GEORGE JOCHNOWITZ ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:So this is Christa Whitney and today is December 15th, 2013. I'm here at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference in Boston, Massachusetts with George Jochnowitz, 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?

GEORGE JOCHNOWITZ:Certainly.

CW:Thank you. So I'd like to start with your family background. Can you tell me briefly what you know?

GJ:My parents were both born in what is now Poland in 1903. When they were born, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And they came to the United States 1:00in their twenties -- my mother was twenty-five, my father was twenty-seven. They did not know each other; they met in the United States -- although they met through a common connection in Poland.

CW:So do you have a sense from them of what their life was like before they came?

GJ:Very much so. And it was very different. My mother was from Ropshits or Ropczyce, a small city -- small town -- shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community]. She lived outside the town. Her father was a cattle dealer. And they felt there was no future in that town. And she and her family -- not all at the same time -- left. Almost all came to the United States, except for one brother, who went to Argentina because he wanted to leave Poland 2:00before he became draft eligible and couldn't wait for a visa. But otherwise, they all came here. My father, although he was born in a town very near my mother -- Kolbuszowa in Polish, Kolbushov in Yiddish -- never lived there at all, and his family moved a few times and then wound up in Kraków, which is a big city. And they lived in a very nice-looking apartment house on a very nice-looking, wide street -- Ulica Dietla. And the family became more and more educated and assimilated and Polish-speaking and not Yiddish-speaking. The older siblings -- some of them had moved to the United States. He was the eighth of ten. He really was unsure about coming to the United States. He wanted to go to maybe build a kibbutz in Palestine, as many of his friends did. But because he 3:00had some sisters in the United States, he came here, thinking, maybe permanently, maybe temporarily. Met my mother because a neighbor of his from Kraków was my mother's cousin. And then they -- the Depression was sort of bad, and my father said, "Let's go back to Poland." And my mother said, "Never." My mother won, as you can see. My father lost five sisters and a brother during the war. And when I saw where my father lived and where my mother lived, it was very easy to understand why he wanted to go back and why she didn't.

CW:Are there any stories that were often told or that were passed down to you?

GJ:I don't know if they were stories -- they were just little bits of anecdotes. But my father did say that when Poland became independent right after World War I ended, that some people were celebrating and decided to celebrate by running after the Jews on the street with bayonets and attempting to stab them. And he ran away. And whether they did stab any of them, I don't know. But that was one of the anecdotes he told me. He also told me -- when he was much younger than that -- that he had been very aware of the Triangle fire that took place in New York City in 1911, because many of the victims were Jewish women from East Europe. It was a great, big story, and he had never thought about it again 5:00until, in 1951, we moved to the apartment where I live today -- on Eighth Street, between Green and Mercer Streets. And if you walk down Green Street, you get to the place where the Triangle fire was, and he saw the plaque on the building, and it reminded him immediately of that 1911 Triangle fire experience. So I became much more aware of the Triangle fire as a result of that. And my mother told me little bits of anecdotes. That when her mother was in labor with, I think, the eighth of her nine children, my mother went to some neighbor -- Polish gentleman -- and he rushed her to the center of the town or something -- 6:00or ran to get a midwife or something -- but did something -- and was yelling something in Polish -- I can't remember it -- but, "Shimshova is in labor!" And that was the moment that I learned that my maternal grandmother was called "Shimshova" -- that wasn't her name -- her name in Yiddish was Brukhe or Brukhe-Leye and her husband's name was Shimshon. And Shimshova, I gather, means "Shimshon's woman." And that was when I learned that's what my grandmother was called. When I went to visit my mother's town, the taxi driver who was serving as our interpreter asked somebody who was the oldest person who lives here, and 7:00they said, "The crazy woman in that house." And we went to meet the crazy woman, who in certain ways seemed very crazy and was very hostile to other people who were around and poked somebody in the stomach with her cane for no apparent reason. To us, she was sweetness and charm. And she didn't recognize the names of my mother or whatever. And the taxi driver said, "What was your grandfather's name?" And I said, "Shimshon." And he said, "That's not a Polish name." And the woman at that point yelled out, "Shimshova!" And she had known my grandmother. And I immediately knew that my grandmother was Shimshova. And we were with my daughter, Eve. And she looked at Eve, and said she resembles Shimshova, and there's something of a family resemblance. So that came out of an anecdote my 8:00mother told me. But my mother had a lot of anecdotes.

CW:I want to come back to your travels, but did your parents talk much about it? I mean, did they talk often about the old country -- memories of their teen and childhood years?

GJ:My father mentioned that he had gone to school in Poland and was studying to be an engineer. And there was talk, but it was always in little dribs and drabs -- it wasn't ever a complete story. But my mother told me that she had gone to school barefooted all the time, even in the winter. That there was an enormously wealthy family that lived nearby, except they didn't quite live there -- they 9:00only lived there during the month of October, when they came to hunt. And she said the way they would hunt is, the family members would go with their rifles and be accompanied by various servants who would surround the forest and begin making noise and walk towards the center of the forest, with the animals running away from the noise, and then the people would ride up on their horses and kill the deer that had run to the middle. And she thought this was really very horrible. And the remaining eleven months, the house was empty, but she had a friend the same age she was who was a daughter of servants who lived in the house all the time and took care of it. And this friend invited her into the mansion. And she was always dazzled by the mansion and said she came in and saw 10:00all the mirrors on the walls and saw herself barefooted and looking ragged in the mirrors and felt how out of place she was. And then, many years later, we took a trip to Newport, Rhode Island, and my mother was very curious to see the mansions. And we went to this one, that one, that one, and she said, "Nothing like the one in Poland." Until we got to The Breakers -- then she said, "This is it. This is the way the one in Poland looked." So that was part of her storytelling experience.

