JOAN RUDD ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:So, this is Christa Whitney, and today is February 19th, 2014.  I'm here in Seattle with Joan Rudd.  Is that how you pronounce it?

JOAN RUDD: Yeah.

CW:  And we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Do I have your permission to record?

JR:  Yes, you do.

CW:  Thank you.  So, to start, can you tell me briefly what you know about your family background before the US?

JR:  Okay.  Both my mother and father were born in Russia.  My father was born in St. Petersburg and my mother was born in Odessa.  And I first learned 1:00that there were regional differences between Jews, because my grandmothers used to fight about how to cook.  So, in the south, they cooked with lemon and in the north, they cook with garlic.  So, there were probably regional differences in everything else, as well.  (laughs) Both my father and mother, I learned much, much later, lived with grandparents who spoke Yiddish at home.  And so, both my father and mother understood Yiddish, although they didn't use it.

CW:  Would you know -- do you have any sense of what the -- what life was like St. Petersburg or Odessa?

JR:  Not too much, because both sets of people had to flee.  My father's family was fairly well off.  They manufactured noodles.  They lived in St. Petersburg because they wanted their oldest to go to high school.  Jews were forbidden from living in St. Petersburg at that time, but you could buy your way in.  And when the Russian Revolution came, my grandfather was imprisoned and 2:00the family fled, according to the story, by sled, across the frozen river to Finland.  So, my father actually grew up in Finland, from age three to thirteen.  My mother's family fled the Russian Revolution, from Odessa.  Again, that grandfather was also imprisoned, but they waited for him and got him out somehow.  I think there was a lot of bribery involved in the survival of my family through the generations.  They left from Odessa through the Black Sea, Istanbul, I would guess Spain, to France.  So, my mother ended up in Paris by age three, and my father was sent to Paris at age thirteen, right after his bar mitzvah in Mustamäki, Finland.  I didn't know there was a shul in Mustamäki, Finland.  So, my father was sent to Paris for high school to live with one of his older sisters.  And my parents met in Paris, and they actually did not 3:00marry then.  My mother actually refused him, which I -- another factoid that I didn't learn until pretty recently.  So, she didn't want to leave France.  But he went ahead with his family to America, and then he essentially saved their lives, because my father's family sponsored my mother's family and they got married pretty soon after my mother's family arrived.  And they really escaped France in the nick of time, just ahead of the Nazis.  One week before the fall of Paris, they went to Marseilles, and somehow, they got a boat.  And part of why I think Yiddish disappeared in my oral world was, I think -- among my relatives anyway -- it represented the people who died and the Old World, and a 4:00-- I don't know -- once, I got my mother to tell me that her aunt had been sent to Auschwitz.  Once.  She would not speak of it.  She said she could not speak of it.  And this was the aunt that lived with him in Paris, and was Yiddish-speaking, so that apparently, in their home in Paris, my mother's aunt and mother spoke Yiddish.  But after the war -- by the time I came along -- I was born in '48, and my early memories of my grandparents on both sides were in the early '50s.  Nobody spoke any Yiddish or anything resembling -- my father's family spoke German, but they chose not to.  Mostly, the language at home was Russian.  My parents spoke French to each other.  My grandparents spoke Russian to each other.  And we were pretty confused as kids, I have to say.  I 5:00don't think it's possible to raise kids trilingual.  I think it's a whole lot of why I became an artist, because I just didn't -- I didn't have the words for anything.  And there's a -- I mean, we can jump back and forth a little bit, but when I got to college and studied French, my teacher, who we didn't think was a Jewish man, but in retrospect, of course he was a Jewish man.  His name was Samuel, his first name was Samuel.  He was just a "Hidden Yidden," as I call them.  Anyway, he told me that my French was Yiddish, that my syntax was completely messed up.  And I said, "That's not possible, my parents speak perfect Parisian French.  They went through the entire educational system in France -- well, my father started high school."  And he was very insistent about it, and it wasn't until I studied Yiddish that I realized that he was actually right.  My French is very messed-up with Yiddish syntax, and neither of my parents could write in -- write clearly in any language.  I mean, they 6:00did.  They wrote scientific articles and letters, and they wrote -- they were literate people.  But it was very frustrating to me to have immigrant parents.

