HAROLD EDELSTEIN ORAL HISTORY

BINA ADDES:This is Bina Addes, and today is January 30th, 2014. I am here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Harold Edelstein, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Harold Edelstein, do I have your permission to record this interview?

HAROLD EDELSTEIN:Yes, you do.

BA:Thank you. We're gonna start with talking about your background a little bit. So, can you tell me briefly what you know about your family's background?

HE:You mean before they came to the United States or after they came to the 1:00United States?

BA:If you know about before, whatever you know, and then in the United States.

HE:Sure. Typical Jewish immigration family. My grandfather, Fred -- so my father tells me years later -- came to the United States -- and I don't know if my grandmother was with him or not -- or they met in the United States, but -- my grandfather had to flee Austria Poland. I can say Austria Poland because at the time, like many other shtetls [small towns in Eastern Europe with Jewish communities] in Poland and the Ukraine, it was conquered by the Kaiser Franz Joseph of the Ottoman Empire -- not the Ottoman Empire, excuse me -- that's wrong -- cut that out -- by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And they swept over these countries and they surrounded all the -- and conquered the Yiddish shtetls. And they both taxed them -- that's why a lot of Jews have German names, by the way -- for the tax accounts that go back to the Kaiser -- and they also wanted to induct all the young men into the Kaiser's armies -- one way -- you 2:00never got out -- you were cannon fodder, in short. So my grandfather fled to the United States. Like many other American Jews, he landed in Ellis Island -- I never found out about that. But he landed on the Lower East Side. And he had five children -- my father and four siblings -- two more daughters and two more sons -- two daughters and two more sons. And they grew up on the East Side and then they moved to Brooklyn. One uncle -- one of my father's brothers, who I call my uncle, Harry-- and I'm named Harold -- we're both named after Tsvi Hersh -- moved up to the Bronx. He stayed there for the rest of his life. And one uncle, Mo, stayed on the Lower East Side. And an aunt named Lillian stayed on Hester Street -- because I remember that because of the movie, and it was Hester Street. That building was demolished and they put a huge project up on that 3:00site. And the last one, Lillian, lived two blocks from me in Crown Heights. And my grandmother and grandfather lived in a one-room apartment in Coney Island. So that's their background. My father never graduated high school. After junior high school, he had to go to work to support my grandmother and grandfather, Esther and Fred, because there was no welfare -- you were impoverished, or you had some young child or child support the family. And he was a gute neshome [good soul]. (laughs)

BA:Very good. So let's talk a little bit about the home that you grew up in. Do you consider it a Jewish home?

HE:Well, okay. My grandmother Esther ate bacon at her house in Coney Island. My brother had the whooping cough and the doctor -- Doctor Samuel T. Markoff -- said to my mother, "I think if you gave him bacon, it would help his throat with the whooping cough." So Marvin broke the kosher sanctity in our apartment in 4:00Brooklyn. But my mother kept two sets of dishes, the fleyshikh [meat dishes] and miledikh [dairy dishes], and everything else. And during the holidays -- we followed the conventional symbolism of being Jewish on holidays. My mother came from an Orthodox family -- I never told you about my mother's family yet, did I? I will soon. But I'll be honest, my mother was a typical -- well, not typical -- my mother was a person who said, Do as I do, not as I say. And I saw quite early that this was the way she was. And my father was laissez-faire. And that laissez-faire attitude was with his whole life. It was wonderful sometimes, and sometimes it was not so wonderful -- when you don't act up when you should. So my mother and father realized at an early age -- and this might sound very self-righteous or arrogant -- but my mother and father saw at an early age -- 5:00compared to my brother, who was a typical go through life and see what you can get and not really plan and think about things -- but I was that way. I saw from an early age things around me -- during World War II -- not too many toys -- you had to make do with what you had in the early '40s. And I played with whatever things I could -- old radios, clocks, making a train out of shoeboxes -- putting my mother's beads and things and pulling it around the linoleum floor in the kitchen, making believe I had a train. And that sort of got me interested. My brother was a boy scout. I was six years younger -- I am six years younger than him -- he's still alive, thank God -- just barely -- he's eighty-one. And when he would become a boy scout, he would get disinterested and -- very early, and I would get his merit badge books -- on chemistry, on magnetism, on electricity. I 6:00loved them, and it just turned me on, and I already felt, something about this is interesting to get involved in. General Motors put out a series of cartoon or comic books explaining engines and motors. My big thing, I wanted to be an automobile mechanic. And my mother saw that I was accepted to something called the SP system in New York City -- Special Progress -- and I didn't know what was going on. But hey, yeah -- that's where you made the school in two years rather than three in junior high school. So my mother realized I was kind of bright. (laughs) She never knew anybody in the family like me. And she let me be. She let me play with fire over the stove without -- when I wanted to experiment with tin -- caps and bottles -- you know, you take the can and then the bottle top 7:00off -- and it's just brass or whatever it is -- just metal -- and you can turn it upside down and make believe it's a small cauldron and put things in and see how they decompose or how they bubble. And my mother would say to me, "If it is a wind coming through the window, and the curtain tends to blow when you're doing your experiments. Stop! Don't set the house on fire." Other than that, she left me alone. I used to, you know, burn things, and see what they looked like. That curiosity about nature and how things worked helped me later on, and I'll get to that --

BA:We'll get to that. In your home, were there any special foods or celebrations, or did you do something special for the Shabbos?

HE:No. There were special foods. My mother learned from her mother, 'cause her mother -- she came from an Orthodox family. I haven't talked about my mother much, and that might be something -- (laughs) -- something psychological. I spoke about my father, but not much about my mother. She was sort of a little bit cold to everybody, and maybe that aloofness allowed me to be a better 8:00person. I don't know. And that was good, because I had more leisure time to be me -- (laughs) -- and not be over- or super-mothered -- (laughs) -- which I find sometimes can be a detriment to children -- in maturing and getting independence on their mind. So that, in some ways, was good.

BA:Were there special foods that she made that you --

HE:Yes. My mother made wonderful khalupshes [stuffed cabbage rolls] and latkes for the holidays. And brisket. And she made pickled herring, but I didn't like fish. And here's an interesting thing -- I never liked lox. I'm probably the only Jew in captivity who doesn't like lox. When I was bar mitzvahed, I had to join -- or I was induced to join -- the post-Hebrew school Temple Petach Tikvah boys' bar mitzvah club. And there, every summer morning, we'd get together and have bagels and lox and cream cheese, which I couldn't stand -- I loved the 9:00bagels and cream cheese, I couldn't stand the lox. And then they all went out to play basketball, except for me. I never was interested in competitive sports. My mind was elsewhere. And later on, I'll talk in some of my essays how this coagulated into me getting on a scientific path and all that.

BA:Were there any special things that you did as a family -- any outings or other religious observances that you did together?

HE:All right. The temple we belonged to, Temple Petach Tivkah -- my father couldn't aff-- he was a blue-collar bus driver. We just struggled on his salary -- the four of us in a one-bedroom apartment -- just to get on. So when it was the High Holidays, he would buy a ticket for one -- for him -- in the temple auditorium, away from the main sanctuary, which is a beautiful, magnificent Conservative shul. We never went into that. The only time I went into that was when I was bar mitzvahed or when a friend of mine was bar mitzvahed. So in the 10:00auditorium, he would get in, and me and my other Jewish friends, just for the fun of it, would try to sneak past the guard who would want to see the ticket -- and get in. (laughs) And once we were in, we'd stay for a while. And I took from Hebrew school my prayers and knowledge of Hebrew, and I sort of hung along. But that was the only time -- Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We never had a seder in our house, and no one ever invited us to their seder. And I remember one time when I had learned from Hebrew school how to conduct a seder, I asked my mother, "Can we have a seder? Can we have a seder?" She said no. We'd just have the meal with matzo, and that's good enough. So we were not a religious family. We were very culturally Jewish, but we were not religious.

BA:What do you remember about being culturally Jewish?

HE:Well, the feeling of Israel -- 1948, the pride of Ben-Gurion. And the fact 11:00that my parents spoke Yiddish but I never knew what they were talking about -- they didn't want me to understand. That's why most American Jews do not understand Yiddish -- 'cause it was the secret language. It's funny, my daughter-in-law, who's Korean American, knew Korean, but didn't know Japanese -- 'cause the Japanese invaded Korea, and they learned Japanese -- and because of that, she never knew what their parents said in Japanese to each other. It's a family, parents-children thing.

BA:What languages were spoken in your home?

