GLENN DYNNER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:So this is Christa Whitney, and today is December 16th, 2013. I'm here at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference in Boston with Glenn Dynner, and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

GLENN DYNNER:Yes.

CW:Thank you. So, can you just tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

GD:In what respect?

CW:Well, do you know how they came to this country?

GD:Ah. Okay. I don't have so much the typical story, because my parents were both born in America. Grandparents -- one came over when she was three -- she 1:00was born in a small town or village outside of Kiev -- it was called "Kipel" in her rendering -- probably Kupel if you look on a map -- that's my maternal grandmother. Grandfather came over from Vienna when he was thirteen; he joined the Merchant Marine. And then, on my mother's side, it was a much more assimilated background -- actually, my father's father was also quite assimilated -- I mean, really, in that Viennese fashion. On my mother's side -- so, her father was born in Riga, Latvia, but again, as a baby, brought over to Brooklyn. And then her mother was born in Budapest, and came over as a baby. 2:00That's the extent of my knowledge. I could have it a little wrong, but that's pretty much the idea. So we have some very, very diverse background there. We have Ukraine marrying Vienna, Austria; we have Budapest marrying Riga, Latvia. And, well, the marriages worked out, more or less. But these are very different cultural backgrounds coming together.

CW:Yeah. So can you describe the home that you grew up in?

GD:So the home I grew up in, I think, eradicated most of those distinctions. And even though I always considered my mother to be more genteel and my father to be more rough around the edges -- sort of the East European type -- he always looked up to his father so much, so he was always trying to emulate that 3:00Viennese thing, but then, he'd -- sort of, the Ukrainian would spill out. I think there's a real effort to suppress all of that Old World, ethnic Jewishness, to the extreme -- to the point where they moved to neighborhoods that weren't considered distinctly Jewish, they went to a Reform temple where we were Hebrews, not Jews -- the Washington Hebrew Congregation -- this is a suburb of Washington, DC, that I grew up in -- Potomac, Maryland. And Yiddish was always a sign of derision. So you would hear them say a Yiddish term to make fun of each other, or to make fun of each other's -- well, usually my dad's mother. It was a signal to us that this represented backwardness, and it was something 4:00to really kind of hold up as an object of ridicule and to differentiate ourselves from.

CW:What languages, if any, other than English, were you exposed to, growing up?

GD:None.

CW:What was Jewish about your home?

GD:Very little. We had a Christmas tree. The story is, we had a Christmas tree until I was five or six years old. And I was the one, apparently, who said, "I don't want to celebrate Christmas anymore, because we're Jewish." So I was a pain in the ass back then, too. And they actually were sufficiently embarrassed to never have a Christmas tree again. So we would celebrate Hanukkah in the 5:00home. Never Shabbat. But we would have a Passover Seder, and sometimes in our home, sometimes in the home of, I think, equally acculturated or assimilated friends who also went to our temple. And it was a two or three times a year experience. So it wasn't a part of growing up; it was something you did which entailed putting on a tie and a jacket and suffering. And yet, the food was great. The food was great. Like, around Passover, whenever you'd have, like, a real matzo ball soup, it was great. So.

CW:What was your attendance to the Reform temple?

GD:Twice a year. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Maybe a bar mitzvah, if you had one. And I did have a bar mitzvah.

CW:And can you describe just a little bit about the neighborhood that you grew 6:00up in?

GD:Yeah. So, I grew up in Potomac, Maryland, which is often considered a very Jewish suburb, but we were really in the part of Potomac that was not -- it was considered more the WASP-y part of Potomac. There was a clubhouse, a swimming pool, a tennis court -- very competitive sports-wise, and especially swimming and tennis were taken very seriously. That was your culture. And yet, I did have piano lessons. I became, I think, a very serious pianist -- concert pianist -- where I was practicing two hours a day. And that classical music, in an odd way, was a very Jewish thing. If you read some of the Jewish literature -- like, Isaac Babel, if you consider Jewish literature -- he could be writing about me with his violin lessons. So there was something Jewish about that that I don't 7:00think our friends did. They didn't have piano lessons, they didn't have violin lessons. So there was still something to that engagement with higher culture that, ironically, I experience as a kind of expression of Jewishness, even though -- you know, what are we playing? We're playing Beethoven sonatas, Mozart concertos -- not exactly Jewish music. And yet, the piano lessons, the violin lessons -- it was only my Jewish friends who seemed to be doing this.

