MIRIAM UDEL ORAL HISTORY

JESSICA PARKER: This is Jessica Parker, and today is Monday, December 16th, 2013.  I am here at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference in Boston, Massachusetts with Miriam Udel, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Miriam Udel, do I have your permission to record this interview?

MIRIAM UDEL:   Yes, you do.

JP:  Thank you very much.  So, to start, I'd like to ask you a bit about family.  Can you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

MU:  Sure.  We have a vague sense of a family from Jewish Eastern Europe.  There's a lot of detail that we don't know.  My father has been something of a genealogist, and he managed to secure and construct a family history that has 1:00our family originating -- his father's family originating in Kovna, in Lithuania.  My mother's family -- my mother always describes her parents as having a mixed marriage in the sense that her mother came from kind of high Reform and her father came from Russian, whatever that means.  Her mother's father was Viennese, and he seems to have been the most colorful ancestor.  And the sound bite that I was always fed about him was that he was a linguist and he spoke seven languages, and this was considered to be a feat of wonder in my family as I was growing up.  But as far as my maternal grandfather's family, 2:00and even my paternal grandmother's family, I really don't know much.

JP:  And did you ever hear what seven languages he spoke, which --

MU:  I did not.  I know that German was one of them and that English was one of them.  But it's a bit of a fun guessing game to try to imagine what the other five were.

JP:  Sure.  And you have pretty deep American roots at this point.  Do you know anything about the immigration or the family's time here?

MU:  Sure.  So, I know that my father's family first went to Baltimore, and there were three brothers who had a photography business together.  At one point, it was quite successful, and my father managed to unearth some photos that the Udel brothers had taken of President Roosevelt, and -- I think.  I'm 3:00not absolutely positive.  All of the family lore gets a little bit burnished.  So, I can do the research on that.  But they were three brothers who had this photography business together, and then my father's grandfather was the one who branched out of Baltimore and headed to western Massachusetts, which is where my father has spent his life, and that's actually where I was born.  As far as my mother's family, they were centered in the New York area.  My mother was born during World War II, when my grandfather was serving as a dentist in the Philippines.  And so, my mother was born in Fort Riley, Kansas, which was always presented as something incredibly exotic, and I don't think I appreciated fully the exoticism of that for what was essentially a New York Jewish family until much later.  But my mother grew up in the Bronx, across the street from 4:00the old Yankee Stadium, which I think is now the old, old Yankee Stadium, the alter [old] stadium.  And then, when she was in ninth grade, her family moved out to Great Neck, which was a wonderful instance of upward mobility, and I think something of a trauma for the children in the family.

JP:  Any sense of why it was a trauma?

MU:  Well, I know my mother's perspective most intimately, and she went from being a fairly effortless A student in her public school in the Bronx to all of a sudden not quite being up to snuff in the public school, Great Neck South, in Great Neck, Long Island.

JP:  I'm wondering if you could tell me a bit about the home in which you grew up?  Would you say that you grew up in a Jewish home?

MU:  Definitely.  My parents divorced when I was very young, so I really grew 5:00up in my mother's home, and we had a really strong sense of Jewish identity.  Being Jewish and doing Jewish was always really important.  We kept kosher to varying degrees and in varying ways over the course of my childhood, but I always had a sense that we keep kosher and there are certain things we don't eat.  And, at first, that meant reading labels and figuring out whether there were any obviously non-kosher ingredients in a food, and then we adopted more strictures later on in my childhood.  But that was always something in my consciousness.  We always had Friday night dinner.  There were periods of more and less prosperity in my childhood, and so, I know that there were times when 6:00it was difficult for my mother to afford kosher meat at the butcher.  But we could always count on chicken or some kind of a meat dish on Friday night, and that was part of what marked it as special.  We always lit candles together.  My mother had and has a pair of pewter candlesticks that were very simple and very beautiful.  And -- my mother's an artist, and a lot of her art has Jewish themes.  And I'm trying to think about the other things that kind of marked my childhood experience as Jewish.  I know that it was a strong priority for both of my parents that I receive a Jewish education, and so, I had a kind of typical suburban liberal Jewish education, but one that was taken very seriously.  There was Sunday school, there was Hebrew school, yeah.

JP:  What languages were spoken in your home?  Was it English or did some of the seven languages from other ancestors trickle down?

MU:  So, we spoke English in the home, and really only English.  I mean, just a smattering of Yiddish terms here and there that, I think -- I would almost say that they're Yinglish more than Yiddish terms.  A lot of them came out in relation to situations that I think are fairly typical for American Jewish families, such as road rage.  I know that I heard more Yiddish when we were driving than during any other single activity in my childhood.  So, you can imagine what some of those terms were, none of them complimentary.  But here's the interesting thing, and the thing that ultimately connects to my life as a scholar of Yiddish: my mother and I moved from western Massachusetts to Miami when I was in the middle of kindergarten.  I was five years old.  And this was 8:00in 1980, and it was around the time of the Mariel boatlift.  So, Miami already had a very large and kind of hard to ignore Cuban population.  But after Mariel, I think there was just a sense of total influx, and that we had moved to a place that was not fully or exclusively American.  And as I grew up, it was very interesting to watch how other families that were white, whether that meant Jewish or non-Jewish, but white in the sense of non-Anglo -- and I would say, also, African American.  But I'm really talking about the reaction of families that understood themselves as white -- to see how they dealt with this.  And there was a lot of tacit -- maybe racism, maybe chauvinism, maybe just a sense 9:00of encroachment of all of these Cubans.  And my mother had and modeled from me exactly the opposite response.  And so, when I was in fourth grade, she heard that there was going to be a new pilot program at a magnet school for languages, and that she could sign me up to study Spanish, French, or German very intensively.  And she jumped on that.  She was going to get me into the school, and the language -- I think I was given the choice, and I had already taken a couple of years of Spanish and I knew the days of the week and I knew the colors, and not very much more.  I had wonderful teachers, but it was not an immersive program.  But my mother said, "Let's have you in this program," and I said, "Great.  I want to learn Spanish."  And so, for two years, when I 10:00was in fifth and sixth grade, I had this really thorough immersion program.  And part of the way that they worked it was that they ordered all of our science textbooks and our social studies textbooks from the same publisher in English and in Spanish.  So, I don't really know about photosynthesis in English, to this day, but I can tell you all about it in Spanish.  In social studies, of course, we learned everything that we were going to learn about Latin America, whether it was geography or the period of the conquistadores [Spanish: conquerors].  We learned all of that in Spanish.  And so, before I learned any other foreign language, I learned Spanish, and we had these incredible teachers, and I would only find out later on, when I was an adult, that having come from Cuba with nothing, with very little, they had doctorates and they were teaching fifth grade, and it was very much to my advantage.  I was the beneficiary of 11:00Señora Rodriguez in fifth grade and Señora Rosalesin sixth grade.  And I think I've taken a lot of them with me into the foreign language classroom.

JP:  And is all of the Spanish that you know from those two formative years in elementary school?

MU:  No, that launched me, and then I continued in middle school.  We used to call it junior high.  But then, they ran out of Spanish for me to take.  There was no more until I got to high school, and then I took two years of AP Spanish.  I took the language and the literature course, and then I had Señoras Vialra and Loyola.  And Spanish teachers always come in pairs in my consciousness.  There were always two, and they always -- in both instances, my Spanish teachers kind of played off of each other.  And so, then in college, my freshman year, I started Hebrew, but I also was able to take Spanish literature 12:00classes at a fairly high level.

JP:  I'm wondering if there was any sense for you or your mother that there was a connection between Jewish identity and seeking out additional languages or engagement with a Spanish-speaking population?