HE:Yiddish and English -- but Yiddish when they didn't want us to understand. And, perhaps, when a relative came over and visited, I was more comfortable. And I must say, my Hebrew school teacher really gave me more Hebrew and Israeli culture and Yiddishkayt than my parents. I used to listen to WEVD on AM radio that had Yiddish klezmer music -- in those days, we called it "freylekh music"; 12:00today, it's klezmer music -- to have a cultural icon to identify with. And I'll get back to that later. Because my wife's maiden name is Beckerman. Does the name Beckerman mean familiar to you? Sidney Beckerman and Shloimke Beckerman? They were the original klezmer musicians in the United States -- which were Taner and Musiker -- who started the original, original in the Lower East Side and then later in Brownsville, playing freylekh music at Yiddish weddings. And my wife is related -- her father was a cousin of the Beckermans. And his name was Beckerman. (laughs) I'm drifting, I'm sorry.

BA:That's okay. We're covering different kinds of things. But in thinking about your early life, talk a little bit about the neighborhood -- what it was like, where you grew up, what was in the neighborhood, your friends.

HE:Certainly. I'll be very happy to. St. John's Place was in Crown Heights, two 13:00blocks away from Eastern Parkway. If you walked about four blocks towards Howard Avenue, Eastern Parkway swung to the left -- north -- and to the right was the magical street of Pitkin Avenue -- started with the Loew's Pitkin, which is a very cultural icon. And as you went down Pitkin Avenue, you saw -- it was sort of like a Jewish Fifth Avenue for the people who were living there. The people in Brownsville and Crown Heights were blue-collar -- there may be some middle-class, but not too many. The richer people went further south in Brooklyn, along Ocean Parkway. The culture of Jewish Brooklyn people follows the history of the building of Brooklyn. After the Brooklyn Bridge was built and there was a path for the carriage trade from Manhattan to go to their brownstones -- up and down Brooklyn Heights and Flatbush Avenue -- they did -- 14:00after the Civil War -- opened up Prospect Park. It was made by the same -- I think it was the same architect who did Central Park. And he put -- where Flatbush Avenue went into that place, he made an eastern route into Brooklyn, called Eastern Parkway, and a place down to the ocean, called Ocean Parkway. And the wealthier people lived on those streets -- and Ocean Parkway, especially, 'cause it was open, a little wider. And the Eastern Parkway part of Brooklyn, that was more Irish American and more blue-collar -- it never got classy. But Eastern Parkway did have brownstones and did have beautiful buildings. I'll talk about my friend Mark Raven living in one of those apartments on Eastern Parkway. And that triangle -- going to the east and going south to Coney Island -- and going east towards Queens -- that was two blocks from us, and that influenced the culture of a better life. But everything else was tenements. And the kids -- 15:00during World War II and after -- our parents were poor. Everybody, no matter how many children you had, lived in a one-bedroom apartment. There were a few two-bedroom apartments, but not many. And we played with -- I heard this the other day, and it's true -- we made rifles out of orange crates and little linoleum zip guns -- a rubber band on a T on the end of a crate. And we made scooters out of a skate that we nailed to the front and the back of a two-by-four plank with an orange crate on the top for a front, and we scooted down the street. So we made our own toys. Now I was close -- on the other side of Eastern Parkway -- to a place called Lincoln Terrace Park, named after Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. And that was a place that we used to go for a playground and to play ball -- which I never was good at -- and play soldiers. We didn't play cowboys and Indians; we played just soldiers -- with our orange 16:00crate rifles. (laughs) We went up on the roof a lot -- thank God, no one ever fell off -- although there was a boy older than us who fell off the roof across the street from me, and they never found out if he fell by himself or was pushed. Big mystery on St. John's Place -- never solved. So we grew up that way. One of my friends, Danny Koloski, was one of the people I could talk to about things other than the general stuff, and he and I liked to do exploring. We both had a Rudge bicycle -- three-speed, with Sturmey Archer gear shift. And we went all over the world with it -- our world -- including Fort Lee, New Jersey, which I talk about. So I had a good childhood. When I went into the SP, I found it was challenging. And I wasn't the top banana and there were kids smarter than me and it was a struggle for me. But I survived. They left with ninety to ninety-five 17:00averages; I left with an eighty or eighty-one average. But I survived. And I said, I'm going to stay in the game until they kick me out. I had that perseverance.

BA:And talking about your neighborhood, you spoke in your essays a little bit about the Hebrew Educational Society.

HE:HES. Yes. I talked about that in my video. The HES -- the Hebrew Educational Society -- was like a lot of Jewish non-profit organizations to help underprivileged, poor Jewish people. That was in Brownsville. It was on Hopkinton Avenue, off Pitkin Avenue. And my friend Davy Schechtman -- who I mentioned later on, a friend for many years, from Hunter College on -- he was an instructor there in the playground. So I used to visit him. And I would walk from St. John's Place to Eastern Parkway, through Pitkin Avenue, make a right turn on Hopkinton Avenue and go down to the HES -- and that was nothing, we're 18:00young, it's exercise (laughs) -- and play around. But then, my mother found out -- and this is how I talked on the other interview -- that they have a summer camp for the poorer children. And I went there with this guy named Sheldon -- interesting if you know about "The Big Bang Theory" -- this friend of mine from the street on St. John's Place had the same name, Sheldon Cooper. But he was no "Big Bang" Sheldon Cooper -- he was very opposite to that. And he and I went. And the story I told was interesting. It was a four-week stay, and in the middle there was a two-week break, parents could come up and visit the children. My parents and Mrs. Cooper didn't come up, but there was a girl in the neighborhood named Eleanor, and her mother, Mrs. Fierstein came up, with candy for Eleanor and a bag of candy for Sheldon -- so I thought. And Sheldon begrudgingly would dole out a piece once in a while to me, like a big knaker [hotshot]. Now, fast-forward about twenty-five years. I'm in Edison, New Jersey, at a nice 19:00Jewish sort of swim club. And one day, who should walk in, after not seeing her for twenty years -- Eleanor, with a new name -- she's married, with her daughters -- I'm there with my son and my daughter. "Eleanor!" "Harold, how are you?" Well, she called me "Mo" -- that's another story. And we're talking about HES. And I said, "You know that louse Sheldon, he doled out his mother's candy to me one piece at a time." And Eleanor looks at me and says, "What? His mother's candy? Your mother and Mrs. Cooper paid for it half-and-half, and my mother told Sheldon to give you half." That was like nineteen seventy-something, in Edison, New Jersey, at a swim club -- Ashbrook Swim Club. And I said to Eleanor, "Oh my God, that louse doled it out like he was the king and I was the pauper!" Now, the good thing about this whole thing is that Sheldon, having a miserly, nasty way, what do you think he became? He became an accountant! 20:00(laughs And who do you think he worked for? He worked for the IRS. (laughs) So Sheldon Cooper, honestly --

BA:He stayed true to his personality.

HE:His nasty shnorekayt [exploitative] personality. Yeah.

BA:I know there were other -- you spoke about in your essay -- other friends that you were close to.

HE:Yes.

BA:Is there a particular one story that you would like to share?

HE:(laughs) Only one?

BA:At this point, can you pick one?

