father tells me that his father's body was brought by the neighbor peasants. They put him on a door, they had no stretcher. And they delivered him to the house. So, that had a very powerful effect on my father's life.

CW:He was ten at the time, right? Ten years old?

JE:Yeah, about ten or eleven. I'm not sure, exactly. I think ten. And for a while, his mother was able to get a little bit of financial income. She was a very, very enterprising person. My father describes how she would go to the 7:00market and sell her chickens or -- or chicken fat. And she had a way of demonstrating their quality by evoking them in very eloquent ways, and holding the chicken over her head, and calling attention to herself. She had another very interesting avenue of income. On Saturday nights, she would dress up as a gypsy, putting a scarf over her head, and she had some kind of a crystal ball. And she would offer to tell the young neighbor peasant girls their fortune, especially their prospects in romance. And she would read their palms and tell 8:00their fortunes that way. And then, she would offer them an aphrodisiac, little paper packets that she would tell them, "Slip this into your boyfriend's tea when he isn't looking and he'll fall in love with you." The packets had sugar. And my father helped his mother assemble the little packets over the -- in advance. So, he had a very vivid picture of the power of words from his mother's example. And then, there was another example. His mother's father, the senior Wilenchik -- no, no, I'm sorry. I got that wrong. His paternal grandfather Yosl 9:00Serebrenik, had been a teacher in the kheyder [traditional religious school]. And he lost his job because he was that rarity, a yid shiker, a Jew drunkard. So, what he did instead of having that gig -- he wrote stories for the Jewish women, who of course didn't learn Hebrew. He wrote them in Yiddish, little fairy tales, little romances, mayselekh. And so, my father had a heritage of the power of language that evidently gave him the seed for what he later became. But the effect of my father's orphan state had the following difficult result. His 10:00mother came to him after some weeks, and she said to him, "Orkeh, I can't feed all of you. I'm going to have to send you off to work." And my father had no choice. So, she sent him to be an apprentice to a shnayder, a tailor. And my father had just one item to take with him, a kishele, a little cushion for him to sleep on. So, when he arrived at the tailor shop, they immediately set about teaching him how to be a tailor. And the tailor was very unhappy because my 11:00father was left-handed. And he said to my father, "You have to learn to use your right hand, or you won't become a tailor." So, what he did, he took thread and tied his left hand up so that he couldn't open the hand, and he was forced to use his right hand. And my father found this very distressing, being of course a spirited young kid, and just not welcoming this kind of attack on his life. So, after -- I don't know how long, a week or two, he decided he'd had enough. And he took off in the middle of the night, taking with him the kishele. And he returned to his mother's home. And she understood his discomfiture, and she 12:00said, "Well, okay, I'm going to send you off," and this time she sent him to be an apprentice cigarette maker. And that was in the days before Duke m-- you know, invented the cigarette machine. And the way cigarettes were made in those days was: there was a roomful of young girls, and they would take these cylinders of preglued paper and fill them quickly with loose tobacco. They could do maybe a dozen or two in a minute. But in the course of doing that, a lot of 13:00tobacco got spread onto the floor. And my father's job was first of all, to get up early and start the -- the fire in the fireplace, and then to do errands, and to sweep the floor of the tobacco, which he called "makhorke [inferior tobacco]." And it was very, very potent. So, the effect was that he became addicted to smoking. And he had this experience of being the only male in a room full of young girls who had no avenue to express their feelings except perhaps to make his life miserable, so that they had all kinds of devices to tease him and make his life unlivable. So, after a while -- I don't know how long -- he 14:00said to himself, "That's enough," and he took his little kishele and walked whatever number of miles it was back home. This time, his mother was not so very welcoming. And she said, "This time, you're going to learn to be a carpenter." And then, handing him back the kishele, she said to him, "Orkeh, kum nit tsurik -- don't come back." So with that, off he went to become a carpenter, which was the -- the vocation that he had to live with the rest of his life. And that apprenticeship lasted -- I think it was five years. And he filled the 15:00apprenticeship and learned to become a superb craftsman. And this was of course in the days before power tools -- and he also had the experience of taking a tree and cutting it up into lumber, which involved his being one end of a two-handed long saw. And that resulted in a long, long experience of suffering, because the older men would take delight in pushing their end of the saw -- his end of the saw into his chest. And he had a permanent abrasion that he was 16:00living with all the rest of his life from those many, many times. He told me not too much about the apprenticeship except that there was an expectation of a visit from the tsar to whatever the community was, and that he had to spend weeks cutting up little pieces for some kind of a wooden gate in honor, you know, to welcome the tsar, and the tsar never showed up. So, the pieces were all done. At any rate, he finished the apprenticeship and returned home, at which point he discovered that his family had arranged to send him to the United 17:00States. Now, in those days there was a kind of widespread phenomenon of the older -- eldest son being sent off to America, with the hope that the son would prosper and earn enough to enable him to have the rest of the family come. As a matter of fact, my mother's family was an example of that. My mother's family, the Friedlands, had an older son named Jake who was a very enterprising man. And he was able to bring all of the Friedlands, his parents and his five siblings, to the United States, where they settled in Milwaukee. But that's sort of off 18:00the track of what we're talking about.

CW:Can I interrupt you for one sec?

JE:Yeah.

CW:Can we look at the photograph of the grandparents?

JE:Yes. Yeah. Now --

CW:If you'd just hold it up in front of you.

JE:Yeah. Now this is his mother. And that man is his -- her second husband. I don't know exactly who these other people are there. Evidently in-laws. But you can see that Tzivia has -- evokes the kind of person that she was. And I never, of course, knew anything about his siblings except I have this one picture that shows his brother and two sisters. There was another picture that I somehow lost 19:00that showed his brother and one of the sisters in a military uniform during the Second World War. My knowledge of how my mother -- my grandmother died is that one day when I was home, my father was reading a letter he'd gotten from his family in Russia. It was in Russian. And he told me that it said to him that he would never see his mother again, potomushto umerla -- because she died. The way she died was that the regime, in anticipation of the arrival of the Germans had moved a whole lot of Jews in the Chernigov area onto -- train that would go to 20:00Siberia or to some part in the eastern part of -- Soviet, and that his mother had died on the train because she was old and fragile.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:So we were -- can we pick up, as he's --

JE:Yes.

CW:-- heading to the goldene medine [America, lit. "golden land"], right?

JE:Yes. So, the family had arranged for his transportation to the United States. And so, there was a carriage ride to the train, and then the train all across the continent to Antwerp, Belgium. And there was a ship. I think it was called the "Vaterland," as a matter of fact. And so, it was a long journey. The only 21:00possession that he took with him was a large wheel of cheese for him to eat on the way. But it became his one way of having a connection with his home. So, he didn't eat it. And all across the journey across Europe, it stayed whole. When he got to the harbor, he found out that the ship wasn't ready for some reason or other. So, he had to wait a week or maybe two before boarding. And all that time, he still had the cheese. He got onto the boat in steerage, and from all the descriptions of what those ships were like, it was the hold in which there 22:00were no separate rooms. It was just a mass, crowded mass of Jewish immigrants. My father had the cheese with him, and bit by bit, the ship went through the North Sea. Then, you know, into the Atlantic. And it was on the Atlantic for several days when my father had a visit from a committee of older Jews, and they looked down at him, and they said to him, Either the cheese goes into the ocean or you will go into the ocean. So, the cheese, which had become redolent, went into the ocean. And my father didn't get thrown into the Atlantic Sea.

CW:Luckily for you.

JE:Yes. So, when he arrived -- and I don't know what city. It may have been B-- I think it was Boston. I don't know. At any rate, waiting for him at the dock was not the uncle that he had been told would be there. His mother's brother, his uncle, had died. So, instead of that uncle, he was greeted by the brother of the widow. And they took him into their household -- not to the house of his dead uncle, because there was a widow there with several small children, the 24:00very image of what he had himself encountered. So, he was there with a non-blood relative and the relationship didn't go well. They found him a job working as a carpenter, I think in a factory that made furniture or something. Incidentally, in order to work at his craft, his uncle brought him to the carpenters' union where my father says he was facing the union official who looked down at him from a tall height, tall young Irishman, and his -- he remembers that the man asked him, "Sonny, what's your name?" And my father said, "Orkeh Serebrenik." 25:00And the man said, "How do you spell that?" And my father's uncle took him aside and said, "Orkele, you have to get an American name." So, my father said, "All right." So, he came back to the official, union official, and he said, "My name is Artur." That was in honor of Artur Rubinstein. And then, the last name he took was Solomon, for the wisest man who ever lived, which is an indication of my father's poetic way of thinking about things. So, he became as a member of the carpenters' union, which he became all of his -- the rest of his life, he 26:00was Art Solomon. They called him Arthur Solomon. And that's the name that he was using in his young experience in the United States. The household that he found himself in was not hospitable. And he compounded their alienation by doing something very thoughtless. The pay that he got -- they expected him to bring it home to their household. And instead he bought some new clothes, which didn't go well. And it accelerated so that my father, being young and temperamental, had a 27:00romance with another Jewish immigrant, a young woman. And they got married. And that marriage didn't go well -- partly because they were both very young, temperamental, and emotionally not ready for a real marriage. And the marriage stopped with the elopement of his bride. Her name was Feygl -- little bird -- and like a little bird, she flew. And somehow or other, my father gave me to understand that she flew with a circus acrobat. I don't know if that's true or 28:00not. But she disappeared, and with that shock, my father reacted by becoming a wanderer. He hooked up with another Jewish carpenter immigrant whose name I don't know, never knew. But what they did was they roamed the eastern part of the United States. And they got into going on the freight trains, riding the rails, at a time when it wasn't as fashionable as it did become in the '30s. So, they went to a number of different places. And it stopped with their ending up in the freight yard of the Montreal depot. And they were spotted jumping off one 29:00of the freight tr-- freight cars by a security guard who shot at them. And they managed to get away. But that put an end to their roaming. And my father says that somehow or other, he ended up in Buffalo. And the story he tells me about that is that he was in a saloon, very -- lot of drunken people. And he got into a fight with another man who came at him aggressively. And my father was told in one ear, "Be careful, this man's a boxing champion." My father didn't know the 30:00John L. Sullivan technique. So, what he did was, he rushed to the man and gripped him very tightly. My father had enormously long arms, and -- disproportionately long -- and he was very muscular from a lifetime of working as a carpenter. So, he was able to squeeze this opponent so tightly that the man couldn't breathe, and collapsed. And all the onlookers were so impressed that one of them said, "You ought to become a professional fighter," and my father said, "No." He walked out of the saloon, and that was the end of that. And what he did then was become in the true sense of the word literally a journeyman, 31:00that is, a day laborer. And what he would do is he would get to some city, like one of the cities he mentioned was Wheeling, West Virginia, or McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. These are names that he mentioned. There may have been others. And what he would do was he would work for a week or two, take the money, get himself a room, and spend days and days and days reading Yiddish and English. And that was where he became aware of wanting to become a poet. And he tells me that he was especially moved by the poetry of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, whose very sweetly melancholy, witty, and brilliant poetry spoke to him in such a way that 32:00he said to himself, I maybe can do this too. So, his wanderings continued. And somehow or other, he ended up in Canton, Ohio, where there was a small community of intellectual Jewish -- Polish Jews. And he found himself very much taken with the group, especially -- I guess there was a young woman, who saw one of his poems and said to him, "I want to translate this into Polish." And he said, "Okay." So, she got it printed in Polish in the community Polish-Jewish 33:00newspaper. It was -- I don't -- never saw the poem. But he said it was "Di forn fun gloybn [The journey of belief]." And he was delighted by not only having the poem printed, but that they all said, This is good. So, he had written a few other poems, and he took it unto himself to send them to a Yiddish newspaper in Detroit, "Der Veg." He sent off a couple of the poems, and to his delight, they were printed. So, he sent them another. And this time, the poem was accompanied by a little editorial note, which said, "We are printing for the second time the 34:00words of what we think is a new star, a new Yiddish star. And we can only wonder if this is a star that will continue to shine or whether it'll be a rocket that just flares up and then falls to earth." So, he said to himself, That's the place that I should go.

