BARNETT ZUMOFF ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney, and today is December 4th, 2013. I am here in New York City with Dr. Barnett Zumoff, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

BARNETT ZUMOFF:Yes.

CW:Thank you. So, to start, can you tell me what you know about your family and how -- before they came to this country?

BZ:I know rather a good amount about the family. My father was an inveterate researcher in family matters, and he published two editions of a tremendous family tree that described all the family with pictures of almost all of them. 1:00Our knowledge of the family starts with my paternal great grandfather, after whom I am named. His name was Dov-Ber Zumsky, and my name is Dov-Ber Zumoff. Most of my friends call me Berl.

CW:And since you know so much about the family, are there -- is there a general parnose, you know, living, that your family had?

BZ:No, they were people who made a living the hard way. They were not particularly academic or educated, and they weren't wealthy and they didn't have any particular profession. They made do with whatever there was. My paternal grandfather was born in a little town in White Russia.

CW:What was it called? Do you --

BZ:I don't remember exactly. It was near the city of Mogilev, but I don't remember the name of the town. And he moved rather early in life to the outskirts of Kiev. And he and his family lived in many small towns in that vicinity. Part of his life, he spent as a melamed [Jewish teacher in a traditional school]. And later on in life, he and two of his sons, my two -- grandfather and my grandfather's brother -- opened a soap factory.

CW:In Kiev area, or --

BZ:In Kiev, yes.

CW:Do you have any sense of what life was like for -- in the small towns for your family members?

BZ:Not really. My father described things -- he was not particularly literarily oriented. He was -- give him the facts, ma'am, and he wrote down things in a 3:00sort of a cool, unemotional way. Our family was rather better off than what I usually read about about shtetl yidn [Jews living in small towns in Eastern Europe] in the Old Country, because they had the factory. And my father writes that at the time that he was a young married -- he lived with his wife and a few of his children. I mean, my grandfather. I don't mean my father. My -- his grandfather and his wife and a few of the children lived in a rather good-sized apartment in Kiev where most Jews were not allowed to live. And they were allowed to live there because they had special permission as merchants and manufacturers of soap. And it was apparently a good-sized place. They also had a live-in nanny, and it was a rather -- I guess what we would call a middle-class existence then. Later on, the factory went bust and they didn't have any money, 4:00and my grandfather went hunting all over Russia to find a way to make a living and he couldn't, and that was what stirred them to emigrate to the United States.

CW:Did your father have memories of Kiev that he shared with you?

BZ:Yes. He came -- he left the city when he was seventeen. So, he was already -- pretty big boy for a long time before he left. And one anecdote he told me that I enjoyed reading about -- there is, in Kiev, right near the River Dnieper, a statue of Khmelnytsky, who was the famous Cossack who led a pogrom against the Jews in 1648. The Kiev people are very fond of him. He's a great hero. And he recalls saying that he and his friends used to go down at night to the statue 5:00and they used to spit on it, is what he put in his book. He was very delicate. He was not given to vulgar things. What they did was urinate on it. And when I was there in 1990, with a group, the young lady who was our guide, who was a KGB person, as they all were, took us down to see this statue and was waxing enthusiastic about what a wonderful, important person he was. And we shocked her to the bottom of her feet by telling her he was definitely not one of our culture heroes. In fact, we hated him.

CW:And what about your mother's family? What do you know about your mother's family?

BZ:Oh, my mother's family and my father's family are the same family, because my mother and father are first cousins. Their fathers were brothers. Her father was 6:00a couple of years older than my father's father. And they came when she was an infant. She was two years old. So, she remembers nothing about Russia. And he -- her father was a businessman. The first thing he did when he got here was shave his beard off and go out into the world and do various kinds of odd jobs. And they made a modest living.

CW:Was your family frum [observant] in --

BZ:No. My grandfather -- my father's father was. I shouldn't say no so quickly. My father's father was quite frum. He was a misnagid [Orthodox Jew opposed to Hasidism], he wasn't a khosid [follower of Hasidism]. And --

CW:Can you just explain -- I know what that means, but can you explain --

BZ:The difference?

CW:-- what it means?

BZ:Yes. The Hasidic movement, which started around 1700, was a deviation from 7:00the mainstream of Jewish religious observance. And the ways in which it differed were manifold, but one of the main ways was that it was people-oriented. Every Jew was considered an equally important member of the community, and they taught happiness and singing and dancing, and they deemphasized learning and study and so on. The mainstream people who were opposed to this new deviation were called misnagdim, which means "opponents." And they were led by the famous Vilna Gaon in Vilna in the eighteenth century. In this country, we -- let's say in the New York area, at least, we call them the yeshivish people. And my grandfather was 8:00such a misnagid -- and he was a big wheel in his local small synagogue, which is how I got to have a bar mitzvah -- 'cause these days, you have to be part of a synagogue culture for years and years and go to school and whatnot before they'll let you have a bar mitzvah in the synagogue. In those days, my grandfather snapped his finger and said, "My grandson will have a bar mitzvah in this shul," and that was that.

CW:Wow.

BZ:So, I did.

CW:(laughs) Do you know what your father, let's say, since he was of the age that he would remember, what his first impressions of America were? Or his attitude towards America?

BZ:Yes. Well, he was seventeen, so he considered himself a big boy. The first thing he did was go out and work.

CW:Where did he work?

BZ:He -- they immigrated to Philadelphia, so he worked in Philadelphia, and he 9:00did a number of things. One of the things he did was make use of the occupational education he had in a -- what we call a -- the word escapes me. Vocational school. And he was taught to be a carpenter. So, he went out and he got a job being a carpenter, and specifically putting together cardboard valises, which was a big deal in those days. And soon after that, he became a cutter of shirts, which was a pretty good job, and he immediately became a union member. He joined the ILGWU. He also, at the same time, joined the Socialist Party and the Workmen's Circle. And, as he was everywhere he went and everything he touched, he became a big makher [big shot] in the local Workmen's Circle branch. And he, after a couple of years, he got a job with the "Yiddish 10:00Forward." He worked in the office doing miscellaneous things. And he writes in his autobiography (phone rings) of which I have a copy --

CW:Do you want to --

BZ:Pay no attention to that.

CW:Okay.

BZ:It's on multiple speakers.

CW:Sure.

BZ:He writes that he went one day by train, Pennsylvania Railroad, to New York, and there was an accident on the line. Nothing serious, but there was an accident, and he recalls that he made a beeline for the nearest telephone and called in the story as a good reporter should. And he was very proud of that. In 1925, two things happened. One of them was that he moved to New York with his new bride, who was my mother. And the other one was that he got a job in the New 11:00York office of the "Forward," first in -- working in the office, and then he became the director of the composing room, which is the place where they put together the pages, which used to be made by slugs of type in a steel frame with a cardboard image of them, which was then put on the press, and it was done that way. And he was in charge of that for upwards of fifty years. And the other thing that happened was that I was born the year after he moved. My father had three wives. His first wife, who's my elder half-brother's mother, had died about three days after childbirth. It is not clear to me whether she died of childbirth fever or whether she was done in by the influenza epidemic, because it was 1918, in the -- at the height of the epidemic. My father lived with my 12:00mother for forty-seven years, then she died and he married again and lived with his third wife for eight years, and then she died. So, he buried three wives, and he lived to be ninety-three and then died.

