ZEVA GREENDALE ROSCHKO ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:So, this is Christa Whitney, and today is January 27th, 2014. I am here in Brooklyn, New York, with Zeva Greendale Roschko, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

ZEVA GREENDALE ROSCHKO:Excuse me?

CW:Do I have your permission to record?

ZGR:You do, you do.

CW:Thank you. So, as -- I'm not sure if I made it clear before, but at any time, if you want to go into Yiddish, that's fine. So, first of all, can you tell me briefly about your -- what you know about your family background, how they came to this country?

ZGR:Yeah, both of my parents were immigrants, all right? My father came from the 1:00Ukraine, in Russia. Came here right after the 1908 revolution, that was a failure. And he was very concerned about being drafted to the czar's army, so he came to the United States. Not exactly sure what year that was. My mother came from Poland, which then belonged to Russia, from a small shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community], and she was -- she stayed way beyond the time her siblings had already come to the United States. But she had an elderly father, and somebody had to stay with him. And he had elected -- he wanted to be -- to die and be buried in Israel. So, he asked her to stay behind with him, which she did, I guess as a dutiful daughter, and they were -- when he 2:00got kind of sickly, they went there, to Israel, by ship. And onboard, he got very ill and died. So, he ever even got to Israel. He was buried at sea, which seemed such a harsh ending. But my mother decided to disembark and stay in Israel for a while. She was very into socialist things. She had some smattering of Zionism in her, because that was growing as a movement in Poland at the time, though she was not very worldly. But she stayed and they landed in Haifa. I think she stayed there -- she stayed there long enough to get -- to acquire a Hebrew name. Her name was Bat Sheva which is quite common, I think, in Israel, and she was very taken with the whole dream of Zionism. Unfortunately, she was 3:00not a well woman, and so she couldn't stay -- because it was a pioneer nation at the time -- and she thought -- then had to come to America to be with her siblings, and that's what she did. I believe that must have been something like 1920, right after the First World War. She's -- when she got here, she started to go for English classes at night. My father, who she did not know yet, was also taking English classes. They were both unusual people for immigrant background. He, I think, may have been more worldly. She came from very, very limited parents. Her father was a tailor. Her mother died in childbirth, giving 4:00birth to my mother. And so, she was raised by an eight-year-old sister, if you can believe that. Anyway, that's the sister she came to in America. Her -- and, as I said, she went to night classes. She picked up English rather quickly and was quite -- as my recollections of her English -- was that it was very good. I don't remember my father as well. But anyway, he --

CW:Can I ask, before you get to --

ZGR:Sure.

CW:-- his story a little: did you get a sense of what your mother's shtetl was like? Did she talk about it?

ZGR:Not very much. My aunt, later on, when I lived with her as a child, which you'll hear about later, she talked a little bit more, actually. I remember her 5:00once saying, rather sarcastically, she hears about all this romanticization of the shtetl. She said it was not a wonderful place, and the floors were dirt floors and it was very, very poor. So, I appreciated what she said. So, now, she didn't -- they didn't talk that much about it. I take -- their life was quite limited and quite poor. The father had nobody to care for -- he was left with three daughters. And later on, he did remarry, and that became a stepmother, but she -- I think she was relatively good. And some of my siblings are named after her. When I say siblings, those are really my cousins, 'cause my mother -- and you'll hear more about that -- did not have any other children besides me. All 6:00right, so she landed in Haifa, spent a little time there, and came to the United States. I think, in the beginning, she did work in some -- she was a very talented seamstress and had wonderful, wonderful taste. And she did do some very good sewing. But she didn't have the energy to have a full-time job. So, she did ultimately go into a little business of her own, fix -- selling clothing for women, fixing the -- altering them, that kind of thing. I benefited from that, 'cause when I got older, she made me the most wonderful clothes. And so, it was a fascinating kind of contradiction, because we were poor as church mice, but she used to take me to the Lower East Side and find these remnants of beautiful fabrics, buy them, and put them together by pushing -- putting all the pieces 7:00together. And you cannot imagine how beautiful some of them were. Most of the time, I was wearing hand-me-downs. Was a very -- part of the -- I would say the theme of my childhood is of tremendous contradictions, which were very confusing, I imagine, and left their mark. But anyway, so --

CW:What neighborhood did you grow up in?

ZGR:Oh, we grew up in Brownsville, which is Yiddish poverty. Now it is a -- people talk about it, they say, Oh, it's such a bad neighborhood, Brownsville. And it is a difficult neigh-- but it was not --

CW:(UNCLEAR) the mic.

ZGR:Yeah, don't touch it.

CW:Don't touch it.

CW:So, what was it like?

ZGR:There was nothing wonderful about Brownsville then. Well, when I do have some recollections, it's of where we moved after Brownsville. We went what's considered up, which is a joke, and that was East New York. If you know anything, it -- Brownsville at least had some community centers and things like 8:00that. Browns-- East New York had nothing. It was poverty, poverty. By nothing, I mean no organizations doing things with people or for people. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, because I'm not yet born. My mother meets my father, they both are radicals for whatever -- however they got into that. And --

CW:Do you know how they got into it?

ZGR:Not in the -- I think that they came to the United States, and maybe in night classes, maybe the people's -- well, it was a time where many people were radical, and they were -- from what I remember of my mother, she would be the kind who would become a radical. She was very avant-garde in her thinking, which is phenomenal, because she was -- she had no education. I'll tell you about this 9:00later, but she sent me to the first John Dewey boarding school in the United States. I don't know how she even knew who John Dewey was. So, that's an interesting sideline. Not only did she have exquisite taste, but she also was very smart, very advanced lady. She was a hard mother, because she had such expectations in what she wanted for herself that she obviously couldn't have, because she was ill and poor, but -- and had tremendous expectations for me, which were hard, all right? So, she meets my father at night school, and I think they also belong to radical organizations, though I never got a full story on that. And they decide to marry, or they decide to live together. I think that they were part of a group that was not marrying. That was too bourgeois. But 10:00ultimately, my father did serve in the American Army, so I guess in order to collect some of the benefits for my mother, he did marry her, and that was okay. But I always thought of him as my father. He was. My recollections of them -- and this is the picture of my father and me. I'm about three or four years old. My recollections -- is of being very, very loved by both of these parents. So, this is their first and only child, and maybe they sense they're not gonna have others, because my mother was really told by the doctor she shouldn't even have one. But she did. I did tell you that she had -- what is that disease you have with the heart -- oh, rheumatic fever, as a child, and there was no treatment in the shtetl, is -- she tells me that her father paid somebody to buy him an 11:00orange. They thought an orange might be the cure. You can imagine, it was probably for the most money ever -- they had ever spent on anything. So, my parents, both of them, were kind of free thinkers, and -- with a lot of lofty, interesting ideas about life -- but with both no money and very little education. So, there was nothing that much -- my father, I think, from what I recall, got some kind of job being a -- working in a shoe store. He hated anything -- of course, he was very radical, so that would be the bosses and all of that. And my mother did, as I said, a little sewing on the side, but they -- my father knew that was not for him, and my mother said he was a terrible 12:00businessperson. His lofty ideas, they -- in night school, the teacher discovered that he had some writing ability, and she encouraged it. And now, he started to have this -- these big ideas about what he wanted to do. But he had to support a wife and child, and he had -- whatever. So, that was the period -- and they both belonged to groups. I imagine -- I know my mother's goddess was Emma Goldman. She -- so, she was interested in anarchism and socialism. And I'm wondering why I'm telling you this. Again --

CW:What about the Jewish connection at home? Was the --

ZGR:Oh, okay.