CW:Now the -- we've talked already about two names. And he actually, at this point, was writing --

JE:Oh.

CW:-- with a third name.

JE:Yes. Yeah. Now I'm not sure exactly when this change occurred. But he decided that he needed to have a pen name. In those days, all of the Yiddish writers had pen names. And of course, there was the Russian poet Yesenin. And my father took 35:00a first name of Alter. And there -- the tradition behind that: among the Ashkenaz Jews, if the angel of death, the melekh-amoves, had paid a visit to the family when the father was young, still young, they would rename the eldest son Alter, the old one, as a signal to the angel of death that he's already visited the family, and let them alone for a while. Then for the last name, he took some of the consonants of Solomon and ended up with Esselin, which was euphonious, and had a nice clang sound to Yesenin, you know, who was at that time a star of 36:00Russian poetry. So, that's how he became Alter Esselin. Actually, the Alter I think came before the -- because I have copies of some of the poems that he had published before any of the books. And they had the byline Artur Esselin. But so somewhere in there, the time in Detroit or maybe a little later, he became Alter.

CW:Now this was the time of -- this was in the teens, maybe.

JE:Oh, he was already -- I think in his twenties.

CW:But in the nineteen-teens, I mean.

JE:Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

CW:Does he have any memory of -- do you remember him talking at all about World War I?

JE:No. He never mentioned it. And I suppose there was the draft. But he was not a citizen and they didn't call upon him, so that he lived apart from the happenings of what was going on in the rest of the world. As a matter of fact, I think he was so self-absorbed that he didn't pay any attention to what was going on around him anyway. Except for friendships and the -- the kolegn [colleagues] -- so he stayed a while in Detroit, and savored the kind of local celebrity that he became. In fact, he told me that he would -- on the occasion of the publication of the newspaper when he would have a poem, he would deliberately 38:00sit unobserved and wait to see if anybody was reading his poem. And with an ear cocked to what they said about him. (laughs)

CW:And there's a nice story too of when he -- is this in Detroit where he goes and sleeps in the -- or is waiting in the morning?

JE:Oh, yeah. When he went from Canton, Ohio to Detroit, he was so exuberant about what the editor had printed that he didn't have any kind of formal -- he had his work clothes. So, he arrived at the office of the newspaper, early in the morning, straight from the train, and he went directly to the doorway. It was before the office had opened. So, he was sitting, waiting for somebody to 39:00arrive. And I think the first person was the office secretary or whatever, and saw this man sitting there. And she said, "Well, who are you?" And he said, "Ikh bin [I am] Esselin, the poet." "Oh," she said, "come in," and she opened the door. Or maybe it was the editor, I don't know. But at any rate they -- they greeted him warmly when he identified himself. So, he stayed in Detroit -- I don't know how long. But he realized that there was, brewing in Chicago, a bunch of kolegn. And so, he made his way to Chicago and formed friendships with Ben Sholem and with Lutzky and Shloime Schwartz and Mattes Deitch. And there may 40:00have been others. But there was a whole circle of them and he became enmeshed in that. In fact, there is a picture somewhere of him standing with Ben Sholem and Lutzky.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:He went to Chicago.

JE:Yes. And he became very involved with that group of young Yiddish writers. And then, of course, he had the experience of meeting my mother, Becky Friedland. She was one of six siblings. There were two sisters beside her and then three brothers. And they all had settled in Milwaukee. But my mother evidently was a free spirit. And so, she settled -- went to Chicago. And she was 41:00working in the garment industry. There was not as large of one as in New York, but it was substantial. And she was part of that circle of young Jewish people. The writers and so forth. I think she may have had a romance or two because she was very pretty and self-supporting. And after a while, I think she got together with my father, and as I understand it, because he was so much absorbed in writing poetry, I think she supported him from her earnings as a seamstress. And 42:00I guess it worked out pretty well for both of them because they were in love. She was maybe four years older than my father. And I think she may have gotten tired of the brief affairs that she had had. So, she fastened on my father and they were together for the rest of their lives. But they couldn't get married because my father didn't have any way of divorcing his first wife. He didn't know where she was. So, they had what in those days was not as acceptable as today. And then, something else happened. She got pregnant. That was me. So, in 43:00addition to their not being married they had this other thing, a shande, a scandal. And what they did was flee the Midwest, and they went to Los Angeles, where I was born in 1923. That coincided with my father winning the first prize of an international competition sponsored by "The Freiheit," the communist newspaper. I never saw the poem. It was evidently a long poem and was called "Proletarier." And the prize was the magnificent sum of fifty dollars. He got 44:00the check in Los Angeles and was so delighted with the award that he framed the check and mounted it on the wall, so that when Moyshe-Leyb Halpern came to visit him and found out what he had done with the check, Moyshe-Leyb went and tore the thing off the wall, broke open the frame, said to him, "Here, take this, buy some clothes, we knew that you needed the money, that's why you got the prize." I don't know if he meant it or not. But at any rate, that's how my father cashed the check. There's a passage in my book describing an encounter he had with the 45:00editor of one of the Yiddish papers in LA. I don't know if -- maybe we can dig it up. And it's in the opening there. It's a vivid picture of the kind of person my father was.

CW:I think this one here?

JE:Yes. (reading) "Esselin was then a young journeyman carpenter. He would go around with his box of tools, and even feel its weight on his young shoulders. I remember a hot day on the street in Los Angeles. That was in the year 1925. I was at the time putting out the quarterly journal 'Mayrev,' which means 'west.' 46:00Esselin had submitted two poems. Suddenly, I encountered Esselin on the street with his disarrayed shock of hair and with his box of tools on his shoulders. A tired and sweaty man, he asks if I have the galley proofs of his two poems. We stood together in the middle of the street with the long narrow strips of paper, and we read. That is, we read and we fight, the young editor for his journal and the young poet for his poem. We fight over a bitter -- over a letter and over a comma. And we didn't even notice how the sun is burning on our bare heads and how the sweat soaks us through -- both through. The letter and the comma are the 47:00issue. Esselin struggles with his literary dictator. He boils and jumps, and the heavy box of tools jumps with him like a light and unnoticed bird on his shoulders." (laughs)

CW:That's lovely. And the name of that editor is --

JE:Oh, the name is Yitzhok Hurvich.

CW:Um-hm. Nice. Thank you. I can take that back. So then you, as a young child with your parents, went to Milwaukee.

JE:I'm a toddler. Yes.

CW:Yeah.

JE:Yeah. In fact, there's a picture of me on the lawn somewhere wandering about the water sprayer. And they stayed in Los Angeles -- I guess for long enough for the scandal to somewhat diminish -- or, at least, their anxiety over it. So, 48:00they found their way back to Chicago for a brief period. I think I was maybe three. My mother says that on the train trip back to Chicago, the train stopped in Needles, Arizona and I was very, very unhappy by the heat. And she described to me how difficult it was to get me to quiet down. As a matter of fact, from what my father says, I was a very, very crying child. And that one time, he remembers that I was lying in my crib after a long -- doing a long, long spell 49:00of crying. And my father had one of his colleagues with him. And my father remembers saying to him, "Vos vil er [What does he want]?" And his colleague said, "Well, he wants to eat you up." So, my memory of my infancy is one that I wasn't all that welcomed -- or happy with. So, they got back to Chicago. And I guess my mother wanted to be back with her Friedland family in Milwaukee. So, sometime in 1927, they settled in a flat in Milwaukee. And I remember that it was actually not much more than one room. There was a bedroom and a very small 50:00kitchen attached. We were on the ground floor of a home owned by a family called Goldwasser. And as a matter of fact, we only had access to the toilet in their living quarters. I remember that the tenant on the second floor was a German family -- immigrants from Germany, and not Jewish. And I remember that I was friendly with the daughter of that household. She was maybe a year or two older than me. And we would play in the backyard. And I remember one time, she said to 51:00me, "Your family stinks." And I didn't know what to make of it. I didn't quite understand what she meant. So, I remember telling that to my father. And he said, "Well, just ignore it." Of course, that German family was very hostile to Jews even though they were living as part of a Jewish world. My mother's sister, my aunt, lived across the street. So, I was often there. But the household was very tiny, and we moved to a somewhat larger flat about a mile away. Still, not all that large. And our household was increased by the arrival of my brother, 52:00Yankl, who was a victim of Down syndrome. I had no awareness of what that was for years. But I would play with him and eventually, of course, he was institutionalized. So --

CW:So, I'd like to take a little moment to ask you some questions just to -- I know that we're going to look at photographs.