CW:How much, if ever, was Europe discussed growing up?

GD:Europe was discussed, but never -- or rarely -- in the sense that this is where we used to live, and this is where we were persecuted and annihilated. Europe was spoken about with the utmost reverence -- that this is the heart of 8:00culture. There's a real European envy that I saw in this worship of classical music, art -- really, the only good art seems to come from Europe in this mentality, and it's a completely Eurocentric upbringing in the sense that high culture is equated with Europe. You hear about the Holocaust. At a certain age, my father gave me "Mila 18" -- which he pronounced "mile eighteen" -- it's actually "Miła 18," once you learn Polish -- and I've been to the street now. And that was the first time I had encountered the Holocaust. But when they did the miniseries on TV, we were there, we were watching it -- this is an important thing for you to learn about. Max Dimont's "Jews, God, and History" -- you have to read this, you have to learn about this, this is your -- so there was this kind of odd, almost paradoxical avoidance and then imperative to confront it. 9:00That's how I'd describe it.

CW:So what organizations were your parents involved in, if any?

GD:Organizations? The temple -- but only very passively. They had season tickets to the Kennedy Center and Wolf Trap, which was for their mainly classical music ballet performances, and so on. Organizations -- see, I think my father became active in joining these organizations after my parents got divorced and he got a job in Boston. He became sort of interested, drawn into that Boston Brahmin society, where he became a board member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he's 10:00on the board of the Boston Lyric Opera. And he became very involved in marine conservation, especially, since he's an expert diver, and there's an organization called Conservation International that he is now on the board of and very active in. So these are the kinds of organizations that he's become involved in -- but only rather late in life, and I think after he had the financial ability to do so, because you have to pay to be on these boards, and you have to give a lot of money to be on these boards. So that might have been part of it. But I don't think there was much organizational, institutional involvement when my parents were together. I don't remember if it was happening.

CW:So I'd like to ask a little, just very briefly, about your educational background. Can you give me a brief version of your --

GD:A brief version of my educational background. I went to public school my whole life, through high school. And it was weird for me. I did feel kind of an 11:00alienation, I think, that later on I attributed to my Jewishness. I knew I was different. Even though I had blond hair, blue eyes, I was athletic, I fit in, but I always felt different. Later on, I reconstructed that in a certain way. It was odd to me that my junior year abroad, I went to Israel -- to Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And it was the first time I'd really met Jews -- like, in large numbers. And suddenly, a lot of these personality quirks -- my neurosis, my anxieties, my hyper-intellectualism -- I realized these were Jewish cultural traits that I had always just experienced as just being me. And that was really empowering for me. It was life-changing, in fact, to feel that, Wow, I'm actually part of a culture, and it's nothing to be ashamed of -- in fact, it's something to be extremely proud about. Even the neurosis part. (laughs) 12:00Embrace it, you know?

CW:And then you spent your time after -- I mean, at Brandeis, and then McGill, and then Brandeis again, right?