CW:-- did you celebrate --

ZGR:Both of my parents spoke Yiddish to each other and to me. And so, it -- I 13:00was born -- when I went into schools, I guess I picked up English easily, 'cause I was a bright kid. But Yiddish was the language of the home, it was mame-loshn [mother tongue], okay? So, my -- they belonged to some radical organizations. Though that, they heard about the Soviet Union and about the revolution and the changes that had been wrought in this Soviet Union by the revolution. My father, who had been in czarist Russia, particularly, was absolutely enamored of the whole idea. That was a period where organizations or leftist organizations were encouraging intellectual Jews to come to the Soviet Union and lend their 14:00expertise and their brains to help rebuild this place, which had been so destroyed by the revolution in the sense that so many men had been killed or migrated or whatever. So, he said, "I'm going to go there." And I guess a lot of people thought of it, but he did it, and --

CW:How old were you when he came over?

ZGR:Five. Exactly five. It was -- I was born in 1925, this was 1930. He told my mother that he would go -- they offered to send him to university in Moscow. The United States, he couldn't afford to go to school. He was very excited in the mean-- to him, he's going to the promised land. And my mother shared his excitement. She wasn't -- and he did tell her, "I'm gonna go -- three years, 15:00four-year course, whatever, and then I'm going to get a job and I'm going to send for you and Tsipele." That never happened. He -- when he got there, he started writing these wonderful letters about what an extraordinary country this was, that it had free schools, all free education, all free healthcare, and he -- it was really -- for a child to hear those letters, that was like -- you know, you hear about Santa Claus at Christmas. I was very moved. This was all part -- very much a part of my childhood. Was constant talk about the Soviet Union. And, of course, I really believed I was going to go there, and -- with my mother. Suddenly, the letters stopped, and my mother sensed something was wrong, 16:00but she also, I guess, had worried -- if she had any imagination, she knew that was a possibility, but she didn't really believe it at the beginning. And she had friends, communists, who were going to the Soviet Union to see the workers' paradise. And they -- she gave them the address that she had, they looked him up, and they found him with this other woman. So, they said, Well, we had figured -- Clara -- that's my mother -- figured that out. But what about Zeva? So, he says, "Yes, I feel very guilty about Zeva. I really meant to keep in touch with her, and I'm glad you're here, 'cause now I will reconnect." (coughs) So, excuse me, he went out and he bought some gifts for me. I remember one of those Russian dolls that one goes into the other, some wonderful fabric that had 17:00cross-stitched linen, had cross-stitch on it. And he made me this dress, which I wanted to show you. Right here somewhere.

CW:This one?

ZGR:That's not it. That's me later. It's a -- anyway, we'll find it and I'll show you.

CW:Yeah.

ZGR:So, we -- my mother -- my aunt, my mother's sister, embroidered the -- and my mother made the dress, and I --

CW:So, you brought --

ZGR:-- and we -- and she took me to the local photography store and they took a picture of me and sent it to my father. I think he was really, really very moved by that, 'cause I was a very cute little girl, and he realized all the years 18:00that had -- by then, he had a job, had finished university. He must have met this woman in the university. He had a job in Kiev, which I guess he had not quite started yet. And the job was as the director of a children's theater. So, you could imagine, for a man who had been working as a shoe salesman and had dreams of becoming something, that must have been a very heady time. And he wrote these glowing letters about how much he loved this job and how every weekend, he would be seeing all these little children's faces, and the only face he didn't see was mine. He had the gift of gab, you can see that. But anyway -- and he wanted very much for my mother to get me a visa and for me, that summer, to come -- by now, I'm about nine years old, eight years old -- and for me to 19:00come to the Soviet Union to be with him and to be one of the little children in the audience. Well, it was a real interesting time. So, my mother did get me a visa, but I could see she was extraordinarily pained, because she thought he was gonna send for her, as well. These people told her there was another woman, and she had guessed that. Anyway, but she said she felt it was important that I go, at least, to reconnect with him. And I was ready to go. However, in the meantime, she was so heartbroken and so heartsick she got -- had a serious heart attack, from which she never recovered. So, I -- at the age of nine, my mother 20:00was dead and my father is gone. And I write him this letter -- I had the visa and said, "I'm not coming, 'cause mama died." And then, I sort of attacked him. I said, "How come you never sent for us? How come you never gave any money for me?" All the rest of that. I never heard from him again. And like a -- really, like a very childish child, I figured that what I said was so powerful that I -- that he felt rejected by me. I don't think it was anything like that. Now that I look back on it, I mean, I'm not sure. Kolya has tried to help me as I will go back now, though I want to get to what was happening after he left and I was five or six or seven years old. My mother was very much a wanderer and a dreamer 21:00and somebody who loved to go to different places. I remember we lived in Florida for a while. She also would try different kind of businesses where she would feel it was not so hard for her. I also should get back to the fact that while they were both together and I was around, they -- my father hated this shoe store so much -- he had gone -- they both took Yiddish classes, and they were looking for people to teach Yiddish to the children of immigrants who wanted their kids to -- they weren't interested in the religious aspects of Judaism, but they wanted their kids -- so, they went down -- they were given a job, to go to Savannah, Georgia. I'm almost positive that was the place. And the only 22:00recollection I have of that is of visiting my father in jail. I did know enough to -- and what I have been able to figure out is that probably, he became incensed at the racism that he saw in Georgia and probably opened his mouth or tried to do something -- they put him in jail. (laughs) So, he was in -- then, I don't remember, so he must have gotten disillusioned fast. Came back to New York, and I think that's when he was doing that -- working in the shoe store. So, did I leave anything out -- else -- well, in the meantime, when my father is gone, my mother moves in with her sister, the same sister that raised her. Oh, this is the picture I was talking about.

CW:Oh, yeah.

ZGR:There's the embroidered fabric.

CW:So, can you describe a little bit about -- you were saying that Eastern New 23:00York didn't -- East New York didn't have culture. What was the -- what are your memories of the places that you lived, the houses that you lived in --

ZGR:Well, the --

CW:-- and what made it home?

ZGR:Well, very modest -- in that we lived with my aunt, who also -- they had no money. So, I had a little room with my mother. The two of us lived there with them. You could see for somebody who has grandiose ideas about where she wants to live -- I'm sure that was not to my liking. But the thing that -- I said that about the contradictions. In the midst of living in this place in East New York and ultimately, after this boarding school I'm gonna tell you about, I went to public school in East New York. And I can tell you, honey, that was no fun. I 24:00felt the teachers were slightly anti-Semitic. My mother was very outspoken, and one particular teacher I had -- this is after private school, which was very -- well, I think -- and let me tell you first about the private school. My mother must have read somewhere about John Dewey and progressive education, and she found this school that would take a child for no money. John Dewey said you pay for -- by what you can afford. She could afford nothing, so we paid nothing. So, I go from this poverty in East New York to this wonderful, wonderful place that's in Pawling, New York: a big, big mansion. Not mansion, that's the wrong word. A big, big farmhouse with lots of rooms. We take care of animals, we plant trees, we label trees. Real good progressive education, which has affected my 25:00entire life, because that's the kind of teacher I tried to become when I became the teacher. So, anyway, I went there for three years, as I said. But, as I recall, I did not love the idea, as wonderful as it was -- I just lost my father. I didn't want to be shipped away by my mother. But I guess she insisted that I stay, and I did. And I met some wonderful kids and some -- but I was very, very upset about being there. So, then, they were -- of course, being -- letting you pay by what you could afford, they were not a very successful business, and they finally got a new director. Oh, I did missing. What I missed 26:00is that for the first year or two after my father left, we moved to a commune in Stoughton, New Jersey, and that was a very interesting experience: Jews who bought a big plot of land together and bought farm machinery together and worked the land. And it had an extraordinary, extraordinary principal, teacher, who was the one -- who may have been the one to tell my mother about this John Dewey boarding school, because I think he had looked it up as -- for himself. But this was a very -- and -- his name was Uncle Fern. And when I -- somebody asked me to start to tell some of my memoirs, we did look that up, and my daughter helped me on the internet and found out about this wonderful school, which was called Manumet, which means freedom. A fascinating place.