CW:And where in Brooklyn did you grow up?

BZ:I was born in Borough Park. And my parents lived in an apartment house on Forty-fifth Street and New Utrecht Avenue. And Borough Park then was not Borough Park now. Borough Park was a cosmopolitan, lower middle-class neighborhood. Mostly Jews, but lots of Irish and Italian at the same time. And we lived there, and then we moved to another apartment in a two-family house, also in Borough 13:00Park, not far from that. And then, we moved to a very fancy apartment in an apartment house on Kings Highway and Ocean Parkway, which I remember -- I don't know how I remember this, but I do: in 1930, you must remember the year, we paid a hundred dollars a month for rent, which was an enormous amount of money for rent in those days. We had a lovely five-room apartment, and my father made a reasonably decent income. He -- as basically management at the "Forward."

CW:Even during the Depression.

BZ:Even during the Depression, yes. The Depression did not affect us.

CW:Do you have memories of it -- of how it affected other people or --

BZ:Yes. I had a lot of friends who were poor as church mice. I remember classmates of mine in shule [secular Yiddish school] who hardly had a meal to eat at home. And my good friend Fanny Jacobson, who is almost ten years older 14:00than I, tells the tales of her family during the Depression. They lived in Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and her parents were well-off because they owned a candy store. And her mother used to make meals for groups of their organizations, and she always used to make enough for all the women to take home to their own houses 'cause they didn't have any food.

CW:Can you -- looking -- thinking back to the home you grew up in, what was Jewish about it?

BZ:Well, many things. First of all, my father -- my father's native language was Yiddish. He couldn't speak it as much as he would like to, because my mother didn't speak Yiddish. She came here when she was two years old and she never learned to speak Yiddish well. She spoke a little. But she understood Yiddish 15:00fluently, every word. And she knew lots of good curse words. (laughter) Or various vulgarisms. But she didn't speak Yiddish, as such.

CW:Do you -- would you be willing to share any of the more savory curses? (laughs)

BZ:Oh, sure, sure. When I did something that she didn't like, she would say, "Makht zikh nisht tamevate," "Don't act like a fool." Or she would say -- it was -- I -- when I did something dumb, she would say, "leymene geylem," which means a "clay golem," that I was being stupid. Or she would say, "paskutsve," which means "disgusting, foul." Things like that, when she got mad.

CW:So, what language were you speaking?

BZ:English. English. I understood all these words very well, and I knew quite 16:00well what they meant. I heard a lot of Yiddish on weekends, particularly, because my father's buddies in his Workmen's Circle branch would come and spend time with us -- and his buddies from the "Forward" -- and so, they spoke only Yiddish, and I understood a fair amount of that. And then, when we went to visit my paternal grandfather in Philadelphia, he and his wife spoke Yiddish to all the grandchildren, of which there were many. I had twenty first cousins. And we understood them reasonably well, and we would answer them in English. And I always used to think that the Yiddish word for grandmother was "bahbe." I never heard "bobe" until I was much, much older. In our family, we called her "bahbe." And they were very lovely people. My grandmother was the absolute paradigm of 17:00what a wonderful grandmother should be. She was warm and friendly and forgiving, and she never yelled at anybody, never hollered at everybody. She gave everything of herself, her time, her money, everything. My grandfather was cool. I'm sure my father inherited that from him. He used to sit all the time in the kitchen, in my grandmother's house, wearing a square-cut black yarmulke and a short, well-trimmed white beard. And most of the time, he would be sitting in the kitchen, rolling cigarettes. He hand-rolled his own cigarettes, and he would be working on books. And I learned, sometime later, that these were accounting books for the local charitable society, of which he was the secretary. He was a 18:00retired paper hanger. That was what he did for a living. He taught that to several of his sons. He had five sons. My father and four brothers, and four daughters. Or I should say he had nine children who grew up -- my grandmother had twelve children. Three of them died in infancy. And my other grandparents, my mother's parents -- I knew her father. He died when I was about nine. Her mother had died when my mother was twelve years old. And she lived with a stepmother. There's an interesting tale about that, because she used to tell me about her life as a child, that she didn't have a mother and her elder sister, Ida, brought her up. And she's told me that -- if she told me once, she told me 19:00a thousand times. Never, ever, as long as she lived -- mentioned that she had a stepmother. Never mentioned it. My father told me that later on.

CW:Wow.

BZ:So -- and my mother worked all the time. She was mostly a milliner or other things in the various clothing trades.

CW:So --

BZ:And you wanted to know why we were Jewish, wherein we were Jewish.

CW:Yeah, back -- yeah.

BZ:So, we celebrated holidays, particularly Pesach. My grandfather used to call the whole family to the seder in his house, for Pesach, and I would go with him and collect chometz the night before. And then, he would sit and conduct Pesach -- in Hebrew, of course, not in Yiddish. And he would race through it like a locomotive engine, with a little bottle of vodka in front of him, and he would 20:00finish the bottle of vodka by the end of the seder. All the grandchildren, of which there were many, would sit at a separate table and get drunk. That was the time of year when we were allowed to do -- encouraged, actually, to do that. And, as I say, we didn't go to shul. The only times that I went to synagogue, then and now, would be for a holiday of some kind. My bar mitzvah, my brother's bar mitzvah -- not my brother's bar mitzvah. When he had his bar mitzvah, I don't think I would -- yeah, I was a -- an infant. So, I don't remember that. And my friends' children's bar mitzvah and weddings and all the rest of those things. Otherwise, I don't go. And we were -- we considered ourselves very Jewish. By the time I was eleven years old, I was already going to Workmen's Circle shule and learning Yiddish. At the time, we had what today you would call 21:00immersion, I guess. You would walk into the Yiddish class and you would start talking Yiddish from the very beginning. If you didn't know the words, that was tough. You figured a way out, sooner or later. I had three classes for my elementar-shule, and they were in three different locations, with three different teachers. It was very interesting. Each one with his own style. They were all great teachers. And we learned Yiddish, and we learned literature and we learned history and we learned holidays and we learned general Yiddishkayt, whatever you would call it, I guess.

CW:Yeah, so there were several different shule systems at that time.

BZ:Yes, there were.

CW:Can you explain sort of what the Arbeter Ring pedagogy was?

BZ:Yes, yes. There were -- to amplify on what you said, there were several 22:00different secular Yiddish school systems at the time. They were all secular. The oldest of them was the Sholem Aleichem School network, started in 1913. Then came the Workmen's Circle network in 1918. And subsequently, the Jewish National Alliance, which is the Zionist schools -- came little bit later. And latest of all, the IWO schools. The IWO was an offshoot of the Communist Party, and their ideology was communist, basically. The Sholem Aleichem schools were non-ideological, so they said. They had no -- not communist, not socialist, not Zionist, not anything. Just sort of Jewish and Yiddish cultural. Workmen's Circle was originally very Yiddishistically-oriented and socialistically oriented, and labor-oriented. And the Zionist schools, of course, were Zionist-oriented.