GD:Yeah. So I transferred into Brandeis after being in Israel -- feeling like Yeshiva University would be too extreme. I'd become more religious; I'd gone into an Orthodox yeshiva, experienced studying Talmud, studying Gemara. It was spectacular for me -- I could almost see myself spending the rest of my life studying Gemara -- you know, just in a khevruse [group], the rest of my life, living in an ultra-Orthodox community -- except that my real, deep engagement with European non-Jewish high culture was an inoculation against that. Because at the same time, I also realized that you can get deep spiritual gratification from a symphony, from a great work of art. And so I was almost immune to the bal-tshuve -- you know, religious return that a lot of my friends were 13:00experiencing -- because it involves a rejection of the culture that I also loved and I had been nurtured on, in a very deep and meaningful way. So what happens, then, is I decide on Brandeis as a kind of a compromise -- which wasn't totally wrong. It did end up being like that in a quirky kind of a way. And of course, at Brandeis, I discovered Jewish Studies. I was a History major -- because God forbid you should focus too much on Jews -- so I really -- and also, I felt like an imperative, like, I have to master the history of Britain, history of France, history of Germany -- I still have that really strong Eurocentric feeling that I had to master this first before I could then sort of delve into more boutique kinds of things like Jewish history. But while I was there -- undergrad -- I studied with Antony Polonsky, who's one of the leaders of Polish Jewish Studies, who had been trained as a Polish historian. So you've got nothing over him on 14:00general non-Jewish history, and yet, here's somebody who came to Jewish history late in life, was able to frame it in ways that was meaningful to the rest of the world -- using that same language, the same methodology. In other words, he professionalized Jewish history in a very important way -- through his journal, through his own writings, and so on -- and that was my exposure, which almost was like a heksher [stamp of kosher approval] for Jewish history, you know? A non-Jewish heksher. (laughs) It made it something that you don't just do for personal exploration. I had a little bit of that Viennese grandfather in me which said, You shouldn't be sentimental. You shouldn't be looking at exploring your own roots. You've got to be tough and hold yours-- keep yourself out of this, and become cultured and educated in an objective way. And I -- maybe I've 15:00held that throughout my career a little bit. Because I was just talking to somebody -- Michael Silber -- today. I met him for the first time. We had, like, an hour and a half coffee, and he's saying how he's so interested in genealogy now -- which as historians, we're taught to keep away from, because it's not professional -- and I still found myself saying, Ugh, I could go into my own genealogy -- I have the languages, I have the tools, I even know all the archivists -- but I just feel like -- I don't know, I just -- it's not all about me. I want to write about, you know, history. I don't want to write about me. It seems so narcissistic or something. So I still have that barrier to that kind of self-exploration, even though, obviously, that's exactly what I'm doing. I mean, I'm a Jewish historian, for God's sake. You know, I'm studying Eastern Europe, where all my family came from. But I still -- I'm holding off on that personal exploration thing -- in my own mind, anyways.

CW:Can you describe Antony Polonsky?

GD:Yes. I would describe him as having an erudition which is, unfortunately, so rare nowadays -- because of specialization, but also because we don't read enough. And he can speak and you forget -- every time you see him, you forget how wonderful it is to just sit and listen to him talk, because it's just so learned. He may not have the kind of expertise that we value sometimes in the field now -- which is the Rabbinic Hebrew, the internal Jewish religious culture. And that's something I tried to fill myself, sort of making my own name, and gather that, without sacrificing the context. But, at the same time, what I would say is, he's taught me the importance of context -- that you can't study Judaism in a vacuum, you can't study Jewish culture in a vacuum. That the 17:00study of Jewish history also has to also be a study of the peoples among whom Jews lived. And you need to learn those languages. So, Yiddish is not enough. Hebrew is not enough. You have to learn Polish -- preferably, German and Russian, too. Even French, because a lot of the stuff I'm seeing is in French. You have to understand Jews in a horizontal way -- where they're living among other people, they're influenced deeply, shaped by these other peoples, there's some exchange going on. And that's an important thing. At the same time, as I grew as a historian, I began to write against this approach. Now, Antony's been very active in Polish-Jewish relations -- sometimes conciliatory to a fault, wanting so badly for Jews and Poles to get along that we sort of sift out all the nasty stuff. He's not terrible about it, but you could make that criticism 18:00about him. Another thing is, really, his focus is on acculturated Jews, Polonized Jews. And I understand how important that is to the cause of Polish-Jewish relations. We can agree that there were certain Jews who did learn Polish, speak Polish, go to Polish schools, write in Polish, and so on, and they need to be part of the story. However, in my opinion, they can't be allowed to become the story, because they're not representative -- down to the Holocaust, they're not really representative. This is a culture that differentiated. Peretz knew this. You know, and Peretz had the ch-- if he wanted to become completely Polonized, he could. But instead, he recognized, you're in a place where ethnic nationalism reigns supreme -- that's defining people's identities. And to truly grasp Polish Jewish history, I feel we have to come to terms with the fact that 19:00the vast majority of Jews were deeply traditionalist throughout the nineteenth century and, perhaps, even throughout much of the twentieth century -- that acculturation, Polonization, is a minority phenomenon. And it can become the s-- we can't allow it to be the sole focus. We have to allow for the possibility that modernity entailed these very traditionalist cultures. We might not like them -- they're xenophobic, they're misogynistic -- but they adjust to modernity just as well as the Polonized Jews do. They build new institutions -- turn of the twentieth century, you have Hasidic yeshivas going up, networks of shtiblekh [small Hasidic houses of prayer] that are just as vital and potent as the Zionist networks and the Bundist clubs and the Polish literary clubs, and so on. And to truly understand this history, I think we need to inject some skepticism in this Polonized focus that Polonsky has introduced. So it's a bit of -- I 20:00think everybody goes through this, where you idolize your dissertation advisor for a long time, but then you start to feel shortcomings, and the shortcomings start to eat away at you. And you also -- I think. strategically, you want to carve out your own place. And so I found myself moving into opposition a little bit -- but, of course, with full respect and admiration.