CW:Do you remember what it looked like?

ZGR:Oh, I do. We looked at -- we had pictures on the internet. It -- and if we could look at the internet, we would see: it was a very, very attractive, very nice -- and wonderful -- I guess about ten acres. There was a lot of land. And we worked there, and the schooling was rather informal but very good. And so --

CW:So, can I ask, through all this --

ZGR:Sure.

CW:-- obviously your parents were involved in radical circles. Was it Jewish radical circles --

ZGR:Definitely.

CW:-- Yiddish --

ZGR:Completely Jewish, all right? And there wasn't -- as I said, they were Yiddish teachers. All their friends were Yiddish intelligentsia. Was a stimulating childhood. I remember that one of her closest friends was the principal of the Workmen's Circle mitlshul. "Mitlshul" means "middle school." 28:00And those were the circles in which we traveled. The thing that hurt -- my story might be very different if she had not been ill, because she probably -- might have stayed in Israel. She certainly would have been working in interesting places. She was -- as you know, she died at thirty-six years of age. She was really very ill. So, anyway, where do we go from here? Where are we now?

CW:Did you -- as -- did your parents -- did you celebrate any of the yontoyvim [holidays]? Did you mark anything --

ZGR:We were -- mir zaynen geven komunistn [we were communists], and that was our religion. And we had no talk of religion. There was -- the thing that saved me, as far as I'm concerned, for Judaism, is that they were such big Yiddishists. And they were not unusual in that period. There were many -- to this day, I have 29:00many friends who I met in -- not in that period of my life, but a little later, when I ended up -- after my mother died, I ended up in the shules [secular Yiddish schools], and then at Camp Kinderland every summer, so I --

CW:Yeah, we're going to get to that. I'm --

ZGR:Yeah.

CW:-- wondering about the -- what aspects of Yiddish -- what was the Yiddish world like then? Radio, newspapers, books, do you remember any of that?

ZGR:Yeah, it was very -- there was a very -- we -- the Yiddish paper we read was the "Morning Freiheit." That was the communist paper. But my mother was very into, also, the English -- like "The Daily Worker." She used to sell it, stand on street corners and would shlep me as -- to part of that. I hated it. I hated it passionately, but I did like the Yiddish part. I -- the shule was three blocks away. It was in this pretty -- it was not that unusual for parents not to 30:00choose a religious path but a secular one. So, in the shules, we learned about yidishe geshikhte [Jewish history], literatur [literature], and all of those kind of things, and I loved it. And the teacher spoke Yiddish to us, and when I came home, I spoke a little Yiddish to my mother. But I was busy learning English at that point.

CW:Yeah.

ZGR:But did you ask -- what was --

CW:Oh, radyo [radio], it's -- yidishe radyo [Jewish radio] --

ZGR:No, we didn't --

CW:-- teater [theater].

ZGR:-- I think that that -- oh, I don't know if you know this, but the -- my recollections on -- like, there was a lot of Yiddish teater. We did not go to that. That was -- I think the word that we use now is "shund," which means trash. We thought it was cheap, and my mother was into intellectual things. And we -- oh, and later, I certainly went to a play -- to the Yiddish theater that 31:00was called the "Artef." Have you ever heard of that?

CW:Can you explain what it is, that --

ZGR:Yeah, and it's -- an acronym for Arbeter Teater Farband, okay? And they did very interesting plays. I remember seeing "Tsvey hundert toysent [Two hundred thousand]," which is based on a Sholem Aleichem story about people who win the lottery and get all mixed up in their values. Then, we also saw something called "Uriel da Costa," and interestingly enough, last night on the phone, friend of mine was talking about Baruch Spinoza, and I said there was a connection with Uriel da Costa. "Would you look it up on the internet for me?" And he said he'll call me tomorrow and tell me about it. So, I know that they were skeptics and non-believers, particularly -- Spinoza was excommunicated from the -- from 32:00Judaism. So, did I --

CW:Do --

ZGR:-- answer your question?

CW:Yeah, do you remember Dovid Opatoshu? Was he --

ZGR:Oh, of course.

CW:-- in the theater?

ZGR:Of course. But that was more -- he -- I think he was definitely part of the Artef. And then, there was this whole other group, which probably, at this point in my life -- what I would feel had some value. Kolya has shown us films of that period, and -- but we were very busy. Maybe I'm misreading some of it, but I don't think so. We were very busy scoffing at all of that. That was -- it was called "Ikh bin a mame, vu iz mayn kind [I am a mother, where is my child]?" -- sort of these corny stories about a mother who loses track of her kid and the kid doesn't write to her, and that wasn't what we were into. We were too much into intellectual things, in the English as well as in Yiddish.

CW:So, do you remember any of -- when you say the Yiddish intelligentsia, were 33:00there writers, poets, artists -- what kind of people would visit you?

ZGR:Oh, my mother -- I went to -- well, after I finished elementar-shul [elementary school], bin ikh gegangen in mitlshul [I went to the Yiddish high school]. That, we went every Saturday and Sunday -- all of those things were very good for me, because I was an orphan. So, this became my world, and it was a very secure world, because we went to mitlshul on -- the summer we went to Yiddish camp, so your question is, do I remember --

CW:Just the Yiddish intelligentsia, do you remember shrayber, oder [writers, or] --

ZGR:Oh, well, I don't think -- my mother may have known them but, I mean, one of my teachers was Chaim Suller, who later became a real leader in -- Yiddish movement. Interestingly enough, he's the person who ultimately told me about 34:00news that was coming out of the Soviet Union that very serious anti-Semitism was taking place there. I couldn't believe it, 'cause he was always my teacher who talked about this wonderful place. I think for Yiddish intellectuals, what happened in the Soviet Union was a terrible -- oh, one other person I knew about, and this -- I met him in camp -- was somebody called -- I don't remember. I met him in Kinderland, and he was interested in my first husband, who I met in Kinderland, because he was the -- I think the drama critic for the "Morning Freiheit," and my husband was a playwright, as I will tell you about soon. So, where are we now?

CW:So, why don't we go to Kinderland. First, can you just describe what Camp Kinderland is, for someone who might not know?

ZGR:Okay. Kinderland was my salvation. I still believe -- this -- next week, I'm 35:00going to Florida with a very close friend that I met at Kinderland, and we're staying with two friends that we both met in Kinderland. It was -- when I look back on it, I think it probably wasn't a great camp when one thinks about camping as a place with sports and with nature. We were learning Yiddish, (laughs) we had Yiddish classes, that -- we had Yiddish plays, we had -- I loved it. It was my salvation. It was a wonderful, warm place for me, because every-- I didn't go 'til I was -- I guess my -- there was no money. My mother had died by this time, and I had an aunt who did -- is not the one who took me in. Another one of my mother's sisters had a son who was at camp, and she, as a big 36:00act of generosity, decided to take me to visit him. When I got there, my eyes popped out of my head and she could see that I was dying to remain. So, he had only about one week left of his vacation. She said, "Would you like to stay with him?" Not with him. "Would you like to stay in this camp?" And I say, "Oh, would I love to!" I was a real depressed, deprived kid. So, I stayed for the week. In that week -- I guess I must have been about fifteen, sixteen. In that week, I got myself a boyfriend, I was in the ershte grupe [first group], which is the oldest girls. I knew I had to go home that Sunday when she was coming to get him. I was devastated I had to leave this boyfriend. He was the lifeguard, and gorgeous. Then -- but just as -- and I'm going around to say goodbye to all my 37:00friends at camp who I've just made friends with, and there's a telegram for me that my aunt said for me to stay another two weeks. I guess she got a little guilty 'cause she hasn't done much, maybe. So, you cannot imagine. I'm waving this telegram at everybody. That became the beginning of my real close friendships with all of these people who I say are now -- we go to Yidish-Vokh at Workmen's Circle together, the four of us. There was five, but one of them died. And when I get back, when I go there next week, I will tell them about this interview, about talking about them. We all -- we -- I also -- so, I was at the camp, and there was not the same lifeguard I'm talking about: another 38:00lifeguard. Pretty nice, huh? And I become enamored. By now, I must be about twenty, twenty-one. And he's considerably older. I was pretty, I guess, and -- with big boobs. I guess he really thought I was hot stuff. And for me, it was the answer to something. I found the father I was looking for. We had a very, very good marriage, and it was a very happy thing for me. But that's going ahead of myself.