JE:Right.

CW:But I'd like to ask you to describe your father.

JE:Yes.

CW:What did he -- what did he look like, first of all?

JE:Well, he wasn't tall. He was, I think, five-seven, maybe five-feet-eight. But he was enormously strong. And of course, he had a very handsome face and a shock of brown hair that for the most part was uncombed. He was very strong but very 53:00gentle. And he had a kind of a whole bunch of paradoxes. For one thing, he was deeply religious but because of his unfortunate experience with the observation, the observances of Judaism, he was not ever at the synagogue. But he had a very, very deep knowledge of not only Yiddish, but Hebrew. And he also was very widely 54:00read in English as well. One of the things that I remember vividly about him is that he would be reading, and he would do what people are told not to do -- he would pronounce every word as he read, so that he read slowly, and there was a constant audible output. You know -- and he was left-handed. And he wrote in a way that I think is unique. He would put the pen into these two fingers of his left hand. And he would write in a way that you could read what he had written. It was as if it was engraved. He was very, very meticulous in his penmanship. And of course, when he wrote he would constantly revise, so that after a spell 55:00of writing, he would have a stack of rejected versions. And he was so meticulous that I remember one time, when I was somewhat older. We would have a ritual way of going to send a poem to a publication. And so, we would walk to the letter box and he would deposit the poem, you know, with a kind of a -- an unspoken prayer that it would be successful. And there is this story. He had sent a poem off and, in thinking about one of the lines, he decided it was wrong. So, he was 56:00so anxious about that that he sent a telegram. They, you know, didn't use the phone in that way, the way they do now. Correcting, asking for the correction. And the telegram cost him much more than the fee that he would get for the poem. Now, in his behavior he was -- again there was this paradox. He himself said that he was a recluse. That is, he sought to be alone. But on the other hand, if he was in company, he would become very. very amenable and delighted to talk. But some of the -- much of the time, the occasions were from people coming to 57:00him rather than him going out. And it worked out like that.

CW:And he said he would like this thing about the door. Can you tell --

JE:Oh yes. Yeah. It was when we were living in that first flat in Milwaukee, that one room. And I overheard him, or maybe he said it in my presence wanting me to hear it. He said to this visitor that he had one dream. And that was to have a door that he could close. And I remember in my childhood -- this is when I was five, six, seven, eight -- that I would be eager to talk with him. And you know, he would be off sitting at the writing desk. And I would come to talk. He 58:00would turn over to look down at me and say, "Hello." Not very welcoming. And I would realize that he needed to finish what he was doing. And so, I would go off and play.

CW:Can you describe his writing desk or --

JE:Well -- it was just a conventional little table, you know, that -- oh, it always was accompanied by a huge bowl for cigarette butts. As I may have mentioned, that first -- second apprenticeship, he became hopelessly addicted to cigarettes. So that all through his adulthood, he would smoke constantly. Especially when he was writing. And I would get up in the morning and see that 59:00he was still at the writing desk. He had worked perhaps a whole day, come home, and had supper, and then had sat there writing all through the night. How he did it, I have no way of understanding. He had enormous vitality.

CW:He us-- did he usually write at night?

JE:Yes. Well, I'll come back to that in a moment.

CW:Sure.

JE:I want to finish about the cigarettes.

CW:Yeah.

JE:There would be this -- he didn't have a conventional ashtray. He would have a bowl. And he would have filled it with cigarette butts. I have no way of counting, but an enormous number of cigarette butts. As a matter of fact, I remember one day he had emptied the bowl and it was a window that faced a 60:00neighbor's yard. There were black neighbors on the -- across the yard. And my father had emptied the bowlful, you know, onto the neighbor's yard. And I was overhearing the woman staring. And she said, "Oh my God, isn't that some -- how many cigarettes?" She was astounded. That addiction, by the way, continued up till the time when he was seventy. And at that time, I was living in Chicago and I would visit him on the weekends. This was after my mother had died. So, he was 61:00alone. And this one time -- I should tell you that I became a cigarette smoker when I was twenty. And so, I became -- evidently in somewhat emulation of my father, I became heavily addicted. And so, for many years I was smoking three packs a day. Enormous number. But when I was something like thirty-five, I decided that I had to quit. There were so many warnings. So, I wasn't telling my father about this. But I had gone through a process of withdrawal. So, I came up to see him -- I was about thirty-five, he was seventy, something like that. And 62:00when I went into the house, he greeted me. And he had a cigarette tucked into his ear. And I said, "Why do you have that?" He said, "That's the last cigarette I will ever touch." He said, "I've stopped." And then, I told him that I stopped too. (laughs) It was just a coincidence. We were such -- in such synchrony. At any rate -- so that resolve on his part, I'm sure, made it possible for him to live to be eighty-five. But his life was probably shortened by that lifetime of cigarette smoking. But I think that the cigarette smoking was the crutch on 63:00which he wrote poetry, because after that, he didn't write anything that he felt was worthwhile. So, you know, poets have these. I remember -- was it Shelley that was -- had to have a -- an apple that was rotting or something like that. There were all kinds of things of that sort. So, where were we? We were --

CW:I was asking. He -- did he mostly write at night or --

JE:Well, perfo-- to get back to that, sometimes he would be at work and an idea would come to him. So, he told me that sometimes he would be in the process of hanging a window frame and not having anything to write on, he would inscribe 64:00the lines on the frame. And then, he would finish the job and the frame would be intact. And he would wait till everybody'd gone back -- gone home, and he would rip open what he had done so that he could then transcribe what he'd done. And that sometimes, he would find a way to write by those portable toilets. He would sneak in there and there'd be toilet paper, and he would write on that. And there's one of his poems in which he describes himself as being on top of a roof, shingling the roof, and looking down at the people passing by. And he would say to himself, "They don't know that there's a Shelley on the roof." So, he had a whole involvement with his craftsmanship that was part of his nature. 65:00And it tied in, his craftsmanship and his poetry. They were of the same order of importance to him. As a matter of fact, he became widely known amongst the carpenters in Milwaukee that he was an excellent finisher. That is, they would employ him to put in the final touches of a room being built. And oh, yes. He had this other talent. In those days, of course, before power saws, they had these handsaws. And especially the ones used for ripping into a piece of lumber 66:00-- the --

CW:Teeth?

JE:Points on the saw would become -- not effective because they would be -- so what he was able to do, he had developed a device -- I don't know how complicated it was -- that other carpenters would bring their saws to him, and he would finish. He would correct the -- the tool. He also was expert at door hanging -- that was long before these prefabricated houses. And what would be required is -- here was a door fresh from the lumberyard. But it had to be fitted to the frame. And that needed to be perfected. So, what he would do is he 67:00had devised a set of measuring devices so that he could put the door into place temporarily, measure what needed to be planed from the surface, and take the door, finish the job. And that was a cause of a workman's injury. I would guess that the year was perhaps 1929. Something like that. And Sears Roebuck was building a store at the corner of Third and North Avenue. It was not one of these huge stores, but was like a six-story thing. And they hired him to put in 68:00the doors. As a matter of fact, the location was just about four blocks from where we were living in that small flat. And I remember one time, my mother packed a lunch. And we went to the -- there was a church on the adjoining corner. And we sat on the lawn around this church. And my father was at the window of the third or fourth story of the store. He waved to us, and he came down, and we had our lunch on that lawn. But sometime later in that same project, he had done the preliminary measurement of a door, and had turned away 69:00to pick up whatever tool it was he needed, and the door fell onto his ankle and broke it. So, he was in, you know, in a cast for some weeks after that as payment for his meticulousness.

CW:Did you often go and observe him working or --

JE:No, no, I never did. But I have an insight as to the way he worked. I forget what the reason was, but in our flat on Tenth Street -- it was part of a four-flat house. And there was a basement where the furnace -- coal furnaces. And he had a little workshop there. And for some reason, I was down there while 70:00he was sawing a piece of lumber. And I watched him as he sawed away. And he did it with such an intensity, with a scowl on his face, and with a feverish use of -- so when he finished that particular cut I said, "Pa there's -- you know, why are you working so hard?" And he looked up at me and he said, "The foreman is always watching." For a lifetime where he had been under the scrutiny of the foreman, he had this compulsion to work with vehemence. And I have that memory of how muscular and how hardworking he must have been. I never saw him on the job.

CW:Could I ask -- I'd like to hear a little bit about the home that you grew up in. What was sort of the culture of your home?

JE:Well, they -- their household was without any kind of emotional -- my parents were so accommodating to each other that they never raised their voices, they never had arguments. My mother, I think, was in awe of my father's gift. As a matter of fact, she always called him Esselin. Not Alter, Esselin. You know, in 72:00a way that -- I still don't understand why. But my mother was not widely read. But she had a reverence for learning of the kind that my father had. And also, she was aware of how recognized he was by those who knew of his work, so that I can remember just one argument with their voices raised. And that was when we had left that one room on Meinecke to move to an interim flat. It was without any windows that showed the sunlight. And it was a dark pl-- and I was perhaps 73:00seven. And there was some kind of an argument, the only argument I remember. But it caused my mother to say that she was leaving. And I remember him saying something, "What will you do?" And she held up a scissors. She said, "Kh'hob di sherelekh [I have the scissors]." She said, "I can be a seamstress." And I was sitting there in surprise because they never argued. But she had her hand on the door and he went to her and he embraced her and that was the end of the argument, whatever it was about. So, I remember another thing that they 74:00quarreled about in a very different way. He had -- this was when we lived on Tenth Street. He had unknown to her bought a washing machine. It was not one of the modern ones. It was a -- had electr-- it had an agitator. And on top, there was the thing, the wringer. And he had it delivered. I guess it was from Sears. And she had no expectation of it. And she protested that he had spent this money. You know, and he said, "No, no," he said, "I'm tired of seeing you hand-washing, you know, on the washboard." She had been washing our clothes manually all these years. And he said, "It's long enough." And so, that didn't 75:00cause any kind of --

CW:So, what languages did you speak at home?