CW:So, how -- when did Yiddish become something you needed to study, and how did you go about it?

GD:So, I needed to learn Yiddish as part of my training -- I had an examination in it -- but it was only learning enough to get through the exam. The reason is, is I was doing nineteenth century. There isn't much until the late nineteenth century -- there isn't much in terms of Yiddish literature. Now, I needed to 21:00know enough to be able to read Shatzky's "Yidn in varshe [Jews in Warsaw]," for example -- you know, "The Jews of Warsaw" -- but only enough to get the gist. And then you move on -- the problem is, even studying Hasidism, in order to sanctify something -- and that even includes Hasidic tales -- they would take an originally oral Yiddish tale and translate it into Hebrew and then write it down and print it. Same with Hasidic teachings. My first book was on the rise of Hasidism and how it became a mass movement in Poland. So, I'm realizing, Wait, I don't need Yiddish. So where do I focus? I focus on the Hebrew. I focus on the Polish. I can -- I have access to the government archives, and so on. The next book, on Jewish tavern keepers -- that starts to get more into Yiddish literature, because I'm getting later now, I'm starting to realize -- I found this enormous trove of kvitlekh, these petitions to a miracle worker by the name 22:00of Elijah Guttmacher. I'm thinking, Oh my God, this is such great material -- there's thousands of these petitions, each one tells a story that's deeply intimate about the petitioner's life, and so on -- what a great source -- from the 1870s. I need this stuff. I go, I'm all prepared -- okay, I'm going to have to really work on my Yiddish now and really refine it -- lo and behold, they're writing their petitions in Hebrew most of the time, because that's the -- they might not speak Hebrew, but they're translated or they're having somebody translate for them. So I put it off even more. Now, occasionally, I would find a work of Yiddish literature that dealt with the tavern keeper -- like, Mendele is a great example -- but these are rare. It's only this new project now, where I'm moving into the twentieth century to really test out this whole "tradition within modernity" theory -- you know, how traditionalists survived and really 23:00thrived despite modernity -- that I realize, Oh my God, I really need to work on my Yiddish. So I started. I went through all of college Yiddish -- again, I'd been through it for the most part, but I went through it all over again. I made it through the whole thing -- this is Weinreich's "College Yiddish" -- and then I felt ready to start reading memoirs, so I've started reading Yiddish memoirs now. And I have to tell you, it's like falling in love again. Because the language is just -- it's as natural as a flowing stream. I've never felt that way about a language -- not with Polish, not with Hebrew. That it's somehow just flowing. And it's speaking to me in a certain way that's just been 24:00extraordinary. So, every morning, I get up early, I put the kids on the bus, and I spend an hour with my Yiddish memoirs. And it's been a fantastic experience, because you get to see -- in the memoir, you get to see -- there's a lot of dialogue there, you get to kind of sense the language, how it's spoken, how thoughts are formulated in Yiddish. And it's just been fantastic. I would almost say it's sui generis if I didn't know better -- I'd almost say that there's nothing like this -- you have to read the memoir in Yiddish to really appreciate it. But of course, people wrote in other languages and were just as genuine and authentic. But it's been fantastic. So it's almost been like a rediscovery of Yiddish for me.

CW:I'd like to ask just generally about language, since you have several that you work with. In the context of -- sort of in the largest context -- how does 25:00language influence identity?