CW:  Yeah.

JR:  On the other hand, everybody else I knew had immigrant parents --

CW:  Yeah.

JR:  -- and everybody else I knew were children of refugees and spoke another language at home.

CW:  Yeah.

JR:  This was not unusual.

CW:  So, can you describe your -- the neighborhood?  What was the neighborhood that you grew up in?

JR:  Oh, I grew up in Manhattan, in what is now a very fancy area near Lincoln Center.  At the time, I -- went even one block off Central Park West and you were into tenements, and -- largely inhabited by Puerto Rican families and with some gang activity.  I mean, I actually saw people fight with chains on my own street, and it scared the hell out of me.  But eventually, they actually tore down all that stuff and built Lincoln Center, and then it became suddenly very, very nice -- I lived on the tenth floor, I lived in an apartment pretty high 7:00up.  We had a pretty good view of the parade when that would happen.  But my father had a great fondness for the country, I think partly 'cause of age three to thirteen in Finland?  And he had saved -- I think he told me once. five dollars a day in an envelope to be able to buy a farmhouse in the country, anywhere in the country.  And so, we went to this farmhouse every weekend, my whole childhood, and that was the only place where things seemed like the books.  My father would work outside, my mother would cry over the dishes 'cause she hated housework, and we could play.  We were free.  There weren't cars.  There wasn't -- of course, there was just us, and whatever cousins would come or sometimes some neighbors -- but this sort of idyll is a whole lot of what attracted me to staying in the Pacific Northwest because I wanted to be 8:00able to hear birds, I wanted to be able to hear birds.  I wanted to be able to see the sky and the stars.  I didn't want the diesel buses.  I wanted to be able to have a fire.

CW:  Can you tell me more about the -- you mentioned just all the other kids being also children of refugees.  What environment did that create growing up for you?

JR:  Well, I could think of a couple different stories.  I had a lot of freedom -- I was the third, although I was a girl.  And then, maybe, partly because I was a girl and my mother was pretty feminist and my mother was working -- but my two best friends in high school were both children of camp survivors.  And their two families had reacted very differently to how they 9:00wanted to live in America.  So, one of them, like me, had a bicycle and the other one didn't, 'cause her parents didn't want her to be able to go around freely.  So, I cannot remember anymore how we got the money.  I think we just raised it from our classmates.  But we bought her a bicycle, and then we were sort of this dynamic trio in Manhattan.  But there were peculiarities.  Like the gal that didn't have a bicycle, she had to pay all the utility bills in person, with cashiers' checks, or I don't know.  There was something about how the money was, 'cause her parents didn't trust the banks.  So, the fact that I knew people whose parents -- well, they were adapting, but they had their own meshugaas [issues] about whether to trust the banks, whether to trust the policeman, whether to -- I didn't realize that my own father had such a 10:00messed-up relationship with the policemen until there was -- I forget even what incident it was where he had to talk to a policeman, but I suddenly realized that he had very, very messed up ideas about authority figures -- refugees.  I guess the biggest thing is that my school's already five percent Jewish, which is really unheard of.  I went to the Hunter College campus schools, the elementary school and the high school, which are both special schools.  They're public schools, but you have to test in, so they're for highly capable or gifted -- whatever you want to call them, and it was a very friendly environment in that you can be as capable as you were.  I don't remember anything Jewish about elementary school, or even high school, but I also went to religious school from -- let's see, it's because my oldest brother was five years older.  So, when he 11:00started his bar mitzvah training at age eight, I was three, so I started at the preschool level.  So, I'm the only one that really stuck with -- I'm considered a throwback.  No one else in my extended family is particularly religious -- well, there are cousins now, and children of cousins.  But in my immediate extended family, I think starting religious school at three was a big deal.  Three and a half.

CW:  Were you frum [religiously observant] in your family?

JR:  Was I what?

CW:  Frum, observant?