CW:Can you describe the home that you grew up in?

GJ:Well, I was born in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. We lived in an apartment house. The building was named the Alhambra, a handsome-looking six-story apartment house. And we lived there until I was almost fourteen, and then we moved to Manhattan, to Eighth Street. And my parents stayed there the 11:00rest of their lives, and now I live in that apartment. But in addition to that, my parents bought a farm in Goshen in 1942, and my father -- who had considered the possibility of living on a kibbutz -- was sort of interested in the farm, and an aunt and uncle of mine moved to the farm permanently. And we went there on weekends -- although I stayed there the whole summer -- and at first raised potatoes, but then later raised onions -- it was a big onion-raising area. And I would work in the onion fields somewhat. And then, after the war was over, somehow it seemed we weren't going to become farmers. And my parents had a 12:00machine shop where they made precision metal parts for airplanes -- frequently for propellers, but other parts of airplanes -- and they thought the business might get very slow after the war ended, and it didn't get that slow, and the business stayed in business, and the farm was not making money, and so they stopped farming and they built bungalows. And we just at first rented it to random people -- although many of my relatives and cousins stayed there for the summer. And then, when it became less common for people to rent summer bungalows and move for the summer, we rented it to the Lubavitcher Hasidim, which, of course, gave me a chance to study their dialect.

CW:Well, before we get to the farm, can you just describe what Borough Park was like in the forties and --

GJ:It was known then as an Orthodox neighborhood, and by current standards, most definitely it was not. Orthodox did not mean Orthodox. Most of the Jewish 13:00children went to public school, as I did. Well, my parents were not exactly religious -- they were very -- very confused situation. But generally, the children went to public schools. And some people were Sabbath observant and some weren't. And there were different degrees of keeping kosher -- you know, in the house, out of the house -- your home was kosher; when you ate out, you would go to a restaurant that wasn't kosher, but you wouldn't order pork or shrimp -- that was a common way to do it. And that was, for many people, the meaning of Orthodoxy. And now, of course, that's not Orthodoxy.

CW:When you say your parents were confused about their religion, what do you mean by that?

GJ:They were very fond of it -- very attached to it. We did keep a kosher home 14:00-- certainly, partly so that friends and relatives could eat in the home, but also because when my maternal grandfather came to the United States, instead of a cattle dealer, he became a kosher butcher, so we got the meat from him. And that was part of what we did. We went to services on the High Holidays, and not much other than that, and observed many of the holidays at home -- Passover and so on. But the thing my parents really didn't like -- really didn't want to do -- was observe the Sabbath, because that meant not working, and you're supposed to work all the time, and Sabbath deprives humanity of one-seventh of its working life. And so -- and this was related to the fact that I think my father had wanted to live on a kibbutz or be a founder of a kibbutz -- that work was 15:00beautiful in its own right.

CW:As a child, were there aspects of Jewish culture -- be it holidays or cultural -- you know, music, or traditions -- that you particularly liked or were interested in?

GJ:I always liked the music -- folk music and so on. And I mostly liked the holidays. And my parents went to the Yiddish theater all the time, especially after we moved to Manhattan and we could walk to Second Avenue. So I really became very big on enjoying Yiddish theater. And one of my aunts ran a grocery store with her husband, and apparently, if you sold Maxwell House coffee, Maxwell House would give you tickets to Yiddish shows. I don't know what the connection was. And so, my aunt and uncle and mother and father and I went to 16:00the Yiddish theater together very often. And it was a wonderful thing to do. And I got to know stars like Menasha Skulnik and -- less famous now -- Yetta Zwerling -- but somebody who I thought was wonderful. And I just liked doing that. And we bought some seventy-eight records with the music -- some of them, in some cases, I remember the words, and I really liked them all very much.

CW:What did Second Avenue look like when it was full of Yiddish theaters?

GJ:Most of the buildings were the same buildings that are there today. A few of them have been torn down and replaced, but mostly, they were the same buildings. And those buildings looked like tenements and they looked as if they were designed for poor people. But the building was busy -- there were stores and it was lively. And that, you saw. And there were more Jewish places -- there was 17:00Ratner's Restaurant and Rappoport's Restaurant and Moskowitz and Lupowitz Restaurant -- which looked kosher, but wasn't. But things of that sort. So it was a busy-looking neighborhood that looked much poorer than it does today. But certainly, just as lively -- maybe livelier.

CW:And the plays themselves -- do you remember any songs or specific plays?

GJ:I certainly remember songs. And I'm not too sure if I remember the plays as plays. They were all comedies -- musical comedies. They were all in a mixture of Yiddish and English. And the same with the songs -- they would -- a lot of English words sung with a Yiddish accent. So -- should I give you an excerpt?