GD:I think language influences identity to the point where you're a different person depending on what language you speak. I wouldn't go -- take this too far, but there is a sense that you're speaking a language when you're embodying one kind of identity, and you're speaking another language when you're embodying another identity. The one that you choose the most, I think, is a good indication of where you fall on the cultural spectrum. The more acculturated would seem to be much -- not necessarily more comfortable, but really preferring to speak and write in Polish and Russian. So that puts you -- let's put acculturation, assimilation over here. It gets complicated with Hebrew. Hebrew 26:00could be Rabbinic Hebrew -- but you're only writing it, you're not speaking it. For the most part, when you start dealing with Hebrew as a spoken language and a language of what we would call higher literature -- belles-lettres, so on -- you would fall more on the spectrum of, you're integrated -- I take that back -- you're integrated without being integrated. To become a Zionist, to become a speaker and writer of modern Hebrew, you're usually not part of this religious milieu. You are part of a -- almost unrequited love affair with Polish culture, and you formed your Zionist identity almost out of a sense of rejection -- that you couldn't join Polish or Russian society because of anti-Semitism and 27:00violence. And so, you take lemons and you make lemonade. We're gonna create our own language, our own culture, our own nation -- Zionism. And I think the Hebrew would fall, in this respect, very much in line with a Zionist's inclination. Yiddish. Yiddish is obviously a complicated one, even more so, because you're dealing with the religious masses who are speaking Yiddish, and then you're dealing with Peretz's Yiddishists or Weinreich's Yiddishists, who have come back to Yiddish almost as a rediscovery of the folk [peoplehood] -- usually, with a socialist inclination, a Bundist inclination -- and they're cultivating this as the language of the diaspora. We're not going anywhere, we belong here, Poland is our home -- and yet, we don't belong enough to actually speak Polish or re-- it's a strange kind of identity that forms. But I would place the Yiddish more in line with either the religious or the socialist subcultures. And believe me, 28:00there are plenty of scholars who will say, You're exaggerating, you're over-stating, whatever. But I think this is a rough sketch.

CW:What connection, if any, do you see from the period -- Hasidim in the period that you're studying and Hasidim today?

GD:Say the question again, please?

CW:What is the connection, for you, between the Hasidim that you're studying and the population today?

GD:I don't know yet, because I'm very familiar -- as familiar as a historian can be -- with late-eighteenth-, nineteenth-century Hasidism, but there's a huge gap in our knowledge when it comes to the twentieth century. We don't have a good monograph about twentieth-century Hasidism. So it's almost like a broken link. 29:00We don't know how close Satmar Hasidism, for example, is -- in America -- is to the Hasidism that I studied over in Eastern Europe. I am suspicious, though. Because when I look at Satmar writings and I speak to Satmar Hasidim, I'm not experiencing Hasidism as I know it. The basic terminology doesn't seem to be there, other than the Rebbe. It's almost as if you've got the vessel without the content -- that they have a Hasidic structure -- the Rebbe is this charismatic and extremely influential figure who's venerated -- and yet, at least in the Satmar communities, you're seeing that their roots are very much in Hungary, and they're quoting non-Hasidic sources to, for example, endorse the head-shaving of 30:00women, and they're quoting non-Hasidic sources to endorse the adoption of certain modes of dress which we associate with traditional or Hasidic -- Hildesheimer, Khatam Sofer -- these are not Hasidic figures that they're quoting. So I become very, very wary of naturally associating Satmar with the Hasidism that I've studied. Lubavitch seems a lot closer. Lubavitch seems to maintain that link to the Alter Rebbe. And recently, Elliot Wolfson wrote a fantastic but difficult monograph linking the ideology and theology of the last Lubavitch Rebbe with the first one, and argued very persuasively that there's a continuum there. So, I think it's a complicated question, because I think some Hasidic groups in the contemporary scene have maintained that khsides [Hasidic 31:00doctrine], others have not.

CW:I want to ask now about teaching this material. What's been challenging and delightful about teaching Jewish Studies, in your experience?

GD:Jewish Studies in general?

CW:Yeah.

GD:Oh. No Jews seem to want to take Jewish Studies, which is bad and great, depending on what your aims are. My aims are not necessarily Jewish continuity. My priority is to have a vibrant discussion in the classroom. The best-case scenario for me -- and this has been the case many time at Sarah Lawrence -- is, there may be two or three Jews who strongly identify as Jewish, another few who 32:00weren't really raised Jewish -- maybe even less than I was raised Jewish -- and then fundamentalist Christians and maybe even more just passive Christians -- you know, those who are nonreligious, irreligious -- and you get everybody in the same room relating to the exact same text, the exact same ideas. And that's where you get diversity of discussion and you actually make some progress. It's been very difficult -- the most frustrating thing sometimes is to overcome what people have learned in Jewish day school. I have also some women who were brought up in the Satmar community who found their way to Sarah Lawrence and have been taken my classes and so on. How do you unlearn insularity, superiority? How do you unlearn that certitude that comes from, you know, 33:00fifteen, how many years of Jewish day school? It's very hard to overcome the myths, the biases. So it can be almost more frustrating to have somebody with a really deep Jewish background. Because what do they learn in Jewish day school? They've learned a persecution narrative -- that the experience of being Jewish is being kicked out or kicked. And how do you say -- without denying that this happened -- that's that not really the way that historians today relate to Jewish history? That there's -- we want to find out what happened, we want to find out -- coexistence, because obviously you don't have three-fourths of the world's Jews settling in the Polish lands -- three-fourths of the world's Jewish population settling there -- if it were inhospitable. No, it was once very hospitable -- that's why you had all these Jews living there. Things turned ugly at certain points: once in 1648, even more so in 1881, then 1903 to '06, and 34:00then we all know what happened after that. And so on. But we need to put it all in perspective. It's very hard when somebody's been reared on this notion: They hate us, they've always hated us, they always will hate us, that's why we need a strong Israel.