JR:  My family, I'd say, was completely assimilated, and so were -- certainly my mother's parents -- well, it kind of -- there was something that happened, like I said, after the war, that they were assimilated enough in Paris that my uncle didn't have a bar mitzvah and that they -- and I know that they mixed milk and meat and ate pork.  This horrifies me now, but there it is.  But as I knew them, in Manhattan, my grandfather went to an Orthodox synagogue, where I was 12:00allowed to visit him.  And I remem-- I have a clear memory of him praying with a prayer shawl over his head, and with red velvet Torah covers, and all men.  And I was only allowed in there 'cause I was younger than nine.  I didn't go that often, but -- and I've compared notes with a cousin, another girl cousin, and she was also permitted to go visit him in the men's section.  So, that's kind of surprising.  I would guess, but I don't know, that it was a reaction, and I don't know -- a part of their grieving?  A part of -- I don't know what they intended to accomplish with it.  The fact that my oldest brother was training for a bar mitzvah was sort of on the table for a while.  My father 13:00actually wanted us all to join the ethical culture movement, but my parents, being -- doing due diligence, went around and checked out all the local possibilities in walking distance, and came up with the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue as being a liberal enough place.  But some interesting things happened there that -- I mean, like I say, I got all the holidays from age three, but somebody took it upon themselves to show the entire student body of that religious school the extremely graphic movie "Night and Fog" by Alain Resnais, which most grownups can't really handle.  It's very, very gruesome about the corpses in the camps.  And I saw that movie when I was seven, and it -- I would say it traumatized me and informed my whole life in ways that I'm still figuring out.  Other positive things that happened -- was that our 14:00teachers -- this is in religious school -- were like professors from real universities: Columbia and the University of Chicago.  And so, whatever I know or love about history is actually because of religious school and not the Hunter College campus schools.  Am I swallowing my words too much?

CW:  No, no.

JR:  I got a feeling I'm --

CW:  No.

JR:  Okay.

CW:  Were your -- were the teachers in your religious school also refugees?  Were the -- was it --

JR:  The one I remember the most probably was not.  But the religious school story that informs Yiddish, besides the horrible "Night and Fog" movie is, we had a -- our music professor was A.W. Binder, who's apparently well-known in the world of musicology.  And he taught us different holiday songs.  Sometimes they were parody songs.  He wrote something for Purim to one of the Gilbert and 15:00Sullivan tunes that I still sometimes remember.  But one day, and I don't remember if it was the same year as the "Night and Fog" movie, but I was pretty young, he chose to sing us "Oyfn pripetshik [By the hearth]."  And he was quite commanding, and he could get a whole room full of kids to shut up and sit down.  And he sang this song, all the verses, and he sang with tears streaming down his face.  And I had never seen a man cry.  I don't think I'd ever seen a man cry.  And I don't know how much I understood then and how much I -- because I learned the song later, whatever.  But I grasped -- maybe he translated it at the time -- that from the letters, I would gain strength, that things would happen, the world would change, but I -- from -- the letters would remain -- so, 16:00that's been true -- I really did hold onto that, and I have a set of letters on my living room wall that -- might say, "Well, those look pretty new to me."  They are new, because I Xeroxed the old ones, because we painted the wall.  But I've had the alphabet up on the wall for the last eighteen years.  And I like having it on the wall, and when I took it down to paint the wall, I wanted it back.  So, I put it back.

CW:  So, looking back at your childhood, what were -- I mean, you mentioned letters, but -- and the alphabet, but were the aspects of Jewish culture that were important in your family, to your parents?

JR:  Some things were incomprehensible to me, like my father always said, "Abi 17:00gezunt."  He never translated it.  I had no idea what it meant.  I knew that when somebody sneezed, you say gesundheit.  So, I thought he was saying "a big gezunt," a big health to you, which is not real-- I mean, he's saying the phrase "as long as you're healthy" -- he's saying "big deal."  And my father had a tremendous amount of personal resilience to life.  And he met life with a sense of humor that I now understand is real Yiddish humor.  And it wasn't just him.  It was his sisters, too.  And part of where I would see that humor was if they would laugh, it was a deep, deep, rusty sound, like they had at one time forgotten how to laugh, and laughing again was a -- (imitates laugh) it sort of 18:00-- (laughs) warm-up to get that out there.  Jewish culture at home.  My parents were both physicians, they were both fantastically busy.  My mother usually made it home for dinner and had dinner with us kids.  My father almost never made it home for dinner.  That's why I -- as I said, those weekends were so special.  And he would have dinner with my mother later, like nine or nine-thirty.  While my grandparents on both sides were still alive and -- everybody was gone by the time I was -- middle childhood -- there were holiday celebrations, mostly with my mother's family.  What was Jewish about it?  What an interesting question.  I do get mixed up between European and Jewish.  What 19:00else?  Everybody had at least some pretensions to a sort of a European elegance or glamour that was more common in the late '40s and '50s than it is now.