CW:So, how did those -- the Yiddishist-orient-- how did those play out in the classroom or in -- the ideologies play out in your experience?

BZ:Well, we thought it was perfectly natural for a good Jewish boy to learn to read and speak Yiddish and that that was logical. When we finished the three years of elementary school, we created an alumni club, and it was the most natural thing in the world to conduct all of the business of the club in Yiddish and to make minutes in Yiddish and everything else. And then, it was also the most natural thing in the world to go onto mitlshul [high school].

CW:In Manhattan, right?

BZ:In Manhattan. And one of the reasons that I went to Yiddish school in the 24:00first place, both the elementary and the one in mitlshul was hero worship. I was worshipping my brother. My brother was eight years older than I and he was a big boy, and someone to emulate. And he had gone to those both, and he also went onto the higher classes after mitlshul, which I didn't. So, we went to mitlshul. I went to mitlshul, and mitlshul was four years. Weekends, five hours a day Saturday and five hours a day Sunday. And it was wonderful. It was fun. I met some of my lifelong friends there. Lots of girls. And we learned Yiddish, and we learned a little Hebrew, and we learned a little Tanakh. Hebrew and Tanakh kept falling into and out of the curriculum, depending on what year you were talking 25:00about. And we learned history and we learned political science and we learned socialism. And we learned, as I say, literature at a very high level, because those of us who were in high school would find, when we would take similar courses, that we would be way ahead of the kids in our class, 'cause we knew all this stuff already and they didn't.

CW:What do you mean, the -- in terms of literature?

BZ:Literature and political science and history, labor history, socialism -- the kids in our classes in high school didn't have the foggiest idea about any of those, and we were really at a college level, going into high school.

CW:Are there any teachers that you remember in particular?

BZ:I remember them all. Very particular.

CW:Yeah.

BZ:My first -- let me go back to elementary school. I had three teachers. The first one was a man named Duchovny, who happens to be the grandfather of the 26:00actor David Duchovny, although David, I think, considers himself a Christian and doesn't acknowledge his background. That's my understanding.

CW:Hm.

BZ:He was a wonderful teacher. He was a sweet, quiet, charming man. Never raised his voice. A wonderful teacher. The second year was -- the teacher was Louie Silver. He was a sterner type, also a very good teacher, and he also simultaneously happened to be my counselor in Kinder Ring at the same time. The third one was the best teacher of the three. He was a man named Nathan Susell. He was a short man. He was not much more than five feet tall, and we called him the kleyne riz, the little giant. And he taught -- very rigorously taught 27:00literature and he taught history and he taught Yiddish, and he insisted that we know this all. Classes were five days a week in the afternoon, after school, and we learned a lot. I could almost speak Yiddish by the time I was finished with mitlshul. Not quite. And in mitlshul, we had many wonderful teachers. The head of the mitlshul was a man named Zalman Yufroykan, who was also, ex officio, the director of Camp Kinder Ring, which was the Workmen's Circle camp. It was the same person all the time, the mitlshul director and the director of Kinder Ring. And he taught a variety of things. He was a good teacher and knowledgeable, but next to some of the others, he was less well-educated than some of them were. Others that we had were people like Bromberg, whose first name I don't remember, 28:00Chaim Novak, who was a wonderful teacher, and Binyomin Bialistosky, who was a great poet in addition to being a teacher, Adele Opatoshu, who was the great novelist Joseph Opatoshu's wife, and Morris Vladkovsky and -- oh, I'm sure there are a couple on -- that I'm omitting. They were all great teachers and they taught -- variety of things.

CW:I'm interested in the -- can you remember anything in particular about Adele Opatoshu? What was she like?

BZ:Only that she was a charming woman, very pretty, and she was Opatoshu's wife. I think he was still alive when I was -- when she was my teacher.

CW:Yeah. So, you --

BZ:She taught literature.

CW:So, you were -- obviously, I want to ask a little bit about Kinder Ring, as 29:00well, but --

BZ:Sure.

CW:-- you were in this sea of Yiddish culture --

BZ:Yes.

CW:-- it sounds like. Was there -- were there aspects of Yiddish culture for you that were particularly interesting as a kid?

BZ:History. And language. I was always a language person. I'm still a language person. I took many languages in school. I took French to the point of being fluent and reading it and, eh, to speak it. Spanish, which I read fluently and now speak reasonably fluently. German, which I can read fluently and used to make a little money translating. I can't speak it, 'cause it's too confusing. But I can read it fluently. I took Russian, I took a little Hebrew, I took some Latin. Languages were my thing, and Yiddish was another language, so --

CW:So --

BZ:And history. History --

CW:Oh, and history.

BZ:-- was fascinating.

CW:So, what's a typical day at Kinder Ring?

BZ:Kinder Ring?

CW:Um-hm.

BZ:I guess pretty much like any other children's camp, except that we had a mandatory three-quarters of an hour a day of Yiddish, which was taught by professional Yiddish teachers. We had a lot of them from the various shuln. They would come to camp in the summer and be Yiddish teachers. But other than that, it was the usual athletics and holiday celebration and nothing special. We didn't do anything special about Shabbos or Friday night when I was there. I was a camper from 1932 to 1941. And if you'll pay attention to the years, this -- this is the pre-war, and although the Holocaust was going on, we knew nothing about it at the time. So, we didn't celebrate, really, holidays in camp. We 31:00didn't celebrate any Shabbos, certainly not. We didn't have a flag, I remember. The flag came in after the war, as did celebration of Shabbos night and various holidays and so on. I remember one year, I was up in camp as the camp doctor. This is long after we started as a -- I was already the camp doctor. And the then director of Kinder Ring came to me and he said, very trepidatiously, came to me and he said, "We'd like to slice challah and have wine for Friday evening supper in Kinder Ring," which they hadn't had 'til then. I said, "Is it all right with you?" In my status as president of the Workmen's Circle, which I was 32:00at the moment -- and I said, "Absolutely. Certainly. Go ahead and do that." And, of course, it has evolved a great deal since then, with a lot of celebration and singing and so on.

CW:Yeah.

BZ:At the time, to have that at a Workmen's Circle thing was very iffy.

CW:Wow. What about literature growing up? Were there writers that you particularly liked from the coursework?