HE:Well, Irwin Bernstein, also known as Bitz, really, really shaped my life. And so did Mark Raven in the SP. It's the lady or the tiger -- which door do you choose? I'll talk about Irwin, because he was so significant in my life. Mark had introduced me to a life beyond the bourgeois, humdrum life -- I can't use a pretentious word like bourgeois, but -- I can't think of another word -- life on St. John's Place, blue-collar kids with nothing on their agenda to do except run 21:00around. But we weren't criminals, we didn't get into trouble, we didn't do anything bad. We had that Jewish sense of, our parents control our lives and we are being brought up under a culture -- we're not khayes [animals] -- we'd never be anything like that. And so there's one guy who was in my brother's peer group named Irwin -- he was about six years older than me. And his friends grew up, met girls, got married, left the neighborhood. Irwin was left behind. His nickname was Bitz, and I'll tell you why. He had Tourette Syndrome when there was no known cure for it, and he made these noises, clicks, all these terrible things -- and of course he'd make noises -- he would have an involuntary cursing streak, even -- and I won't go into that -- but he had terrible symptoms. So every night we would get together on the stoop. I would hear the guys talk about the Dodgers and the Yankees and this baseball and that baseball and this ridiculous nonsense about batting averages, like this is going to make their lives different -- this is going to be significant about something -- and they 22:00just rambled on and on. I couldn't stand it. So I had a little job -- I forget what I did -- I had a lot of little jobs in the summer to make money -- and I bought an Emerson AM radio and I brought it down and sat on the other stoop. Irwin comes over to me. He says, "You're" -- my brother's nickname was Mo, I was Little Mo, and then I became Mo -- Marvin, Mo, get it? So he comes over and he says, "You're Mo's brother, Harold, huh? Hey, turn to 1560 AM." You know, it was only AM in those days, he didn't say that -- "Turn to 1560." I did, and it was classical music. And I had heard it a little bit on the radio by accident -- add in at school the time the principal played over the PA. And I fell in love with classical music. And he explained to me about Beethoven, about Mozart, why this is beautiful and why that's beautiful. And we used to listen to QXR all night long while the other guys are talking about baseball scores and batting averages -- and all this important stuff to them. And then Irwin started realizing that, 23:00Hey, maybe I have adult maturity and adult intelligence. First, you know, one of the guys on the street who realized I'm not like everybody else. And he started talking about politics, about religion -- or non-religion -- putting creative humanist thoughts in my head, which made sense to me, talking about life -- about women. A fourteen-year-old wanted to hear about all there was to know about girls -- I mean, you saw them in school, and we were all such on the Jewish cultural non-participation in anything except a handshake or spin-the-bottle once in a while at a party -- and the parties were very rare and few between. But the SP kids were -- they had more social life, because we were all in the same group. The French-speaking SP two, SP one, Spanish-speaking SP two -- SP one, SP two -- we got together because I guess we bonded in a very loose way. And so Irwin and I got very friendly. And sometimes, on a hot night, 24:00when everybody had their tenement windows open, and Irwin was clicking and gurgling and making all these noises, the old women -- the alte-kakes [old farts] -- would stick their head out the window and say, Irwin, you've got to go upstairs and take an aspirin, you'll be better. And they'd go on and on -- Irwin, go take a walk, I can't get to sleep! So Irwin and I would walk around. And believe me, he was very heterosexual, and so was I -- and still am -- so the young boy, older guy six years older thing never went anywhere -- except the guy was my mentor, in a way -- a guy from the street. And then later on, when I started to go off to high school and college, I would see less and less of him. And then I would take the subway back from Thomas Jefferson High School or the subway back from Hunter College to get off at Utica Avenue, and I was cold, in a 25:00rush, I had my books, I had to go study -- I had the study germ, (laughs) bug, too, that's good. And I would see Irwin sometimes sitting on the stoop by himself. And I couldn't look at him, because if he had got ahold of me, he'd want to talk to me. So maybe that -- that was not very nice of me. I didn't do everything in life nice. (laughs) And on reflection, I'm sorry I didn't have some time to spend with him in the cold winter -- with my books and my mother waiting to give me supper upstairs, I just had to do what I had to do. But sometimes you don't do that, if you can.

BA:Right. But it sounds like he introduced you to a new world -- a cultural world that you weren't --

HE:(Overlapping dialogue; unclear) many people. But you know, Mark Raven did that too. Mark lived in one of the nicer high-rise elevated buildings on Eastern Parkway with a view past Lincoln Terrace all the way out to Jamaica Bay -- one of the most magnificent real estate places to live in. And I lived in this three-floor walkup on St. John's Place with a courtyard with the cats running 26:00around the middle and garbage cans that I would take out to the front when there was garbage collection. So anyway, Mark and I became friends. He was in my Hebrew school and we were in the SP together. But he had a brain that said -- about life -- his mother and father must have taught him about life much more than my parents could -- about culture, about society. We'd go over to the trains and go up to the museums and go to art theaters, where they had special cartoons -- and I remember seeing more modernistic cartoons beyond Walt Disney -- very interesting. And from Brooklyn, we'd take the train up to the Bronx Zoo and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Of course, we always had Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and the Brooklyn Museum. We did all these things. And my life was opened up beyond St. John's Place and the storefronts and playing punchball -- I could never play punchball, so I never even bothered. (laughs)

BA:Talking about culture, were there any aspects of Jewish culture that were 27:00particularly important to you -- music, theater, cultural events --

HE:That came later, with a vengeance. As I got more socially conscious and realized I had to mature -- it wasn't given to me in the house; I had to discover it on my own. And I discovered -- later -- and, you know, I really became a full-fledged thinking person when I went to graduate school. In Hunter College, I didn't make too many -- the friends I made were wonderful friends -- Normie and Dave I met in Brooklyn and we went to Hunter together, and a few of them -- not that many others. And Norm was a brilliant guy who was a veteran and came back on a veteran's scholarship to Hunter. And he was also -- my brother's six years older than me, like Irwin. And we were very close. And I used to study 28:00with Norman. Because the first day of the first term, I took my first class in chemistry. Norman was next to me, and we started talking about classical music. (laughs) And he knew about it and I knew about it. And again, he was six years older than me. And he said, "You've gotta go come to my house. I have a high fidelity system." This was 1955. And he did. 'Cause he had money -- he was a veteran and he could afford this high fidelity. Stereo was way off still. And we listened to his recordings. And sometimes -- 'cause he was so way ahead of me in intelligence and brightness -- that he instructed me about things in chemistry which I didn't get in the chemistry course. But he knew it all. And he was a brilliant mathematician, which I was not, and helped me with the math. And he was my friend, but he was also a little bit of a mentor. So Norman Goldsmith was this fellow at Hunter. And he used to play for me recordings of freylekh music. 29:00But I had heard freylekh music on WEVD, so it wasn't alien to me. But I didn't understand the differences. By the time I started -- I was married and started to understand about music and about Jewish culture, I had differentiations of what is Jewish music. There's freylekh music. There's partizan [wartime resistance] music about the Warsaw -- the "Partisan lid [partisan song]." There's Handel and other -- Christian composers wrote music about Jewish things, like "Judas Maccabaeus" and "Samson" and "Israel in Egypt" and "Jephtha" and "Belshazzar's Feast" and on and on and on. So I listened to those. I had quite a recording of Handel music -- I have all his Jewish oratorios -- Jewish story oratorios. And there were some Jewish composers. One was Italian -- Rossi was Italian. And there was a Dutch composer whose name I don't remember. And do you 30:00know the person who wrote the libretto for "Don Giovanni" and "Marriage of Figaro" -- both Mozart operas -- was Jewish? Leon Da Ponte. He was an Italian Jew. And he gave Mozart the idea of "droit du seigneur," which is the whole thing about "Marriage of Figaro" -- and that a don -- a man of great wealth and importance -- can go around raping and screwing around with women and destroying marriages -- with Zerlina and the "Marriage of Figaro." You know the plot of "Don Giovanni." And that he -- the dead captain that he killed because he found him raping his daughter comes alive and chases him to hell. (sings) "Don Giovanni." "I'm going to get you," you know? All of this was by a Jewish man who knew about liberty and justice and that -- maybe one of the few people who 31:00actually inspired the French Revolution -- you never know. When the Mozart operas were played and the royalty heard it, they were upset. Here's a happy comic opera, in quotes -- "Marriage of Figaro" -- "Notti di figaro" -- "Marriage of Figaro" -- "Nozze di Figaro." And in it, they're making fun of us, the counts, to this servant, Figaro, who's the servant to the count. And, you know, the count wants to fool around with his wife, Susanna. But at the end, Figaro gets the top hand.

BA:So it wasn't so much in your house --

HE:No, no. Well --

BA:Jewish culture came to you more as you were an adult?

HE:On my own. As I got older, no. I didn't come from a heymishe [Hasidic] house, no.

BA:Do you think it's something that you passed on to your children?

HE:I tried desperately. Believe me, believe me, Bina. I tried.

BA:We'll talk more about that later.

HE:They're more Americanized than I wanted. (laughs)

BA:And we will get back to that. But I wanted -- you've touched a little bit -- I was gonna ask you about your education, and you've weaved that through our interview so far, but we haven't talked so much about your Jewish education and what kind of Jewish education did you have.

HE:Okay, okay. Hebrew School, with Mrs. Ruth Wexler -- who was in Israel in 1948 when the state was declared. And she talked about walking in the streets of Tel Aviv and having barbed wire, because the British said, Arabs have to walk on this side of the street and Jews have to walk on this side of the street. And there was barbed wire and you couldn't go to other places. So she instilled in me a -- she had a map of Palestine on the wall -- in 1948. And I remember her love and dedication to Palestine -- to Eretz Israel. And when it became Medinat Israel, we were all happy and overjoyed. And I was, too -- I felt Jewish, I felt 33:00a kinship to Jewishness. But you know something, I've got to be true to you and true to my legacy, whatever that is -- after I was bar mitzvahed in October, I never went back to Hebrew school. And one day, Mrs. Wexler was walking down St. John's Place and she met my mother. I don't know how she knew my mother -- I wasn't with her -- I was down the street playing with the kids. And my mother waved me over -- "Come up where I am with the ladies." And she said, "Harold, Mrs. Wexler wants you to go back to Hebrew school and get a diploma." Well, an aside is, I had won the coveted Shapiro award one season. What is the coveted Shapiro award? A nice person named Mr. Shapiro gave to the best student in each class this award for a scholarship in Yiddishkayt and Hebrew knowledge. And it was a farce, because I didn't know anything of any worth, you know? (laughs) Except I sat and kept my mouth shut and answered the few questions that I could 34:00in Hebrew. But I was not a scholar. I was not a Talmud Torah scholar by any means. I was at the other end of the pool -- I was down at the shallow end. (laughs)

BA:So you didn't go back?