CW:Can you describe a typical day at Kinderland for someone --

ZGR:Yeah, I think mostly -- yeah, typical day at Kinderland. Well, there were a lot of -- there's a lot of stress on Yiddish. That was very much -- and politics. This is a picture of me collecting money for Russian war relief, in 39:00Kinderland. I'm wearing a Russian costume. This is the Soviet flag, and though you can't see 'em, in back of us, are Solomon Mikhoels, the head of the Moscow Yiddish Theater, and Itsik Fefer, the outstanding Yiddish writer. They had been asked by Stalin to form an antifascist committee, to go around the country, visit all the leftist camps, and collect money to support the Soviet -- by now, Hitler was already -- they were at war with Hitler. So, this is -- you see how much money we got? A lot of money. Anyway, so we -- it was very political, and it was very Yiddishist. And it was -- but we did sports, we -- and we did mus-- we had a band, we had -- we played baseball. But we did arts and crafts, that 40:00kind of thing. It was like most camps, but with a heavy emphasis on politics. We knew which side we were on. They were unashamedly political.

CW:Do you -- and so, how did that work out? Were there classes? Were there specific --

ZGR:Yeah, I have -- I did look this morning for a picture of me sitting on a camp table with seven little kids sitting around me, and obviously teaching Yiddish, which we did, all right? So, they used to try to get counselors who had had some Yiddish background. It was a great place for me.

CW:So, do you remember meeting Mikhoels and Fefer? What was that --

ZGR:No, that -- they were there and they -- but we were -- they had a big march and then that kind of thing. But I -- they were in back of me, I don't know.

CW:Do you remember any teachers in particular, counselors?

ZGR:Yes, I remember this guy Chaim Suller, who was my Yiddish teacher at -- in the mitlshul. Then there was a guy called Aron Bergman, he was in the mitlshul. I had -- mitlshul was an interesting experience, 'cause you came every Saturday and Sunday. You took geshikhte [history], gezelshaft kentenish -- that means, really, social studies. And we had Yiddish -- oh, there was a lot of music at camp, Yiddish songs. There was a Yiddishist leader whose name was Benyomin, who had a chorus. We learned all the Yiddish songs. Was wonderful. And those Yiddish songs are still very much a part of my life.

CW:Can you give an example, what --

ZGR:Sure. Well, one of them was a song that he would sing to me, "Mit di kleyne tsipelekh, farbisn zikh a lipele. Oy, tsipele, vos veynstu? [With little braids, biting on her lip. Oh, little braids, why are you crying?] An epele dos meynstu -- you want an apple?" And what -- that kind of thing. But that was a personal song, to me, which Kolya now sometimes sings to me. But we sang every folk song that's in all of those Workmen's Circle books. But that was great. Yiddish is a very loving language, and it was a very, very significant part of my upbringing. I become almost unashamedly -- always talking about it to everybody at the synagogue. I'm probably the only Yiddish-speaking person there. Some people have some smattering of it. So, I talked about it enough so that they asked me, Would 43:00you teach a class? I did start, and it wasn't -- probably was very good, but I had such high standards, because by then, I had been an English teacher in the schools, and I knew what good teaching was -- I wasn't that familiar with that, so -- however, as I told you, I decided to take a course and learn how to teach it better so that I could come back. And in the meantime, I had -- later on, many years -- more recently, I invited Kolya to come to the synagogue, and he did a wonderful program. Well, we did the program about himself and me -- [BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:I'm just curious. You had this unfortunately short time with your father and mother. But looking back, what did you learn from them? What did they -- what 44:00were they trying to pass on to you about being Jewish?

ZGR:It seems so obvious to -- well, first of all, that -- since they were Yiddish speaking -- and they spoke an intellectual Yiddish. They spoke literary Yiddish. They didn't speak the street Yiddish. They didn't say, Open the vinde [window]. They would say, Efen d'fentster [Open the window]. They were very obviously enamored with Yiddish, too. But there was no place for that then, I -- except as Yiddish teachers, and maybe they did that well, I don't know. Yiddish was very much a part of my whole family. All of us went, my cousins as well as I, all went to Yiddish schools and to mitlshul. I continued past mitlshul, and I went to what was called the "hekhere kursn," which was school of higher learning, where you learn how to be a Yiddish teacher. And I did do that for a 45:00couple years before -- while I had just gotten married. But can you bring me back to where we were?

CW:Sure.

ZGR:Did I answer that qu--

CW:Yeah, you -- well, I mean I'm wondering sort of what this emphasis on Yiddish -- how did that impact you as you went on to create your own life and your -- and you got married. What -- how did that carry over into your life?

ZGR:Not enough. Not enough. And it isn't until recently that I really returned to it with such fervor. My husband did not come from a Yiddish-speaking home. He knew almost nothing about that, and he wasn't really that -- he was the -- came from a background probably the exact opposite of mine. He was into the American dream. I'm raised by radical parents who are telling me this country is 46:00capitalist, is not interest-- he believes -- he comes from a background that is Horatio Alger, that if you really work hard enough, you can make it, you can become whatever. It's very different. So, when we married, I would say, that probably was something of an issue, because I wanted to send my kids to shule. He went to pick up the kid, one -- my daughter at school. Heard the teacher talking about the fascist government, got very, very upset and said to me, "What kind of school is this? What are they talking about fascist government? We don't have a fascist government." And that was one of the errors that the old left made. They were -- the teachers were all immigrants who never quite, I think, 47:00made it in the American world, so they had -- and it was also the Depression. People were poor, people were struggling. The sweatshops were certainly not gorgeous. And so, he did not approve. So, my -- there was this push and pull kind of thing between us. My -- I did send my daughter to shule for a while, and she does -- she -- my son knows very little, so -- also, since we didn't believe in religion, he never was bar mitzvahed. We had some kind of made-up bar mitzvah. If I had my life to lead over again, I would do things differently. But that's who we were. We did go to camps sponsored by the Jewish Federation so that -- they had no Yiddish, but it certainly had something of Judaism. There 48:00were prayers and things like that. "Prayers! What am I doing here?" So, I remember saying to my husband -- I -- he said, "I have to tell you, Zeva, they say prayers before dinner and stuff like that." I said, "Not going there." But we did go. We made some of our closest friends. Everybody turned out to be an old red at that camp. They -- there was -- that was in the air at the time, and a very wonderful, I think, time to grow up, because you felt you'd be part of these movements that are gonna improve the world. And so, it gave you a very optimistic feeling about your potential as an individual to change the world. Young people today don't feel that way, I don't think, right? We're -- feel overwhelmed by global warming, for one. It's -- very different kind of time.

CW:So, you mentioned the -- I want to ask some questions about sort of the periods of history that you lived in. I mean, when you mention the Depression, do you -- are there any visual memories that you remember of that?

ZGR:Yes. Well, first of all, you have to remember that my father left when I was five. Then, my mother is so poor, 'cause she can't work. So, we go on home relief, we're on relief. In those days, home relief was based on: if you lived with a relative, then they were expected to support you. My aunt and uncle had zero -- so, we -- my mother would shlep me -- every time the investigator from the home relief was coming, she would take me to some landsfroy [fellow countrywoman] that she knew and we would pretend we lived there, and -- so that 50:00we could continue -- so they, in a sense, forced her to lie. But she lied in front of me. I think one of the distressing parts of my childhood was that I never felt we were totally legitimate as Americans. And that's unfortunate. I've overcome that, I would say. But what else do you want to know about that --

CW:I'm wondering about -- in -- within the Jewish radical community, once the -- in the -- once World War II started, sort of -- how was that -- how did news of the war come through to the community? What was your reaction of, for example, the Hitler-Stalin pact? How -- what was your perspective on that?