CW:Sure. Please.

GJ:Okay, so a Menasha Skulnik song, which was called "Double Trouble." And this is an excerpt, and it'll be a bit cut, but: (sings) "Ikh zits mikh in mayn byuik, in for arim in ruik. Zey ikh a vaybl shteyt un vinkt tsu mir. Vayl ikh farshtey dem shvindl, shtel ikh op mayn mashindl. Ikh nem zi far a rayd un floyert mit ir. Zi kimt in rikht zikh tsi shoyn. Ikh gib di gas, ikh fli shoyn. Zey ikh a trafik kop un ikh blaybn shteyn. In vayl er halt anshraybn, a tiket far shnel traybn, hot er zayn vayb in kar bay mir derzeyn. Oy, dubel trubel, dubel trubel! Tsvey tiket, zugt er, far dir ikh shrayb, far spiding mit a 19:00politsmans vayb. Dubel trubel, dubel trubel, trubel in der tsol. [I am sitting in my Buick, calmly cruising around. I see a woman standing and she winks at me. Because I understand the trick, I pull my car over. I take her for a ride and flirt with her. She warming up to me. I hit the gas, we are flying. I see a traffic cop and I pull over. As he's writing me the ticket for speeding, he sees his wife next to me in the car. Oh, double trouble, double trouble! I'm writing you two tickets, he says, for speeding with a policeman's wife. Double trouble, double trouble, so much trouble.]." I cut part of it. There were other verses in the middle that I couldn't remember.

CW:Could you just describe why you like that song, or maybe what it's about, briefly?

GJ:I think it's a silly song. I like the rhymes and I like the melody, sort of, and I remember Menasha Skulnik personally. And --

CW:So what was Menasha Skulnik like as an actor? What was his style?

GJ:Well, he also appeared in English and had his own English television show -- English-language show -- and I remember a running line, people said, How do you spell your name? And he'd say, "M like in Menasha, E like in Enasha, N like in Nasha -- Menasha!" (laughs) But he would play somebody looking very silly, and 20:00he had a funny way of walking, and would walk like this somehow. And the idea was that he looked silly. But he also played parts. There was one that I never saw, but I did hear second-hand about a song that he sang -- or part of it. The play was called "The Scotchman from Orchard Street" -- in those days, you could say "Scotchman" rather than "Scotsman" -- and it had a piece of a song that went: "Oh, you'll take the IRT and I'll take the BMT and I'll be on Orchard Street afore ye." (laughs) And that's the part I know. I did not hear him sing that in person.

CW:Any others that you want to share?

GJ:I don't remember terribly well -- something Molly Picon -- I think it was called "A mantse [A story]." And she would tell a story and take a drink and repeat it and tell it again, but it got mixed up, and she kept doing that. And each time, she would say, "Lekhayim, yidn, hert zikh tsi [Cheers, Jews, listen up]." And towards the end, when she did it about the fourth time, it was, "Hert zikh tsi in shoklt zikh nisht [Listen up and stop swaying]." And I don't remember all the mixed-up parts. But anyway, it was one of the songs. I would -- maybe I should see if I can dig it out somehow.

CW:So, how often would you go to the theater?

GJ:Twice a year.

CW:Any particular occasion, or just when you (UNCLEAR)?

GJ:Usually, they did two plays a year -- maybe more, but I mean, there were always two plays a year at the theater we'd go to most frequently.

CW:So -- who were the people in your home growing up?

GJ:Well, I'm an only child. So, there was my father, my mother, and me. And in the summer, on the farm, cousins -- aunts, uncles, cousins. An aunt from Texas came every summer and spent two months in New York and then went back to Texas. And her children still live in Texas. And there are other relatives in Texas.

CW:And what were the languages you grew up with?