HE:I didn't go back. And I showed defiance. "No!" And to myself, I'm saying, I'm out of there! It was torture for me. I really didn't like it. It was not something about science or education that would make me be interested in creative -- I don't know if I even thought of it in those terms -- today --

BA:Did your family go to shul during this time?

HE:We were what my son today calls "holiday Jews" -- we only went on the big holidays. And we didn't even go on the small ones -- we didn't go for Simchas Torah or Purim or any of the other small ones. We didn't have a sukkah in the back. Some people in our neighborhoods built sukkahs on their fire escapes -- we didn't. (laughs)

BA:Okay. Before we leave your early life, I just want to -- and you talked about this a little bit -- but do you think there were values or practices that your 35:00parents passed on to you?

HE:My father's loving feeling for me and sacrifice for me. How does a poor bus driver sacrifice for me? Well, I got scholarships and teaching fellowships, so he didn't have to spend money that way. But every morning he had to get up at 4:15 and take a walk down to the Atlantic Avenue train to go into Cherry Street, Manhattan, Lower East Side, to get the bus in the garage and drive around and come back. Now I had to study -- I was not the brilliant, easy scholar at Polytechnic -- Brooklyn Polytech. I had to really sweat it. But that stick-to-it-ness -- that I had -- got it early on in the SP -- knowing I wasn't the brightest there, but I've got to stick on -- I did it at Polytech. And it paid off. I jumped through all the hurdles, and I wasn't sieved out -- I stayed with the grain, I didn't go out with the chaff.

BA:Do you give credit to your father for --

HE:Father, yeah. Because my father would stay up late -- he wouldn't sleep in 36:00the -- my little study area was the corner of the bedroom. My mother was sleeping on her side, my father would sleep near where I would work -- they had twin beds. So I would come in, and I'd say, "Dad, I have to study." And he would go out and sleep on the couch in the living room. And I would study until two, three o'clock in the morning. And he had to get up at 4:15. And he said to me, "Harold, I'm happy for you. You're making it. And I'm with you, kid." He was the warmth -- if any warmth I have, it was my father. (laughs) You're getting a bad picture of my mother, but in her way, she did good for me, too, by toughening me early on, and not making me go crazy.

BA:So education was emphasized and --

HE:My mother -- when I said -- okay. Again, I didn't have the best average in high school. I had a seventy-nine average -- that's pretty damn bad. I got an 37:00eighty-five or a ninety in chemistry, 'cause I loved it so much. But I wasn't a very great student in high school. So those people in the New York City system, they had excess seats available in the CUNY system -- City University -- Hunter, Brooklyn, Queens, and CCNY. So they had a test. And I went with my seventy-nine average to Brooklyn College to the Gershwin Auditorium, and with a whole bunch of other people, I got a -- today, it would be called a grad-- what do you call it when kids have to take tests to go into college?

BA:The SATs.

HE:SATs -- yeah, that was the equivalent of an SAT back then. And I took it, I passed. I took it and I said, "Well, if I don't go into this, I'll go in to Brooklyn at night -- you know, I'll a job somewhere, and it'll take me longer." So I got the letter back from Hunter College that I was admitted to Hunter College -- one of the happiest days of my life. I'm not going to be left behind. 38:00I've still got a fighting chance. And I ran down the -- out of the mailbox in the apartment -- in the building -- went into the street, ran over to the candy store, which was a central gathering place, and I showed, "Look, I made Hunter College, I made Hunter College!" And it was a great day for me. And here I got another chance. And I fought with the -- to become a chem major -- you know, because I only got a good -- I had got a ninety-something on the Regents, so they let me go into the chemistry department. I kept fighting and I kept making it.

BA:So we spent a lot of time talking about your earlier life. I'd like to move forward a little bit and ask you to give me sort of a picture of your life today. Now, I know you've talked about your career on and off, but where do you live now, a little bit about your family?

HE:Yes, of course. I'm gonna go right into it. I know what you want. Okay. So I 39:00predicted -- or I saw -- in the future eyes, I realized that back in 2005 -- about that time -- that we were living in Fairlawn, New Jersey for twenty-seven years. I worked for different companies -- I went up to Fisher and I went down to (UNCLEAR) company. Makht a lebn [Make a living], you know? You've got to make a living. And my wife was a teacher, finally, full-time, after the kids were older. So we had some good incomes -- her income, my income. But after twenty-seven years, I realized, I'm sixty-six, and I'm working in a company which I could see I've got something of a 401(k). And I had a good nine years here. I had some bad bosses for a long time, and I had a good boss. But I was getting older, I was getting tired -- I had been a chemist for forty years. My 40:00wife had put in twenty-eight years with the Irvington High School school system in Irvington, New Jersey, which is equivalent to the Newark school system mostly, no more. Sometimes I was glad she made it home alive. She had friends who were the school guards who watched out for the good teachers. Anyway, I heard on a Charlie Rose interview the "New York Times" editor of economics say over the television that everything that the stock market could exploit has had a bubble and burst -- except real estate. Now my house -- I had a beautiful bi-level in Fairlawn in a good Jewish neighborhood -- stable, good school system. And my children had finished graduate school or whatever they were -- or master's degrees. And both of them got married. And by some quirk of fate, both 41:00of their career paths took them up to Cambridge or Boston. So here it is -- I had two grandchildren born, they're all up in the Boston area, my house is worth a lot of money, and the bubble burst is going to come, according to this intelligent woman, who made perfect, logical sense to me. My wife's gonna retire after twenty-eight years -- she has a great pension and health benefits. I've got to get out -- I'm tired of doing the same stuff. I don't have the physical strength anymore to shlep around on the bench as a chemist, and when my boss would ask me to go out to a location like Arizona and stay a night in a motel and fix some chemical problem, I really didn't have the heart anymore. I was tired. So I said to the kids, "Look, you're living here. We'd like to come up to the Boston area." And we looked around, and we found in Hudson, Massachusetts, an over-55 development called Quail Run. We moved in, and we made some friends. 42:00Now, I'm gonna tell you the very honest truth. If my children weren't living in Massachusetts, I'd still probably be somewhere in New Jersey, 'cause my college friends from Polytech were there, my relatives were there. And just friends from the neighborhood we're close to. I'm not a locker room type. I don't make men friends very easily -- the men have to have my personality and attitude and thinking process for me to bond with a guy. I can't say, "Hey, how do you think about those Yanks?" Or, "How do you think about those Pats?" Or whatever the hell it is. Nothing to me. And I find people who are like that, and we have wonderful conversations, but we're not locker room type guys. And I didn't find many people in Quail Run who are like that, except my friend George Champagne and Marv Friedman. And in 2013, they both died. They were in their late seventies. And I had wonderful conversations. My friend George Champagne was born in Minnesota and he can trace his heritage back to Charlemagne. (laughs) My 43:00grandparents -- I can't go past one generation of the shtetl in Poland. But we merged, like two people who had the same thoughts about science and humanity and -- you know, just everything -- religion, social things. And then, just sometimes physics and chemistry -- just talked about that. And wonderful talking, two-way conver-- he's dead. So now I'm a little bit lonely in Quail Run for men -- friendship. My wife is in this club, that club, this thing, that thing, so she has her social network. I don't. My children are wonderful. One lives in New Jersey. He works for Jefferson Medical School. He's getting to be a well-known scientist, and I'm very proud of him -- Dr. Leonard Charles Edelstein. And my daughter, like I say, is in Framingham, at Genzyme, and whenever there's a new drug that has to go from a laboratory test tube to a scalar pilot plant and then to production, she's given a twenty-five million 44:00dollar budget and gets the staff to put it together. And she's in her early forties. Isn't that wonderful? I'm so proud of her. They're both doing so well. So we went up to Massachusetts --

BA:Because of the children?