CW:What do you see as the role of the academic in transmitting culture?

GD:This relates to the last question. Is my role in the classroom to foster Jewish identity, Jewish pride, Jewish heritage? Sure, why not? But only, I think, as a byproduct of what is arguably more serious, and that is discovering what was life like for a diaspora culture -- and not just any diaspora culture -- the Jews -- has a special kick to it in every possible context. What was life 35:00like? And since I'm focused on Eastern Europe, what was life like for the majority of Jews of the world in this time period? And that's what we need to figure out. Because today, we're all diasporas, really. I mean, we're all -- that's the norm now, to be a diaspora. We're all rootless. We're all placed in situations where -- how many people can you say, like, they're living in the town that their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents lived in? It just doesn't happen. So that sense, I think, is a more serious kind of inquiry. And what literature -- what culture is produced out of suffering -- out of a sense of being a pariah -- or out of a sense of finally being accepted? What happens when Jews meet Christians in a meaningful way? I think all these questions are even more important than, what does it mean that I was born 36:00Jewish? Because obviously, the university is not a yeshiva. That's not our task. The university -- the college -- it's a place where you learn how to think. And you learn how to think by embodying different perspectives. So, people ask me all the time, Why are more than half of the students in your classes not Jewish? Why are they taking -- why are they interested? Well, I don't know. Ask a Chinese historian why they're all learning about China. Oh, well that's obvious, because China's on the rise, blah-blah-blah. Well, okay. Maybe. But maybe -- just maybe -- there's a curiosity -- an innate curiosity about the Jewish experience that we should be okay with, we should be welcoming.

CW:What connection, if any, is there for you between your academic work and your own identity?

GD:Oh, I can't answer that question. That's just -- that'll expose me as being non-professional.

CW:(laughs) Okay. What do you see as the place of Yiddish within the field of Eastern European Jewish Studies?

GD:Ah, how do you position Jewish Studies within Eastern European --

CW:And Yiddish, particularly.

GD:-- and Yiddish in particular. Okay. First off, I'd like to quote what the historian Jacob Goldberg said -- or used to say -- on numerous occasions, "There can be no Polish history without Jewish history, and there can be no Jewish history without Polish history." What does he mean? He means that you grow up among each other. Now, I don't want to exaggerate this coexistence, because yes, there was coexistence -- rough coexistence that eventually, occasionally, would break down -- there would be violence -- but by and large, it worked. There was 38:00coexistence. But it's only within very heavily prescribed roles -- roles in the economy. The tavern keeper -- the Jewish tavern keeper. The peasant clientele in the tavern. The nobleman -- the Polish nobleman who owns the tavern and leases it to -- in other words, you each had your role. It could be estate-based, but it was also obviously more than that -- it was also ethnically and religiously based. What that means is we have a kind of coexistence that looks very different from what we have in America today, where you can be whatever you want to be, within reason. And so on. So I would say that it's crucial to understand what life was like in Poland by also understanding what was going on in the tavern, in the marketplace -- these are places where Jews inhabited very important roles. And you won't be a good Polish historian unless you learn it. 39:00And unfortunately, they haven't yet. I mean, most have not yet, although it's improving a great deal. Where does Yiddish fit in? It's the vernacular. It's what people speak. I feel like I'm becoming a better historian the better my Yiddish becomes. It can sound mystical, but I'm feeling a sense of rhythm that I did not have the same access to before -- maybe in other languages I could feel that rhythm, but there's nothing like the rhythm of the vernacular.

CW:What's your analysis of what's going on with Jewish Studies in Poland today?