BZ:No. My father and mother knew all about the writers in a sort of an abstract way, and he knew a lot of them personally at the "Forward." He knew Schwartz. Both of them, both brothers. And he knew Avrom Reyzen and he knew Mani Leib and he knew many of them, most of them. He was not a reader, so he didn't 33:00particularly familiarize me with any literature. Not English, not Yiddish. The Yiddish literature I learned I learned in mitlshul. At the time, although I never realized it -- I wrote this is an article that I wrote for "Afn Shvel" about three years ago, and -- describing my background in Yiddish. Yiddish literature in America was at its absolute acme at the time that I was in mitlshul. All the great Yiddish writers were still alive and still writing at the time. People like Manny Leib, whom I didn't meet but I had occasion to see at an evening supperette that my mother and her gang had at the local Labor Lyceum. He used to come around and give lectures and get a few pennies here and there. He was poor as a church mouse. He couldn't make a living. And Avrom 34:00Reyzen, who was already an old man when I knew him, would come to my father's house because my father and his friends had a leyenkrayz [reading circle] at -- which met at his house, named after Avrom Reyzen. Was the Avrom Reyzen leyenkrayz, and he used to come and visit and bask in the praise and the glory. Those were the only two of them that I ever met myself, besides Bialistotsky, and I didn't know he was a poet at the time. He was our teacher. And I didn't know anything about Adele Opatoshu's husband, either, at the time. And I -- I never met some of the greats that I became terribly fond of, like Glatstein, for example, who was one of my great favorites, and a few of the others. I crossed 35:00paths, literally, with two of the great poets, but never had a chance to speak a word of them -- with them. One was Peretz Miransky, who was a great poet from the Yung-Vilne school, who was living in Toronto a year when I was president of the Workmen's Circle, and I went there to show the flag at a meeting, and he was at this meeting. And somebody pointed out to me, in the corner, "Oh, that's Peretz Miransky over there." But I never spoke to him. The other one was Yosef Papernikov, who was also a great poet. Spent most of his life in Israel, and I was visiting in Israel and I visited the -- what they call the Workmen's Circle of Israel, and an evening event with speeches, and I was the guest of honor on 36:00the dais and so on. And Papernikov was sitting way over at the other end of the dais, and somebody pointed him out to me. "That's Yosef Papernikov," and I never had a chance to see -- say a word to him, either. The other one that I got to know reasonably well was Avrom Sutzkever. Sutzkever was, of course, a great poet, probably the greatest Yiddish poet who ever lived. And my second book of translation was a book of his, an anthology of his, called "Fun alte un yunge ksavyadn," which means "From old and recent manuscripts." And I translated the book in the early 1980s and I subsequently learned that he didn't want to give me permission to publish it. And I asked why. I guess he didn't think I amounted to enough to warrant publishing his book. So, I later got to meet him when I 37:00went to Israel on a visit, and we spent a couple of evenings in his apartment, and when he was here in New York he spent one evening having dinner with me in my house, and as I -- and I knew him reasonably well. I called him on the phone a year before he died, when he was already dying of cancer. He was a very interesting man. And as -- of course, as I say, a great poet.

CW:What was he like in person?

BZ:He was an odd mixture of cool and warm. He -- at first approach, he was sort of forbidding and cool. When you got to know him and talk to him, he was really quite nice. The first time I met him, before I met him in Israel, he had come here for a -- an evening in Yosl Mlotek's house. He came to New York and he 38:00holed up in a hotel in Manhattan. And I was assigned to go fetch him in my car and take him up to the Bronx to Yosl's apartment. So, I went to the hotel and I parked the car and I went up to his room, and we were chatting about nothing special for about ten minutes. And he suddenly stopped me and he said, "Ayer eltern kumen fun ukrayne." "Your parents come from Ukraine." He had an ear for language, but his ear failed him at that time, because while it is true that my parents do come from Ukraine, I or they do not speak Yiddish with a Ukrainian dialect, which I always wondered about. If you've ever spoken to Boris Sandler, he speaks Yiddish with a Ukrainian accent. I don't. I speak with a classic Litvak YIVO accent. Basically, a Litvak accent, but refined to the YIVO kind of 39:00Yiddish that they taught in mitlshul. And I always wondered why that was until I read in my father's autobiography that his paternal grandfather came from Mogilev, which was White Russia. So, they spoke Litvish [Lithuanian] Yiddish, not Ukrainian Yiddish. So, the great poet and linguist misconstrued my Yiddish accent. Nevertheless, he thought that was what it was. Then, we went up to the meeting, and it was a typical literary evening. People were reciting things and whatnot, and I was asked to recite one of his great poems, which is called "Lider tsu a lunatikerin," which is -- "Songs to a Lady Moon Walker," which is the way I translated it, or "to a Sleepwalker." And I translated it. I read it 40:00in Yiddish and I read it in English, my translation. One of my good friends who happens to be still living, another poet, leaned over and whispered in my ear something -- very heretically says, "Your translation is better than his original." So, I thought that was charming. I never said that to him, of course. It's probably not true, but it was a good translation.

CW:What did you -- what is -- what did he look like, Sutzkever?

BZ:Sutzkever?

CW:Well, I know we can see pictures, but --

BZ:Oh, you know what his picture looks like.

CW:Yeah.

BZ:What did he look like? He was a man of medium height, mostly bald. Wore glasses, and a mustache if I remember. He was -- usually, he had no expression on his face. Not angry, not smiling, just sort of bland.

CW:Interesting. So, we were talking a little bit ago about the different ideologies in the Yiddish world that you grew up in. Were there ever tensions or competition, conflict between --

BZ:Yes.

CW:-- the groups?

BZ:Yes. When I was in Kinder Ring, which I was for quite a number of years, we had an athletic league with the other Yiddish camps. And we were very selective in the camps that we went to go see. We would go to see Camp Gan-Eydn, which was the camp of the Jewish Socialist Farband. We would got to Boiberik, which was the Sholem Aleichem Institute's camp. We would sometimes go to Yungvelt, which was the Zionist camp. And those were the principle three, and the one that we didn't go to was Kinderland, which was directly across the lake from us, which 42:00was the IWO camp. That was treyf [not kosher]. We weren't allowed to have anything to do with them. So, of course, in the evening, we would get into rowboat and row across and spend the evening in their casino, dancing and singing and so on. They had a nicer casino than we did, so we enjoyed going there. But officially, they were treyf, we didn't have anything to do with them.

CW:Are there --

BZ:By the way, of course, there is a subsequent history to that. The IWO no longer exists, as you know, and there is -- there are lots and lots and lots of ex-communists, but to find a live specimen of an actual current communist is very difficult, next to impossible. And there has been a great rapprochement based on Yiddish and progressive ideology. And, for example, I am a member of 43:00the editorial board of "Jewish Currents," which used to be put out by the IWO and is now non-party and non-partisan. And then, lots of people on the board are old ex-commies and ex-IWO people, and they're among my best friends and cultural comrades.

CW:Wow. But that may not have happened when you were a kid?

BZ:It wouldn't have happened when I was a kid.

CW:Yeah. Do you remember your parents talking about politics or parents being --

BZ:Not really. The Workmen's Circle was the banner of socialist Yiddishkayt, and socialists hated communists. They hated them more than anything else. Interestingly, my father was a member of a semi-secret club in the Workmen's Circle called the National Social Club, which had no official standing. It was a 44:00paralegal club of the Workmen's Circle big shots, which had a lot of functions, one of which was to create slates for all the officers and committees -- and the other one of which was to be the banner of anti-communism. That was the anti-communist group within the Workmen's Circle.