HE:Yes, because of the children. Now, my grandchildren in Massachusetts are in elementary school. They're gonna grow and mature and develop. They're not going to get to meet grandma and grandpa much anymore. I don't have that many close friends in Quail Run. So I'm gonna be at a point where I'm gonna say, "Hey, I've got to move back to where maybe I felt comfortable." Now, in Quail Run, I'm one of three or four Jewish couples. I can't be too heymish there. In New Jersey, in Fairlawn, with the temples we went to -- with the Jewish friends -- from Brooklyn to North Brunswick to Edison to Fairlawn, I always was in a shtetl community. I felt comfortable, I felt I'm in my own element. Here, I'm amongst 45:00gentiles, and I don't feel comfortable. I'm saying it on the public record --

BA:So you may make another move, but --

HE:I don't know if my wife wants to, I might want to --

BA:-- but in talking about -- you know, you're living in New Jersey and your children, what was it like when they were growing up? What was your home like? What kind of traditions did you establish?

HE:Yes, yes, yes. Well, first of all, they went to a Hebrew school. We had Passover seders in our house. Every yontev [holiday], we had it. We celebrated all of the holidays. I was going to talk -- and maybe I will talk about this couple from Germany, the Herzbergs, who are very Orthodox. And they escaped the Holocaust -- one by being an Anne Frank type survivor in Holland, and the other, on getting one of the last boats out of Hamburg for Australia or England or 46:00whatever. And they met in Australia. They were very religious. And they gave us cultural input that was really Orthodox. But they didn't push us. Fairlawn is a pretty Jewish town. There's an eruv [wire border around a town to indicate its classification as a private area, which allows the carrying of objects on Shabbos] around the town. Do you know what an eruv is?

BA:No.

HE:Eruv, yes.

BA:Oh, yes! A string --

HE:It's a continuous line that says, This is our shtetl -- Jewish God prevails within this eruv. What they do is, they take a wire from the telephone poles that don't meet and they tie it together with a rope. We have an eruv in Fairlawn. In some New Jersey towns, the Jewish community won't get it -- the gentile planning board won't let it happen. But it happened in Fairlawn, because we -- there's like -- thirty to forty percent was Jewish -- maybe it was more, I don't know. So our town was good. We bonded -- we had -- all our friends were Jewish. We all went to religious -- cultural things together. We all were Conservative to not-so-Conservative Reform type Jews. And my wife and I really 47:00-- we don't find it here in Massachusetts, but when we left -- New Jersey, we were Reconstructionist Jews -- which is one step away from becoming a Unitarian, I guess. (laughs) But, it fulfills your humanitarian thinking and it fulfills your scientific thinking that there really is a person that's really up there -- something up there that really cares about the world, other than physics and probability. As a scientist, it's hard for me to believe in it. So, I could say I'm an apikoyrim [heretic] -- I'm really telling you everything about me -- who's a humanitarian and loves his Jewish culture, ancestry and all the things that I appreciate. Now, anybody who's religious -- Jewish religion -- will say, He's an apikoyrim. To hell with him, he's of no importance! But I don't care. You are who you are.

BA:It sounds like you had more traditions in your home as opposed to your 48:00parents and growing up.

HE:Oh, yes. Yes.

BA:What kinds of holidays and celebrations --

HE:-- did we have?

BA:You had a seder.

HE:And we had Rosh Hashanah, we had Yom Kippur, we had Hanukkah. In the picture that's being printed now, you will see my three granddaughters and grandson all lighting the candles. And some can say the prayers in Hebrew, some say -- the two youngest say it in English. By this next Hanukkah -- I should live and be well to be there -- maybe all four will say it in Hebrew. And let me tell you something. This last time, when Hanukkah came around the same time as Thanksgiving and everybody was at my son's house in Belle Mead, New Jersey, my son's showing me who he is -- giving me more nakhes [pride], besides being a great scientist. On Friday night -- which was the night -- day after Thanksgiving -- he baked his own challah. Because some of the Korean people -- my daughter-in-law's family's Korean American -- most of them went home, but her 49:00parents stayed on. We had for the first time in my life under the Edelstein house -- my son's house, and I'm an Edelstein, too, and I'm the father there -- we had a real Shabbos yontev. And here's what happened. The children sang the prayers for the candles -- "Ma nishtana" -- no, sorry!

BA:Wrong holiday.

HE:Wrong holiday! (UNCLEAR) children saying something. No. They said the prayer for lighting the candles, "ner shel hanukkah [Hebrew: lights of Hanukkah]." Then, my daughter (puts his hands over his eyes) did the blessing. And my wife was next to her and beaming. And then I said hamoytse [blessing over the bread] over the challah. And then my son said the blessing for the wine. We had a real traditional multigenerational yontev for Shabbos. I say "Shabbos" -- I don't 50:00like the "Shabbat" -- my head doesn't go there. I like "Shabbos." As a matter of fact, when I got an aliyah [call up to the read the Torah] -- for bar mitzvah or whatever -- I'd say "toyre" instead of "Torah" and "Shabbos" rather than "Shabbat." And I want people to know, there was a shtetl in Europe sometime that said "toyre" rather than "Torah" -- and didn't use the new Israeli pronunciation, used the Yiddish pronunciation, which I grew up with.

BA:So it sounds like that particular holiday was touching to you?

HE:Oh, I had such a glow and such a feeling. I could embrace the world. Even though I don't believe in God, this was something that I'm going to pass on to my children and my grandchildren. And they will know they're Jewish.

BA:And is this important to you?

HE:What?

BA:Passing on --

HE:Yes, yes, yes. I thought you had meant not believing in God.

BA:No.

HE:No. Passing this tradition -- as Tevye says, (sings) "Tradition" -- passing 51:00it on to the two next generations, and hopefully, until the world ends -- Edelstein, Beckerman, Hacker -- which is my mother's maiden name -- will be part of the culture and civilization that goes back five thousand years.

BA:What's important to you out of that to be passed on? What particular traits or -- do you want to --

HE:Well, I wish I could say studying Torah, which is what we should say. (laughs) But --

BA:But to you --

HE:But to me --

BA:-- as a cultural Jew --

HE:Yes, yes, yes. Knowing that the men -- I was thinking it was Moses on Mount Sinai -- but the rabbis and the priests from the beginning and living in Palestine to the Babylonian Torah to all that input of all our ancestors put into our stories and legends -- which some people believe virtually, you know -- that the world was created in seven days -- that's beautiful kindershpiln 52:00[children's tales] stories to make the uneducated people feel, I've got to belong to these people, because look how wonderful David was, look how wonderful Solomon was, look how powerful Joshua was -- look how this, look how that! But the point is, underlying all of this is, you're human, you're going to screw up, but you have to have redemption and you have to go back to the true path. Here are the Ten Commandments -- whether it was given by God or given by either the northern Israeli or the southern Judaea parts of the Kingdom of David who wrote the Torah from two different aspects -- and you know that, there's two different -- people wrote two different parts -- they all had the humanism and the sense of justice -- the sense that slavery is bad -- that's the whole point of Passover -- we were slaves under Pharaoh. This is our culture. This is who we are. This we gave to the world. That's why I have a menorah -- "we shall be a light unto the nations" -- that's me. Can you see me?

BA:Did you want to tell a story about your menorah?

HE:Yeah, it's a nice story. But the reason why I want this menorah rather than the mogn David -- which is the shield of David -- a shield of war, of conquering -- "let us be a light unto the nation" is a better feeling of what we Jews really are. We gave the world a law. We gave them the Torah, or the moral codes that later became humanism -- we gave it to the world. It's ours. And I want my children to know who they are through that. It's not to be good -- it's not a good enough Jew, even though it's not godly -- I don't -- you don't have to pass judgment. I ask a rhetorical question.

BA:No, of course not. And I wanted to know what you think, and what's important to you --

HE:Okay. Well, I told you. I think I elicited it as much as I can --

BA:You did. You did.

HE:All right, let me tell you about the menorah. Back in the '70s, my wife and I went up to the Nevele Country Club -- the Jewish Alps -- in the Catskills. And there was an Israeli sitting at our table who had a silver menorah on his neck. And I said, "Oh, I have to have it. That's beautiful." Let there be a light -- 54:00this is me, I don't need just another mogn David shield. Everybody has that. Look at that. That's the essence of Judaism -- a light unto the nation. Whether it's a hanukkiah or a menorah -- if that's a hanukkiah -- it doesn't matter. So I said, "Where'd you get that?" He said, "Oh, I got it in Israel at a shop in Tel Aviv." (laughs) Wonderful. I'm not running off to Israel just yet. At the time -- eventually, I did all the jewelry stores in Manhattan and in New Jersey that I could find, no one had it. And then I got a job with Fisher, as I told you, and I took trips around America and Canada. Every time I had some free time, I went to a jewelry store where I could buy a silver menorah. So one day, my wife accompanied me to Los Angeles on a business trip. And we went to La Brea Tar Pits and then we went down the street, and there's a big jewelry store, like you see sometimes in New Jersey -- or there's one in Sudbury on Route Twenty, I 55:00think -- a big store, we have all kinds of jewelry. So we walked in, because she knew I was always looking for a menorah, and there was a Persian Jew who had counter, and there this was, glistening, saying, "You found me, Harold! Here I am! Take me home!" And I didn't even haggle with him for the price. I bought it like a goy -- I just gave him what he wanted. (laughs)

BA:You were so happy to find it.