GJ:My parents spoke English to each other. Even though they both spoke Yiddish and they both spoke Polish -- my father's language was Polish, my mother's was Yiddish. (clears throat) And they just spoke English. My grandparents, who came 23:00in their fifties or early sixties or something, really never learned English very well; when we went to my grandparents', everybody spoke Yiddish. And then there were some other relatives here and there, and when we visited them, one would hear Yiddish. I'm told when I was very little, my grandmother spent a lot of time with me, and that I was more fluent in Yiddish than in English. I don't remember that this was ever the case. I remember that I could speak Yiddish; I always think of myself as having thought in English. And then over the years -- you know, my grandparents died and the cousins stopped coming to the farm, and my Yiddish atrophied somewhat. It came back to life with the Lubavitchers. And 24:00then, I discovered there was a language called Judeo-Italian. Somebody saw an article in "Commentary," mailed it to me -- or gave it to me, said, "The author of this article is asking for you." And I wrote a letter to him in care of "Commentary Magazine" and went to Italy in 1968 with my wife and children. And we spent two months in Italy going from Jewish community to community -- visited many old age homes, made lots of recordings. And I heard a lot of Judeo-Italian. I think many of those speakers are no longer alive. And while we were there, the same friend who had told me this wrote me another letter saying, "While you're in Italy, maybe you can get to Monaco. There is a man named Armand Lunel -- an old man -- and he is the last speaker on earth of Judeo-Provençal." So I went 25:00to Monaco and I got him. And he was certainly old and he was a bit deaf, and the way you spoke to him was, you spoke to him and his wife, and then his wife would scream in his ear. (laughs) So she was his hearing aid. And he sang, "Chad gadya [Hebrew: Passover song, lit. "One little goat"]" for me in Judeo-Provençal and told me a couple of things. And then I got very interested in the language and didn't know exactly where to proceed. And I went to the "Encyclopedia Judaica," and the encyclopedia said there was a prayer book, pre-printing, in the Cecil Roth Collection. Well, there was no Google in those years, and I felt there must be a way to find out where the Cecil Roth Collection is. And we went to a party at a neighbor's house, and there was Mrs. Cecil Roth as one of the guests. And I 26:00said, "Where's the collection?" And she said, "University of Leeds, England." So we went to England, went to Leeds, which I wouldn't have gone to otherwise -- heard beautiful North English dialects in Leeds, which I really enjoyed very much -- and found the prayer book, which was extremely hard to read. It was before printing, it was Hebrew letters, I wasn't sure which letter was which -- I don't know Provençal terribly well under any circumstances, and I certainly didn't know how to read it in Hebrew letters -- but fortunately, the blessing that I found was on page two: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who made me a woman." I thought that was an incredible discovery. Pre-printing! You know, maybe late 1300s, 1400s -- I don't know when. There was no date. So it was all 27:00luck, it was all coincidence. Finding out there was Judeo-Italian was a coincidence. Finding out that this man was there in Monaco was a coincidence. Having the Lubavitcher tenants -- I never knew that I would study their dialect until I was there.

CW:Yeah, can you go back and just tell me about the Lubavitcher tenants more? What was your interaction with them?

GJ:They were very friendly. They were tolerant of the fact that we were less observant than they were, and while we were there, we became more observant -- but never as observant as they were. And then, you know, they would -- let's say, say the Mincha -- afternoon prayers -- and then the evening prayers, but between the two of those, they would walk out -- sort of make a break, which I guess it's easy to do if you're in the country. And when they walked out, I 28:00always saw the bats flying -- which I had never been aware of before, and I understood bats fly between Mincha and Maariv. (laughs) And so that was one of the things I learned from the Lubavitchers. And my parents, as I said, had been sort of anti-Shabbos, but they had grown up in Europe in very traditional communities -- especially my mother. And my mother got sort of sentimental and said, "Shabbos is very beautiful. It's as hard as work." That made it okay. (laughs)

CW:You write that it was really at that time that you realized that there were different dialects in Yiddish -- when you were in Goshen at the farm. Can you describe --

GJ:Well, that's when I first realized there were different dialects in English -- when I was maybe still five, probably six. But I had grown up in Borough Park 29:00and spoke Borough Park English, and heard the farm boys, who spoke Orange County, New York English, and it was clearly very different -- and it was much more like the radio. So that struck me at once. And as I have written, I became consciously bidialectal -- I didn't know the word. No, I sort of knew there were different Yiddish dialects. I don't know when I really became aware of that. I mean, when the Lubavitchers came, I knew they would speak a different dialect.

CW:So, how did you get involved in linguistics academically?

GJ:I started college as an engineering major because that's what my parents thought I should do and that's what they did. And I was a very, very lousy 30:00engineering student. I knew I liked languages. I was thinking maybe I should major in French, which was the language I had most studied, but that meant majoring in French literature, which wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. There was no undergraduate linguistics major at that time. But I was really doing quite badly in physics. I went to my physics professor, Nobel Prize winner Polykarp Kusch. He used to talk like this. (laughs) I said to him, "Am I the worst student of the class?" He said, "Yes, you are." And he asked why I didn't major in some other subject. He said, "Isn't there anything else you're interested in?" And I said, "Philology." And he said, "For God's sake, be a philologist." (laughs) And I started looking at graduate catalogues for philology, and I discovered the word "linguistics" -- I hadn't known it. And I 31:00felt the really best place for me to study what I wanted to study was Columbia, and that's where I met Uriel Weinreich, who became my advisor -- and, of course, not for Yiddish -- my dissertation was about French dialects. But that's where I got to know him, and I wrote the dissertation, and he approved it -- and died ten days later. He was not at my defense. I had a very difficult defense, but he had approved it.

CW:What was it like to work with him?

GJ:He was wonderful -- kind, sweet, understanding. Told me how to go about things. Gave me very practical, useful advice. I just thought, couldn't have been better.

CW:Did you meet any other members of the family?

GJ:Of his family?

CW:Max's father or --

GJ:I met Max's father, I met his wife -- very briefly. I didn't get to know them.

CW:Did you have any contact with Yiddish linguistics when you were in contact with Uriel Weinreich?