MU:  That's a good question.  When I was studying -- I had to go back, and I actually just remembered something.  I was about to say, "Not really," but I do remember something.  When I was studying for my bat mitzvah, because our temple was so large and there were so many b'nai mitzvahs each week, they had to outsource some of the tutoring.  And I got outsourced to a Rabbi Bryn who had a Conservative shul of his own on Calle Ocho.  And he -- I couldn't honestly tell 13:00you what his nationality was, but he was -- Eastern European Jewish family that had migrated to somewhere in Latin America, and then he had made his way to the States, and he had this Cuban Hebrew congregation.  It's not the Cuban Hebrew congregation, but he had this shul on Calle Ocho, and so, at a certain point in my bat mitzvah tutoring, instead of his always coming to our big suburban temple, we would start going to his shul in Calle Ocho, and we became involved there a little bit and got to know him.  And it was a big treat, because the other exciting thing on Calle Ocho -- well, there were a couple of things, that -- you could get guarapo, which is sugarcane juice, and you don't have to worry about it being kosher, because they're just literally taking pieces of sugarcane and feeding it into this big juicer.  So, we would get guarapo, and we would go 14:00to La Moderna Poesia, which was the big Spanish-language bookstore.  So, I would have bat mitzvah tutoring, Spanish bookstore, and guarapo, which is like the trifecta of heaven.  If you think putting honey on the page of the Hebrew primer is special, you should try bat mitzvah lessons with guarapo.  (laughs)

JP:  What a lovely story.  I'm wondering if you can tell me a bit more about Jewish life in Miami?

MU:  Sure.  So, I would have to say that it's variegated, and I moved through a good bit of it over the course of my childhood.  When my mother and I arrived in Miami, there was not a Conservative synagogue close to where we were living.  She and my dad had belonged to a Conservative synagogue in western Massachusetts, and that was what felt comfortable.  And so, she ended up having 15:00us join this Reform synagogue, where I was educated.  And I was educated as a scholarship kid, and I will always be grateful for the schooling that I received in -- particularly Hebrew school, but also Sunday school.  But at the same time that -- I now have the adult perspective to look back upon it with a great deal of gratitude.  As I was going through that process of growing up and separating and individuating, I became very frustrated with the Reform synagogue as an institution, and I think with Reform Judaism.  And now, I know that my beef was less with the ideology, perhaps, of the Reform movement and more with the particular manifestation that it had in that sociological moment, that time and 16:00place.  But nevertheless, when you're fourteen, you realize that the adults around you are just incredibly stupid and that they're hypocritical and all of their values are wrong, and you want to overturn everything.  And so, one of the best things that I did during those teenage years was that I quit confirmation school when I was in, I think, ninth grade.  And that sent me on kind of a Jewish quest.  And so, for a while, I think I would have said -- maybe for something like four to six months, I would have said that I was agnostic.  I would have said, "Well, I believe in God, but I don't -- I'm taking a break from organized religion."  And then, my mother had started teaching.  I told you she's an artist, and she made a living as an art teacher for most of my childhood.  And she started teaching at the Hebrew Academy on 17:00Miami Beach, which was an Orthodox day school.  And so, the -- for the first time, I came to know, socially, Orthodox kids and Orthodox families.  And I asked a lot of questions.  I think it was a time of life when many kids are asking questions.  And I realized that what I wanted was not actually a break from religion, but I wanted a more rigorous engagement with Judaism.

JP:  I think that takes us nicely into, if you can, detailing, overall, your general and Jewish education.

MU:  Sure.  So, I was curious about a lot of things, and one of the things that I was curious about was Judaism.  And so, I visited, at one point during my public school spring break -- I visited the school where my mother was teaching.  And I came to the conclusion at the end of the week that I didn't 18:00want to transfer.  But there was an experience that stayed with me, and that was when the class that I was with, my fellow ninth graders, I suppose, had chumash [Hebrew: Pentateuch], and they got out their chumashim and they started reading.  And it was just a basic chumash with Rashi, and it was in Rashi script, and I had never seen Rashi script.  And they were reading and translating.  I don't think that it was any earthshattering or cutting-edge, innovative pedagogical technique.  It was kind of the basics.  And I was completely lost.  And I knew that I was completely lost, because I had just never learned the rudiments of what they were doing.  But I didn't like not knowing that, I didn't like being illiterate about something that seemed kind of 19:00basic.  And so, I think that, although I didn't do a lot about it at the time, when I went to college, I had a really strongly-felt determination that I would learn Hebrew and that I would learn that script, and that these texts would become intelligible to me, and that that was just something that I needed to do as a Jewish person.  And I have felt, since that time -- and I've shared with my students many times the image of encountering something for yourself versus encountering it in translation.  And when you are dependent upon a translation, then it's always going to be at arm's length.  And depending on the angle at which that person, your translator, is holding his or her arm, it might block your view in a way that you wouldn't choose.  And so, I really wanted to learn 20:00the language and I felt like language was my way into texts and texts were my way into culture, into my own independent decision-making.  A panoply of things that were important to me about being Jewish could only be accessed by learning Jewish languages.

JP:  I'm wondering who your academic mentors or influences were in this important Jewish academic journey?

MU:  Sure.  So, during the time that I was in college, I would say that there were two teachers who influenced me very deeply.  Only one of them was formally my teacher.  So, first I'll talk about the one who -- with whom I never took an actual class, and that was Professor Isadore Twersky of blessed memory.  He is a unique figure.  This is well-known, certainly to Boston Jewry, but I think 21:00many folks beyond.  He was an eminent scholar of Maimonides who also happened to inherit the mantle of being a Hasidic rebbe.  And so, there's an extraordinary fusion and integration of different intellectual traditions, different claims upon his person.  And I felt very drawn to him, and we had a really nice relationship when I was in college.  I heard him speak at Hillel, and he invited us to come by his office hours and follow up if we had questions about anything.  And so, I did.  And we had a really good conversation, and it just started a series of conversations.  And sometimes, when you arrive as the naïf or the innocent, you tap into things that would be foreclosed if you knew 22:00the conventional wisdom.  So, I didn't know that the conventional wisdom was that Professor Twersky was horrifically frightening and intimidating, and that he didn't talk to undergraduates and that he didn't have any use for anyone but the most intellectually rarified company, all of which turns out to be completely false.  So, I never got anything but encouragement and encouragement of my curiosity from him.  And he had this conviction that you could do anything that you wanted to do, but you had to do it well.  So, at the time, I was very interested in journalism and in writing, and he was really supportive of that.  And he just felt like you have to be an excellent journalist.  And he gave me suggestions about what to read.  So, that was one.  And then, the 23:00person who really taught me how to read Jewish texts was Bernard or Berl Septimus.  He is a medieval historian and intellectual historian, but he has a vast command, going out, I would say, in every direction from the medieval period, but certainly an extraordinary command of rabbinics, and he taught me how to read.  He taught me textual mastery, and I do not rise to the level of what he modeled for me, but I take him with me into just about every teaching situation that I enter.  And I would say it's an aspirational relationship for me to have the kind of subtle apprehension of texts and their nuances that he 24:00manifested himself.

JP:  I'm wondering, as a female undergrad with weighty figures who, for the most part, are male --

MU:  Yeah.

JP:  -- were these worlds open to you?  Were you fully encouraged?  Or were there gender dynamics at play that made this trajectory somewhat difficult at times?