CW:  How did that manifest, or just show --

JR:  Oh, my father's sisters, in particular, they were incredibly critical.  Everything from whether you were dressed appropriately or whether you could make more of yourself or -- my mother was actually the most down-to-earth about -- she wasn't fussed-over, and she didn't want people to fuss over me.  But there are plenty of stories of the aunts annihilating various people, and actually once, when I went to a New Year's party -- this is now on the other side, on my 20:00mother's side instead of my father's side -- I was invited for supper, on New Year's.  And my mother wasn't well, so I went by myself.  And this entire circle of Russian Jewish ladies sort of had a little look.  "She gained" -- "No, she lost" -- "No, she gained" -- "No, she lost" -- and they went around the whole semicircle discussing whether I had gained or lost since they saw me last.  And I finally said, "Ladies, I'm here for dinner."  (laughs) Or supper.  [BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:  Can you explain more about -- when you say you get confused between European and -- what was European and Jewish, what do you mean by that?

JR:  Well, one of my mother's best friends was Russian and French, but not Jewish.  So, she had the same manner, the same level of looks, the same speech patterns.  She would also be very concerned and mix in when it wasn't her 21:00business.  (laughs) So, I couldn't -- I mean, she wasn't Jewish, so it wasn't her Jewish characteristics that were showing.  She was a friend of my mother's, so she acted a little bit like my mother.  Boy, I wasn't expecting this tack.

CW:  Sorry.  (laughs)

JR:  No, no, it's all right.  Help me find some other --

CW:  Yeah, sure.

JR:  -- entrée into it.

CW:  Well, I know you also traveled to Europe, right, when you were young.  Can you tell me about that experience, how that -- what memories do you have of those travels?

JR:  Yeah, that's kind of complicated, so don't let me spend too much time on it.  The big trip was when I was ten.  I went with my mother, my two brothers, and one of my father's sisters, who I realize now was suffering from empty nest depression.  Anyway, my father wasn't free to go for the whole two months.  He was gonna meet us later.  And we went all over the place, and my mother was 22:00terrific.  She did all the driving and she figured out where we were going to stay, and we ate a lot of picnics, and we sort of -- it was a style of traveling that I'm still comfortable with and that I still do myself.  If I'm traveling, I'm much more likely to buy some stuff at a supermarket for lunch than go out for every meal, and to try to stay in small, local family places and stuff like that.  But I thought my mother was really heroic to deal with all of us and all of our luggage and all of our -- I mean, that was a lot of personalities, my two brothers and me and the aunt?  But I saw a lot of stuff, and it was the summer I decided I wanted to be an artist.  So, that was really critical.

CW:  Can you tell me more about that?

JR:  Well, there was a very specific experience of -- I mean, I saw a lot of stuff, the Louvre and so on.  But we went to the island of Capri, and I saw a 23:00sculpture which had been hauled out of the sea.  So, it had been down in the ocean for several thousand years, and it was of a man sitting.  And I could tell how he was feeling from how he was sitting.  And I remember chasing after my parents and making them come back and look, because I somehow got that -- how is it that three thousand years later, a little American girl could know how that man was feeling?  And he wasn't even real, he was just a sculpture of a man.  And so, art must be the thing that transcends time.  It was a pretty profound thing, actually.  But I've stayed with that.

CW:  Yeah.  Well, obviously, we could talk for hours about your family background, but I just have one last question, which is: looking back, what do you feel you learned from your background, from your -- the way you were raised?