HE:Yes, I was so delight-- I said, "Where are you from?" He said, "Oh, there's a big Persian community here in Los Angeles. And I was a goldsmith in Persia" -- didn't say "Iran" -- they said "Persia" -- you know, who they are. "And I'm so happy you appreciate it." And I bought it. And both gentiles and Jews -- and this shirt -- I wear it inside, I'll take it back, go back -- (laughs) -- people who know me or don't know me come up to me and say, That's a beautiful menorah! Where'd you get it? So I say, "I got in Los Angeles at a Jewish store near the 56:00La Brea Tar Pits." I'm not going to go into mayse [story], but that is the mayse.

BA:It is unusual. I don't think I've seen anybody else wear --

HE:No, you haven't seen that. Only me. If the Persian made another one, somebody in Los Angeles, maybe.

BA:So we circled through a bunch of things. I want to go back a little bit and ask you, from a historical perspective -- and you mentioned some of this, and some of it was woven into your stories and your essays, but -- in terms of the Holocaust or the influence that it had on you --

HE:Yes. It had a lot of influence on me. I don't know if you read my --

BA:I did.

HE:-- my preface. Can I read it -- I think it's --

BA:Why don't you just speak about it?

HE:Okay. Not too many Jews knew about the Holocaust. When I was a little boy on St. John's Place, in about 1946, '47, we got new neighbors into the middle-income, blue-collar apartments. One was my barber, Martin, who had a 57:00barber shop across the street. And one day, when he's cutting hair in the summer, his sleeve was up. I see these blue letters on his wrist. And I said, "Mr." -- I forgot his last name -- everybody called him Martin, anyway -- "Martin, what's that from?" And he says, "Oh, Harold, just be happy you were born in the United States. I was in a concentration camp in some place in Europe. I survived, and I'm here now in America. Don't think about it. Don't worry about it." And that got me thinking. And I had heard about this on the radio and on television a little bit -- about the Holocaust. And then, later on, I was up in camp HES reading a book, and someone gave me a book about the truth of -- an early book. And I must have been about fourteen. So I was born in '38 and fourteen is what, 1952, maybe? Yeah, I was about fourteen. And I read this 58:00book about children -- the golden youth who were sitting in Poland in the ghetto, and how it gets worse and worse -- and they even made a movie out of it -- I forget the name, it was very popular at the time -- and how they start starving and everything and how -- the author really goes into the nitty-gritty of the Warsaw ghetto. And I said, "This is my people. These are Jews. And just because they're Jewish, look what the nazi -- I'm years old. And finally, the goyim in the United States realized that this is important enough -- that six million people died -- six million, I can't believe -- and you heard -- you know, the Jewish organizations started to get interested in it, and I thought very much about it -- like everybody else. And then there was the movie about -- I read the book and I saw the movie where the kid is --

BA:"The Choice."

HE:"The Choice." Exactly.

BA:It's not "The Choice" -- it's someone with the name "Choice," someone's --

HE:"The Chosen"?

BA:Well, I don't know. Speak a little more --

HE:It was about the kid who plays baseball, he gets a ball in his eyeglasses and then the boy who does it is a Hasid, and the Hasid wants to become a psychologist. And here's what I love -- the boy's Orthodox -- wants to go to yeshiva where there's both -- I think it was the Bobover Hasidim, who hate Israel -- is that the Hasidim who -- the Bobover? Not the Lubavitchers, not this, not that -- I think it was the Bobovers. And they're not going to come to Eretz -- they're not going to come to Medinat Israel, only Eretz Israel -- when God gives them the land, yeah, it's going to happen. It's like the Yiddish -- cynical Yiddish accounts of when is the messiah is going to come. "He's going to come, but don't hold your breath" is the Jewish mentality. And that's a certain 60:00feeling that moshiach [Hebrew: the Messiah] will save us, but don't hold your breath. And that was even before the Holocaust. So how could -- the Israelis who are realists are really atheists, because they realize, the moshiach is gonna come, but, you know, don't hold your breath. Where was he when we needed him? So I'm in that camp. Does that make me a bad Jew? I don't know. Maybe. I don't know, is Judaism gonna die out because we don't believe in a supreme being? Are we going to have a culture to hold us together? The Hasidim and the Orthodox say no, we won't survive. Will Yiddish survive? Well, it's surviving. (laughs)

BA:It's interesting that you mention that, 'cause I was going to ask you a little bit more about Yiddish and the language of Yiddish and how people say that Yiddish is a dead language at this point. What do you think about that?

HE:I'll give you a story about that. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel 61:00Prize -- you know the story I'm gonna tell you? Okay. You're gonna like this story. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize, he went to Stockholm, and the king, King Christian gave him his plaque and his award. And he stepped up to the podium -- and I memorized is speech. Here's what he said. Quote, they say to me, "Isaac, why do you write such books in a dead language? No one's going to read them anymore. You're writing in a dead language. Why do you do that? And I tell them, "Some day when moshiach comes and all the dead arise from the graves, they're going to turn around, see everybody else, and say to each other, Have you read anything good new lately? Unquote. That's Isaac Bashevis Singer. Now I told it to what's-his-name -- Lansky. He never heard that story.

BA:I never heard that story.

HE:You never heard that story. I don't have a documentary about Isaac Bashevis Singer -- uh oh, I touched a cord.

BA:I think you're okay.

HE:Okay. It doesn't -- if nothing else, it's a beautiful --

BA:It's a lovely story.

HE:A lovely story. I think I have other stories, too.

BA:And what do you think about --

HE:I love that story.

BA:-- the role of the Yiddish language?

HE:Like I say, I wish I could read in Yiddish. I have a cousin Janet from the Hacker side of the family -- the religious side -- who in Queens could go to Jewish cultural places -- a synagogue. She's learning to speak Yiddish and she's learning to read -- in Hebrew letters -- Yiddish writing. And she loves my stories, but I can't read anything she tells me. (laughs) I love the Yiddish language for the fact that it's European, it's secular -- it's the mame-loshn [mother tongue], not the heyliker [holy], do you know what I mean?

BA:No.

HE:It's the mame-loshn means it's the language of the people, the same way as Italian, mame-loshn from Latin and the clergy -- same correlation. The heyliker -- the holy language -- "losh," "language." The heyliker loshn is Hebrew, 63:00mame-loshn is Yiddish. They both use the same character, letters. So I love it because it's the secular mame-loshn, and in it is the expressiveness of our culture, of our irony, of our cynicism -- our expressions. Like I said to you, "Tukhes oyfn tish [Put your money where your mouth is, lit. "butt on the table"]." There's so much in there. And the Italians say the same thing about Italian words. The Russians have that, too, I think. But we have our culture. We have Yiddish.

BA:So do you think it plays a role in the transmission of the Yiddish culture -- the language?

HE:For good or for bad, yes. It makes our comedians more ironic. It makes our commentators more honest and more cynical and more on-the-point. All of our culture that has this ironic honesty, beyond bullshit -- excuse me -- a façade -- and attempting to be pretentious or snow people which are -- say it in 64:00Yiddish, and you get the essence of the truth of it.

BA:Do you have a favorite Yiddish word or phrase?

HE:Well, I like "tukhes oyfn tish."

BA:You like that one? (laughs)

HE:That says something (UNCLEAR) that I mentioned. I guess this is like the television station where the guy from the theatrical business asks the actor, "Do you have any favorite words? What's your favorite word? What's your favorite curse word?" After he interviews the actor. I forget the name of that program. But anyway, I like that phrase. And then there are some words that come in with me from my parents. And they could be Yiddish. Oh, my grandmother had one -- "man trakht un got lakht [Man plans and God laughs]." Farshteyst vos ikh hob gezogt [Do you understand what I said]?

BA:No, I don't know --

HE:"Man plans, and God laughs."

BA:Oh, that's a famous one.

HE:Yes. And my grandmother said that to me. I like the one in English -- I don't know how to say it in Yiddish. But it's part of my culture, because I grew up in a culture where New York Jews knew the (UNCLEAR) outside the shtetl -- neighborhood lines. "In the warmest of warm gentile hearts, there's a cold spot for the Jew."