MU:  So, when I was an undergraduate -- and looking back on it, I was really quite young.  You know, the undergraduates get younger every year, especially if you spend time on a college campus.  I think that the dynamic was almost paternal-parental, and there was so much -- there was such active and vigorous encouragement from these figures.  And then, it was only as I grew -- I wouldn't even say in graduate school -- that I ever encountered any discouragement.  But I became aware of the really complicated gender dynamics 25:00of being a woman, accessing these texts and this knowledge as I grew into adulthood, and I was no longer the kind of intellectual daughter.  And so, that's all there and I would never seek to minimize it.  But at the time, that was not the dominant note of my relationships.

JP:  Is there an example you can give now of how you see some of those complicated things come into play?

MU:  So, in my own field of modern Jewish literature, I don't particularly feel at a disadvantage, strictly in the intellectual arena.  I think that there are a lot of female scholars.  We'll talk in a few minutes, I hope, about my 26:00relationship with Dr. Ruth Wisse, who was my doctoral advisor and a dokter-mame [doctoral mother] in the fullest sense.  I would say "doktormutter [German: doctoral advisor, lit. "doctoral mother"]," but she was really a dokter-mame.  And I chose -- I knew that in choosing her, I was choosing not only one of the titanic minds of Yiddish scholarship of the time -- I would say of our generation, but really, we're not of the same generation -- but of her generation.  But I was also choosing a woman, and I was choosing a woman who had had this illustrious career while also raising a family, and that all went into the mix on varying levels of consciousness and unconsciousness.  So, I would say that in the field of modern Jewish literature, it comes up in more recondite ways having to do with just the institutional dynamics of what it 27:00means to be a young professor on the tenure track, with a family, but not so much in the arena of intellectual discourse.  Now, with my -- what has become my sideline or my interest, my avocation in rabbinic texts and classical Jewish texts, there I feel very strongly that I am part of a generation that's really caught in the middle, where access to these texts opened up in time for me, and I am really grateful to have come along at a time when it was possible to learn Talmud, to learn halachah, to learn midrash critically.  But the question of what I can do with that knowledge outside of academic Jewish studies is still a very live one.  That's a question that remains to be resolved.  And so, instead of complaining and beating my breast about it, I will share something 28:00that happened very recently that, for me, in a very small way, was cause for celebration.  So, my husband and I have a very complicated postmodern, post-nuclear family life whereby he lives and teaches in New York and I teach in Atlanta.  And so, as a result of this, we have two shuls, we have two synagogues that we frequent: one in Atlanta and one in New York.  And the shuls that we go to in New York, Congregation Ramath Orah, has been extremely receptive to having female scholars.  They try, as actively as they can, to invite and encourage female scholars to speak -- perhaps not with the frequency that I would hope for, but they're doing their best.  A few weeks ago, the rabbi had to go out of town in order to be with his mother while she recovered 29:00from a surgery.  And he needed someone to give the drashe [sermon], and I think it was a little bit down to the wire.  It was Wednesday, and he was trying to make these arrangements.  And I've spoken there a number of times, and he emailed me and said, "Miriam, are you going to be in town?  I need someone to give the drashe."  So, it was not unique that they invited me to speak.  But it was unique, in my experience, to have been invited because they needed me.  And there wasn't this element of kind of self-congratulatory, "Look, we're having a woman speak!"  It was, "We need someone to give this drashe, and we know that you know how to do it."  And that felt really good.  And so, I guess what that kind of long-winded anecdote is tending toward is really valuing the normalization of women performing in these roles and being able to share what we know and share the skills that the whole community has invested in our attaining.

JP:  I'd like to turn now to how you learned Yiddish and decided to learn Yiddish.

MU:  Yeah.

JP:  Can you tell me about how that -- how you embarked upon that journey?

MU:  Sure.  So, after college, I spent two years studying in Israel, and I was pursuing a curriculum of classical Jewish texts, and that's when I really got my grounding in gemara and halachah.  Strengthened my understanding of Tanakh and parshanut [Hebrew: Torah portions].  And then, I came back and I was going to be a journalist, and I had started publishing an article here and there on a freelance basis in Israel.  And as I started my freelance journalism career, I realized that there were a great number of frustrations in being a freelance journalist, and also that I had some unfinished business with literary studies.  And I thought that I would like to go to graduate school.  And at 31:00that point, I was geographically tethered to Boston.  I knew that I couldn't go far outside of Boston because of commitments that other people in my family had.  And so, I decided -- this was a little while after Hilary Rodham Clinton had run for senator in New York, and one of the things that really impressed me about her campaign was that she had a listening tour where she went around -- and this was billed -- I like that phrase: listening tour.  And I decided I would go on a listening tour of professors that I had known from my undergraduate career or, better yet, from those that I was aware of but had barely connected with.  And so, one of the people that I went to speak with, whom I knew very glancingly but had never studied with was Ruth Wisse, and I unfurled before her my plan, my desire to study about the relationship between 32:00literature and the process of secularization.  And I was interested, specifically, in the question of how the modern secular West has come to embrace literature, and particularly the novel and fiction, as a kind of repository for our moral and ethical thinking, so that in a public school like the one I went to, we don't study religion, we don't study philosophy, we don't study anthropology, we don't study moral reasoning in any formal way.  But we get some of that thinking through our English class.  And this seemed curious to me in retrospect, and I wanted to understand how things got to be that way.  So, I mentioned all of this to Ruth and she said, "Well, this is a fascinating project."  And I had been immersing myself in George Eliot and I wanted to study English literature and French literature and Spanish literature.  She 33:00said, "This is great, but you're going so far afield.  You already know Hebrew, and secularization took place so rapidly within the Jewish world, if you just learn Yiddish, you'll have this incredibly fertile ground for studying this question, right here at home, as it were."  And she said, "You have Hebrew, you have Spanish.  You're good at languages.  Why don't you just try Yiddish, see how it goes?"  And I thought okay.  I was studying Arabic at the time, for fun, and I loved learning another Semitic cognate language.  I mean, I guess I am my great grandfather's great granddaughter in some sense, because there's nothing more fun than studying a new language.  So, I figured I'll try Yiddish.  I'll see -- is it going to be harder than Arabic?  So, I remember 34:00that Ruth left me a copy of Weinreich's "College Yiddish" in her box, and I was to pick it up.  And I went on some snowy spring day to pick up this book, and I found a little Post-It note attached to it, and it said, "Far miryam, a matone [For Miriam, a gift]."  And, of course, I didn't know any Yiddish yet, but I could figure out -- I knew Hebrew, so "a matone," I got that.  So, the very first thing I learned in Yiddish was that "far" must mean "for," and I opened the book and, as so many generations have done before me, I learned that "zenen do yidn in ale lender [there are Jews in every country]."  (laughter) And I learned the Peretz "Ode to Joy."  And I learned about the Jewish nose.  And so, I found out that -- I planned that I would go to YIVO that summer and I 35:00found out that if I wanted to place into the lower intermediate, I would need to make it through the first five kapitlen [chapters].  So, I figured, okay, I can try to do that.  Yiddish was so intuitive.  It was such a joy.  I really took to it.  I mean, we say a fish into water -- and maybe I'll talk a little bit more about my favorite expression that I -- my favorite shprikhvort [proverb] that I learned from Ruth, which is "Bimkom she'in ish, a hering iz oykh a fish [Where there is no worthy man, even a herring is a fish]."  My whole relationship to Yiddish, you might say, is quite Piscean.  So the first element of that was fish into water.  It just made sense, there were so many cognates.  I love being a little bit of a linguistic archaeologist, and so words that I had never thought about in English when I would study Spanish -- 36:00then I would learn that the perfectly normal word in Spanish for "rapid," "celero," was a cognate of this English word, "celerity," that I'd never hear of in English.  So, too, when you start learning Yiddish and you learn about "heybn [raise]" and "onheybn [begin]," you think about the English word heave in a new way.  And when you learn about "knekht [slave]" or a "shklaf [slave]," you start hearing the silent letters from Old English, from -- really, from Middle High German, but from Old English.  And so, it always injects this new vigor into English when I study a foreign language.  So, I made it through those chapters, and then I went to Brukhe Lang Caplan's "Iberkhazer kurs [Review course]," which is supposed to be a refresher for people who have had a year of Yiddish and who are now starting the YIVO summer program.  And, of course, I was exposed to things in the iberkhazer kurs that I'd never had for the first time, and it was a lot of fun.  So, the -- my whole goal was to place into that 37:00mitlers eyns, first intermediate level.  And it all came together and I was able to do it.  And so, that first summer, I had Kalman Weiser for grammar, and I had Sheva Zucker for literature.  I could not have had better first Yiddish teachers, and I loved it, and I was off and running.  And so, that was that summer, and then I started the graduate program at Harvard in the fall.  And I had the incomparable Dovid Brown for what was at that point advanced intermediate and advanced, yeah.  And I guess I'll just say that Ruth had this wonderful practice of giving her graduate seminars in Yiddish and giving her mixed undergraduate/graduate courses in English translation, but with a special section for those able to read the Yiddish, where we would meet once a week over 38:00dinner.  And so, it was convivial and it was just a wonderful way to begin entering into this language and this literary world.