ZGR:Well, I think before that, we would have to realize that -- my father had 51:00stopped writing, which I told you, so I had very little news of what was going on. I still was sufficiently part of the left, so I really thought -- and since they were the ones who got into this antifascist war -- incidentally, I was very involved in -- even though I was quite young, my mother felt that the Spanish Civil War was a very significant period in history, as it turned out to be. And so, we were very sympathetic to that. Then, when the Soviet Union was -- it got into the war, we really felt that this was -- is the -- we started to hear about the severe anti-Semitism in Germany. We were very, very -- and then, the -- of 52:00course, that -- what happened with Japan -- I remembered singing something about "Wear hose made of lisle, don't wear -- buy anything Japanese." We -- there was -- it was a period of great feeling of -- that we had a significant war to be on the side of the -- we were on the side of the right -- I don't think -- unfortunately, we didn't get -- at least, I can't remember getting that much information about Germany. I think that a lot of that -- the problem with the Soviet Union is that even though there were significant beginnings of people like Andre Malraux and Andre Gide, and all -- finding -- becoming very 53:00disillusioned with the Soviet Union, we still didn't believe that. We really thought things were wonderful there, and because they were the sole progressive force fighting Hitler, it was a significant time. And then, of course, Franklin Roosevelt was working with Stalin and Churchill on strateg-- whatever. It was a -- we were relatively sure that we were in the right war. And I don't think we really knew the severity of the Holocaust and what -- and I know many people my age who think, "Why didn't we get more fully involved in trying to fight? Why didn't we become much more Jewish? Why didn't we join organizations which were 54:00doing more in the radical" -- okay, I don't mean radical, but in the anti-German -- we were really -- that was -- we were too busy being very pro-Soviet. And when you find out about some of the things that were going on then, you really get very upset.

CW:And you mentioned there was a particular teacher who sort of let you know what was happening in the Soviet Union.

ZGR:Yeah, that was Suller, who was the -- really -- I guess the head of the mitlshul for a while. And he was also a writer. I think he wrote for the "Freiheit." I had -- didn't see him from -- that was the time I was sort of raising my kids, so I never got to -- but I came to -- there was -- I guess I used to come to things like the Zhitlovsky ovnt [evening], where we -- do you know who Zhitlovsky was? He was a --

CW:Can you explain it, though?

ZGR:Yeah.

CW:Yeah.

ZGR:Well, he -- anyway, he was a great secular Jew, and very much involved in the Yiddishist movement. And we used to honor every year in his name some person, and I was there that time. And I remember seeing Suller -- was my teacher, and talking to him. And I said, "How are things?" I knew he had just come back from Russia. So, I was expecting that he was going to tell me these wonderful things. And then, I realized, as he was talking, that he was telling me that something very bad was going -- and he said, "I have a brother who just" -- I remember, his brother had just come to the United States and was with him and was telling him what was going on, and he -- I can imagine what that meant to him. Very terrible thing. Okay, this was after, I think, the war had already 56:00ended. So --

CW:Was there a moment for you, personally, when you -- your thinking changed?

ZGR:Oh, very much so, yeah. Not one moment, but thing happened. I started hearing about the anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, which was this country that my father had told me was -- had a -- the first country in the world to have a law against anti-Semitism. And here -- and that they turn out to have -- not let certain Jews go to schools, whatever they were doing. I could-- I found that very hard to take. And I'd been affected by it. Then, of course, I -- we didn't get into what I did -- after I met -- married my husband, I did teach Yiddish 57:00shule for a while. And then, I went into actual teaching, teaching in the public schools. And because of my background, I said that I wanted to teach in poverty schools. And this was a period where it was -- many people were trying to figure out how to get out of poverty schools. So, I kept -- that early idealism stayed with me, I would say, 'til now. So, in my synagogue, I'm the head of social action. I really -- I'm pleased about that. It was -- even though I sensed that -- so, what it was, in terms of the schools, I was teaching in all-Black schools all the time, all through -- and doing -- and I was able to deal with it, 'cause 58:00I cared a lot about the kids. And there's a lot of people who care about the kids and get -- have lousy experiences. I was a pretty good teacher. Very firm and very sure. And the kids responded to that. I did -- as a matter of fact, I put a letter out here that is from a parent saying, "I wish all the" -- here it is! It sort of made me feel -- it says, "P.S., I wish you could teach every class, because these are -- there is no one in school as good as you are for our kids." Nice. I don't know why I don't throw it out. But anyway, some -- I will. (laughs) I was very determined, yeah. When the -- and I found little notes in my letter box calling me names. N-lover. But I was determined that I was in the 59:00right place and that didn't bother me. When the Black Power movement started and there was a lot of anti-Semitism connected with that, again, there was tremendous disillusionment that that -- and they didn't excuse me from any of it. It was all white -- whitey doesn't care about our kids. And Jews, particularly, were attacked. So, that was another case of -- where an early dream became a harsh reality, and that's a sad thing. But I never became totally cynical. I continued to teach at those kind of schools, did not try to get out of them, and continued to be a pretty good teacher. Because of that, I was offered a job at Brooklyn College. And when I retired from teaching, after thirty years, I was offered a job training teachers at Brooklyn College, and 60:00they did it because I had this positive attitude towards teaching poverty kids, I think. We have -- we know certain things that work. We have to try. I don't have any answers now, because it's very, very difficult. But that's -- did I answer any --

CW:Yeah, you did. I'm curious about when you -- how it was that you came to join a Reform synagogue, something that --

ZGR:Oh.

CW:-- you wouldn't have grown up with, obviously.

ZGR:I -- definitely not grown up with. I guess it started -- this started with the Holocaust, with maybe the -- what was happening in Israel and what was happening in Black schools. I realized that Jews were very much the target of many, many groups that should have known better, because certainly -- I mean, 61:00I'm an example of a teacher who did go down South with teachers from the union to try to organize people to vote. I really -- so, why do they pick Jews? We were the -- I didn't see any other people besides Jews in these groups that went. There are others, obviously, but I didn't like that we -- selected us, particularly, for that. And it started to make a lot of sense to me that I have to be much more clearly defined as a Jew. And I also started to have some regrets that my kids -- because there were no more shules by this time, because the shules -- well, there may have been some Workmen's Circle ones, but I wouldn't step near Workmen's Circle because they were socialists and we were 62:00commun-- the idiocy of that, I can't tell you. But it -- I started to feel I have to be much more identified. And fortunately, my husband, who -- we didn't talk at all about him. We should, because it's -- very interesting thing. He was a playwright when I met him at -- he was -- worked at the camp for the summer, and I was fascinated with this guy. He knew Elia Kazan and all of these important people. But went to the Group Theater, told me this fascinating story, which I love and always remember him telling it to me. The Group Theater -- do you know of -- anything about it? Was kind of leftist theater of the '30s -- had 63:00a contest one year, and they encouraged all playwrights to send examples of their work. They had rented a little theater out in Long Island, and they were going to select certain of these plays and try them out, do try-outs in Long Island. And if the play worked, then they were gonna bring it to Broadway. And my husband sent them a play and they accepted him as one of them. He said two playwrights that he knows of were turned down. One of them was Arthur Miller and the other one was Tennessee Williams. And he was accept-- and, of course, never made it in the theater. So, it was a wild story. He would tell it about himself in this kind of self -- laughing all the time. I mean, he's a really interesting 64:00guy. So, he had -- when I met him, he had already had a play on Broadway, which hadn't -- was just as the war was starting in -- the Second World War. And theater was kind of floundering. His play didn't make it. He kept getting little college productions, things like that. But didn't really work. But he loved that -- he was an amazing man. When he was near death, he was writing a play. The reason I'm making such a thing about the -- for me, a twenty-two-year-old Kinderland kid, coming from a Yiddishist, somewhat limited background, to meet a playwright who, when he had that Hollywood -- I mean, I'm sorry, when he had 65:00that play on Broadway that didn't make it, he was offered a Hollywood contract to come there. Was a very fast writer and they knew he could prod-- and he turned it down. He said, "I'm not going to prostitute myself for Hollywood." So, he was a real idealist, a real nut job. And, I mean, if I had been around, I think I would -- might have encouraged him to do it. But I respected that about him. He was -- so, we were an interesting mixture of idealism, both of us, but on -- really, his -- much more veered toward America and America's promise, and mine very much, except I very much would agree with him now, in terms of America, even though I'm furious at the Republican Party and I'm very questioning about what's going to be in this country. I still think we're -- fabulous country.