GJ:Well, I knew that that's what was going on, so I became aware of that. And sometimes he would ask me how my parents said something, and sometimes I would say something to him, and he said, "That doesn't sound right." But once he said, "How do they pronounce the word for 'city'?" And I thought and thought and thought, and said, "shtuit." And he was very happy with that. And then another time, I was wondering -- I was hearing people who spoke other dialects use the not very polite word "shaysn [shit]." And my parents said it the same way, and I 33:00thought, If my parents say "shaysn," why shouldn't they say "sheysn"? And I asked Weinreich, and he said, "Your parents shouldn't be saying 'shaysn,' they should be saying 'shasn.'" So I went home and asked my parents, and they said, Yes, that's what we used to say, but we switched when we came to America. And you know, off-color words are the ones that switch first. (laughs) So -- and then there were other things that I learned that I was a little surprised about. I thought the Yiddish word for "window" was "vinde." And then I was told that it was "fenster" -- just as if it were German or something. And then I went home and asked my parents and learned, yes, there really is a Yiddish word "fenster."

CW:What did you learn from Uriel Weinreich -- in terms of your studies?

GJ:I learned the relationship between language and culture -- language and regional dialects and also social dialects and class dialects and all that kind of thing. I had known they existed, but I realized this was something you could study -- and that was a very wonderful thing to learn.

CW:Can you just briefly describe what he looked like?

GJ:Well, there are photos of him, but he was in -- when he died, he was forty-one, and he looked like a pleasant man -- a somewhat roundish face, maybe? I don't know how to describe people. (laughs)

CW:Is there anything else you remember or would like to share about Uriel Weinreich?

GJ:Well, he was away for a while, during which time I was writing my master's 35:00essay and getting into a lot of disagreements. Because I was writing about the Romanian noun declension, and I was taking a Romanian course in Philadelphia and commuting, and somehow, I thought that the teacher in Pennsylvania, Juilland, was really my advisor -- but he wasn't, he was at another school. And so I would get back, and my official advisor, Professor Austerlitz, and the department head, Diver, would say, Do this, and I thought I should do it the other way. And then, they didn't want to approve the master's essay. And Austerlitz said, "Well, approve it anyway." And Diver said no. And then they said, Let's give it 36:00to a person -- third party -- who doesn't know the author. That was Greenberg. And he read it and he approved it and I got the master's degree. And then Weinreich came back. And then Weinreich called me into his office and said, "We'd like to have a conversation -- Professor Diver, Professor Austerlitz, and me and you." And Austerlitz and Diver said I had the MA, but they thought I shouldn't go on to work for the PhD, because I was a difficult person, or something like that -- didn't take advice very well -- and Weinreich saved me. So I went on and was able to complete my PhD work. And then, as I say, he 37:00approved it for defense. And once he approved it for defense, I think I was going to -- you know, at that point, I think you usually make it -- though I had a tough defense.

CW:And then you described how you sort of accidentally got into Jewish languages. So how does Yiddish fit into your academic work?

GJ:Well, two ways. The Lubavitchers. I started out thinking I would write about Romance languages, and then there were the Lubavitchers. So what could one do but study them? They were right there, you know? And I interviewed them all one at a time. And so that was very nice. I really felt it was extremely enlightening and pleasurable. And that was the beginning of it. And I didn't know I'd go on with Jewish languages, but then I learned -- I had learned about 38:00Judeo-Italian, so there was this connection. And then the last step -- connected with the farm -- there were German Jewish cattle dealers in Orange County. And I had known some of them, sort of. I didn't know they had their -- I didn't know they spoke Yiddish at all. I didn't know there was such a thing as West Yiddish. But once I started reading about Yiddish -- with the Lubavitchers and with Weinreich and so on -- I learned that there was a West Yiddish and that in particular there was a cattle dealer Yiddish, and I thought, maybe some of these people knew it. But then I was talking to a particular person, and he used some word or some pronunciation, and it struck me at once -- this is West Yiddish. And I asked him about it, and he said yes, that he had this way of speaking. And I said, could I meet him and record an interview with him? And he said I could 39:00do it on the telephone, so I did it on the telephone. And then I spoke to the rabbi in Middletown, who said there were two other West Yiddish speakers. And I called them up. One of them had just died, so I never got him. And the other one really was a big source of information, and I went up with one of my College of Staten Island students, who was tape recording while I was there, and got all his West Yiddish conversation. And he died very shortly afterwards, so I really caught him at the last minute. And the first guy, I got him, as well. Their West Yiddish wasn't identical. And it was, again, a whole series of things that were all based on luck and coincidence, you know? My parents bought a farm in Goshen; 40:00did they know that would lead me to study Jewish languages and linguistics? (laughs) But that was the way it turned out to be. And it's what I always wanted to do -- I hadn't known I wanted to do it. And if I had known thirty years earlier that there were all these West Yiddish speakers, I would have been so eager to get hold of them.

CW:So what do you like about it?

GJ:It's interesting. It's part of the world. It's something -- when people speak -- you hear them talk every day, and they have their own way of speaking, and you can learn things about people just from listening to them. And I like to do that. And I remember I was on a train in China going from Baoding -- which is the city we lived in -- to Beijing. And I got on with my daughter and we were looking for a seat. And a voice called out in English, "There are some seats 41:00over here." And I thought, Borough Park. (laughs) And he was -- he had gone to my elementary school. And I thought that was so wonderful. Isn't it wonderful to be a linguist? You can do this. (laughs) And not terribly long ago, a Chinese-looking young man in Manhattan came up and asked me how to find Washington Place. And I directed him, and he said, "Sure." And I said, "Beijing." And he said, "How did you know?" (laughs) Because he hadn't even spoken Chinese -- except sort of he had, because "Shì" in Chinese is a way to say "yes" -- and then it's also English, "sure." But, you know, it just sounded like Beijing. So it's nice to be able to do that. It brings you closer to the 42:00world and to what's going on around you.