JP:  Do you want to say, briefly, something about your favorite expression and this Piscean connection?  (laughter)

MU:  Sure.  So, no one's Yiddish is ever good enough, and I will certainly be the first to cop to the admission that my Yiddish isn't as good as I want it to be.  It isn't as good as I hope it will be tomorrow and next year.  And so, I think when you take the double-whammy of scholarship and scholarly insecurity with the particular world of Yiddish and the anxiety about what's being lost, and it's year-in, year-out, another great Yiddishist passes away and we feel 39:00these losses very keenly -- and we just had a slew of them in recent weeks, before the conversation we're having today.  So, I think there's this kind of double-whammy of anxiety, of "I'm not good enough.  Do I have what it takes?"  That has to be balanced on the other hand against the knowledge that very few people are interested in doing this at all.  And so, the expression that I always keep in the forefront of my mind is, "Bimkom she'in ish, hering iz oykh a fish -- in the place where there is no man and no person, then herring also counts as a fish."  And I like this expression so much that I ended up writing about it in my scholarly work, and really unpacking it and thinking about it.  So, of course, the first half of it is in Hebrew, and it comes from "peyrek 40:00[study of "Ethics of the Fathers"]," or what we would call in Hebrew "Pirkei avot" or "Pirke-oves," which is the "Ethics of the Fathers."  And so, it's this very high-minded aphorism, that in the place where there is no man -- and "man" here means person with agency and power who's going to step up and do what needs to be done, then you should strive to be that person.  "Hishtadel l'hiyot ish [Hebrew: Strive to be a man]."  And that's the original.  And that is from a rabbinic culture that is in the ascendant and that is striding forward to take Judaism into a new reality.  But then, the second half of the Yiddish expression, of course, is very wry, and it says, herring, the nothing of fish, that also counts.  If you're hungry enough, herring will fill you.  And so, I really feel that the landscape of being a Yiddishist in the 21st century is one 41:00of a lot of herring.  There are still some big fish swimming around, but herring is what we have and herring is what we're going to have to fill up on.  And so, be the herring!  And that's the spirit with which I swim into the waters of Yiddish.

JP:  What a fascinating expression and wonderful message to take from it.  I believe you studied at YIVO in 2001 and 2007.

MU:  Right.

JP:  I'm wondering if you can sort of compare and contrast your experience and also the New York Yiddish scene, how it might have changed even in those six years.

MU:  Sure.  So, I would say that more than the New York -- more than I'm aware of the Yiddish scene having changed, I changed.  The first time that I did the program, I was about to start graduate school.  I didn't have children yet.  I really was throwing myself into this experience in as immersive a way as I 42:00could.  The second time, in 2007, I took the advanced course with Eugene Orenstein and [Alexander Birnboym?].  And that was also a wonderful educational experience.  But I was trogendik [pregnant].  I was carrying my second child.  So, I had a toddler at home, and I was never without my accessory of this second child.  So, I was really taking the classes and making sure that I had my Yiddish in a place that was going to be fluent enough to start teaching Yiddish language, because I had won the lottery and landed this job as a professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Emory, to start in 43:00fall 2007.  So, I wanted to make sure that my geredner yidish [spoken Yiddish] was up to speed, and that's what took me back to YIVO.  And, of course, I had a wonderful summer of reading texts and discussing them in Yiddish, and it was a pleasure and a joy.  But I was only marginally aware of the whole Yiddish scene at that point, because I was going home to my toddler.  But I will say that one thing that struck me that summer was that Naftali Ejdelman stopped into our class in order to tell us about Yiddish Farm.  And I thought that's interesting and kind of random.  Now I don't think it's so random, because I've actually become very interested in Jewish utopian agricultural movements, and I see that he comes by it quite honestly in -- this interesting in fusing or merging Yiddish cultural expression with farming.  Makes a whole lot of sense to me 44:00now, but I remember taking that away from the summer and thinking, Oh, that's interesting.  There's someone younger than I am, and he's launching this project.  And that's fascinating. 

JP:  And that there's still innovation in the --

MU:  Absolutely.

JP:  -- Yiddish institutional world.

MU:  That's right, that completely new things still start up.  And people always ask me -- I'm sure this comes up in a lot of your interviews -- but people ask me twice a month, "So, is Yiddish dying?"  And I finally have come up with my pithy answer, which is, "Yes, Yiddish is dying, and it's been attending its own funeral for the last 150 years, at least, and I expect it to continue doing so for the next -- at least 150 years."  (laughter)

JP:  And how do people react to that?

MU:  Well, they usually smile, and I think people are heartened by it.  Nobody really wants to think that Yiddish is dying in a way that it will actually be dead.

JP:  Right.  What is your experience with different Yiddish-speaking populations?  What -- who or what are some of the voices you've heard?

MU:  So, most of my Yiddish is classroom Yiddish.  I have made my forays to try to speak Yiddish in the field.  I've gone to Borough Park and I've gone to Williamsburg, and I've gone to the Homowack.  And I have to say that the only time my Yiddish was just taken at face value and people were willing to interact with me in Yiddish and didn't try to switch over to English was when I was very visibly pregnant with my younger son, and I went maternity clothes shopping in Borough Park -- not because I'm a particular fan of Borough Park fashions, but I was about to start that teaching job at Emory and I felt like I needed clothes 46:00that looked professional.  So, I was looking for a blazer, and it's hard to find a blazer at your typical maternity shop.  So, I had a good solid reason to be there.  It wasn't just my quest to speak Yiddish disguised as a book buying expedition or something.  So, when I was just very obviously pregnant, the saleswoman kind of accepted that we were speaking Yiddish and we were doing this whole exchange in Yiddish.  And that was fine.  Once I spent Shabbos at the Homowack, and I met a woman who was clearly a Yiddish speaker -- really didn't want to speak to me in Yiddish at first, but then a curious thing happened.  Somebody Israeli came up to us and asked some question about where they were davening, when was Kabbalat Shabbat, and -- she had questions and she didn't 47:00speak very much English.  And since she was Israeli, I spoke with her in Hebrew and we had a whole conversation in Hebrew.  And then, the woman who was the Yiddish speaker, with whom I was originally hoping to have a conversation, she seemed to decide that if I knew Hebrew, then I was okay.  And so, then she became willing to speak Yiddish with me.  So, we spoke Yiddish for the rest of the evening, and after about twenty minutes, thirty minutes, she said, "Look, I have to tell you, your Yiddish is very strange."  And I said, "I know, I speak a little bit of a different Yiddish than you do.  Can you tell me some of the things that are strange about it?"  She said, "Well, you're just using all the wrong words."  And I said, "I would be so grateful if you could tell me about that."  So, she said, "Well, I heard you say 'der fenster [the window].'  Nobody says that.  It's 'di vinde [the window].'  And you say 'pruvn, gepruv [to try, to have attempted],' neh!  'Getrayt [To have attempted]'!"  And so, I 48:00was speaking this fossilized, caught in amber YIVO Yiddish, and she was speaking the living hybrid language of Williamsburg, where she lives.  And so, I was always very appreciative of that.