CW:So, I'm curious -- just to question out of order, but what did -- how would 66:00you characterize your parents' attitudes towards America?

ZGR:Very anti, I think. They never saw it as the dream of America. My father left it because he thought -- my mother -- it didn't answer her needs. She was sick, and that -- I was not imbued with a love for Amer-- which was totally opposite to him. My mother read me, as a child, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." My husband's -- took him to the library and he got Horatio Alger. It's a very different -- interesting. Fun, in a way. So, I think my kids probably suffer from some of that confusion that was coming through there, although we didn't fight openly about it. I was a kid that, when I was at Kinderland, I went to 67:00Peekskill. Do you know about Peekskill? Peekskill had a lot of these little bungalow colonies. It's upstate New York. A lot of bungalow colonies with a radical tint, very much so. And Paul Robeson used to come there, used to entertain, and sing -- and that there was -- these bungalow colonies -- were Jewish radical bungalow colonies, in the midst of a very backward redneck kind of group, the people who lived in Peekskill all the time. They found out that this was the -- just the beginnings of the McCarthy kind of thing -- found out 68:00that Robeson was scheduled to speak and they threatened that they were gonna do something. So, those of us who were counselors in these camps were asked to go to Peekskill to protect Paul Robeson. And I did go, with a whole group from my camp, and we were okay, protecting him while he sang. But then, as we left the grounds where he sang, we got into cars, and all up and down the sides of the road where we were dri-- were these redneck-looking guys. The cops are in front of them, supposedly to protect us. Had their arms folded, didn't do a thing, and 69:00these guys threw rocks into the cars. And one person, the rock hit him in the eye and he was blinded for life. This was somebody I knew about. So, it was a very scary thing. You saw the face -- the faces of fascism. So, you know, that in a sense did make -- give one pause. It would be -- but, you see, my husband would probably see that as an aberration. I saw it as much more typical of many things -- I knew about the South. He was a very different kind of guy from me. But it was a very nice marriage, because he knew my history and he said, "Zeva, I'll never leave you. I'll stay with you forever." Except the son of a gun got sick and died at the age -- when he -- much before he should have, 'cause he was in superb condition. He had been an Olympic swimmer and swam the Chicago River 70:00Swim, I think they called it, and had people like Johnny Weissmuller, who he knew about. He was a very talented man. And he swam every day of his life. He claimed he got jobs because they -- was near a swimming pool. I'll never know if all that chlorine may have affected him. Some people think the disease he got is related to chemicals, but we don't know. We now think it was -- his mother had ovarian cancer -- my daughter is a geneticist. She had ov-- cancer as a thirty-five-year-old young woman, my daughter, and when they started doing the tests to find out about breast cancer, they found that she had the gene. I was 71:00tested; I did not have the gene. That means that she got it from her father. And she tells me now that they're doing work trying to determine if the disease which he died of, which was multiple myeloma, might have something to do with that same gene. But we don't know. But anyway, he was seventy years old when he died. He had just gone to a doctor who told him, "I never saw a man at your age in such marvelous condition." Three day later, called him to come back, said, "You have something seriously wrong with your blood tests." And it was multiple myeloma, which is a death sentence and awful. So, that was very sad, because I remembered he said he was gonna stick around. But while it lasted, thirty-five years, it was very good. We have two very nice kids. My -- as I said, my -- 72:00well, there's some very nice pictures of my kids.

CW:Yeah. Well, I want to ask about -- given this interesting mix of the two of you, what Jewish traditions did you have in your own family?

ZGR:Now, which? My own?

CW:Yeah.

ZGR:My husband and I? He scoffed at a lot of it, and I guess I didn't -- since I was coming from the Yiddishist thing -- and that kind of was fading in importance because the Workman's Circle shule was still around, because they did not -- they didn't have that kind of close connection with the left. The shule that I went to was radical, and they suffered during the McCarthy period. So, they were no longer an option. So, it was very hard to find a place for 73:00yourself. So, I was not that involved with Yiddish things -- with Jewish things at all. I would never have dreamed of going into a synagogue in my -- not only my own mother, but my aunt and my uncle, all the people I was -- we never went to synagogue. And when I joined the synagogue, my cousins, who I called my sisters, used to refer to me as "the rebbetsin," making fun, teasing about what I had become. But it was one of the very, very significant moves of my life, and that really happened -- my husband got this job on the Upper West Side as the director of all the Jewish organizations. He had become -- 'cause he couldn't make a living as a playwright, he start-- he -- when I started to work and sent him to social work school -- we had gone to social work camps with the -- where the was a lifeguard. And so, then he became a social worker, got this very 74:00interesting job. He came home a couple -- and says, "Zeva, I met some fascinating rabbis!" And then he said (UNCLEAR) really start -- he said, "Maybe we ought to join the synagogue." Well, we lived all the way in Brooklyn, and the -- those synagogues he was -- were on the Upper West Side, and my kids were young, and it was alien to me. I didn't know how to -- after he died, I knew that it -- that was beckoning to me, and that -- as he said -- he also felt the same way, after the -- oh, and he, who had been so totally not Jewish, got this job at the American Jewish Committee, as their housing director. That's before the other job. He came home and he said, "Zeva, I've come home." I'll never forget that. I got very teary-eyed and I said, "What happened?" It had to do 75:00with what we found out about the Holocaust and then what we found out about the Six-Day War. He was very moved by the fact that this little tiny country had been able to have that kind of victory. So, both of us became farbrente [zealous] -- mostly, he -- he was even -- he would kind of scold his friends for not being Jewish enough. It was funny. You know that when you find religion, you become crazy. Anyway, when he died -- so, about two years later, somebody said, "Zeva, would you be willing to go out with -- I know a nice man." And they introduced me to this very nice man. There's a picture here. And he was the president of his synagogue. And he -- one day, he said to me -- we had a date. It was good right from the beginning. He said, "Zeva, would -- I'm going to 76:00synagogue tonight." And I -- he said, "It's a holiday." I didn't know any of the holidays. I was worse than Kolya. He said, "It's Simchas Torah." Never heard of that. And he said -- oh, I said, "What do you do on Simchas Torah?" He said, "We carry around the Torah and we dance and we sing." Took me to this synagogue. I was so eager to be his date, I would have gone with him to anywhere. So, we went to the synagogue. It's the one on the corner here. And they started dancing with it, carrying the Torah. And I can see that he's standing there with the Torah, waiting to find me so he can hand me the Torah. So, I was very moved at the idea that he wanted to hand me the Torah. But I was more moved -- the idea that carrying this Torah, what it meant to all these people. He handed me the Torah and I started to weep. And that's what I -- then, I -- when I married him, which 77:00happened very soon after that, we would go to the synagogue all the time. The rabbi, who -- now the rabbi -- loved Joe, who was a very wonderful mentsh. So, you see, I had two wonderful marriages. It's an amazing feat. I don't know how I accomplished that. And he was very much a part of that, and he -- when his kids were young, he sent them to religious school. He -- the then rabbi saw that Joe was a very good teacher. He was in business, he -- and he encouraged them -- one of the teachers was dropping out, wasn't good. He said, "Why don't you teach the class?" And Joe felt he didn't have enough knowledge, so he went -- the HUC, Hebrew Union College, that -- trained as a Hebrew teacher and loved it and did a 78:00very good job. But he went to his business, mostly. When he met me, he was no longer in -- but he was very much a part of the synagogue. And as I say, I -- my encouragement -- became the president of the synagogue, or maybe he was already. And I made some wonderful friends there. And now that I'm leaving, they're going to make me a big party to tell me about what a significant thing -- oh, then I find out that one of the things that's significant about the Reform movement is they're into social justice, and isn't that my background? So, I say, "Hey, where's the social justice committee?" And they don't have one, because somebody didn't take it on. I said, "I'll do that." And I started to form a social justice committee. We did some significant things, and I --

CW:Can you explain -- why did you start crying with -- when you were handed the Torah?