JE:Oh. Our household was Yiddish-speaking. And that brings to mind something embarrassing about myself. The first language that I spoke was Yiddish. And as I started school, I began to use English. But my parents spoke to me in Yiddish and I would answer in English. Now, in thinking about that, as I have through the years, my father had the notion that if I continued to be fluent in Yiddish 76:00that would somehow imprison me in the kind of life that he had led. And he was eager for me to become successful in this New World. So, he didn't do anything to encourage my fluency in Yiddish. And that must have been because of his misunderstanding of the value of having the -- I can't explain it. But I was influenced by his not wanting me to be fluent in Yiddish. So, when I came back to realizing what a treasure he represented, I was in my fifties. But it was not 77:00too late, so that I was able to do something in relation to what he had been doing.

CW:I do want to talk more about your translation. But not quite yet.

JE:Okay.

CW:Were there -- you mentioned how Moyshe-Leyb visited your parents in Los Angeles.

JE:Yes.

CW:Were there often visitors to the home?

JE:There were, yes. There was one time I remember when we were living on Tenth Street. I was then maybe twelve. My father was in the kitchen. And so, when there was a knock at the door I was the one who answered it. And there stood this tall gray-haired man. And he said, "Voynt do der dikhter Alter Esselin [The writer Alter Esselin lives here]." And it was Leivick. And he had been on his 78:00way back from the sanitarium in Colorado and he had made a trip to Milwaukee, got off the train and went back to Milwaukee, just to spend -- well, I called my father, and the two men were together for hours. And I -- they didn't want me to be there, I guess. So, I stayed out of the thing. There was a time when we would have visits from various writers. Malka Tussman for a while lived in Milwaukee. She was a teacher at one of the schools. And she would come very often to our --

CW:Can you -- can you describe her?

JE:Yes. She was witty and full of -- I don't know how to explain it. But -- 79:00jollity. Somehow or other in conversation with her, I mentioned that I had this little bulge at the tip of my tongue. And to my surprise, she said, "I have that too." And she stuck out her tongue and it was (laughs) -- so, there were visits from -- oh, well, there was a whole thing that -- sometime along the Yiddish writers in Chicago had decided to produce an antologye [anthology]. And for some reason -- I don't know exactly why, they used our house in Milwaukee as a kind of a central place because they had to pick which poems and all that. So, there 80:00was a period of several days in which they were in command of the house. They were arguing and -- I stayed away from listening, because it was too arcane for me. But they finally settled. And the antologye got published. I have somewhere a copy of it in some tatters. But --

CW:Well, you mentioned that later you came to realize the value. As a child, what was your attitude towards having this Yiddish poet as a father?

JE:Well, he would be writing and I would wake up and he would have finished a 81:00poem. And he would read it to me. And I would say, "It's wonderful." And he would say, "You always say that." And I'd say, "It's always true." But -- I'm trying to understand my lack of interest. You know, each book got published. He had the three. And there was always, you know, his involvement in it. But he didn't share it with me. Except occasionally -- in his second collection, there was a poem called, "When the Apples Fall." And he said to me -- he said, "I 82:00wrote that at the printer's." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, the printer showed me that there was a blank page. And he said, 'Do you have a poem that we can put there?'" So, he said, "Okay." And he sat down and he wrote that poem. And so, it's one of the ones that a lot of people like very much, but he wrote it just spontaneously because he had to fill that page. But, you know, I have a vivid memory of the poem "Ai-le-lu" which is addressed to me, to Yosl. And I remember that I recited it from memory when I was four in a white sailor 83:00suit at the Sholem Aleichem Folkshul. And I can remember that they were delighted. I can recite that poem even now, even though it's eighty-five years ago.

CW:Please do, if you can.

JE:Pardon?

CW:Please do.

JE:Okay. Ai-le-lu. Unter dayn vigele shteyt nisht kayn vays tsigele,/dayn tate iz nisht mit rozhinkes handlen geforn: Nor tsvelfn gorn palatsn boyt er./Palatsn boyt er in a fremdn gegnt./Ai-le-lu./Mid, shvaygendik kumt dayn tate tsurik ven di nakht falt tsu un der himl brent./Shpreyt er oys tsu dir zayne shtayfe hent/un kisht dikh af di hentelekh,/dayne hentelekh./Ai-le-lu./Un er bringt dir a mentshele, a gumenes,/vus mit a drey ken es loyfn, tantsn,/ vet es oyszen vi 84:00der tendler fun di oremhoyfn/vos dershpreyt troyer oyf di shtign,/troyer oyf di shtign./Ai-le-lu./Un nokhn ovnbreyt, a lidele er zingt far dir/un a maysele dertseylt vegn a shvartsn ber/ver loyert oyf di vanderer in mitn vald,/in mitn mitn vald./Ai-le-lu. Ai-le-lu. [Under your little crib there stands no little white kid,/And your father has not gone to sell raisins at the fair,/But with a saw and a hammer on the twelfth story somewhere/He builds palaces for strangers,/Palaces for strangers,/Ai-le-lu./Weary and silent, your father comes home with the setting sun./As night falls the sky is filled with burning brands/He stretches forth his work stiffened hands/And kisses your tiny fingers,/Your tiny fingers,/Ai-le-lu./And be brings you a manikin, all pale and rubbery;/You give it a turn and it will leap and run--/It looks like the old clothes man of the slum/Who spreads sorrow on the stairs,/Sorrow on the stairs./Ai-le-lu./After supper your father sings a little song to you/And then tells you a tale about the ferocious bear/Who lurks in the woods and stalks the wanderer/Going through the woods,/The wild, wild woods,/Ai-le-lu.] And of course, the poem's first line is a deliberate reference to the Goldfaden "Rozhinkes un mandlen [Raisins and almonds]." In other words, "Your father is destined not to be a merchant but a workman." And there's no mention of what he 85:00expects for me. Except, of course, when I talked with him about that poem sometime later, and also in relation to his other poems that have a dark side to them, and I said, "Why? Your poems have all this darkness to them." And he said, "Well," he said, "first of all, with regard to the lullaby, it's important for the child to know that there's a dangerous world out there." And he said, "Secondly, even more important," is that when he began to write poetry he asked himself, What is the point of what I'm doing? And his answer was that he deliberately chose to deal with subjects, themes, that are dark, things that are 86:00frightening, in order to confront them and by means of the power of his craft to defy them, to survive them. And I think that that's true. He was very much aware of what he was up to.

CW:Yeah. Now, we -- was there -- you mentioned you weren't religious at home. Did you celebrate any of the holidays in your family?

JE:Our family did not. My aunt, Jenny, was -- had a household in which the zeyde 87:00[grandfather] lived. And he was not simply religious, he was obsessive. He had the white hair and the clothes of the Orthodox. And as I remember him, he was nearly blind and also almost totally deaf. And I can recall because he was living with my aunt just two houses away. And so, I would see him walking to whichever synagogue he had currently been going to. And in order to cross the street, he would raise his white and red cane as a kind of a torch, and just 88:00charge across, even though there might be cars coming. And he conducted seders at my aunt's house. So, I remember having to sit through this seder in which they recited all of the Haggadah in -- in Hebrew -- not the Haggadah. You know what I mean, the -- and I remember that we sipped a little wine and I got very drunk on just a little glassful. Now, that was when I was maybe six. So, those were the only observances that I remember. My father never went to synagogue and I was not bar mitzvahed, because he chose not to have me do that. And as a 89:00matter of fact, for a few years I went to the Sholem Aleichem Yiddish school. But it didn't -- he didn't encourage it, so that I stopped. And I had no religious training at all. As a matter of fact, I was an atheist without knowing I was an atheist. I didn't have the word. But I didn't have any sense of a divine at all.

CW:Yeah.

JE:So, my Jewishness is because I grew up Jewish. I can't escape that. I don't want to. But it's a Jewishness of a very secular sort.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:Foreman is always watching. I talked about the injury at Sears. I have a couple of other things about his -- well, I don't know. There's an anecdote about when he arrived at the nursing home. And -- are we talking now?

CW:Sure.

JE:Yeah. The nursing home that he came to in Milwaukee was -- splendid place. Sponsored by the Jewish community with -- equipped with all kinds of services, medical and various other -- social work, as well. And when my father got there, he was then in his eighties. And the social worker came to welcome him, just, 91:00you know, gotten settled a little bit. And she said to him, "I notice you're -- been a carpenter. I want you to know that we have in the basement a complete workshop with all the tools you could ever want." And he said, "Well, that's very interesting. But I'll only do it at union scale." (laughs) And of course, what there was was a way in which he looked upon his craft as not being a hobby but rather a vocation.

CW:Right.

JE:And that -- the social worker didn't understand his connection with the thing.

CW:Right. Now you -- you mentioned this a little bit before. But was there -- 92:00did you get a sense of your father's political outlook?

JE:Yes. It was very complicated. Now, there's something really mystifying to me. There's an article that appeared in the Jewish -- the "Chronicle" or something like that. It was written by my father's friend Howard Weinshel. And in that article, Weinshel says that my father, after his apprenticeship in Ukraine, had become active politically and was briefly imprisoned and then released. Now, I have no memory of my father ever having mentioned that. To the contrary, I had a 93:00youth and adolescence and young adulthood that was immersed in political enthusiasm, because I was a friend of Bill Letwin, who was the son of the Letwins -- my parents were friends with. Bill Letwin was a member of the Communist Youth Organization, CYO. And I became a member very briefly until the 1939 Soviet-Nazi pact, and I couldn't go along with that. And I became a Trotskyite. And then, I became a member -- oh, no, no. It was the other way 94:00around. At some point, I became a member of the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir and was enthusiastic for a while and then left. All through these various enthusiasms, my father looked on with a very amused and skeptical notion. And I remember we had a conversation once about how, you know, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir was going to be a halutz [Hebrew: pioneer], and, you know, and he said to me, he said, "Yosl, think about a cat at the gap in a fence, and is about to walk in through that gap. And think about how the cat uses its whiskers to make sure that there's 95:00room enough to go through." He said, "You should always remember how careful the cat is before it goes into there." And as further evidence of his skepticism about politics, the Letwins were very, very devoted to the Soviet homeland. In fact, they were proud of their maintaining their fluency in Russian. And I remember when my father would go to their home to play poker for pennies. Because they had no way of having somebody watch over me, they would take me 96:00with them. So, I would be sitting on the floor amidst all this hullabaloo going on and there would be arguments. One of them was about whether Yiddish had a future. And my father would say no, it was destined to fail. And the other was the wonders of the Soviet rebirth. And how it was the prospect of utopia, and there was Birobidzhan, the colony of, you know, the -- and all that. And my father would say, "Look at you. You're bourgeois. You're shopkeepers. And I am the proletarian. And you're worried about the fate of my class? Don't. Don't 97:00worry about it. We don't need you. We don't need your ideals." And there's an irony about all this, because Bill Letwin went on to study economics at the University of Chicago, where I went a little -- a year or two later. And Bill Letwin became an acolyte of the University of Chicago free market. And he went on to get a PhD. Then, he went on to teach at MIT and from there he went to the London School of Economics, where he became a professor. And he had a son, Oliver Letwin, who became a Conservative member of Parliament, and as a matter of fact, was part of the brains of Margaret Thatcher's little cabinet. As a 98:00matter of fact, he had initiated a form of tax code in municipalities that resulted eventually in Thatcher losing the premiership. So, there's a -- an evolution there of, you know, different paths that come from the same kind of source.