CW:Can you describe a little more about what you said you learned from Weinreich -- the way that language can teach you things about the culture and the connection that's between language and culture? How does language function in culture?

GJ:Well, the thing about language is that you're not born knowing it -- you're born with an ability to learn it, which isn't quite the same thing. And so, you learn it, and you will always learn it, in a slightly different way from what you heard. And language is just change. Most of the changes serve no purpose. But language has to change, because the world changes. And we have to change our language to be able to talk about a new world -- you know, we have to be able to 43:00talk about computers and all sorts of things. And so, since language always changes, any group that is more or less living by itself will evolve, and it will do so in two ways. One of the ways is random. Does it matter whether you say an "r" or leave it out? That's random. But if you're within the community, it'll work that way. But the other thing is, a community is gonna have to talk about something. So if you're a linguist and you say "morphology," it means something different if -- than other people who are talking about other professions, other parts of the world. And you have your own technical thing. And of course, if you're Jewish, you really need to be able to say Mincha and Maariv. You could say "afternoon prayers," "afternoon service," "evening 44:00service," but it's already too long, and you have -- and then there are all sorts of other technical details, which you can talk about so much more efficiently if you just have your own word for it and don't have to use a five-word expression to explain it. So you need your own vocabulary and your own way of speaking about something. And so the two things work together -- the natural fact that everything changes, and the very practical fact that your language has to fit your needs. And whenever you need a new word, the word is gonna have to come there, somehow. And languages are always increasingly vocabulary. And there are different ways -- you can borrow a word from another language, you can create something with prefixes or suffixes, or you can make a 45:00compound word. And it varies. English borrows lots of words from other languages. Chinese hardly does, because it's not written with an alphabet -- it would be hard to spell it -- and so Chinese makes up new words by creating compounds of old words. And so, in English, you say "cinema" and "cinematography" and such -- those words -- borrowed -- they're sort of international. But in Chinese, the word for "movie" has to be reinvented or made up, so it's "Diànyǐng," meaning "electric shadow," which I think is just beautiful. And so I got to see that -- that you have this different Chinese way of increasing the vocabulary. But if it needs to increase, it will increase.

CW:So for the Jewish languages you've studied, what do you learn about Jewish identity, Jewish culture -- or cultures -- through the Jewish languages?

GJ:Well, once you're speaking the language, that will already -- once you're speaking the language, it will interfere with other languages -- the words will go from one language to another. And that will already describe you -- locate you. And then another thing about Jewish languages, they tend to have more of a sing-song -- not always the same sing-song -- and that comes from the tradition, I think, of studying the Talmud, where this rabbi says, and the -- you know. And so you're making all the contrasts between this point of view and that point of view. And a thing about Jewish culture, perhaps as a result of this, is that there's a tradition of disagreeing. And it also is reflected in your intonation 47:00-- and then people will hear the intonation, and you will be recognizable by the intonation. But of course, the languages absorb from the surrounding culture. And just before I walked in, I was looking at this headline, and I saw this painting -- I had seen the painting live many times before, in the past, but it is written in the Hebrew alphabet, and it's English -- it's a strictly kosher chicken market. And so here is this store -- kosher butcher store -- writing to a Jewish audience of Yiddish speakers. And how do you say "strictly" in Yiddish? "Striktly." And how do you say chicken? "Tshiken." And how do you say market? "Market." (laughs) So -- and, of course, "kosher" is a borrowing in English from 48:00Hebrew. So there you have it -- it's all English in the Hebrew alphabet -- Judeo-English. So that's how languages evolve. And you see it all the time.

CW:Can you describe, if at all, if there's connection between your academic interests and your personal life or your personal Jewish identity?

GJ:Well, my academic interests took me to Italy, took me to Provence, and took me to Leeds. So that was part of it. And as a result of that, I met people -- in Italy, particularly, I went to the synagogue in Italy all the time, and got -- made contact with Italian Jews, and in some cases I'm still in contact with them. And then, it led me to meet somebody in the United States who was from Italy, Francesco Spagnolo, who I believe is at the conference today. And I was 49:00talking to somebody or other and talking about the "Chad gadya" song, and you can say the fathers -- "Avram, Yitshak, [e yang?] Yaakov" -- that's the way I learned it in Rome, the first way -- if you're more in the north, instead of "[yang?] Yaakov," you say "[yayn?] Yaakov." And Francesco overheard me and came over right away and was very delighted that I knew this, and that led to a connection with somebody else who I could become friends with. Well, he lives in California, so it's sort of long-distance, but it's nice to be able to meet people like that. So it brings you in touch with the world.

CW:When do you get a chance to use Yiddish or other Jewish languages in your daily life?

GJ:Well, my daughter -- Eve, my older daughter -- is one of the two people who 50:00runs a cooking show on YouTube. So when I see that, I hear Eve speaking Yiddish -- Eve's Yiddish is very much better than mine. And then I'll meet friends of Eve, and they're going to be speaking Yiddish much more than other friends, so I'll be able to use Yiddish. I don't use it ordinarily every day -- I mostly live in an English-speaking world.