CW:You mentioned before that you didn't -- you weren't aware of the Holocaust.

BZ:No.

CW:When -- how did news about World War II and the Holocaust come through, and when?

BZ:It came to me like it came to everybody else, in drips and drabs towards the end of the '40s. And, of course, the great wave of refugees that we got to meet personally, they were -- there was a flood of them in new Workmen's Circle branches and in camp and everywhere.

CW:Yeah. So, how did -- oh, I did want to ask one thing about the composing 45:00room. Did you visit it --

BZ:Yes.

CW:-- as a kid?

BZ:All the time, sure.

CW:So, could you describe what it looked like?

BZ:Yes. It was a big room. It was the top floor of the "Forward" building. It was very noisy because there were machines going constantly.

CW:Linotypes or --

BZ:Linotypes and what they called stereotypes -- I'll describe in a minute. But the way you made the newspaper physically, in those days, was that the text would be given to a linotypist, and he would type it on a linotype, which was basically a typewriter, which, instead of putting out black type on a piece of paper, would put letters on the top of a slug of lead. Each line would be one slug. So, then when he was finished with all of those on a page, they would go 46:00to one of the men, who would work on a big table with a steel frame, and all the slugs would be fitted in in the way that they were going to fit on the page. And my father was in charge of the layout on the pages. He decided which would go where, what it would look like, and there were many different editions, corresponding to different cities. So, he would be laying out six or eight different editions of what those would look like. Then these slugs would be put into this frame, and the frame would be locked with a hand lock, and it would go to the stereotypist in a different part of the room. And the stereotypist ran a big machine, which worked like this: a piece of heavy cardboard would be laid over the page mockup, and then they would run a heavy press over it, which would create an impression in the cardboard of the type. Then, that would go 47:00downstairs to the basement, to the press, and would be put on the press rollers in a semicircular form, locked onto the press rollers. And then, the paper would roll over those and pick up the ink.

CW:Who were -- what type of people would work there?

BZ:People.

CW:Yeah.

BZ:What kind of people? I don't know. Ordinary people.

CW:Yeah. Is there anything --

BZ:My father was noted for having a loud voice, which he used very freely. He yelled all the time.

CW:At other people in the office, and --

BZ:Yeah, just -- the hell of it, not that he was really angry, particularly. He was just a person who yelled.

CW:(laughs) Well, is there anything that I haven't asked about and that you want to share about your childhood and this world you grew up in?

BZ:Well, many of my very dearest friends come from either mitlshul or camp or 48:00both, or our Workmen's Circle branches. Practically all of them. I have almost no friends from my standard English schooling, high school, college. None of those are left. Didn't make many to begin with, but I did from mitlshul and from camp. And we were all imbued with the same ideal, we were all interested in Yiddishkayt. We all knew Yiddish pretty well. I probably knew it the best of the bunch. Not that I was necessarily the best student, but getting into translating made it an order of magnitude better than it was before.

CW:When did you do your first translation?

BZ:Nineteen eighty-three.

CW:What was it?

BZ:It was a book -- I translated -- I co-translated a play of Sholem Aleichem's 49:00called "Dos groyse gevins [The great big win]," which is variously translated. I translated it "The Jackpot." And it was being translated by a young man named Kobi Weitzner, and his English was shvakh [weak]. So, I helped him with it, and basically co-translated it with him and was given co-authorship. That was the first book that I did. First book that I did by myself was Sutzkever's book that I told you about, and that one happened in an interesting way, or at least I think it's interesting. In 1983, the Workmen's Circle was having its annual book fair, which was an exposition of books on tables, outside the Workmen's Circle building on Thirty-third Street. I picked up a copy of the then recently 50:00published bilingual translation of "Yiddish Poetry: An Anthology" by Ruth Whitman. I forget what she called it. Was an anthology of Yiddish poetry by her. And I started reading it. I read the first poem, which was by Glatstein. Was a poem called "Der poet lebt," "The Poet Lives." And I stopped after one sentence and I said in a sort of a stage whisper, "I can do better than that." As it happened, a good friend of mine was standing next to me and he said, "Really? Show me." So, I went up -- immediately, I went up to see Yosl Mlotek in his office, in the building, and I said, "Yosl, I want to try translating some Yiddish poetry." And I expected he would bust out laughing, of course. He didn't. He took me perfectly seriously, and he walked over to the bookcase on 51:00the -- in -- on the wall, and he pulled out this copy of Sutzkever's book, and he said, "Here is something I think you'll find interesting." So, I worked on that, and I worked on it for quite a while. It took me about a year and a half. And I needed help, of course. Every translator needs help. I discovered, interestingly, that there is no one person that you can go to to be the fount of universal help. You must have a stable of helpers, which I had.

CW:Who did you go to?

BZ:Oh, I went to Yosl, and I went to my friend Motl Zomanovich, and I went to Mikhl Baron, the teacher. And I went to my father, and a couple -- and to -- and Chava Lapin and a couple of other people. And between them all, I managed. Never had to go to Sutzkever himself, and he wouldn't have been able to help me anyway, 'cause he didn't know any English. And then, I got it all done, and then 52:00he wouldn't let me translate -- wouldn't let me publish it. So, I went up to Yosl and I said, "Yeah, okay, I'm finished with that one. Now, let me try another one." So, he went over to the bookcase again, and he pulled out a book by Glatstein this time. And the book by Glatstein is called "Kh'tu dermonen," which I translated in English, "I Keep Recalling." And he said to me -- he said, "Ikh gleyb az dos vet zayn aykh tsum hartsn," "I think you'll like this and you'll enjoy this." So, I did that one, and that was the first one I actually got to publish. It was Holocaust-themed poetry. It was a collection of his Holocaust poems, put together by the Bergen-Belsen Survivors Association. And because it was Holocaust theme, it sold. I actually sold a thousand copies of that, which is more than all my other books put together. I got spoiled. It 53:00never happened again. And then, there were a variety of others, all kinds of other books. Glatstein is one of my favorites. I would say if you have to pick let's say three or four of the greatest Yiddish poets, Sutzkever is obviously one of them. Glatstein is another. And you could argue about who the third one is. Probably Leivick.

CW:So, we obviously jumped over a lot of your lifetime from --

BZ:Okay.

CW:-- the '30s to --

BZ:Let's go back to --

CW:-- 1983, but --

BZ:-- wherever you want.

CW:-- but can you just give me -- we're not going to talk about your whole life in order, but can you just --

BZ:Yeah.

CW:-- give me a snapshot of sort of what your position is here in this building and also in other -- in Yiddish organizations?

BZ:Okay, let me talk to you about Yiddish organizations first.

CW:Sure.