CW:Right.

JE:It astonishes me.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Were there many books in your home?

JE:There weren't many, but there were a lot of his Yiddish. As a matter of fact, over in the corner I have a cache of part of his library. I -- I sent years ago -- a large number of them to the Yiddish Book Center. But these, I've been 99:00holding back. They have inscriptions from the various authors. Salutations to my father. Sutzkever, there are three books by him signed. Tabatchnik, Melech Ravitch, Rolnick, and so forth. So, I'm going to be sending them to the Yiddish Book Center. But, there weren't many books. But we were living just a block or two from a public library. And I would be there each week shlepping home four or five books which I would read through the -- I -- I was very bookish. I remember that my father was entranced by the English translation of "Crime and 100:00Punishment" and that he would be walking around the flat with the book, not wanting to let go of it. He'd be reading it, you know, with that pronunciation of every word. And I don't remember asking him if I could read it. But I think he said I should read it. I was twelve. And my mother said, "Oh no, not that book, it's too -- too terrible a book to read for a kid." And my father said, "Nonsense." And of course, I found it fascinating. I remember that -- I was in eighth grade. I was in junior high. And we had to do a book report. And so, I got up and announced that I was going to talk about "Crime and Punishment." And 101:00Miss Bourne in the back of the room said, "Oh, is that a sociology textbook?" I said, "No, no, it's Dostoyevsky." I couldn't imagine her not knowing what the reference was. So, I went on to describe "Crime and Punishment." And both my father and I talked at length about one passage in which the young kid Raskolnikov is remembering walking with his father in the downtown of -- I guess it's Moscow. And that they stopped because there was a peddler who was infuriated by his elderly horse having fallen to the ground in the harness. And 102:00the peddler was whipping, whipping the horse that couldn't -- didn't even have the strength to get up. And that Raskolnikov says to his father, "Why is he doing that? Isn't that cruel?" And the father said, "No, we c-- we have to go on." And so, that passage, I remember my father and I reading it together, you know. And saying that that is such a powerful picture of what led to Raskolnikov's doing what he did, you know, when he killed the pawnbroker. So -- 103:00there were books in our household but we weren't -- we weren't in literary -- in a literary world as such because Milwaukee didn't have the kind of -- or at least we didn't have access to what I'm sure was going on amongst other intellectuals. So we were a kind of a self -- self-limiting literary couple.

CW:Can you -- can you describe Milwaukee, I guess in the '30s it would have been? What -- what was it like?

JE:Yes. Th-- that's fascinating. There were something like twenty-five thousand Jews in Milwaukee, which was, you know, a small fraction of the -- it was of course largely immigrants from Poland and Germany, non-Jewish. The Milwaukee 104:00Jewish community was somewhat the result of the reaction of the people who were of German Jewish origin in New York who were confronted by this influx of eastern -- of Ashkenazi Jews, and felt that their status was threatened by these aliens, these less respectable, bearded (laughs) rabble. And what they did was they had a conscious effort to get as many of these immigrants into the center and the south and the west of the United States. So, there was a lot of subsidy 105:00of immigrants being funneled to Milwaukee. And what is interesting about it is that that small number of people had a community that was extraordinary. My father had all of the three books that he had published were all subsidized by the Milwaukee Jewish community. As a matter of fact, very specifically by the members of the Perhift, the Peretz Hirshbein Theatre Group, of which Howard Weinshel was a very prominent leader. And so that -- he had this community there 106:00that somehow or other, of those who were literate in Yiddish and understood it, they somehow realized that he was an extraordinarily gifted member of the community. So, even though they were small, they were very, very effective. And there are pictures that will show that. And they would visit, Weinshel and, oh, a number of the other people. Names escape me. There's one rather poignant anecdote in relation to that. Sometime in the '50s, a committee of the smetene, 107:00the crème of the Jewish world sent a committee to erets yisroel [the land of Israel] to be shepherded around. Because they were large contributors to the Zionist cause. And they got the royal treatment. There was Weingrod, who was a jeweler, and the Komisars, who were, I don't know, had some kind of financial thing. And there were a number of others. Half a dozen. And according to what my father tells me, what happened was that as part of this very royal visit they were shepherded into the office of Zalman Shazar, who was then the president -- 108:00or the pr-- no, the president. And as they walked in, Shazar looked at them and said, "Oh. I see that you're from the town of --" and they all expected him to say Golda Meir, because she was -- she grew up in Milwaukee. And instead, they heard him say Alter Esselin. And they were taken aback. They knew of Alter Esselin but they -- in a very nonliterary way. And what they didn't know is that Zalman Shazar was a Yiddishist, that he wrote poetry in Yiddish, and that he corresponded with my father. So, when they came back, they -- I don't know how they demonstrated their new respect for him. But it was quite clear that they 109:00had been surprised.

CW:Yeah. Maybe you can -- before we get into reading some of the poetry --

JE:Yeah.

CW:Could you describe as you do in some of your writings the main themes of his work for someone who hasn't read his work?

JE:Yes. Well, the themes are -- loneliness, guilty conscience, the tribulations of being a craftsman. He has a poem, "To the gekreytsiktn [one on the cross]," in which he compares himself to another Jewish carpenter. He has poems addressed to God, begging him not to reject the pleas of those who have suffered. He has a poem about death in which he describes death as not being the hostile creature, 110:00but rather the one who tweaks the noses of the victors and brings the homeless home. He has a poem, much inspired by "Thanatopsis," in which his view of confronting death --

CW:What about his -- what about the style, the rhythm, and the rhyming?

JE:Yes. Well, he was a craftsman. And so, many of his poems are deliberate use of the traditional A-B-A-B or other kinds of rhymes. There are some that are somewhat free verse. But all of them are very disciplined. And -- oh, and 111:00another thing about his poetry. He was a nature poet. He has a poem about a tomcat. He has poems about a bull being lost in the snow. He has a poem, of course, the "Elegy for a Tree." Now, I ascribe that to his memory of his childhood, which was evidently -- just enriched by the -- the rural -- the -- the endless plains. As a matter of fact, here is something I just remembered. He had -- I was living in Chicago. He was in Milwaukee. And I was not able to see him on a daily -- I would -- after my mother died, I would get there for 112:00weekends, sometimes twice a month, sometimes three or, you know, almost every weekend. So, I w-- and of course, on the phone I was constantly in touch with him, especially when we were collaborating on the translations. And one time I got a phone call from a neighbor. Oh, no, no. What happened was I tried to call him and over a period of like a day or two, he wasn't answering. So, I was able to get the number of a neighbor family. By then, this neighborhood, my father had bought the house in, had become very much African-American. So, the neighbor was an African-American family. And I got their number and I spoke to a young 113:00woman. And I said, "My father is your neighbor and I can't get hold of him." And she said, "Well, didn't you know he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance?" So, I -- so, what I did was I got on the train immediately. In those days you could get trains -- on the hour almost. You know, so I was able to get up to Milwaukee within a few hours of that phone call. And I was able to find out that he had been -- went to the county hospital. And of course, I found my way there. And there he was, comatose. They -- they had, I guess, some trouble with him, 114:00because he was wanting to get up and about. So, they had drugged him. And they let me sit beside him and I -- I was in a state of shock and bewilderment. I had with me a copy of "Partisan Review" that had printed translation of a story by Ivan Bunin, which evoked his childhood in Ukraine. So, I don't know what impulse I had, but I decided to read that to him as he lay there comatose. And somehow or other, I don't remember the story at all, but it described the landscape. 115:00Somehow or other, that -- he -- he became alert. And, you know, and just completely conscious. So, you know, th-- I don't know if that has any sense to it. But that's what I remember. His awareness of the metaphorical aspects of our universe is extraordinary. It -- he was just a born poet. Of course, there was also his devotion to the craft. And --

CW:Can you tell me about the -- you brought this up, the translation that you worked on for many years with him. What -- what inspired that?

JE:Well, I had been in analysis with a brilliant man, Ernest Rappaport. As a matter of fact, I didn't quite manage to achieve Woody Allen's length because Ernest died. But I'd been over the years, a total of twenty-two years. And in the course of the analysis, I had written plays and so forth. And we got to talking one time, Ernest and I, about my father and his poetry. And I remember, I was sitting facing him at his desk. And he said, "Why don't you translate your father's poet--" -- and up to that moment, it had never occurred to me. And I 117:00don't know why. But when he said it, I immediately realized that that's something I had to do. And so, I got in touch with my -- I was calling my father almost every day. And I told him about what I wanted to do. And I said, "I need your help." And he said, "Of course." So, for the next fifteen years we worked at the translations. And I have recordings of his conversation with me about particular poems. And we had -- my translations were really a collaboration because we would discuss particular words, you know, and try to find the exact nuance, so that without his help I could never have done the fifty or so poems. 118:00Then, after he died, Howard Weinshel became a substitute parent in a way. And so, he helped me to translate another couple dozen that are not in the collection that was printed in 1969. So, go ahead.

CW:What was his reaction to this book?

JE:I can tell you that he was delighted. In fact, I have pictures of him holding the book when it was published in 1969. He was immensely pleased. As a matter of fact, one time he said that some of the translations, in his opinion, were better than the original. And I -- I don't know if that could be said to be true. But they are very faithful because he wouldn't let a careless thing go. He 119:00did let a few things go through that I now realize were mistakes. But there are very few of those.