BA:That's a sad one.

HE:Well, I'm telling you my culture. And your culture, maybe -- if you went to Hunter College and you're a New Yorker.

BA:Yes, I am. What do you think makes a language a living language?

HE:(laughs) The people who use it expand it and use it in their time to reflect their conditions. And if you listen to "Partizaner lid [Partisan song]" in Yiddish or in English -- "Es brent [It's burning]" -- Hannah Senesh -- to light 66:00a match -- that Yiddish is used to express the times -- and the terrible times. And, you know, you cry when you hear those things. We have a very big thirty-three RPM Yiddish and Hebrew collection, because I love the music and the culture, even though I don't speak the language. And I have songs by Martha Schlamme -- do you know who she is?

BA:No.

HE:The Hebrew guitar player and -- she died before the famous woman guitar player did "Yerushalayim shel zahav [Golden Jerusalem]." Schlamme was from World War II, and she knew the "Partizaner lid." She could sing "Es brent" and songs like that. And Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce sang "Partizaner lid." And I have an Israeli marching song -- "Marches and Songs of the IDF." And they have so 67:00many songs -- even if you don't know Hebrew, you can know the -- the melodies are from the Russian, Yiddish -- all the melodies are Russian, by the way. That's why the culture is -- because the partisans were the ones who were alive -- they were the Russians who went into the woods. Who was it -- the Birnbacks brothers or the Birnbaum brothers who lived in the forest? There were several movies and documents about them -- escaped from the Ukraine, went into the forest, and they joined with the Soviets to kill the Nazis. And they had to move from camp to camp. When all looks like there's no reason to live -- you know, these people are -- I think I have a friend who I didn't speak to named Cy Taybeck who was in the Russian woods with the partisans, but he doesn't want to talk about it. And he lived in Edison, New Jersey. I haven't -- really just exchange New Year's greetings, Rosh Hashanah greetings. So that's what I think about the Yiddish language. It should be alive, because as long as a Jew has a 68:00yidishe kop [Jewish mind] -- his mind is educated and given the direction of his ancestors -- through his parents or grandparents -- and focuses on who he is, there will be a Yiddish language. Whether I speak Yiddish or not, I'm sorry to say. (laughs) I wish I did.

BA:So we are nearing the end of our time, so I would like to ask you if there's any other topics or particular stories that you would like to share?

HE:I have several. Should I read them fast? Because I can't tell them -- I've got to read them. They are me -- what I think, and how to say it. I'll try some short ones -- one-pagers.

BA:Why not tell them to me?

HE:If I can remember all of them, I will. Well, "When Perry sang Kol Nidre" is too long -- you have to read it. It's a piece of -- it's not a big one, but -- what I'd like to talk about is -- okay, I'll just give you little quotes of my 69:00memoirs, is that okay?

BA:Sure.

HE:After reading the finished version of my memoirs, I realized that I have some sections influenced by the Holocaust event, and also, an ensuing impact upon my American Jewish outlook on life. I am not alone. I have found over the decades that when a group of Jews get together for a pleasant social soiree, sooner or later, the topic of the Holocaust may come up. Anyone over the age of an adult -- the young adult -- who is Jewish feels in their gut and in their soul to be emotionally attached to our murdered six million landsmen [fellow countrymen] and the great tragedy which befell them. This group feeling was true in Brooklyn, in Edison, New Jersey, Fairlawn, New Jersey, and in Hudson, Mass. I want to make that clear. That's who I am.

BA:That's important to you.

HE:And then there's something else I'd like to -- well, if I start talking about -- no, I'm not gonna talk -- that story. Okay. Some of these are interesting 70:00about my culture on my block in Brooklyn. I talk about an interesting thing -- just an interesting thing which is not Jewish that much, but it's part of my childhood. My friend Danny Koloski and I, when we were about fifteen or so -- I had a Rudge bicycle, I had driven around Brooklyn -- one Passover, Danny Koloski, who was Polish Catholic, said, "Hey" -- my nickname -- "Hey, Mo, let's take a ride to my cousin near the Williamsburg Bridge." And on the way we stopped at an Italian grocery on Utica Avenue and bought a bologna sandwich during Passover -- you know, I didn't think anything about it. The cousin wasn't home, so we went over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan. We drove up the West Side Highway on Riverside Drive all the way to the George Washington 71:00Bridge, went over the bridge, and I called up my mother from Fort Lee, New Jersey -- living in the middle of Crown Heights -- and I said, "Mom, I'm in New Jersey!" (laughs) And she said, "Oh, come home safe." She didn't get hysterical, just, "Take care of yourself." But anyway, I could call my mother -- she wouldn't go crazy like some mothers would. One of my friends, Jackie, his mothers would slash his tires so he shouldn't get killed riding a bicycle. So then Danny and I go down and cross into Edgewater. There's an Alcoa plant with train tracks, going diagonally with my front wheel -- the thin racer tires -- I fell off my bike, got a big gash in my elbow and in my wrist. So Danny, who wanted to be a doctor someday, went to a drug store nearby, came back with bandages and Mercurochrome, made me look like a mummy, straightened my wheel. And me and Danny -- I should say, Danny and I went down to Weehawken, got on the ferry, and we got home around seven o'clock at night -- we started out around eleven, ten thirty in the morning. My father was downstairs waiting for me. And 72:00there were people looking out the tenement windows -- Did they get killed? Are they coming home? When are they going to show up already? Finally, we showed up. Danny went across the street to his tenement building. His father was the super. And that's a funny thing. If you ever saw the movie "My Favorite Year," a bunch of Jews are saying to the guy who's supposed to be Errol Flynn, We love you, we love you! And then they give a Jewish name -- one says, "I love you, my name's Koloski!" He says, "What are you doing here?" He says, "I'm the super." (laughs) It's part of the movie "My Favorite Year." Well, I had the same thing. Danny's grandfather was the super. That's why a Polack -- excuse me -- a Polish American kid lived in a Jewish tenement building. It's ironic. That came out later on with -- I think Mel Brooks had something to do with that movie. So I come upstairs. And it was quite a trek -- that's the most athletic thing I've ever done in my life. And I talk about my friend Jackie, who had the bicycle -- whose 73:00mother slashed the tires. His father was a taxi driver, and he knew his way around New York. And he -- okay, this is about how us poor Jewish kids enjoyed Christmas in Manhattan. My second bike ride -- and Jackie also knew subways, I said that. At the tender age of ten to thirteen years, we would go to explore Manhattan. We would walk around the department stores at Christmas time to look at the toys, go to Polk's Hobby Shop to stare at the unattainable model railroad trains, and then walk over to Central Park and enjoy the lakes and the zoo. I can't list other trips we took -- there were so many. I do remember sitting on a large rock at the edge of a lake in lower Central Park at sundown in the darkening late autumn and staring at the lights of the skyscraper buildings surrounding the edge of the park. It made me feel like I was in another 74:00dimension -- maybe the sensation of an overwhelming scenario of nature juxtaposed against a huge portrait of tall concrete and steel modern structures. Is that what makes a person feel like a native New Yorker? (laughs)

BA:I didn't read that in your --

HE:You should. It's there.

BA:It wasn't. It wasn't.

HE:Oh!

BA:But that's -- it's lovely.

HE:You didn't get number five, "Around the Block by Subway and Bike"?

BA:I don't remember.

HE:If you didn't maybe I added it a little later. I didn't think -- maybe I did. I don't think I have time to talk about Dr. Goldsmith. But -- and here's something -- I would love to talk about him. He was a mentor of mine. But he was also a bit of a ganef [thief] -- a very colorful person.

BA:There was a story about -- a work-related story that I found -- I mean, many of them were interesting, but this one had to do with religion.

HE:Yes. Oh, let me go to that. Let me go to that.

BA:Maybe we can finish with that one, because I thought that --

HE:Can I talk about Joseph Halperin? His story deserves to be told. And it's an interesting thing. I love this story. "Joe and the Copper Tubing." My second job in industry brought me in contact with a nice old gentleman named Joe Halperin. He befriended me, and one day I told him that because of the work-related stress, I had a colon pain. He then told me, many years ago, when he was a young man, he had the same pain, and it lasted for years because he was a Hungarian Jew in Nazi-occupied Budapest. I asked him to fill out the details and he said the following. He and his life were lucky, because the Swedish embassy took them in and gave them employment as servants under Swedish protection. I realize now that they were probably the so-called fortunate Wallenberg Jews. They survived until the Red Army liberated Budapest. Now here's the clever part about Joe. He 76:00and his surviving brother, both chemists, had a brilliant plan. The city was in chaos and no one was in charge. They secured a horse and cart and went along the abandoned trolley route, cutting down the overhead inactive copper wire. They then found a place to make copper sulfate. This material is an excellent fungicide for grape crops. They then went to the countryside vineyards and traded it in to the local wine growers for Tokaj wine. They then found twelve feet of copper tubing from a destroyed building and built a still. They distilled the Tokaj wine into brandy and sold it to the Russians occupying Budapest. Joe then told me, "Harold, if you were ever in an occupied country where there are foreign troops and you want to survive, secure twelve feet of copper tubing." I love that.