BZ:There was a time when I was the president or vice-president of everything. 54:00Reminded me of one of the books of Anthony Trollope. I don't remember which one it was. He has a character in it called the Duke of Omnium et Gatherum, which is Latin slang for every damn thing. And I was president of the Workmen's Circle. I had two two-year terms and then an interim and then two more two-year terms. I was the president of the Forward Association, which publishes the "Forward," for many years. I was president or vice-president or board member or something for about twenty years. I was vice president of the Workmen Circle's old age home. I was vice president of the Atran Foundation, which does Yiddish philanthropy. I 55:00am co-president of the Congress for Jewish Culture. I'm vice president of the Folksbiene, and I probably forgot a few things. Those are various -- oh, and my branch of the Workmen's Circle, I was everything: secretary, vice president, president in various times. Here is my professional home. This is a hospital, of course, and I am a -- a full-time attending physician at the hospital. I do endocrinology. That's my specialty. I was the chief of the division of endocrinology here for close to twenty years, and for the last eighteen or nineteen years, I've been the emeritus chief, so-called, which means I see patients, I teach, I monitor fellows. You saw one of the fellows before. What 56:00else? I see patients, of course.

CW:So, how did you get from where we were talking about -- mitlshul and Kinder Ring -- to becoming the president of so many Yiddish organizations?

BZ:I'm not sure what the answer to that is. Wherever I joined anything, I always became an active leader, partly by my own initiative and partly because other people think I'm capable of doing it. They were always after me to take this job or that job or that position, even if I didn't express any initiative. I remember that years before I became the president of the Workmen's Circle, they used to be -- each two years, they would -- the club, the National Social Club, 57:00would circulate to various people they thought were potential members of the executive board and ask, "Do you want to be nominated for the national executive board?" And for years and years and years, I said, "No." And all of a sudden, one year -- I think it was 1974 -- I changed my mind. I said, "Yes." I can't tell you what made me decide that. Probably because I was more settled in my professional life. I wasn't running around, getting training and going here and going there. I was pretty settled. So, I took it, and they said, Tough, we've got our slate all made this year, so you can't do it this year. But we can do it the next time, so -- and I did it in 19-- I think it was '78. And I was elected to the executive board, which is the ruling body of the Workmen's Circle. Yosl, who knew me from various places, including camp, came to me and he said, "Would 58:00you be a member of our educational committee?" The organization ran by various standing committees, and there was an educational committee that was in charge of a shule, which he said -- actually, what he said -- I -- precisely was, "Efsher vilstu helfn in der shul komitet [Would you perhaps help on the shule committee]?" I said, "Sure." So, I was that for two years, and then the following two years, I was the chairman of that committee. I got promoted all of a sudden. One of the people I ran into during that second two-year term was Aaron Lansky. Aaron Lansky was just starting to go around looking for money, and we in the Workmen's Circle, with my interest and assistance, gave him money. We were one of the few places that did.

CW:What was your first impression of him?

BZ:That it was a wonderful idea and he was a terrific salesman. And a couple of years later, the Workmen's Circle honored him at its annual educational banquet, and I made a speech acknowledging him, in Yiddish.

CW:Oh.

BZ:So -- and then, in other organizations -- as far as the "Forward" was concerned, I was born into the "Forward." My father was there since 1925, which was before I was born. And they were after me for years and years to join the association, which was a layman's group that ran the organization. And I always said no. Finally, they -- I said yes, then I discovered, much to my surprise, that I needed to go before a star chamber committee who could blackball me. And so, I went before them, they didn't blackball me. They took me in. And then, soon thereafter, the position of president became vacant. I went from an 60:00ordinary member to president in one jump, without anything in between. And everything else that I joined, they always asked me, "Would you like to be president? Would you like to be vice president?" And I, like a fool, said yes. Most of the time. And now, I am reaching the back end of that, and everything is leaving. I'm no longer a member of the board of the directors of the "Forward" for the first time in upwards of twenty years. I'm still a member of the board of directors of the Workmen's Circle, but not an officer. And I'm still an officer of all the other things I mentioned.

CW:(laughs) Was this -- was your involvement in the Yiddish world constantly parallel with your professional life?

BZ:I don't know exactly how to answer that. My involvement took a quantum jump 61:00at the time I started doing translating. Before that, it was off and on. If I were in a meeting of the Workmen's Circle or "Forward" association, I would speak Yiddish. I would speak some Yiddish with my friends, especially up in camp. We did that to make a point and to keep ourselves reasonably current. It was not always too easy for me. Now, it's relatively easy. When people ask me, "How many languages do you speak," my normal answer, which is not what I wrote to you, is one, and that is English. My Yiddish is pretty good, but every now and then, I'll miss a word or two. My accent -- my father used to make fun of my accent. He used to make fun of my terrible English -- American accent. So first 62:00of all, it wasn't so terrible, even then. Now, it's practically gone. My Yiddish accent is practically perfect now. And furthermore, as occurred to me later on, I never came back at him with it -- I said, "You know, you have a nerve complaining about my American accent. Why is that any less than kosher than a Galitsianer [Galician] or Romanian or a Litvish accent, which are all different from one another? What's wrong with an American accent?" "Well," he thought that was -- he was making fun of me, that it was a terrible American accent. It went away, sooner or later. Later, usually.

CW:Yeah. You've mentioned Yosl Mlotek.

BZ:Yeah.

CW:Can --

BZ:A dear friend --

CW:Can --

BZ:-- and colleague.

CW:Yeah, can you describe him?

BZ:Yeah, sure. I met him when he was a young man. I -- let's see, he was -- I think had just gotten married or was just about to get married, and he had just 63:00come from Canada. And before that, from Shanghai. And he was handsome in an unusual way. Not movie star handsome, but very good looking, with curly blonde hair. Soft-spoken, beautifully spoken. His Yiddish was music to the ear. Spoke some of the best Yiddish I've ever heard. And I knew him off and on, and I knew him mostly because he became the educational director of the Workmen's Circle, and I was, what else, the chairman of my local Yiddish school in Borough Park, which was, for a while, physically located in the basement of my house. So, we were in constant contact. And I would go see him very frequently. And when I sat in his office, I would make a heroic attempt to speak Yiddish, and he could see 64:00the sweat pouring down. At the time, it was a big effort for me to speak Yiddish continuously, and he was very patient with me. And we got to be more and more and more friendly, and I got to know his sons slightly. I didn't know them well at the time. And I knew his wife, Chana, slightly, also. But became closer and closer and closer as the years went by. And then, when I got to be the chairman of the committee, of which he was the professional, we got very close -- and working with the translations and everything else, and all the organizations. I mean, you know, he was the educational director of the Workmen's Circle, I was the president. He was a vice-editor of the Forward, I was the president. We were geknipt un gebundn [tied up together], as they say. And I got to know his son 65:00very well, and I handpicked his younger son, Moish, as my successor as president in the Workmen's Circle. What else can I tell you? Chana, I got to know even better than before when I translated her book, the "Pearls of Yiddish Poetry."

CW:How did you come to do that?