CW:And now, we watched before the -- the television spot that was about the same time. How did that come about?

JE:Yeah. Well, it was just a combination of right circumstance. He was eighty years old. And they were going to celebrate his eightieth birthday. And they did with a gathering that -- just extraordinary. There were several hundred people at the gathering. And of course, the book got published. I got it published. It was, you know, completely my -- my own doing. And -- the design was by a -- 120:00because I had connections from my job at an insurance company, I was head of advertising, I had ways of getting the stuff done, you know. So, the designer was a Swiss designer. And I remember that -- they gave me four covers to choose from. And so, I brought them to my father. And the three of them were all pictorial. There -- there was one that showed a landscape of trees, another one that showed a man looking at the moon, a third one. But this was the only one that he wanted. He said, "I want that." The simplest, the purest, was his -- his own impulse.

CW:Are there time -- obviously when you -- during all that time, you would have 121:00been reading the poetry. But are there times now or across your life that you find yourself reading your father's poetry?

JE:Not really. And I can't explain it. Well, partly I've lost the fluency of reading Yiddish. It's a skill that -- needs work. And I don't -- I don't have the impulse to do that. And that's a failure on my part and I regret it. But --

CW:When do you think of your father now?

JE:I think of him often. I have -- I can evoke vivid memories of various of the 122:00things. He -- he's a living presence with me. And through the years, I've come more and more to realize what it was I was witnessing and at the time was oblivious. And -- I'm sorry but -- but now I can -- I can understand. Well, first of all when I think of the way he lived his life and the -- the dedication he was to what he saw -- for example, when I was in Chicago, without my being 123:00aware of it, during the war, he went to work at the construction of an army camp in northern Wisconsin. He was there for six months. My mother maintained herself all the while he was gone without complaint. And he worked there, you know, the regular time. And he lived in a little hotel or something. Then, after that, he went to work at the building of a munitions plant in Indi-- in Indiana. He was there for something like a year. Commuting back to Milwaukee every month or so. During that time, he was able -- they were able to save enough money so they were able to buy a house. And they moved into that house and then th-- their 124:00remaining -- well, my -- my mother lived to ninet-- eigh-- 19 --

CW:Sixty.

JE:Eighty. And the house had a yard with a peach tree and an apple tree. And my mother was able to do a little bit of gardening in the yard, something she'd always wanted to do. So, I have pictures of them in that house. The house was a shabby old one. Typical of that kind of vintage. And I remember that the foundation was shifting. And my father, being a carpenter, was able to put a huge turnbuckle into the basement and he would every couple of weeks pull the 125:00turnbuckle so that the house didn't collapse. (laughs)

CW:Wow. (laughs) Did your father talk to you about his Jewish identity, what was important to him?

JE:Never. No. That was such an unspoken given that -- it didn't need to be said. I mean, he was just living his particular Jewishness in a very special way. And he was a believer. He believed in God and he was on such good terms that he could write poems addressed to Him. And there are several such poems that are direct -- demands upon God. So, there's no question that he was a believing Jew. 126:00But he has another poem called "In Temple" in which he finds alien the kind of worship that, you know -- he says that you've destroyed my religion by being what you are. And so --

CW:Yeah. Well, would you like to read some poems?

JE:Yes. Yes. I would. Well, you know, there's a way in which we can hear him reciting some of the poems. And then, I can --

CW:Well, why don't we -- I can add those afterwards. It might be better if we could add the --

JE:Well, they're -- they're on my computer.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:This is a beautiful picture of my mother. I think she was in her mid-twenties. And this is a picture of me with my brother and my mother. That's Yankel in the middle.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:I want to talk about that moment.

CW:Sure. Do you want to hold it up and --

JE:Yeah.

CW:Um-hm. Okay. So, what is in this one?

JE:All right. This is on the publication of his first book, "Knoytn [Knots]." And this is a meeting at the auditorium of a large hotel in downtown. And the people in this au-- this -- at these tables are for the most part friends of my 128:00father, primarily members of the theater group Perhift, who had subsidized the printing of that collection. And here at the center, you can see me sitting on my mother's lap in a little sailor suit. The very same sailor suit that I wore when I recited "Ai-le-lu" at the -- and now I don't have other pictures to go along with this as such. But the two other volumes of his poetry, that is, the '54 one, the '37 one -- this was 1927. Then 1937 was "Unter der Last," and in '54, "Lider fun a mdbarnik." All three of those books were subsidized by the 129:00Jewish community, especially Perhift. So, it was very fortunate.

CW:Wow. Great. Are there other photos? Do you w-- you want to show?

JE:Yes. Well, there is --

CW:We looked at that one. Yeah.

JE:We looked at that one. If we can find that one of the three. Oh. Did we look at this?

CW:Yes. Yeah.

JE:Okay. Yeah.

CW:What about these guys?

JE:Now this is when he was -- late seventies. And it's in the backyard of the house that he bought at 2053 North Twenty-Third Street. He's a little bit dressed up there. I think that may have been on the seventy-fifth birthday, 130:00which had another kind of celebration. Here he is at the front door of the house that he bought. I was visiting him one weekend and I think we took a lot of pictures at that time.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:This is of a party connected with his eightieth birthday. I don't know who baked the cake or something. But that was at the Jewish Center in Milwaukee.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:The "Milwaukee Journal" printed an article about my father having won the Kovner Award. And so, he's there with -- I guess that may be the document that the Jewish Book Council sent him in honor of the award.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:That portrait was done in 1923, when my father had won the award from the "Freiheit" for his poem "Proletarier." And Todros Geller, who was a very well-regarded portrait artist, came to Los Angeles precisely to do that -- that charcoal portrait of him.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:This, of course, is the printing of that portrait. But this portrait -- alas, I've lost the original.

CW:Um-hm.

JE:That -- that's a pen-and-ink drawing which was done by a non-Jewish artist named Ribas who somehow got involved with the Yiddish world in Chicago. And my 132:00father was then living in Milwaukee, but he went to -- as he did occasionally spend a weekend in Chicago. And so, he was sitting at a table in one of the coffeehouses that was where the -- the Yiddish poets sort of centered. And Ribas did this pen-and-ink drawing of my father, and then he took the -- according to what Ribas himself told me one time when he visited in Milwaukee, he said, "I took the portrait around to various tables and I showed them to the women," and he said he asked them if they thought it was an attractive man and would they like to meet him. And some of them said yes. And so, he would point to where my 133:00father was sitting. (laughs) I'm -- I had -- the pen-and-ink drawing was not life-size, but it was, you know -- it showed he was a very good-looking man.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:I have somewhere the original photograph. But this is a reproduction in the -- the book. He was then about thirty. And you can see that he's got the carpenters' union symbol in his lapel.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:These pictures have a story to tell. This is one that has a tree in the background. And that's the tree that is memorialized in his "Elegy for a Tree." It isn't the same tree, but it's sort of the basis of the metaphor. And this is 134:00-- he's standing in front of the apple tree, or the peach tree, in the backyard of his house at 2053.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:Yeah. This is another newspaper article in connection with the Kovner Award. And it shows the -- the photographer had him show that he's a carpenter there. And this is a very -- typical way in which he would sit and write. So, you get an idea of what he worked at.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:You could hold up that whole sheet if you want.

JE:Pardon.

CW:You want to look -- we looked at this one but that one is --

JE:Yeah. This one is kind of interesting because these are a group of people. 135:00This center one is Malka Tussman. There's my father. This is Mordecai Melrud, a Yiddish teacher. This one is -- a jeweler. One of the -- the people that went on the trip to Israel. You notice something I think is interesting. All of the others are wearing suits and formal. My father is without a jacket and without a tie. (laughs) So, you can see how he --

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:I'm sure that this was on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. I don't know how it came about that it was a color photograph, but you can see he's -- he died five years later. And this was just before he began to show some signs 136:00of dementia. So, he was still alert.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE: This shows him to have been a stunningly handsome man. I don't know when it was taken or where or how old he was, but this is the picture that we put in the Wikipedia article. His -- he -- somebody used to say that he had a resemblance to Paul Muni. I think he was better-looking than Paul Muni.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:Oh, yeah. This is again in front of the 2053 North Twenty-Third Street. So, he was then in his seventies.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:What is this one?

JE:Oh, yeah. This is a newspaper shot of the award of the Kovner Award. And he's 137:00sitting way at the end.

CW:Can you tell about how he wrote his speeches? It's kind of a nice thing about how he wrote short speeches.

JE:Oh yes, yes. He once -- there were occasions when there would be celebrations either in connection with his book being published or somehow, some kind of anniversary. And he would be the -- central speaker. And he told me that he had a way of approaching it. He always asked to be the very last person to speak. And so, there would be this kind of a banquet set up, and there would be various speakers and all that. And so, then he would get up to be the last. And he said 138:00-- well, I didn't need to be told this. But I knew that he always wrote out what he was going to say and carefully revised it so that it was as short as possible. And then, he would have it all in his head so that he would get up and he was the last speaker. And so, with an awareness that everybody was interested in getting home, it had been a long evening, so he would speak as if spontaneously without any kind of notes or written thing. And he would deliberately speak in a softer voice so that they would have to lean forward to hear what he was saying. And then, to their great relief, he was done. And so, you know, there's a -- writer n-- psychologist named Kahneman who has done 139:00studies of the way people react to difficulty or pain or something like that. And they discovered that people don't remember the actual pain. But they remember how they felt at the end of the process. And if it's a short span they remember it with pleasure. If it is -- even though the pain isn't inflicted as much, they remember the longer thing l-- so, my father had an awareness of something that thirty years later a man won the Nobel Prize for that insight. (laughs)

CW:Wow. Wow.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:This picture of my parents together. My mother was -- in the last stages of 140:00cancer, so it was like 1980 or so. I don't know if we want to show that or not.

CW:Fifty-nine, yeah.

JE:Oh.

CW:I think we saw that one. No, no, that's a different one.

JE:Yeah.

CW:From the bottom, I --

JE:Yeah. Now, that picture is when my father was eighty-five. In fact, he died within a few months after that. This man is Howard Weinshel. And that's me. I was somewhat younger then. And that was at the Milwaukee Home for the Aged. We were celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday. So --

CW:From the other side, I think. This top one.