CW:How does language play a role in the transmission of culture -- or not?

GJ:Well, language plays a role in the transmission of absolutely everything. That's the way we humans communicate -- we do it by language. And then, the 51:00language adapts to the culture and transmits the culture. So I guess that's how it works.

CW:How, when you had your own family, did you -- what kind of Jewish environment did you create? What were you consciously trying to transmit?

GJ:We became regular synagogue-goers. And the children went to public school for elementary school and then went to B'nai Jeshurun day school for intermediate school and then went to Stuyvesant for high school. So it was just a brief period, but that brief period made a big difference in their lives. And we were very happy to do that. And they became, in different ways, much more Jewishly oriented than we are.

CW:What do you see in younger generations that's different than your generation in terms of Jewish identity?

GJ:People now who are my children's generation are much less likely to reproduce. When I think of all my friends -- college friends, whatever, that I've kept in touch with -- well, of course, different families are different, but I would say my average friend -- the median -- had two children, as I do. And I guess the median has one grandchild, as I do -- or sometimes they have more, sometimes they have zero, but there seems to have been a great drop-off. So my contemporaries have more children as a group than they have grandchildren. 53:00And that's a real change. And of course, if you go to a religious community, it's quite different. And people I knew who were Orthodox -- I mean, much more -- really Orthodox -- in Borough Park -- did not have families of eight or ten children. Well, my parents were parts of those big families, but that was a different world. And now, it's come back in that group. Now, when I was in Borough Park, I never spoke Yiddish to a contemporary of mine. Maybe they knew it, maybe they didn't -- I didn't know how well they knew it. And I went for a walk in Borough Park, and there was a kind of recess break at, I think, Bobover yeshiva or something, and the kids came out and were playing ball or something, 54:00and all speaking to each other in Yiddish -- and all speaking to each other in the central Yiddish dialect that my parents spoke. And that was, again, something I never expected to hear. By the way, I was aware -- even though my parents came from the same area -- that there were a few minor differences. They had a different "r." My mother and her siblings said, "royt," meaning "red," and my father and his siblings said, "royt" -- apical "r." So that was a difference. And just one particular plural -- the word for "nose." And both parents said "nues," but the plural for my mother was "neyzer," and for my father was "neys." 55:00So that was another difference that I noticed. But I didn't ever notice that there was a word for "window," other than "vinde." (laughs)

CW:And as you mentioned, Eve, your daughter, is very involved in the Yiddish world. Did you ever speak Yiddish with her, or did that develop separately?

GJ:Never really. Sometimes my mother said a couple of things to her in Yiddish. My mother spoke more Yiddish to my children than she did to me. But that was maybe a factor. But we did not speak Yiddish -- unless there was something to be said in Yiddish or somebody who was around and there was a reason to speak Yiddish or something. There were Yiddish words that came in that were always -- 56:00certainly, in my family, one never said, "A person has no choice." You said, "So-and-so has no brayre." So that just was part of the English. And that might have existed in my own family, too, to a lesser extent.

CW:So, I'd like to ask a little bit about your teaching and work in the university. Who are the types of students that you have in your classes?

GJ:Well, I'm retired. At the College of Staten Island, very few Jewish students. Students from many different parts of the world -- loads of interesting places, every continent. I did teach linguistics. I also taught ESL, and the ESL 57:00students were obviously from everywhere. And some of the linguistics students were very good, and some of them were taking it because they thought it was something you ought to take if you're going to be a teacher or so. And some were very bright, and some were less so. Variety. I did not teach, ever, in a class where everybody was really interested in linguistics and wanted to go into linguistics

-- nothing like my own graduate student experience. Though I did come across people who were very good. But they were as individuals.

CW:Did you ever have the opportunity to work with a student on Jewish languages?

GJ:I don't think I ever did. Not at Staten Island. I also taught linguistics in China, but certainly no student ever wanted to major in Jewish languages in 58:00China. Although I could imagine it happening. People were surprisingly interested in Jews in China.

CW:In what way?

GJ:They were aware of the fact that there were Jews. They knew that Jews tended to be very prominent in certain areas. Sometimes -- more than once -- when people learned I was Jewish, they would say, Very intelligent people. Einstein, Kissinger, Zamenhof. And I was not all that aware of Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, but in 1984, he was a big name in China. When I went back in '89, people in China who had been interested in Esperanto had pretty much lost the interest and felt English is Esperanto. In 1989, China was a very 59:00English-oriented country. And I haven't been back since '89.

CW:Well, I'd like to -- since we're talking about travel -- maybe talk about your trips to Poland a little more. First of all, what was the impulse to go to Poland for the first time?