BA:It's a wonderful story.

HE:I'm not finished. This is not the end of the story that it says. He and his 77:00wife bartered enough brandy with the soldiers to go towards the sea to -- on their journey to Palestine. Finally, the pain in his colon had stopped. He was free. He was on his way. He had money, and he was on his way to the Adriatic to get a freighter to Eretz Israel. He was on his way. And they went in to a small village, stopped overnight, and asked for a place to eat and sleep. They were granted. In the morning, the Red Army surrounded the village and brought everyone into the village square. The Soviet general asked if there were any Jews in the village. Joe and his wife knew their luck had run out. They stepped forward. The general said to them, "Take your belongings and leave the town and don't stop." They did, and on the outskirts of town, they heard gunfire in the square. Joe surmised that this was a known fascist collaborator village -- and 78:00not surprising in Hungary, the bastards -- excuse me -- and the Red Army was doling out payback justice. Joe and his wife made it to the Adriatic, caught a ship to Palestine, and eventually, to America, on that twelve feet of tubing.

BA:That's a wonderful story.

HE:Isn't that a wonderful story? I've got a lot of them. I've got to tell you them. (laughs)

BA:Well, we're coming towards the end, so is there --

HE:Let me talk about the boss I had trouble with. This was at Fisher. Okay. I have a lot of wonderful stories about Fisher, but I'll --

BA:Well, pick one, and then we will --

HE:There are so many. But the most important one I want to tell you was about when we had a born-again Christian boss. I love that story. I have others I've got to tell you from Fisher -- I have so many good stories there, but -- about how I found one guy was a ganef and I caught him --

BA:Let's do this one.

HE:Yeah, I am. I am. I'm looking for it. All right, where is it? Where is it? I'll find it. You want me to talk about my hematoxylin? I love that story, too. 79:00Where is it? Where are you? Where are you?

BA:I bet you could just tell it.

HE:Well, there are certain parts I want to say correctly. All right, it'll be after here. It's got to be at the end. Let me get to the end. Oh, here we are. I'll start by saying, this boss took over the nice boss, my mentor, Charlie Dixon, who retired -- the new guy's name was Dave Cassidy. So he was driving everybody crazy by trying to use his MBA techniques to get us to work more efficiently and cutting back on payroll and making everybody be more efficient. And then, because they couldn't do it, he had to lie to -- he had to finagle the books to make it happen. Now I'll get to the story. His other charming attraction was the fact that he was a born-again Christian and wanted to institute prayer in the company. One day, he gathered his overly expanded staff 80:00in the conference room and told us the following: "I got a message this morning from a third shift worker who wanted to have a prayer meeting on site. I gathered you today in this conference room to have your thoughts on the matter, and we should go around the conference table to get a concession." Mm, what a nice guy. Everybody in the room knew how he stood on the matter, and all were wishing to keep their jobs, so thus, naturally, everybody agreed with him -- until he got to me, the Jewish troublemaker, who could not keep his mouth shut in the presence of intolerance. It's in my genes, and probably goes back to the days of my ancestors resisting Roman rule in Jerusalem. Throwing propriety to the wind -- and possibly my job -- I said, "I don't think politics nor religion has any place in the workplace." Then, he looked up at me and told me the 81:00following story, so help me. "When I worked for J and J, old general Johnson died, and his board of directors went through his business policies and came upon the J and J credo. It said words to the effect that J and J will attempt to make the best medical products it can with the help of almighty God. Well, they thought they would update the credo and remove 'with the help of almighty God.' And don't you know, two months after that, four people in Chicago were poisoned by Tylenol and died." Again, my Jewish big mouth couldn't keep shut at such stupidity, and I blurted out [BREAK IN RECORDING] -- "Excuse me, sir, but I don't believe God would punish four innocent Chicagoans to make a point to the board of directors of J and J." The veins on his head popped out and his face was red. Everybody in the room gave silent gasps and my heart raced. I thought 82:00how I was going to tell my wife I got fired for saying a stupid thing to my boss. The meeting ended without further incident. The next morning, as I walked past his office, he ran out the door and caught up with me in the hall. He put his arm around me and said, "Harold, last night I was reading the Old Testament and saw that God of the Hebrews was a strict and punishing God." I answered, without missing a beat, and said, "Yes. And Jesus was a loving and forgiving God in the New Testament. Isn't it strange how we use each other's religion to make a personal point?" After that, he thought I was a truly profound and religious member of the staff. If he only knew.

BA:(laughs)

HE:You want me to continue about "Chariots of Fire" or not?

BA:I think we don't have very much time left --

HE:Okay, okay. I have so much I wanted to talk about.

BA:I know. I want to ask if there's any particular advice you want to give to future generations about the transmission of Yiddishkayt, Yiddish culture, 83:00before we conclude?

HE:Yes. We are privileged to have come from a lineage which goes back generations and centuries. And we always say -- and you always hear this with great pride -- great armies and great countries have come and have disappeared from the world, but we Jews have survived and are here and alive because of our culture -- and, if you're religious, (UNCLEAR) certainly because of our Torah. And we should realize that we're not just another people -- we're a people who are the people of the book. A nation who should be a light unto other nations from the book. And we should remember this because the menorah has gone back -- Jewish archaeologists in Israeli have found menorahs going back -- from the very beginnings of their archaeology studies, in the depths of Israel, all over. And they even found a name in an ancient hieroglyphic inscription in Egypt that the 84:00Egyptian army had defeated an army of the Kingdom of David. Even the name of David has gone back to an Egyptian hieroglyphics that said, Yes, this is not just a bobe-mayse [fairy tale], this is the real world. The Jews were there, and we're still -- am chai yisrael [Hebrew: long live the people of Israel] -- we're still alive. Why? Because we know who we are. If you want to use the Torah to keep you alive, so be it. If you want to believe in God -- if that's the way -- so be it. If you want to believe that your time on earth is a matter of biology and evolution like I do -- and probability -- sooner or later, give enough monkeys enough typewriters, you'll soon type "Hamlet" by Shakespeare -- and that's what we have -- billions of years of time -- and that's where I'm coming from. But in our billions of years of time, our Jewish religion will be alive, and our culture -- maybe in different forms, but there will always be religious 85:00people in Israel and the United States. And there will always be free-thinking people -- and I still wonder, did Einstein believe in God when he said, "I do not believe that God played dice with the universe." Now it's looking like -- from other quantum theory -- God didn't play dice with the world. There are physicists that figured out -- astrophysicists -- why the world is the way it is. And if you stop saying, Well, I don't have to ask -- as soon as you stop saying, I don't know why this is real as a scientific fact, you sneak back to religion -- "Oh, maybe God wanted it this way. Let's go to the Bible." From Copernicus's time on, when a people didn't believe science, they said, Well, let's see what the Bible says. The world is flat, the world is the center of the universe. But the thinking Jew can believe in God if he wants -- because many do -- look at Yeshiva University professors. But we who don't believe in God but 86:00believe in -- our brains were somehow genetically wonderful from our culture and from our -- who we are. Here's my theory. When we were put in ghettos, we kept our gene pool intact. So instead of destroying us Jews, they strengthened us. Because who did the rich merchant give his daughter to? Not the guy with the biggest muscles and could mow the great fields -- he gave it to the yeshiva bocher, 'cause he had the intelligence. That was in a state where they didn't know where their next meal was coming from. And we should not disperse that and destroy that with going to worship false gods -- small "g" -- of other cultures that don't understand. I saw it in Fairlawn High School, where the Soviet Jews and the Israeli Jews made Americanized Brooklyn to New Jersey Jews a culture 87:00that they understood who they were -- and they competed together and they worked together. And because most of the people who were honors students were Jewish -- there were some Christians. But the Israelis and the Soviet Jews, even though they come from different cultures, had that spark from their parents. That spark must be kept alive like the flame on a menorah. Thank you.

BA:That's lovely. I want to thank you, firstly, for sharing your stories and your reflections with me. And I also want to thank you on behalf of the Yiddish Book Center for participating in the Wexler Oral History Project.

[END OF INTERVIEW]