JE:Yeah. The top one. Yeah, that's my parents. That was -- that was around, I think around 1970. Yeah, that was before they moved to that house.

CW:That's a very nice one, this one.

JE:Yeah. Oh. This is on the -- the grass of the 2053 North Twenty-Third Street. He was then in his seventies.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:This is me with my mother. I was then I think sixteen or seventeen.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:From what my father says --

CW:Can you show me again where they were? I didn't get that --

JE:That's in Chicago.

CW:Um-hm. And so, Lutzky is --

JE:Lutzky is the man seated and the other one standing is Ben Sholem. And my father tells me this story, that Ben Sholem woke him up one morning and said, "Kum [Come], I have something to show you." And he got my father to the Art Institute where there was a painting showing a bull in the middle of a snowstorm. And my father was enchanted with the picture. And that's -- "An oks in shney [An ox in the snow]" came from his seeing that. But what also is in my mind is that his father was killed by a bull. And so, there must have been 143:00something there. Because the bull ends up being engulfed in the snow. So, there was a kind of a long-range revenge.

CW:Right.

JE:And this is a picture of my brother, Yankel. He lived with us till he was nine. And then, they put him into an institution. My mother was adamant she didn't want him to be taken away. I think somehow or other she felt that it was her fault that he was retarded. And of course, actually, she was right because 144:00she was forty-five when he was born and in that age, we now know that Down syndrome is very much more likely to happen.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JE:I can read in Yiddish and the translation because --

CW:Please.

JE:-- it is such a -- emblematic of my father's writing.

CW:Um-hm.

JE:So, in Yiddish it goes like this. "Epitaph." Forzikhtik [Careful], oh, wait a minute. Let me start again. Oh. You know, my Yiddish is so bad here. Maybe if you read it in Yiddish.

CW:Sure. "Epitaph." "Epitaf." Forzikhtik! Tret nit shver, tseshter [Careful! 145:00Tread softly stranger, don't disturb] --

JE:Oh, I --

CW:You can do --

JE:Forziktik, tret nit shver,/tseshter nit dem shlumer./ Kh'hob zikh koym dershlept aher --/nomenlos vi a numer./Un vet dir di nayger a pik ton/tsu vemen dergeyt ver es ligt do,/to nem in dayn farshrayb in dayn kronik:/Do ligt a poet vi a kenig,/vet hot zikh farshamt mit di lider fun -- fun lider, farshamt mit 146:00arsenik. I'll read it in English. It's "Epitaph." "Careful! Tread -- tread softly, stranger,/don't disturb my slumber./Took all my strength to get here/and I'm nameless as a number./But should you feel the itch to know/who it is that lies below,/open your album and jot this down:/'Here lies a poet with a kingly crown/who died of drinking his own sweet brew--/honeyed song that held arsenic too.'" And that -- that poem is evocative of my father in a most poignant way. Because he speaks of himself as having gotten there with all of his strength as 147:00if that is what he was aiming for. And that one should regard him as being a member of a royal brood and that he died of drinking songs that were mixed with arsenic. And -- arsenic and honey. That's a way to describe all of his work, because there is a lyrical, beautiful, melodic voice and it also has a bitterness in it that has to do with death and dying and so forth. So, that's I think, one of his finest poems.

CW:It's not really -- is it really on his headstone?

JE:No. No, no, as a matter of fact, there's no inscription on his --

CW:But this is really lovely.

JE:Yeah.

CW:This is really great.

JE:There are poems that are on the computer. The -- the one called -- oh. Well, how about my reading the translation of "Elegy for a Tree" which will be the opening thing in which he's reading it?

CW:Sure.

JE:You know, on -- on the --

CW:Sure. Yeah.

JE:So --

CW:So the -- I think this'll have to be the last one because I have to digitize.

JE:Yeah, okay, well, this is the last one.

CW:That's great.

JE:I really appreciate --

CW:No, I'm sorry that I -- but I think this will be a great one to end on.

JE:Yeah. Okay. "Elegy for a Tree." "Eighteen years he stood before my window and with the curiosity of a dog's nose he probed his shadowing -- he probed his 149:00shadowing leaves at the walls. 'What's going on in there?' He listened for the scratch of my pen, the creak of my chair. 'Something new on your desk?' Often, I felt he rejoiced with me over a freshly rhyme -- freshly coined rhyme or a well-built stanza. And sometimes, late at night, he tapped at my window. 'Go to sleep, fool, nothing will come of it anyway.' How amazing was the place where he began, from under iron gratings near a cellar stair he had emerged, a slender sapling with one head as -- bud as a cap. As if he -- humbly trembling in the wind as if he were asking of the world, 'May I?' He never grew at all in height, only in breadth, contrarily, a cripple from birth. Each year, a new bough, a new deformity. More branches, more monster. Octopus-like, he broke -- he -- he bent 150:00and broke around him steel, stone, and concrete. Till he saw me through the window and entrusted his life to me. And after the iron he had overcome, there were so many monkey-quick climbing children. So many hooks holding long lines of laundry, so many carved names, dates, and little hearts. Albums of innocent young loves. Of -- so now, when I look at the shattered whiteness of his broken trunk and the saffron-yellow ring in the center, I hardly remember that he ever bloomed at all. I saw him in despair when the blue silk of evening enfolded us both in melancholy. In white deep nights, I would hear him sighing through the frost, 'It goes badly for me, near one.' I saw him in a joyous mood when April 151:00besprinkled him with life, breathing upon him diamond-bright warmth. As I would open the window, he would blow in a breath of lilac sweetness from his heart's core, 'All for you, I have no one else.' I never even knew his taxonomic name or from what genus he came, from which Gehenna, which oasis. Eighteen years, just think. Not only his but a great portion of my life too, with one thunderclap null. Today, I haven't wound my watch, I skipped two meals and never took the pipe from my mouth." What is very pertinent is akhtsn yor [eighteen years]. "Akhtsn" in Hebrew is "chai," which also means "life." So, the poem is a 152:00metaphor upon his life. You can see that he's looking through the window at the tree. And of course, the window is a mirror. The tree is himself because the tree grew up out of the most unwelcome source, you know, the iron and concrete, and became as it grew more of a monster because it was deformed. And then, there is that identity between them in which they speak to each other. He's speaking to himself about his own life. And of course, that shattering blow. And what is pertinent here is how observant he is. I mean, with the curiosity of a dog's nose, the lilac sweetness that blows in. You know, it is one long, brilliant 153:00metaphor of his life and how he regards it. And I think it's a superb expression of the best that he could do.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

(An audio recording of Alter Esselin reciting a poem plays) "Yingl liber,/vos vestu ton mit der yerushe?/Vos vet zayn az di tsayt vet ariber/un ikh vel gehern tsun groz fun di oves./Un du -- tsum vifltn gilgul -- a 'homo novus',/ikh vel nit tsertlen dikh mer un nit kushn,/vos vestu ton mit der shverer yerushe/vos ikh loz dir do iber in ofene shafes:/takhles mit vokh,/perl fun yontev un shabes;/deyres hobn a tukh dort bahaltn./Vos vestu ton mit di alte, brune polyantn:/khoves-halevoves, khay-odem, kav-yosher, eyn-yankev,/un dinenke 154:00bikhelekh lider -- geshanken/fun yidishe printsn, monarkhn --/es zogt mir dos harts az du vest zay nit darfn,/khotsh zukhn zey vestu, in dem bin ikh zikher,/durkh andere vegn un andere bikher." (Esselin looks up and smiles melancholically) "S'vet kumen der 'dzshonker,' a yid in koltns,/vos vet oys vi der meylekh iz kortn,/un a plits ton in gas mit a nign fun heymvey:/'eni regs, eni batls tudey?'/Ruf im arayn un tu im a freg/tsi hot er genug shpigat far gepek?/Un tsi iz er kholile nit keyn gebrikhter/tsu shlepn a shvere kultur-geshikhte?/Un vayz im di almers -- skheyre, papir,/un farges nit in keler dem suvenir/dem zaydns talis un tfiln,/mit dem vet afile di kats zikh nit shpiln./A letstn glet di tovlen un tsoytn/vi du volst geglet mayne oygn 155:00teyte,/un helf im trogn di sforim tsum vogn,/un az du vest veln megstu im zogn/on reyd -- vi ingber durkh rikhes/az du shtamst fun yikhes:/dayn zeyde iz geven a mekhaber, a nister,/dayn tate -- a sheli, a bayron a vister,/un alts vos geblibn iz dos vos er hot/in vogn, vos geyt durkh fayer tsu got." (Esselin laughs tearfully)

CW:Great.

JE:And this is the translation that I --

CW:Can you hold it up? Then I can see your face.

JE:Yeah. "And What Will You Do with the Bequest?" "Dear little boy, what will you do when my time will come and I will belong to the grass of ancestry and will not be here to kiss and fondle you, a Homo Novus, a new kind of Jew? What 156:00will you then do with these burgeoning shelves which I will leave to you here in these open shelves, jewels for the weekday, jewels for holiday and Sabbath? Generations have stored a treasure here. What will you then do with the old brown folios, 'The Duty of the Law,' 'The Life of Man,' 'Righteous Measures,' and 'Talmudic Legends,' and thin, thin books of verse, presents to me from Yiddish princes, kings? My heart tells me that you will not need them, even 157:00though of this I am sure. You will seek their treasure, in other accents, other tongues. And one day, the Junkman will come by, a Jew with sidelocks who after a bath looks like the King of Spades. He will flood the streets with his nostalgic cry, 'Any rags? Any bottles today?' Call him in and ask him this. Has he a good supply of sturdy cord? And he has not, God forbid, a rupture? Can he carry a heavy load of culture? Then show him your inheritance. The finest paper. And 158:00don't forget the souvenir in the cellar, your grandfather's tallis and tefillin, so musty now that even the cat will not deign to play with its tassels or toy with the ribbon. Give a last caress to the smooth silk as if you were closing my dead eyes. And help the Junkman load his wagon. But before he goes, if you wish, tell him in the fewest words, like ginger sweetening the air, that you are descended from princes. Your granddad a scholar and savant, your father a poet and recluse. And their residue is this wagonload which goes through fire to God." Yeah. Well, that poem has stayed with me and has sort of overwhelmed the 159:00balance of my life. Because it's my answer. My answer is you're wrong, it isn't going to the Junkman, thanks to the Yiddish Book Center, thanks to the collective memory of Jews, of Yiddishists, who have realized what a treasure these Yiddish poets and writers are. I remember having an encounter in a running shop when I was running. And there was a little bit of a gathering and we would talk. And there was one man who had been told that I was in the process of 160:00translating from the Yiddish and so forth. And he sort of looked at me and said, "Why are you wasting your time on that dead language?" And I said, "Well, it's not dead as long as there are people who remember it." And the conversation ended. But by chance, that week Bashevis Singer got the Nobel Prize in Literature and somehow or other, I was back at that running shop and there was this man who said, "You were right, I was wrong." As if the world had conspired to refute him. (laughs)

CW:So, you talked about your father's feelings about -- his predictions about the Yiddish language. Which -- he was a sad realist, you say, about Yiddish.