GJ:For the first time, 1990. Two things. One is, I had just wanted to go back and see where my parents were from and see if I could locate something very specific. In the case of my father, I actually saw the house he lived in. In the case of my mother, it was no longer standing, but we saw the woman who had known Shimshova. So, I mean, I wanted to go and make that contact. That was one reason. The other is, in 1989, I was in China at the time of the Tiananmen massacre; there was a student independence movement and it had failed. In 60:00Poland, it succeeded. It wasn't quite the same thing -- there wasn't a massacre, Poland had opened up. And I wanted to go to the country where the revolution that I had saw crushed in China had made it. So those two worked together. And so 1990 was the year after '89, I just thought, Now is the time to go to Poland. That was the first time. The second time -- '95 -- I don't know. We went with Eve the second time, but not with Miriam. Was there a conference or something?

CW:What was your parents' reaction to this desire of yours to go back and see their --

GJ:Oh. My father was no longer living. My mother pretty much had lost her mind. 61:00And when I came back from Poland, I said I had been to her hometown. And she said, "Did you see my dog?"

CW:What do you think they would have said had they been cogent?

GJ:I think they would have been afraid that I'd get into trouble. And I think they would have been very curious to see what had happened and what I had seen -- both. But as I say, my father was not alive, and my mother was no longer living in the same world.

CW:What were your expectations in going there, and what did you find?

GJ:I felt I would find things to ring some sort of bell. And I did, in different 62:00ways. My mother had her own recipe for making a kind of stewed chicken, gedempte [stewed] chicken. And when I was in my mother's town and we went to the dining room in the hotel -- which was the only restaurant we found, I don't know if it was the only one there -- I ordered some sort of chicken dish, and it was my mother's recipe. Not as good as my mother's -- (laughs) -- but there it was. And I never found it anywhere else. Another thing that we discovered was, my mother would make a kind of cucumber salad, and in Poland, it was eaten all the time and was called "mizeria," which is a peculiar name for cucumber salad. (laughs) So that was something. I found there were food connections. Even though we met 63:00very, very few Polish Jews, because there are very few, there seemed to be certain cultural parallels -- also, a lot of cultural differences. Hard to -- I mean, just style of moving or talking or something, it's very hard to put my finger on it. But there were also things that were very different. We had the experience of walking in Warsaw in the evening and seeing people staggering, obviously drunk, sometimes just falling flat down on the sidewalk, and I thought, That isn't part of my own culture. And my parents used to refer to alcoholism as "goyishe nakhes [pride of the Gentiles]." So -- (laughs) -- I saw that. That was one of the things that didn't cross the cultural boundary. I was 64:00surprised to see the Jewish music festival in Kraków, about a block and a half from where my father lived, and hear the klezmer music performed. It was very moving. It was a very exciting, moving experience. And I don't know if it would have happened in the days when all the Jews were living there. I mean, it was -- the Polish population was remembering something they hadn't participated in. And I thought that -- we came across very, very mixed reactions to Jews, but there was much more positive Jewish feeling -- pro-Jewish feeling in Poland -- much more interested in Jewish food and in Jewish culture and in Jewish music. And I 65:00think even politically, I think that Poland is perhaps one of the least anti-Israel countries in Europe. So that was not something that I had expected. I knew there were mixed feelings. I mean, I knew my parents had talked about people who were friendly and who were hostile, and helpful and difficult and -- you know, and maybe dangerous -- but I didn't expect the balance to be so much more pro-Jewish and pro-Jewishly sentimental than what I saw. That was a nice surprise.

CW:So, we've been talking about language and the way that language influences 66:00culture. I'm wondering about Yiddish specifically. What is the role that you see academics playing in transmitting culture -- Jewish culture?

GJ:Well, I think that there is -- most Yiddish speakers now are Hasidim. But academics have created a small community of Yiddishist young people, among them those who founded the Yiddish Farm, which is now located on my farm. So I think that's something. I think that Eve's cooking partner, I believe, is the daughter of Mordkhe Schaechter, somebody I had met at Columbia and become somewhat friendly with. And his grandson is one of the two Yiddish farmers. And that is 67:00part of the -- I think, part of the academic world. And I think the Yiddish Farm is both a farm and an academic community. So, I think that's the way. I don't know how far this will go. And, of course, there is the Yiddish bookstore in Amherst, Massachusetts.

CW:Where do you see -- from your perspective, what's the place of Yiddish in the academy and in American culture today?

GJ:Well, I think all languages and all cultures have a place in the academy. I would expect it to be fair.

CW:What about in American Jewish culture?

GJ:It's part of the way the American Jewish culture is splitting, I think. Some people are very interested in it, and, of course, the religious people actually 68:00speak it -- or some of them. And some of them have no interest in it whatsoever and are not only lacking in interest, but pretty much unaware.

CW:Where do you see as the future of Yiddish?

GJ:Oh, the future is always unpredictable. I don't know.

CW:Well, I have just one last question, but -- I know our conversation is varied, but is there anything that you want to add to the topics we've been talking about today?

GJ:I'll probably think about it as soon as we leave. (laughs)

CW:Okay. (laughs) Well, you can write me. I just -- I'd like to end by asking, what advice do you have to students of Jewish languages -- of Yiddish in particular?

GJ:The world is beautiful. Languages are beautiful. Culture is beautiful. Anything that people do is beautiful.

CW:Well, a hartsikn dank [thank you very much].

GJ:Nishtu farvos [You're welcome].

CW:Thanks so much for taking the time -- from me and the Yiddish Book Center, of course.

GJ:Sure. My pleasure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]