BZ:They asked me to. Moish asked me -- "Pearls of Yiddish Poetry's a magnificent anthology, and -- scholarly articles about each of the authors. And in Yiddish, it was a classic. And Moish asked me -- I guess it was about four years ago: "Would you translate Yiddish" -- the book, and I said yes, I would, and I did. She helped a little bit, he helped a little bit, but it's about ninety-five 66:00percent my translation.

CW:Yeah. I'd like to ask you about your process for translating.

BZ:Okay.

CW:If you're about to translate a page or a poem, what do you do?

BZ:Read it, first, and -- let's say a poem, for the sake of argument. Read it first, try to relate it in my mind to other poems by that poet. Make a decision: should it be translated in rhyme or not, which brings up a very interesting issue -- whether poetry should be written in rhyme or translated into rhyme is a sore point among poets. My opinion, which is probably, at this point, a minority 67:00opinion, is that if the original is not rhymed, leave it alone, and if it is rhymed in the original, make a heroic effort to translate it in rhyme, if you can, which you can't always do. And on -- when I was dealing with the Yale University Press with a book about -- the Yiddish anthology, "Goldsmith's Yiddish Anthology," which I translated, we were trying to get them to publish it, which they didn't, in the end. The poetry editor said to me, in writing, that he thought poetry in rhyme was very declassee, and no self-respecting poet would write Yiddish or any other poetry in rhyme. Just wasn't done these days. That's probably a majority opinion among poets at the present time. I vigorously 68:00disagree with that.

CW:Why?

BZ:Because I think that if the original is rhymed, it -- doing it in rhyme adds a great deal. And in general, I think, rhyme often adds a great deal if you can do it that way. And you could argue it. It's interesting, I recently, for the first time in my life, wrote a book of original English poetry. I started about two years ago, and the first book is going to be published in February. It's thirty-six poems, which is not an accident. It's two times chai [Hebrew: eighteen]. And none of them is rhymed. None of the poems is rhymed.

CW:Because you're a self-respecting poet? (laughs)

BZ:No, no, just didn't come out that way. The process of writing those, you have to understand -- to know why that is -- is I didn't sit down, decide I'm going to write poetry. I woke up one morning with two poems finished, in my head, and 69:00I put 'em down. Every so often, at intervals, I will wake up in the morning with another poem ready to be transcribed. Little fiddling with -- transcribe. I have never sat down to write a poem. They're always there, pre-written in my head, so -- and they never come out in rhyme.

CW:So, after you read the poem --

BZ:So, I read the poem, decide whether to do it in rhyme or not, and then just go ahead and translate it, straight through.

CW:What resources do you have on hand?

BZ:Various dictionaries and my stable of assistants.

CW:And --

BZ:I have four or five dictionaries, and I sometimes need a Russian dictionary, 70:00which I get from somebody else.

CW:Is there particular -- I mean, you've worked on so much translation. Is there a particularly meaningful project --

BZ:Project?

CW:A translation project that you worked on?

BZ:No. The biggest project that I had of translation is translating that big, two-volume book over there called "Yiddish Literature in America, 1870 to 2000," an anthology which was put together by Emanuel Goldsmith. It's a magnificent anthology, and when he put it together and published it, I said to him, "Manny, we got to -- we got to translate this." So, I did indeed translate it. It took a 71:00long time. I needed help. It took a long time. And then, I wanted to translate the two -- to publish the two volumes. Well, nobody would publish anything that big. So, I took a one-third excerpt of the two of them and put it in that book over there that says Yid-- no, the one to the left of it. "Yiddish Literature" --

CW:That one.

BZ:That one, yeah. "Yiddish Literature in America," put that one together and tried to get it published when, as I say, we tried to get done in Yale University Press, and they said no, less politely than I just said it.

CW:(laughs) Yeah.

BZ:And I finally got it published by KTAV, which we had to pay for. But, on the other hand, Moish Mlotek paid for it in lieu of my translating his mother's book. So, that's the way we have to do it in this business. M'shlept fun do, 72:00m'shlept fun dortn; m'dreyt zikh ahin, m'dreyt zikh aher [You take something from here, you take something from there; you come from here, you go over there].

CW:I'm won-- there --

BZ:But that was a project, and now the other two-thirds are still left. They've been translated. I have two more volumes, finished in manuscript form, ready to be published. All I got to do is find the money to do it.

CW:Who -- when you're translating a Yiddish poem, do you have an audience in mind?

BZ:No. Me.

CW:Who do you think reads Yiddish literature in original -- or in translation --

BZ:Now?

CW:-- these days, yeah?

BZ:Very few people. Almost no one.

CW:How often do you read Yiddish poetry or Yiddish literature?

BZ:Not extremely often. I do it when I'm working on it, of course. And there are 73:00some that I will go back and read over and over again.

CW:Like whom?

BZ:Anything by Sutzkever or Glatstein. There's an anthology that I published a few years ago, the one that's called "Songs to a Lady Moon Walker," which is one of my favorites, and I go back and reread those poems quite often.

CW:If you were recommending to someone new to Yiddish literature, where would you suggest they start?

BZ:In English or in Yiddish? Someone who can read Yiddish?

CW:Yeah, first let's start with that: someone who can read Yiddish.

BZ:Oh, I would say you should start at the top, start with the greats. Start with Sutzkever, again, Glatstein, again, Leivick, again, and then representatives of the various important schools of Yiddish poetry. People like 74:00Dovid Edelstadt and people like Avrom Reyzen and Yehoash and Mani Leib and -- names escape me. Several of the others of "Di Yunge." Leivick I mentioned already.

CW:Halpern.

BZ:Moyshe-Leyb Halpern. I could -- the greats. Reyzl Zhikhlinski, a much underrated woman poet who's one of the greatest, whom I translated, also.

CW:What can -- what does one learn from reading Yiddish literature?

BZ:That you wouldn't learn from something else?

CW:Um-hm.

BZ:I think every Yiddish -- every literature is unique. You learn something 75:00about the soul of the culture.

CW:Can you articulate what the soul of Yiddish culture is?

BZ:I doubt it. I think better men than I have tried that.

CW:I -- I'm -- I'd like to go back to the -- what we were talking about at the beginning, about the divisions in the Yiddish world --

BZ:Okay.

CW:-- and see if I can tie that to the fact that you have sat on so many --

BZ:Okay.

CW:-- at the top of so many Yiddish organizations today, how -- is there still a yikhes [legacy] of tension within the Yiddish world?

BZ:No.

CW:How does that play out? No?

BZ:No.

CW:And how has this world changed? As you said, when you were in mitlshul, it was the apex of Yiddish culture.

BZ:Yes, it was.

CW:So, what have you seen over your lifetime?