JP:  A new dialect of English entering -- Yiddishized into Yiddish --

MU:  Yeah.

JP:  -- rather than Yinglish, where Yiddish enters into English.

MU:  That's exactly right

JP:  How fascinating.  So, you told me a bit about how you came to Yiddish and Yiddish studies in general.  But I'm wondering how you came to the specific research topics that you have and are working on?

MU:  Sure.  So, my interest in secularization, broadly obviously, had to go somewhere more specific.  And at the same time that I was taking my courses in Yiddish, I was a student in comparative literature.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

MU:  So, I was a student of comparative literature, and at the same time that I 49:00was studying Yiddish, I was taking the courses that I had never managed to fit in as an undergraduate, in English literature, in Anglo-American literature.  And I was studying with Philip Fisher, who is absolutely an incomparable scholar, and he also taught me to read.  He taught me to read in a whole new way.  And it was very difficult, week after week, as I had these seminars, to resist the urge to compare.  So, I think things kind of came to a head for me during the week that I was reading "Middlemarch" with Philip Fisher, and I was reading Esther Kreitman with Ruth Wisse.  And Kreitman is magnificent, and the fact that she's Isaac Bashevis Singer and Israel Joshua Singer's sister.  And she wrote a couple of novels, lightly veiled autobiographical novels, and we 50:00were reading one called "Der sheydims tants -- Devil's Dance."  It's translated as something else in English, but I don't remember how it was translated in English.  And she's wonderful, but come on, she's no George Eliot.  And so, this was -- week after week, there was this kind of painful comparison that I was -- that sort of was forcing itself upon me.  It felt like I wasn't choosing it, but of course I was choosing to make the comparison.  And the kind of mysterious alchemy of my graduate education was that at some point, I chose to stop making that comparison, and I let Yiddish claim me and bowl me over and enter, and I stopped resisting it and saying, "Is Yiddish good enough?  Is this literature good enough for me?"  And I started asking, "Am I good enough to be one of the stewards of this literature?"  And so, okay, so that's the first 51:00part of it.  So, I'm interested in modernism, and I'm studying modernism, both in Yiddish and in the Anglo-American novel, and other European novels, but particularly Anglo-American.  And I see this strange thing happening to the novel as we move into modernism.  And it's the transformation that we basically call modernism, whether it is experimental modes of writing or a different set of concerns, or post-World War I anomie and a sense of the atomized individual.  But strange things are happening to the fictional world of George Eliot, and I want to understand these things better.  And so, that moment of changing from an essentially 19th century consciousness to an essentially 20th 52:00century consciousness, that fascinated me.  And that is what I wanted to really focus on.  And so, the first book that I wrote, which actually was not my dissertation -- and I can loop back and talk about the dissertation a little bit, if you'd like -- but the first book that I wrote, that now I have the manuscript complete and it's under publisher's review, and I hope that, God willing, a year from now, it will be a book.  But it really entertains this question of what happened to the novel?  And I propose that we look at in terms of genre, and that we see the dominance throughout the 19th century, and certainly the origins of the Yiddish novel in the bildungsroman, the story of moral development or of the protagonist's education.  And then, as a kind of 53:00counter-trend to that in the 20th century, this other kind of novel that I claim is a revisiting and a refurbishing of the picaresque.  And the picaresque comes to us originally as a form of the Spanish Golden Age.  So, it originally comes out of 16th century Spain, and it is marked by first person narration, by a protagonist who is socially marginal.  He's kind of at the outskirts of his society.  And then, the really novel thing about the picaresque is that the narration takes place episodically, so that something happens and then something else happens and the causal link between the first event and the second may be unclear or may be tenuous.  And what I realized is that, for a lot of Yiddish authors, this was the perfect vehicle for talking about the modern Jewish 54:00condition in Europe.  It is a magnificent vehicle for talking about an essentially chaotic society that doesn't feel linear, where it doesn't feel like if you take the next logical step and educate yourself, you can become mensch.  Maybe you can't become a mensch.  Maybe certain social possibilities are foreclosed to you by virtue of being Jewish, by being young, by being urban, by being alienated.  And so, I decided to really look close at the development of this modern and modernist Yiddish picaresque. 

JP:  Considering that you're drawing from so many traditions, I'm wondering how you define yourself academically?

MU:  So, my go-to phrase is scholar of modern Jewish literatures, but I've been thinking about maybe a slightly more developed definition, being the Jewish 55:00encounter with modernity. 

JP:  Fascinating [BREAK IN RECORDING] -- how Yiddishist isn't -- careful, the mic, sorry -- how Yiddishist is part of that, but not necessarily a key term in that larger self-identification.

MU:  That's true.  I said at the AJS -- a few years ago, we had a panel on teaching Yiddish in the 21st century, and I described myself as an accidental Yiddishist.  And there is something that feels very contingent.  Yiddish chose me and then I chose Yiddish, and it's not the whole story of what my commitment is intellectually and also personally to this modern Jewish cultural enterprise.  But it's a very -- it's the most important single piece of it.

JP:  And in light of that, can you describe how, if at all, your academic interests and personal life connect or intersect or relate to one another?

MU:  So, there is a tendency to keep them somewhat partitioned off.  I think that if there were more chronological proximity between my core Jewish religious interests and my core academic, literary interests, then there might be more crossover.  But, at the same time, part of my evocation has become a process of putting classical Jewish sources into conversation with modern Jewish literature.  And so, there are a few things that I like to go into the Jewish community and teach when I'm invited to do so, where I either create some unexpected juxtapositions or I put before people authors who were themselves 57:00engaging classical Jewish sources.  So, I love to teach about Manger and his khumesh-lider [Bible songs], and Manger as an instance of the midrashic imagination.  And there's actually a talk that I really love to give about the family dynamics of Avram, Sara, Yitzhak, and Hagar as Manger imagined them in his "Lider [Poetry]" and how this squares against rabbinic midrash, because he actually was very well aware of many midrashic motifs.  And so, that's a great juxtaposition.  It's also really fun to teach in the Jewish community about Peretz, to teach the neo-Hasidic stories, and to make people understand how 58:00these lovely little, dear stories were so subversive.  To bring Sholem Aleichem, to bring Rabinovitz and his holiday stories and his stories for children, which are actually so dark -- but to bring them into conversations with rabbinic midrash.

JP:  In light of the challenges you mentioned that you face in using your Yiddish, how have you kept it up?  And do you use it daily, if at all?