ZGR:I can't answer that, except that I think it was something that I was denied. One day, I remember, it was the -- one of the Jewish holidays, probably Rosh Hashanah. And they're singing these beautiful, beautiful melodies, which -- I find the music extreme-- and I'm listening to this music and I turn to the person that I've become friendly with, and I said, "I've been robbed." That's how I felt. I felt something was taken away from me. Now it's odd, because I certainly had the Yiddish. It was not an -- in any way non-Jewish home. But we never celebrated the holidays, and I remember there was almost a scoffing thing like just go out and eat on Yom Kippur. The left was very confused about what it should -- also, we had Yiddish classes on Shabbos. I had to travel on the train. Some of those things I would not do today, and I feel it was the era of the Yiddish left. We'd also -- did not teach any Hebrew, so when I tried to read 80:00Sholem Aleichem, half the words I can't read. But I was able, I think -- and this is the happy part of my life -- to bring the two parts of my life together: the social justice of the left -- although the Reform movement has always been into social justice -- and the Yiddish and the significant -- what's the word I'm looking for? The significant ritual of the --

CW:So, how -- so, what do you do with Yiddish now?

ZGR:Well, I told you, they asked me to teach it because they know -- so, I did -- so, now I did -- I invited Kolya to come. He had just taught us about this wonderful Yiddish poet. He's very into poetry. Sutzkever, do you know anything 81:00about him? You do know about Sutzkever, good.

CW:Yeah, but can you explain who he is?

ZGR:Well, Sutzkever was in -- was raised in --

CW:Vilna.

ZGR:-- Vilna, exactly, and was -- started to do poetry at an early age. A very unusual guy. Then, he was -- when the Germans marched in, he was part of the Vilna ghetto, and he wrote some of his most fabulous poetry about this teacher who keeps on teaching, even when -- clear that every day, a couple of her students disappear because they're taken away. She keeps teaching. Oh, so moving. And then, there's also this wonderful story about -- I mean, poem about "Mayn mames shikh [My mother's shoes]." He sees the Germans with wagons, so you 82:00know that -- well, I'm telling her -- wagons full of shoes, and he recognizes his mother's shabes shikh [Shabbos shoes], which she didn't wear 'cause she was saving it. It's a spectacular poem. So, I knew that, probably, none of the people in my synagogue knew about Sutzkever, though they know things -- many things. And I invited Kolya to come, and he does a wonderful, wonderful job with that. Sutzkever, then -- I should've told -- little more -- after he is in the ghetto, he's taken into the camps. And when he's in the camp, he is asked by the commandant there to be the one to collect all the materials from significant 83:00Jewish intellectual -- writers, artists, everything, because the Germans are saving that, because when the war is over, they're going to have a museum to show off all the stuff that was destroyed. Ugh, to this day, that gets to me.

CW:Yeah, he -- that's when he was still in the ghetto, yeah.

ZGR:He -- was it --

CW:From the ghetto, yeah.

ZGR:No, he was already, I think, in the camps -- that they did that. No? It doesn't really matter.

CW:Right, doesn't matter, but yeah.

ZGR:But he -- anyway, he collects all the stuff and he -- gutsy, because he knows what'll happen if they catch him -- he hides it. He hides it with the idea that he will come back someday and he will find that stuff, which is actually what happened. Took all that stuff and brought it to the -- YIVO, and it's now part of one. So, he saved all that Yiddish culture. In the meantime, he also 84:00escaped from the camps and went into the forest and became a partisan. And in the -- somewhere in the middle he was married and had a child and -- very wonderful marriage, and -- wife was killed. It's a very painful, painful history. But then, he ultimately -- when the war was over, he went to Israel and became a poet there. And sadly, Israel did not give him the koved [honor] he deserved, I think. I think now, they're sort of catching on and trying to do more. But he wrote in Yiddish, and Israel -- or -- and maybe he did some writing in Hebrew. But anyway, Kolya presented that at my synagogue. It was such an eye-opener. So, I feel, in a way, this wonderful connection of my eyes being opened to the things that they have to offer and my offering them the things 85:00that they did not know about. So, that was nice. I really feel very good about wrapping up my life in that kind of way.

CW:Well, before we end, I want to make sure that we -- that I ask you about -- to explain about Kolya Borodulin, how you met him?

ZGR:All right, so what happened, as I said, they asked me to teach Yiddish in my synagogue. I didn't feel I did as good a job as I'd like to. So, I asked -- I decided to take a class. And I did have a teacher that they make a big fuss about. I didn't love him, so that didn't work, but then I went to the camp in the summer and I took his beginner's class and I thought he was dynamite. I think he's a wonderful teacher. And when I -- then he said he taught advanced 86:00Yiddish at the Workmen's Circle. I came to him the first day, in the class, and I said, "Kolya, I want to tell you something. I have a father who left the United States and went to Russia." He sort of -- he said to me, "Really?" He said, "I'm gonna help you" -- oh, and I -- he said, "So, do you -- are you in touch with him?" I said, "No. After I was five years old, I never saw him again." He said, "I'm gonna help you." I said, "You can't. I've been searching for seventy-five years." Said to me, "A different time now. They have the internet. They have -- the archives are open. I'll help you. I" -- said, "Give me four months." Three days later, he called me, says, "Zeva, I have something for you." He found a copy of the play my father wrote for his master's thesis 87:00from the University of Moscow. I never knew my father was a playwright, and here I married a playwright. I was so -- that made me crazy. Was a wonderful, wonderful thought. Very different kind of plays than my husband wrote, but that doesn't matter. Somehow, I managed to get myself back, that whole thing I thought I was missing. So, anyway, by this time, my father, of course, is dead. And Kolya says, "Give me some time." He had friends who were working on the archives, and he found quite a few things. He found records, the early census in 1930 with my father's name on it. Found a lot of stuff. So, for me, I thought I was getting the second chance -- maybe I would find some half-brothers and 88:00sisters. There's nothing like that. So, that was -- it was a very bittersweet kind of thing. I was excited but I was very let down, because nothing hap-- now, Kolya kept, I thought -- when a lot of the Russian Jews moved into the neighborhood where I had a home before I bought this, there were a lot of Russian Jews there, because it's near Brighton, and Brighton is the new Odessa. So, I asked him, I told him, "I have a father went to Russia," so -- first of all, none of them believed me. They couldn't believe anybody left here to go there. They said, Do you -- what did they say? Do you know what happened to him? -- or something. I don't know. I'm forgetting what I was trying to say.

CW:Well, the -- what your neighbors were asking you about --

ZGR:Oh, yeah, yeah. So, they told me -- when I told them, they said, What year were you in touch with him? When I told them, they said, He was killed. And 89:00then, that -- lot of the information -- by then, we knew, very much knew -- I knew it earlier -- that those twenty-one Soviet Yiddish writers had all been killed by Stalin just before he died. He got rid of them. And I also knew that they were devout, devoted communists, and they had been killed, simply because they were Jews. That helped with that evolution into Judaism. So, where were we? I'm starting to --

CW:Oh, that's fine. I just have -- can you just briefly review Kolya's background? I want to make sure that gets into your story, too.