GD:Poland often exhibits an inferiority complex, for good reasons. This is a state that existed, that didn't exist, that existed, that -- and just as soon as they get independence, what happens? Germany invades from one side, the Soviet 40:00Union invades from another. And the end of World War II is not a happy ending, because you become a Soviet satellite. It's only until 1989 -- so, there's a real sense of wanting to be Western. I've even been corrected -- you know, God forbid I should call Poland part of Eastern Europe. No, no. We're East-Central Europe. You know, you can see that. Now, how does that influence Jewish Studies? There's even more than what I described with Antony Polonsky -- even more so, there's a tendency to focus on only those Jews who were Polonized, who were acculturated. And what happens is, some Polish historians are almost fabricating artificial Haskalah, because we don't want to think of our Jews as backwards, as Eastern-oriented, as Hasidic. And the effect of all this is to allow the 41:00traditionalist Jewish masses to really recede into the background. And you're focusing on a small group of Polonized Jews living in Warsaw who fought for Poland during the uprisings against the czar. And I'm afraid that you're kidding yourself. This was not a representative sample. This was a specific group with specific goals and orientations that in many ways broke with the Jewish tradition. How did they break with it? Being willing to fight and die for nationalism. It's a new phenomenon, and it's not a widespread phenomenon. And yet, Polish historians will still try to emphasize Polish patriots among the Jews. I think it's an apologetic enterprise, and I'm deeply ambivalent about it. I think we need to turn and face the music. If the majority of Jews differentiated themselves or maintained a sort of cold neutrality -- or didn't 42:00-- we need to come to terms with that, and we can't be trying to speak to an agenda -- even if it's well-meaning. Even if it helps Polish-Jewish relations to focus on the most Polonized, we can't allow ourselves to continue to do that. We need a much more representative history of the Jews of Poland. I don't see it happening in Poland yet. I don't see the Polish historians really learning Hebrew. I've seen entire books come out about Hasidism in Poland by authors who can't even read Hasidic texts because they can't read the Hebrew. So you're looking almost from the outside -- you're looking -- it's like an aquarium sort of approach to history -- your only perspective is the outsider perspective. How are you ever going to understand the Hasidic community that way? So these are some of the problems. I think the training needs to be rigorous. Hebrew -- not 43:00just Hebrew, Rabbinic Hebrew -- so we can gain a sense of all these different perspectives, and get a much fuller, richer picture of what Polish Jewish culture was. And that includes Yiddish, of course.

CW:Is there a connection for you -- or what connection, if any, is there between your work and interacting with contemporary populations of Jews and non-Jews -- for example, when you were doing your work in Poland?

GD:See, the problem is, there's an abiding fear of presentism. By speaking to contemporary concerns, you run the risk of imposing those concerns on an earlier 44:00period. So I really try to keep the two separate. I don't know if that's right. I don't know if people will disagree strongly with me. But I feel that the past was different. It's fascinating to me when I see lingering traces of the past in the present. Go to the town of Kotzk today, where the famous Kotzke Rebbe had his court. Go there. You'll see the place where he lived, you'll see where his court was -- the attic where he banished himself in seclusion the last twenty or so years of his life. It's fascinating. And you can see little traces of the eighteenth century peeking through the storefronts -- you know, an older coat of paint, an older building, and so on, behind all the glaring signs of modernity, and so on. That kind of thing's fascinating to me -- but only heuristically. You know, it's something that maybe draws the reader's interest. But to rely on the 45:00present as an indicator of the past, I think, is very hazardous.

CW:I'd like to end by asking, do you have advice to students who are considering getting into your field?

GD:I would say, you have to learn languages. The problem is, when you don't learn a language, you use that as an unconscious reason for ignoring a whole body of material: It can't be important, since I don't know that language. In order to be a great historian of Eastern Europe, you need to learn Hebrew, Yiddish, and a Slavic language -- Russian or Polish. You need to. It's a three-pronged kind of a thing. Learn the languages. The second thing I would say 46:00is, try with all your might not to approach any project with a preconceived idea -- because what happens then is you start trying to cram all your sources into that preconceived ideational category, and you wind up doing bad history. Try to have a completely open mind and be willing to be wrong as you approach these sources. Let these sources speak for themselves before you give them an interpretation. That's the kind of advice I would give.

CW:A hartsikn dank [Thank you very much]. Thank you for your time -- from me and from the Yiddish Book Center.

GD:Okay. You're welcome.

[END OF INTERVIEW]