MU:  So, I try to speak as often as I can.  When I am teaching shprakh-kurs [language class?] at Emory, that is my single greatest opportunity for a sustained daily use of Yiddish.  So, I told you that I carry forward some of the Spanish education -- and then the Hebrew education -- that I received into my Yiddish classroom.  My students walk in on day one, un ikh red nor yidish -- 59:00I speak only Yiddish to them from the first moment.  And they look at me like I'm from Mars, but then they lean in a little bit, which they have to do in order to follow, and they realize that, actually, by paying close attention, they can absorb a lot by osmosis.  And so, that's how I run my classroom, and that is how I get the most Yiddish in.  Then, I do find the necessity of keeping up my Yiddish and trying to develop my Yiddish has a role in helping me to choose my next project.  So, the next project that I'm working on is going to be a two-book project about Yiddish children's literature.  And the first part of that is really just to assemble a corpus.  So, I am selecting and translating and then annotating an anthology of Yiddish children's literature.  And I've gotten off to a great start with that, because I was very fortunate to 60:00be chosen as one of the inaugural translation fellows at the Yiddish Book Center.  And so, this translation fellowship has been an incredible education in the art of literary translation.  And part of what motivated me to want to work with children's literature was that it was going to expose me to this unending stream of nouns and verbs.  And I find that the more abstract the noun is -- the more abstract a noun is, the more cosmopolitan and less distinctively Yiddish register it comes from.  So, it's very easy to talk about literary criticism and philosophy in a very highfalutin Yiddish that doesn't teach me a lot of new Yiddish.  But once we're talking about the ducks and bunnies on the farm or about the winter wind having a raging temper tantrum in the form of a 61:00blizzard -- and that's a story by Moyshe Kulbak -- then we're really getting into nouns and verbs, and that actually -- paradoxically, by going to the ostensibly simpler thing, that's what's helping, at this point, to enrich my Yiddish.

JP:  Going back to the fact that you only speak Yiddish from day one in your Yiddish language classroom, what are some of the challenges, pressures, and delights of teaching Yiddish language to university-level students?

MU:  So, the biggest challenge, I would say, is that most of my students -- and I have robust enrollments.  The Yiddish language class has drawn thirteen students the last several times I've taught it, and I think that when I was a graduate student at Harvard, the equivalent beginning Yiddish class had between six and eight students.  So, thirteen is a fine thing.  But the vast majority 62:00of them are there for a combination of two reasons.  One is that they've heard Professor Udel is really fun and it's the most fun you can have taking a language.  But the second thing is that they have a one-year language requirement to fulfill.  And so, just trying to transcend that mentality of "I'm here fulfilling a requirement.  I really don't like studying foreign languages" -- moving beyond that into "Dos heyst yidishland, un mir zenen a yidish-redndike mishpokhe -- you're here in this little Yiddish land that we're creating, and this is your Yiddish family on campus."  And we get there every year.  It's a small miracle, but we do form this really cohesive familial classroom environment.  And so, that's one of the joys.  And so, it's the challenge that brings about the joy.  Other joys: I seem to always have, in the 63:00Yiddish language class, in Yiddish literature, and certainly in my freshman seminars -- I have more non-heritage learners.  But in the Yiddish language class, I seem to always have one non-Jewish student.  And that ends up, usually, being the most accomplished Yiddishist of the group.  And so, a few years ago, it was someone named Mikhail Reddy Miller, who's now in medical school.  But he actually went to Yidish-vokh.  I don't get to Yidish-vokh, because my kids are in school.  They're starting school by that time in Atlanta.  We have a slightly different academic year.  But he got to go to Yidish-vokh, and he had a fantastic time.  So, introducing that non-Jewish student, who really just falls in love with Yiddish and with the material -- and it's always such a great affirmation that this appeals to everybody, everyone 64:00who kind of lets it into their life.  Other joys: we run a really playful, joyful classroom.  Part of the way that we're able to cope on that first day -- and this is an idea -- I didn't invent this, but I got this from a Yiddish pedagogy seminar in 2007.  I come in with a big yellow ball, and I toss that ball to somebody, and I say, "Ikh heys profesor udel, vi heystu [My name is Professor Udel, what's your name]?"  And they look at me again like I'm from Mars or from Yehupets, and I say again, "Ikh heys profesor udel, vi heystu?"  And then, they say, "Sidney," and we go from there.  And by the end of that first hour, they know how to say their name in a complete sentence.  They know 65:00how to ask each other's names, and they usually all have elected Yiddish names.

JP:  I would like to ask you about -- since you teach a lot, also, through Yiddish song as a way to --

MU:  Yeah.

JP:  -- teach vocabulary and grammar, I'm wondering if that was what helped spark the Yiddish-only acapella group that I read about?

MU:  Absolutely.  So, I use Sheva Zucker's book, and she has a song at the end of every chapter.  And this was also part of my instruction when I took modern Hebrew in college.  The curriculum that was developed at Harvard relied very heavily on Top 40 songs.  So, it is a wonderful thing pedagogically, and I'm tempted to say kind of neurologically, because instead of learning that painstaking word-by-word retrieval, you can retrieve an entire phrase, and this 66:00is a great thing for students.  And so, I decided that if Yiddish was meeting four days a week, we would spend Thursday, the fourth day, or at least a good chunk of Thursday singing.  And we do that.  And so, a friend that I made in Atlanta, her mother had come to Atlanta during what proved to be the period of her decline and her final illness.  But she had a good six months before she really took that turn for the worse.  And she had come from Winnipeg, and she had spent a lot -- she had made aliyah and then she had come back from Israel and lived in Canada again, and in the States.  And so, she was one of these cosmopolitan Jews who collected a lot of languages.  But Yiddish was very close 67:00to her heart from her upbringing in Winnipeg.  And so, she was having memory problems.  And her daughter, my friend, asked, "Could you come by and just sing with my mother in Yiddish?  It would bring her a lot of joy."  And she was very musical, and so, at first, she was at home and they had a piano and we would sit and we would sing Yiddish songs at the piano.  And then, after she had gotten sicker and she was hospitalized, my friend asked, "Would you come by the hospital and sing for my mother?  Maybe you could bring a student or something.  That would really just make her very happy."  So, I went in one day, and I said to my class, "All right.  So, we're learning these songs.  There is an old Jewish lady in Emory Hospital who would love to hear you sing these songs.  Are any of you willing?"  And every hand went up.  And so, unfortunately, before we could actually get there, she passed away.  But she 68:00had really been the impetus for us to form this group.  And it came to my attention in the interim that there's an organization called Naturally Occurring Retirement Community -- is NORC, that has chapters all over the country.  And the idea of this organization is to help provide scaffolding and support for seniors who are aging in place.  Instead of going to assisted living, they remain in their homes and they have regular meetings with luncheons and cultural programming in order to provide some stimulation.  And there's a NORC chapter that meets right in the neighborhood where I live, and next neighborhood from -- over from Emory.  And so, the director of this NORC chapter asked, "Well, I hear that your students sing.  Would you be willing to come and put on a performance?"  And so, we did.  We sang for probably seventy or eighty senior citizens, not all of whom were Jewish, but most of whom were Jewish.  And then, 69:00the chapter of local Holocaust survivors heard about us and they invited us to come and sing.  And that was very moving for my students.  And so, yeah, we have made a little career within Emory at some Emory events, Shabbat dinners, wonderful Wednesdays when every student organization shows up on the quad.  And then, also, beyond Emory -- and so, this has become a form of what they like to call community-engaged learning.  And we sing and we take it out into the community, and it's been good all around.  It would be nice if I, personally, had a little bit more musical talent, but I feel like when you're singing Yiddish songs to Holocaust survivors, the actual caliber of the musical performance is secondary if not tertiary. 