ZGR:Okay. Kolya -- parents, they were from the Crimea, as I remember. And then, 90:00when Stalin or Lenin, both, decided to have this little Jewish settlement, many people who were good communists and believed in this were very overwhelmed and delighted. And Kolya's parents were two that went there. They met -- I think they met in the Crimea and then moved to Birobidzhan. And he was brought up with this love of Birobidzhan. I cannot understand quite how he answered himself that there was no Yiddish as he got older. But whatever. They went there, and he -- that was where he was raised, and he was -- his father was a staunch communist, very pro-Stalin, I think, towards -- 'til the end. And, as I started -- as I told you before, when these people from Columbia, I think, came, they were 91:00introduced to Kolya, who was supposed to tell them all about -- in Yiddish, I think, about Birobidzhan and how it came to be. At the same time, was having some thoughts about the fact that he did not know what Jewish holiday came in September. Was a little horrified. So, certain things were happening to him. They were so impressed with his teaching techniques, and I guess they were looking to -- maybe that he had just started that thing in Columbia, Yiddish studies. They offered him a job. He went to his parents and told them that he was going to accept the job, and they were very, very upset, 'cause they did not want to leave the Soviet Union. He said, "You're gonna have to leave, 'cause I'm leaving." Now, this had nothing to do with an anti-Soviet feeling. He did not 92:00have that yet. He said, "I'm going." I guess it was just a very good opportunity and more money than he knew -- anything -- or whatever. He came here and he got the job and he's made a life for himself. But he said he was -- after he found out that he was quite brainwashed by the Soviet Union, he's become fairly apolitical. It's interesting, I've tried to get him to talk about certain things, doesn't talk about them that much. But he's an interesting man and a wonderful teacher. And he and I have become kind of good friends. He -- anyway, what bothers me a little bit, because it's -- would tie us much more to the present was that I didn't talk about my -- what happened in -- to me later on, 93:00after I married my second husband. I bought a summer home. There's the picture. It's a wonderful area, I love it. That's why I'm moving up towards Albany, 'cause we'll be in touch with all of that. So --

CW:But -- so, what do you see as the role of Yiddish today in American Jewish culture?

ZGR:Well, I keep asking. I asked -- you know Sheva Zucker? Sheva --

CW:Yes.

ZGR:-- lived here last summer while I was up in my summer home.

CW:The Yiddish -- she wrote the Yiddish textbook.

ZGR:Exactly, and we -- she and I became quite friendly. Josh is also a good -- was a good --

CW:Josh Waletzky?

ZGR:-- friend --

CW:Yeah.

ZGR:Yeah, and Kolya. So, I think I -- particularly Sheva I asked, I said, "So what do you think, Sheva? You think Yiddish has a future here?" She didn't sound that positive. But I think some -- there -- when I see young people like you 94:00learning Yiddish, I could cry. That's like carrying the Torah. I think there's some -- what do you think? (laughter) Or you're not supposed to --

CW:I'm not gonna tell you on camera, but I'm -- but, I mean, what -- I mean, do you have any inkling of where things might go with Yiddish?

ZGR:So hard to know. I'm only glad that, for me personally, I'm able to return to it with some of the fervor -- we're reading wonderful things. One of the problems with the Yiddish left, too, was they were very -- they -- I think we only read stories that came out of the Soviet Union. I don't -- we did not read some very significant writers. We read Sholem Aleichem, of course, and Mendele and I --

CW:Peretz.

ZGR:-- and Peretz. But there wasn't anywhere the -- who's that famous writer?

CW:Bashevis?

ZGR:Bash-- we would not have read Bashevis. We would have scoffed at that, I think. Course, he may have been very young. Still beginning. But they would scoff at stories like "Yentl," I think, they wouldn't know what to do with it. They were quite, quite rigid in their thinking. And that's why they've disappeared, in a way.

CW:So, from this journey of -- evolution from -- that you've had through your development of your Jewish identity, any lessons that you -- any eytses [pieces of advice] that you've learned and want to share?

ZGR:Well, I would say that it -- I was interested, when that guy from the radio in Winnipeg interviewed me and I spoke about my connection with the synagogue, 96:00he, who was obviously very interested in Yiddish, said, "Zeva, you're the only person that I've met in all this work I'm doing that feels as I do about having to bring the two parts of the Jewish experience together: the Judaism with" -- in a Reform setting, obviously. We're not gonna become Ultra-Orthodox. But we have to bring that together with the Yiddishkayt. And he said, "I feel" -- he said, "My parents don't understand me. They're quite critical." He said, "You're the only one" -- and he was very excited about -- so, I -- that's what I think. We have to find a way of melding the two together, and I think that people are doing that, hopefully in some places. I mean, he's trying to do that. I just -- that -- I think it's extremely important to emphasize the love of Yiddish and 97:00the love of being a Jew, and the significant contributions that Jews have made to the world. And I feel very proud and happy I'm a Jew, and I would like my kids to feel the same way. One of the things I'm excited about in moving to Albany -- obviously, I will lose my contact with my synagogue here, but my rabbi has a friend who has a synagogue up in Troy, which is very close by. And I spoke to my daughter the other night, and I said, "If I decide to connect with that" -- they do take you from a place on that -- to the local synagogue, which is also Reform and quite good, I'm sure. But I'm kind of interested in this other place. The woman is gay. She's very avant-garde. She's very into the women's movement and she's very -- I talked -- she came -- she was an invited speaker -- 98:00to a church in the town I'm in, which is a very interesting church, which is only open in the summer, is very liberal, and has a rabbi one week, a gay man another week, a Catholic priest the third week. They have -- but all liberals. So, she spoke, and she spoke about the women of the world, the subject of the -- the theme of the summer was how does religion adapt to all the changes that are taking place? And she talked about how the Jewish movement has had to change because of the women's movement and what's happened there. It was wonderful. So, I think -- so, I said to my daughter, "Would you go with me? Would you drive me 99:00to" -- she said, "Yeah, ma, I would." So, I'm hoping that through me, she will -- she's always been very -- conscious Jew, but never involved with -- she said she didn't -- she was turned off by a lot of what she saw in certain synagogues, it's -- she felt it was pompous, it was not -- I think I'll get her to become more involved.

CW:So, what did you -- why -- I'd just like to end by asking why is Yiddish important?

ZGR:Because according to what Einstein said, it is really the most loving language. I think it has enormous warmth. It's full of idioms. It's full of Yiddishkayt. It's just -- it's -- and mentshlekhkayt [humaneness]. I think it would be a total tragedy if it were permitted to completely die. And if I have one serious anger with Israel, was that they did what they did. I think that 100:00that was -- now, friends of mine whose kids live in Israel tell me that their granddaughter is now taking Yiddish as a second language in her Modern Orthodox school. So, who knows what the future will bring? For me, personally, I've managed to keep Yiddish back in my life, and I'm very thrilled that I have.

CW:Great.

ZGR:So, I want Yiddish to survive, and I think a little bit -- the -- we have a Korean pianist at my synagogue, and I've imbued her with a love of Yiddish folk music. So, they do -- and with her little choir, she has -- they do Yiddish songs.

CW:(laughs) Well, a hartsikn dank -- thank you --

ZGR:What's that?

CW:A hartsikn dank.

ZGR:Oh, my pleasure.

CW:Thank you so much for sharing your stories --

ZGR:Nishto far vos [You're welcome].

CW:And thanks from the Yiddish Book Center, too.

ZGR:What's that?

CW:Thank you from the Yiddish Book Center, too.

ZGR:Oh, I --

[END OF INTERVIEW]