BZ:Unfortunately, I've seen all these people die. There are some younger people who are creating Yiddish literature. For example, my colleague, Boris Sandler, the editor of the "Forward," writes lovely novels and novellas, one of which I just finished translating, as a matter of fact, the other day. And we're going to publish that. And he's a pretty good poet, and Dov Ber-Kerler, the -- who is now a professor in Indiana, is an excellent Yiddish poet. Zackary Sholem Berger is a pretty good Yiddish poet. Who else? There are a couple of others who write Yiddish prose that's some -- oh, my good friend, Zvi Eisenman, who is one of the great short story writers in world literature. Much underrated 'cause he only 77:00wrote in Yiddish. I translated a couple books of his short stories. He's still alive, he's still writing.

CW:In Israel?

BZ:Hmm?

CW:Is he in Israel?

BZ:Yes. Yeah.

CW:And on a -- in a normal day or week, how often would you speak Yiddish?

BZ:Every day, to somebody.

CW:Have the -- we've talked about how your Yiddish life has sort of gone parallel with your professional life. Have there been crossovers ever?

BZ:No, I -- at one time, I thought Yiddish would become -- in handy in -- hospital, dealing with patients -- a nekhtike tog [nothing doing]. Practically nobody speaks Yiddish, even among the Hassidim. I had one woman, a patient of 78:00mine, who thought that she spoke Yiddish. She was a Satmar khosid. Her Yiddish was wretched. It was -- basically, she spoke Hungarian. A little bit of Yiddish. Every now and then, I get a call to help with a sign or a translation here in the hospital, by the chaplain, who doesn't speak Yiddish. The Jewish chaplain. The hospital has a panel of translators for various languages, but they never bother to make one for Yiddish or ask me to be on it. I probably speak Yiddish -- I think probably better than anybody in the hospital, better than anybody on the staff.

CW:I -- just one second, I want to look at my questions here.

BZ:Sure.

CW:Oh, yes. So, when -- how -- when you created -- when you have -- had created 79:00your own family did Yiddish and Jewish culture play out in your family home that you created?

BZ:Not very well. My three daughters all went to our elementary shule. And the degree to which it took varies in descending order. The eldest one can read a headline in a Yiddish paper and knows some words here and there, and occasionally memorizes a Pesach poem in Yiddish or whatnot. The middle one, who has the great ear for language among the three of them, knows a few words here and there, and the baby knows nothing. And my grandchildren know nothing.

CW:What about the -- did you celebrate the holidays and --

BZ:Yeah, we celebrate Pesach and Hanukkah. I usually run a secular Pesach seder.

CW:In -- as part of the Workmen's Circle or --

BZ:No, no.

CW:-- separately?

BZ:In my home or my daughter's home.

CW:Can you explain what -- how is secular observance of a traditional holiday different than a religious one?

BZ:Well, I would think that that's almost self-explanatory. Secular is a word that everybody gets all wrapped up about, but it's a very simple word. All it means is non-religious. And a secular holiday or a secular celebration is one 81:00that does not revolve around anything supernatural -- or God. It is not unusual, even in a secular Pesach seder to hear the word "God," but it's used just because it's a custom. Nobody takes it seriously. What the difference, I think, really is between a secular celebration and a religious celebration is that people who do a religious celebration really mean it. They take it seriously. If they don't, they're fakers. And I've got to tell you, although it's impolitic to say so, a lot of people who consider themselves religious are fakers. I am an absolutist in that area, and I have defined for myself -- not unique to me, but 82:00my definition of religious: you must be a person who believes in God, but not only believes in God, but believes in a particular kind of God, a God who always has and still does intervene in human experience and is available for direct communication and assistance by prayer. If you don't believe in that, by Zumoff's law, you are not religious. If you use those criteria, there isn't one religious Jew in a dozen that's really religious, including most rabbis -- so that the issue of secular and religious is, to a certain extent, an artificial one. Probably the only ones who are really religious by my lights are some of 83:00the yeshivish and Hasidic people, and not all of them. The ones who go to Reform or Conservative or Modern Orthodox congregations -- not in my book.

CW:(laughs) Do you consider yourself an activist?

BZ:Yes.

CW:And what does that mean to you?

BZ:It means that one tries to further things that one believes in. I am an activist in the area of Yiddishism. I'm an activist in progressive politics. Those are the two main areas.

CW:People talk about a cultural revival or renaissance of Yiddish culture. What's your take on that?

BZ:I think everybody means something a little bit different by that. In order for a culture to really revive, there have to be people living in it twenty-four hours a day. There are practically none of those left for Yiddish, except Hasidim. And their Yiddishism is a Yiddishism manqué. They're not interested in history, they're not interested in literature. That means two of the most important slices that constitute culture mean nothing to them. So, whether they are living a Yiddish culture or not could be argued pro and con. But they're the only ones who even approach it at the present time. The rest of us play with it, academically, or we stay with it, person to person, emotionally. But I'm not 85:00sure I would call it a religious culture. There are a few. There are the people up on Bainbridge Avenue in the Gottesman, Fishman, Schaechter group. There are people running the Yiddish Farm. There are some in the Yugntruf who go to Yidish-Vokh, which I understand, from those who go there all the time, is deteriorating. There are many of us who try, any time we're with people who can reciprocate, try to use Yiddish as much as we can. But to say that there is a renaissance or revival of Yiddish culture I think would be a vast exaggeration.

CW:So, where are we now with secular Yiddish culture?

BZ:Where I am, as I put it to a number of people who ask me that question, is I follow Dylan Thomas's famous poem. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do not go gentle into that good night." Yiddish will -- will die as a living culture, but not because I'll help it or help it along. I will drag my heels to the bitter end.

CW:What advice -- do you have an eytse [advice] that you'd like to give to younger generations who might choose to participate in Yiddish culture?

BZ:Try it, you'll like it. Find others like yourself. You can't do it alone. Find others like yourself. Participate in all the aspects, particularly history, 87:00literature, holidays -- all the things that the proponents of secular Yiddishkayt have been talking about for decades. I mean, I edited a book, also up on one of those shelves, called "Secular Jewishness for Our Time," which is a compendium of articles that have been written by (makes air quotes) mevinim [experts] about what to do about Yiddishkayt and how to celebrate it. And they've all had wonderful ideas and all you need to do is have the people who follow it. And the Workmen's Circle's new incarnation, as of the last couple of years, has been to revive and recreate Yiddish and Jewish learning communities, which were very prominent and extensive and sort of faded away to next to nothingness. And we hope to be able to bring back many, many more than there were.

CW:Well, I think that's a great note to end on, and a hartsikn dank [thank you very much] --

BZ:Nishto farvos [You're welcome].

CW:-- s'iz geven a koved [it was an honor]. (laughs) Thanks for speaking with us.

BZ:You know, I would -- I learned how to say "thank you" decades before I learned how to say "you're welcome." I don't know why. I never knew how to say "you're welcome" until I was a well-advanced adult.

CW:(laughs) Interesting.

BZ:It must mean something.

CW:Yeah. Well, it's been really a pleasure to talk to you, and also thanks from the Yiddish Book Center.

BZ:My pleasure, and I have nothing but admiration for you folks.

CW:A sheynem dank [Thank you very much].

[END OF INTERVIEW]