JP:  To return to something you mentioned earlier, I watched your ELI talk 70:00online, where I feel like sort of an underpinning of it was stewardship --

MU:  Yeah.

JP:  -- of a heritage and a legacy, and a grappling with it that is sort of -- I'm gonna say, quote-unquote, our responsibility.  I'm wondering if you could speak a little to that in light of the role that you feel academics play or don't play in the transmission of culture?

MU:  Yeah.  So, I think that we have a lot of claims that are on us that are all valid claims and that need to be responded to and receive their due.  So, for those of us who do engage in a substantive way with Yiddish, the texts themselves and the preservation of these texts and getting them out to people who are invested in Jewish life and Jewish continuity, this is right up there, 71:00and it's undeniable.  At the same time, if we think that there is a pathway to the preservation of these texts within academe, we need to bring Yiddish -- in my case, Yiddish literature, for some people it's Yiddish linguistics, history, anthropology, what have you, whatever their disciplines are -- we need to bring Yiddish squarely into our disciplinary commitments and use Yiddish as the case study, so that Yiddish has this robust life within the Academy and its place is secure within the Academy.  And I think we are always balancing both of those.  Fortunately, I don't think they're really in conflict with one another.  I think they're complimentary processes.  So, I'm going to need to use a different kind of apparatus, a scholarly apparatus when I am showcasing my 72:00work in an academic context -- than when I'm teaching at my local JCC or synagogue.  But I want to get the same material out there into people's hands in the most vivid and lively way possible.

JP:  I'm wondering if, from your perspective -- what is the place of Yiddish within the academy or within your department and field, or within the broader culture?

MU:  So, I think the question is what are the places of Yiddish? It needs to occupy manifold places, and I have my little piece that I can do, the little piece that I can contribute as a scholar of literature, as a scholar of literary modernism.  One of the things that I'm excited about in the book that I've completed on the picaresque is that I think that I've unearthed a certain 73:00relationship here between two literary genres, between the picaresque and bildungsroman that people haven't really talked about much in a direct way.  And I say, in my introduction, that I've opened a door here with Yiddish, but that I very much hope that scholars of other literatures will walk through that door and talk about a Latin American picaresque, and maybe a sub-Saharan African picaresque, and for all I know, a Malaysian picaresque, a central European picaresque, in relation to bildungsroman.  So, that's part of what I have to contribute.  Then, within the Jewish community, I have a certain kind of investment because of the education I've been able to receive and the commitment that I have to classical Jewish texts.  And so, making sure that what Ruth Wisse likes to call the vertical plane within a Jewish textual heritage is 74:00preserved, with Yiddish as an integral part of that vertical plane.

JP:  Is there also a horizontal plane that corresponds?

MU:  Definitely, and that is -- I think one of the really useful images for that is in Dan Miron's recent book where he -- called "From Continuity to Contiguity," where he, if anything, kind of challenges the supremacy of that vertical plane.  And he talks about all kinds of literary contiguity, Yiddish in relation to all of these contiguous parallels.  And we need to be working in both, right?  Because if you want to really orient yourself, you need to understand the vertical and the horizontal axes.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JP:  The long question is --

MU:  Yeah.

JP:  -- in your opinion, what should be the place of Yiddish within the academy, within your department or field --

MU:  Right.

JP:  -- or within the broader culture?

MU:  Yeah.

JP:  You know, should as opposed to kind of what currently is.

MU:  Right.  So, aspirations for the role of Yiddish?  So, I think that my 76:00answer falls out less along the lines of critique -- I wish it were this and not that -- more along the lines of aspiration.  More.  I just want more.  I want more students who come through first year Yiddish, decide they're going to go on to second year Yiddish, fall in love with Yiddish linguistics or with Yiddish literature, or who want to be anthropologists or ethnographers or ethnomusicologists, who say, I want Yiddish to be part of this for me.  And so, keeping the sense of richness and opportunity that makes Yiddish feel like a viable path, and then institutionally and structurally, that means all kinds of 77:00things.  That means all kinds of support for doing Yiddish.  That means jobs.  One of the things that is dismaying is that between the time that I was so fortunate to be hired at Emory while I was still in graduate school in 2007 -- between then and 2013, I don't think I've seen a Yiddish tenure-track job advertised.  Seeing Yiddish have the protections of tenure is really important.  I'm grateful for everything that my institution, Emory, makes possible for me, and I certainly don't mean to sound like an ingrate.  But in the spirit of things could always be better, let me say that I have a somewhat unusual position among foreign language teachers.  I'm the only person who has 78:00responsibility for a language program, including introductory teaching within that language, who's also on the tenure track.  So, that means that I have research expectations, which is wonderful, and it's a privilege to be able to teach the language.  But it means that unless I get a fellowship that comes with funding to hire a substitute in my stud-- in my stead, every time I take a fellowship leave or some kind of a research leave, our Yiddish pipeline dries up and our program grinds to a halt while I have my research year.  And then I come back and I get things going again.  So, this is difficult for continuity.  What can my students do next?  I would say that every first-year Yiddish offering produces two or three kids who willy-nilly, even though it's not required, they want to go on to that second year of Yiddish.  So, I try to 79:00send them to YIVO, to the Book Center, to Tel Aviv.  I try to send them somewhere.  But we don't have a way for them to continue yet at Emory.  So, this is one of my goals, just speaking in the very limited realm that I know best.  And I imagine that many other people are having a kind of analogous experience of wanting there to be more available.

JP:  Yeah, that sounds like it would resonate with other academics in other places, working with --

MU:  Yeah.

JP:  -- limited departments and -- funding structures.

MU:  Right.  Oh, I'll tell you another place I want more.  I was invited about a year ago to speak through an organization called RAVSAK, which is an organization of Jewish community day schools.  So, Jewish day schools without a specific tie to one of the denominations -- that cut across the denominations.  80:00And they have a principal program for administrators and principals, not only to work on the kind of technical admin end of Jewish day school life, but to also bolster their own core Jewish knowledge and Jewish competency.  And so, the folks at RAVSAK, I think very presciently, invited me as a spokesperson for modern Jewish literature.  And I gave a weekend-long seminar that I think had four talks included, and I also facilitated a discussion about how administrators and teachers can bring modern Jewish literature, and specifically Yiddish literature, into Jewish high schools.  And I would like to see more of that happening, and I would like to see organizations within the Jewish world figure out ways of providing support and scaffolding for schools that want to do that, because there were many administrators who spoke to me afterwards and 81:00said, This is amazing.  We want this.  I don't know how to get it in.  I don't know who knows about it.  There's no prepared curriculum.  Somebody needs to write that curriculum that can be plugged into a Jewish community school or a day school.

JP:  We talked a little bit about your response to "is Yiddish dying?"

MU:  Yeah.

JP:  I'm wondering --

MU:  Perpetually.

JP:  Perpetually.  (laughter) Do you think there is a Yiddish revival, on the flipside of that question?

MU:  Undoubtedly.  I think that there is, undoubtedly.  I mean, there is so much contingency and happenstance and happy accident in my own commitment to Yiddish, my finding my way to it.  If the job that I happened to get at Emory through many other people's good offices -- as much as or even more than through 82:00my own desserts -- if that job had not been defined as it was, I don't know that I would be as squarely self-defining a scholar of Yiddish as I am today.  They called it professor of Yiddish language, literature, and cultures -- or culture.  So, yeah, there's definitely a revival.  The revival needs to follow the money.  I mean, people are always, in kind of subtle ways, recondite ways, hidden ways, following pots of money here and there.  So, we need to make sure that in an intelligent way, not in a kind of unconsidered or ham-handed -- we certainly wouldn't want any ham hands touching our Yiddish culture -- but that in an intelligent and considerate way, we find the right pathways to incentivize 83:00people to keep engaging with Yiddish.