JE:Yes. They accused him. They always used the word, You're a pessimist. And he would say, "No, no, I'm a realist. I'm looking at what I see. And that is that there's a whole generation or two that have no knowledge of Yiddish. And in fact, they're indifferent to it." And he said, "How can that continue?" What he didn't know was -- well, what we're concerned with now. And that is that this shall not die, that somehow or other, it can be rescued and become a -- a treasured world literature that was created in an extraordinary efflorescence of creativity by people who were not aware of what -- what they were doing except that they had this civilization that they were enmeshed with, and somehow or 162:00other the combination of the way the world grows and develops, that there was room for it somehow.

CW:So, you too are a writer. Can you talk about how -- how you -- how that came about, what that connection is with your father?

JE:Yes. Well, I told you I was in analysis. And, Ernest of course was a polymath. He was aware of world literature. And of course, I was reading Beckett and Ionesco and all of these other writers. And there was -- a startling thing that happened here in Chicago. A man named Bob Sickinger -- he had a degree in social work, and he got a gig at the Jane Addams Hull House, Foundation. And -- 163:00very enterprising, decided to start theaters. And he managed to pioneer a whole lot of theaters. And he also got a writers' group to start. And I became part of that. I had always been trying to write. I was working as a hack writer, that's in advertising and PR and all that. But I would try. I would try to write fiction. I would -- didn't try to write poetry, because there was something that told me that I would be trying to compete with my father. And I knew that that could not be allowed. So, I turned to writing theater. And in fact, I composed a sketch that got performed in somebody's living room and had professional actors 164:00come and read it. And I thought, Gee, that's great. And so, I launched into writing a full-length play, "The Bookstore," which was based on my having worked in a secondhand bookstore. And I -- satirical. At any rate, I worked on it for months. And I got in touch with Bob Sickinger and he referred me to a lawyer who was kind of an entrepreneur. The lawyer said, "Well, I'm leaving Chicago, and I won't be able to help you, but I put you in touch with a television guy." That was somebody at Channel 11. And my -- my play got performed on television, on national television, when it was still NET, National Education Network. So, I 165:00got the hook. And then, what happened is that I would bring parts of what I was working on to my psychoanalytic sessions. And I wrote another play which my analyst said, "Well, it's an evocation of your analysis." It was called "Child of Destiny." It got performed in half a dozen -- off-loop amateur theaters. And then, to my continual surprise, even now, Ernest promoted it -- proposed that we collaborate. And we wrote a play together, which I think is unique for an analyst and a patient to colla-- well, we worked on it for a period of like, six months. And it got performed. But while it was in the process, Ernest died. So, 166:00so I have these three plays that got performed. And I have a bunch of others that didn't -- I didn't finish, but the translation, you know, came into what I was doing literarily.

CW:Where do you see the yikhes [ancestry] of your father in your own life?

JE:I'm just sort of --

CW:The yikhes, the inheritance and the connection to your father in your own life.

JE:Well, I had grown up with the idea that I would be a writer. It just was no other thing I wanted to do. So, I earned a living as a writer and then I would try these various ways. Recently, I've begun to write poems (laughs) about the 167:00various malfunctions in my body. And they're somewhat in the same vein as my father with a slight variation. There's no -- no evocation of God, but rather a very secular confrontation with what is otherwise regarded as difficult. And so, the poems defy the various malfunctions.

CW:Well, I -- what do you see as the future of Yiddish?

JE:I -- I recognize that it will never be a spoken language. The only Jews who speak Yiddish are the Orthodox. And they are unhappy with anything that is secular. So, the future of Yiddish in their hands is not something that will 168:00bear fruit. But Yiddish has a world literature treasure. And that is going to be reserved, preserved, and valued, thanks to the world of the academy and -- non-academics who are made aware of Yiddish, in translation of course, and maybe also people who become aware of Yiddish and its beauty, because the language has a music that is unique. I suppose because the language is a hybrid. There is, of 169:00course, the Hebrew and the Aramaic component which lies at the heart of its spirituality. And then, of course, there is the Germanic bulge, which has a special growth because of course, Yiddish had its independent development at the same time that modern German was evolving. And then, of course, there are the Slavic and the Spanish and the -- French, so that it's a -- a language -- well, as I understand it, the Yiddish vocabulary rivals that of English in terms of the number of words in the language. Just the sheer volume of it. So that when I was in the process of doing the translation, I was amazed at how often there was an English equivalent, even to the nuance. I mean, there's a poem about death. 170:00"Kumt [Come] on poyk, on glokl," and of course "without bells or rataplan." That rataplan is the drum. You know, so, there are all kinds of wonderful little surprises that English -- because English is also a hybrid language. I mean, there was the Anglo-Saxon, then the German, then -- and the Norman Conquest. So, I think it maybe sounds inappropriate. But I think English and Yiddish have a lot in common is that -- in that they are hybrid languages. Now, English became a hybrid language because it was the source -- the seat of an empire, so that, you know, they were incorporating all these words from various sources. He-- 171:00Yiddish wasn't an empire. (laughs) In fact, you'll remember the definition of a language is -- a language that has a navy and an army. And of course, Yiddish became a hybrid because it was forced to, to deal with the neighbors, so that -- they have a kind of a relationship that, you know, one grew from an empire, the other grew from the ghetto. You know, so that there's a meeting there. A very fortunate meeting. Because the English language is such a dominant one that Yiddish in translation, you know, has a longevity that you could not have expected except for this fortunate combination of circumstance.

CW:Well, I'd like to end at least this portion by asking you what -- what you learned from your father.

JE:I wish I could say that I learned the lesson well, and I didn't. The lesson I should have learned was the importance of zitsfleysh [perseverance]. That is, the ability to pursue. And I didn't learn that lesson until late in life. And -- and now I'm trying to make up for it a bit. But it, you know, I'm ninety years old. And there isn't much time to make use of it. But that's the langu-- that's the lesson I should have learned. Other things that -- I think are his model for 173:00me is that worldly success is -- overvalued. We were desperately poor and yet my childhood, I remember it as being a happy one. You know -- I remember becoming aware that we were poor in a very special way. In grade school, when we started the semester, there was an announcement that those who are indigent can get their textbooks from the office. And I didn't know the word indigent. (laughs) I 174:00looked it up and I realized it meant I'm poor. Of course, I did get the textbooks. But that's how the world let me know that we were poor. I can give you another illustration of our being impoverished. We were put during the '30s on county relief. And that had a whole institution behind it. And that was a visit to our house, to our flat, from a woman who came with a list of items that we would get because we were on county relief. So, she would check off the number of bags of potatoes, the number of jars of peanut butter, and so forth. And this was our certificate. And then, my father and I would use the coaster wagon that he had modified so that it had sides. And we would drag the thing 175:00through the street to the outdoor relief station, which was a storefront that had a long counter. And we would -- my father would hand in the slip. And they would pile the various items that we were entitled to. And so, I had a visible reminder that we were poor. But it didn't affect me in any way. There wasn't anything that I wanted to buy. I remember that one of my mother's brothers, Uncle Sol, he had moved to Indianapolis, and he came by to visit the Friedlands. And he came into our flat. And I remember he asked me what I would want in the 176:00way of a present. I said, "An encyclopedia." So, about a week later, a package arrived. It was a "Book of Knowledge." And I loved it. Just a treasure. I can remember reading the entries, you know, and I was immersed in the "Book of Knowledge." So, we were poor but we were rich. In that we had whatever we really needed. I have the impression that my mother's siblings did somewhat -- subsidize our household. But my father worked in the WPA first in their manual labor, unskilled thing. And then, he was promoted to status of a carpenter. So, 177:00from fifty dollars a week he got seventy-five dollars a week, which was all we needed, and so that --

CW:So, you learned from him. You learned how --

JE:What did I learn from him? Well, I learned love of words. That has been central to my life. Language has been the way I earned a living and the way I expressed myself. So, that was the one true gift that I did learn from him, that language, words -- well, he has a poem about how when he was a kid, he didn't realize how powerful words were. And that's true. Words are at the heart of humanity. And I -- I live with that in mind.

CW:Well, I'd like to say a hartsikn dank. Thank you so much for taking the time to share all of this with us. And we'll take some time also to look at all these photos.

JE:Yeah. Okay. I have another anecdote.

CW:Sure.

JE:When my father had his second book published, "Unter der last [Under the yoke]," somehow or other he was working at some kind of a construction job. And in his toolbox, he had a copy of "Unter der last." And the toolbox was open so that the book was sitting there. And the foreman came by, looked at the book, and he said, "Well, this is a foreign language." And my father said, "Yeah, well, it's my language, it's in Yiddish." And the foreman said, "Well, what is 179:00it?" And he -- my father said, "It's poetry. I write poetry." So, this foreman, who was of Irish origin, said, "Oh, you Jews, you have such a wonderful culture." He said, "I -- I wish that our tribe had something like that." And my father, looking at him, thought to himself, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Sean O'Hare, Sean O'Casey. (laughs) You know, and my father told me about this encounter that day at home. And I said, "Well, why didn't you point out to him that?" And he said, "Well, I didn't want to hurt his feelings." To accuse him of being unaware. Yeah.

CW:Very nice. Great. Well, thank you. And also thank you from the Yiddish Book Center.

JE:Well, it's my -- my warmest thanks. This has been such a pleasure.

CW:For me, too.

[END OF INTERVIEW]