JP:  So, I feel the continuation of that question is: what do you see as the future of Yiddish?

MU:  Sure.  So, I see young people who delight in speaking Yiddish and in all kinds of Yiddish cultural production. It was after I left Harvard, but I know that there was a production of "Shulamis" mounted in Yiddish.  That's incredible to me.  So, I think that there will be this kind of mostly happy coterie of people who've made a commitment to Yiddish.  And it's significant that I say mostly happy, because I think that for very good reasons, which I would never, ever seek to undermine or belittle, I think that there has been a kind of lachrymose feeling around Yiddish for a long time in the States.  There 84:00was this overwhelming sense of -- and here I'll invoke Hebrew, because it is a biblical verse, of ud mutzal me'eish, of the brand that was plucked from the fire.  But the great thing about plucking a brand from the fire is if you keep that flame going, no matter how vulnerable it feels for a while, you can transfer the flame to something more robust.  And I think that we are seeing that.  We do lose another towering Yiddishist every year, and those losses are irreplaceable.  But at the same time, something new is crackling, and that -- those flames are crackling and growing, and it's a very exciting time to be a 85:00Yiddishist and to be still a relatively young Yiddishist.  And I think that one of my favorite texts -- not in Yiddish, but about Yiddish -- is the Cynthia Ozick story, "Envy, or Yiddish in America."  And there's this young woman who's interested in Yiddish.  And Ozick really takes pains to show that for these kind of cranky older Yiddish poets with their foibles and their arguments and their struggles with each other, this young Yiddishist, this young female Yiddishist -- it's also quite gendered in the story -- she is a curiosity.  She's exotic and she's bizarre.  And I've often, at various points over my career in Yiddish, I've thought back to that story and I've thought, Well, how true does that ring?  How much do you measure up with or measure up against or identify with that character?  And I'm happy to say that that's really a story 86:00of its cultural moment, and it doesn't -- I mean, it rings true as a work of literature, and Ozick is a wonderful storyteller, but it doesn't ring true as far as my own experience.  This person, this character, would be completely unexceptional at the AJS, and that's a wonderful thing.

JP:  That is a wonderful thing.  I'm wondering if this commitment to the future of Yiddish extends to what you transmit and teach your sons?

MU:  Not really.  The truth is, I've treated it as my own kind of quixotic intellectual experience that I allowed to happen to me.  I have a somewhat laissez-faire attitude.  If Yiddish finds them, I will be delighted.  If they find Yiddish, I will be delighted.  I will do everything to facilitate it.  87:00Until now, I've prioritized their acquisition of Hebrew, which -- I'm probably one of the few Yiddishists but I know I'm not the only one who would still say to people (UNCLEAR) "I have a finite amount of time.  Should I study Hebrew first or Yiddish first?"  I would still say, "Study Hebrew first."  But, that said, my older son has been a living model, when I've taught der kerper, when I've taught the body parts.  He happened to have a day off from school and he came in and he showed everyone his bakn [cheeks] and his shtern [forehead] and his noz [nose] and his bremen [eyebrows] and all -- his gombe [chin] and all of his body parts.  So, that was his first real interaction with Yiddish.  And what I'm doing now, the project for children, he's actually very excited 88:00about.  And when I went to the third and sadly final workshop just a week ago at the Yiddish Book Center for the translation fellowship, and we were workshopping the story that I had brought, somebody raised the point that, "It's really good sometimes to have another person read the story out loud and see how it sounds." And my older son is very excited about this project being for kids.  And I thought, You know what?  Here's a task for him.  And I went home and I asked him, "How would you like to help me out in this way?  I want you to read -- you're a very good reader by now."  He's nine, he's a strong reader.  "I would like you to read these stories to your little brother, and we'll see whether he can follow them, and how it is for you reading them out loud."  And 89:00he's been asking me at bedtime, "All right, when do we get to start?  When do we get to read the stories?"  So you never know.

JP:  And these are -- these are the translations you will have done?

MU:  So, these are translations that I'm working on now, yeah.

JP:  And -- well, that's amazing that you're getting your sons involve in that project.

MU:  I view it as a really inexpensive focus group.  (laughs)

JP:  And an age-appropriate focus group.

MU:  Absolutely.

JP:  We're nearing the end of our time, but I'd like to ask if there is something you would like to add before I ask one last question.

MU:  Sure.  There's an anecdote that I just want to recount.  So, I've explained that Ruth Wisse set me on this course toward studying Yiddish, and then my first formal classroom experience with Yiddish was that first summer in New York.  And I was studying Yiddish in the mornings, and I was teaching at the Drisha Institute in the afternoons.  And that was actually kind of 90:00unconventional, because although I would go on to teach Gemara and Midrash and to eventually direct a program at Drisha for high school students, I started out that first summer teaching kickboxing.  And so, I was on my way from my Yiddish class that I -- where I was a student -- to the kickboxing class for the mostly Orthodox high school-age girls where I was a teacher.  And I came out -- Drisha was then housed on Eighty-sixth Street, which -- West Eighty-sixth Street, near the Belnord, which is Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard.  So, I was on Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard, coming out of the subway.  I walked maybe ten paces.  Who is coming into the subway?  None other than Ruth Wisse.  And this is after a week of Yiddish.  And I was so excited to see her, because she had launched me on this course of study that was clearly going to be wonderful.  I mean, I was having the time of my life studying Yiddish.  And, of course, the 91:00classroom was an immersive environment, and I wanted to be able to just grab her by the lapels and thank her and tell her how wonderful it was and how much this meant to me and say everything to her in Yiddish.  And, of course, with a week of Yiddish under my belt and five chapters of self-study Weinreich, I was totally tongue-tied, and I got really frustrated, and I just -- I was so sad that I couldn't have this kind of perfect encounter on Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard.  And so, I started the conversation in Yiddish, and then we had to switch to English.  And she said, "Miriam, don't worry.  We have an expression, we have a shprikhvort."  I said, "Oh?"  She said, "S'iz do a lange lebn af tsu redn yidish -- there's a long life for speaking Yiddish."  And so, part of the counterweight to that feeling of it's never enough, I'm never good enough, is that, that's the hope, that s'iz do a lange lebn af tsu redn yidish, 92:00and we'll get there.

JP:  In light of that, I'm wondering if you have any advice to students of Yiddish -- who are now sort of going where you've been?

MU:  Yeah, right.  Stay -- my advice to students of Yiddish is stay honest with yourself about what really draws you and what doesn't.  You don't have to love all of it.  This is an entire civilization.  It is rich beyond our wildest imaginings, and nobody in any field would say, "You personally have to be the steward and be accountable to an entire civilization."  So, if it's literature, great.  If it's just modernist poetry, that's fine.  If it's just a particular area in applied linguistics, that's fine.  I think that there is a 93:00tendency, when you are the Yiddishist, and there are so few of us, or when you are that serious student of Yiddish, that people come and they want you to know about everything and they want you to have opinions about everything and they want you to love everything, and you don't have to.  You just need to find the parts of it that really do resonate with you, and then pursue them with a passion.

JP:  Thank you so much.  I want to thank you personally for sharing your stories and reflections with me.  I also want to thank you on behalf of the Yiddish Book Center for participating in the Wexler Oral History Project.

MU:  It was my pleasure.

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

MU:  Nito farvos [You're welcome].

[END OF INTERVIEW]