JR:  My mother was tremendously capable, and my father was tremendously resilient.  And I think I have incorporated a lot of both of those things.  It -- my mother wasn't fazed by -- well, it goes back to more war stories.  One of these women that I went to high school with whose mother survived the camp survived by claiming to be an electrician, which she wasn't.  She faked it.  And my mother went -- my own mother, years later, hearing this story, went on this tear of trying to repair all the electrical appliances in the house.  Fortunately, nothing bad happened.  But, I mean, that wasn't really common in the '50s, for women to take apart the iron or the toaster or -- how complicated is it, really, just because the men think they know how to do this.  Anyway, I 25:00thought that was kind of interesting, and I described her behavior on this big family trip.  My father's resilience -- he really had a lot of tragedy in his own extended family: a nephew who was ill, his various sisters' health problems.  He was one of six, so he had a lot of family to cope with.  And then, I don't -- I didn't write it in the report, but I had a rare sarcoma cancer when I was fifteen, and it was discovered quite suddenly.  And the treatment of choice in that era, actually even today, was amputation.  My parents were very -- they took this very hard, and so did I, I mean, obviously.  But my father's bounce was, "She's young and she's healthy, she'll be all right."  My mother's was more, "We should get a nurse, we should get a 26:00wheelchair, we should move, because our house has steps."  But my father won.  We stayed in the house with steps.  I actually went to summer camp that summer, like a month later.  I didn't have a wheelchair.  I went back to school.  It was not great going back to school, because my eighty-five percent Jewish high school reacted, "Ah!" with trauma, and a lot of screaming, which was really most unpleasant.  There's one woman I will never -- I don't know if I'll ever find it in my heart to forgive her, but she became literally hysterical.  I don't remember what they did with her.  I mean, they sort of led her away.  But I just ignored them, and different good things happened pretty quickly.  I relearned how to ride a bicycle within a year.  I had a usable, if extremely heavy, prosthesis that I wore to school, riding the bicycle.  And the Jewish 27:00summer camp stuff that I was doing at that time was all through NFTY, which is the Reform movement's youth group.  And that really is just happenstance.  The Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, their youth group was NFTY.  I became president of that.  Then I became secretary of New York and Manhattan and Bronx.  By the time I finished high school, I was actually -- I do want this on tape -- I was president of the Bronx and Manhattan Federation of Temple Youth and, moreover, I was dating the president of the Brooklyn Federation of Temple Youth.  So, between us, we had all of greater New York, (laughs) which I think is really a sweet story.  Very short relationship, but anyway.  But the most important thing about going to NFTY summer camp that same summer that I had the amputation -- and it really was within a month, because it was -- all this after July, maybe a month and a half.  But I met a Reform rabbi who made me feel -- I don't 28:00know how -- how do I explain this?  There was a level of acceptance that was really important and good, and his teaching to everybody, which for a Reform rabbi's kind of unusual, was just start doing stuff.  Even if you don't know what it means, just start doing it and you'll learn what it means.  And so, one of the things that he suggested -- to a whole group of us, it wasn't just to me -- was that we start lighting sabbath candles.  So, at fifteen and a half, I started lighting sabbath candles at home.  My parents had never done this before.  And this was one of the times when I understood -- or I understand now that my father actually did know some Yiddish, because he started telling all the aunts, "It's amazing!  Do you know that she wants to bentsh di likht [bless the candles]."  So, where the heck did -- where did this come from?  How did he even know this expression?  He knew this expression, and he didn't mind.  29:00And I -- so, I've always done that.  And I think it helped me focus on living and on hope and on -- I think it was a very good piece of advice from this Reform rabbi, and unusual for the time, and very unusual for the Reform movement, actually. 

CW:  So, then you left New York for school.  Can you talk a little bit about that decision?

JR:  (laughs) Well, there's a short story and there's a longer story.  In those days, we didn't apply to a dozen schools.  I applied to three.  I got into Reed in Portland.  My mother wanted me to go to a girls' school, Bryn Mawr, Smith kind of school, and I did not.  In that era, we went to visit and all the girls had Peter Pan collars and -- what do you call those circle pins?  30:00I knew I would not survive.  (laughs) I had long hair in braids, no makeup, peasant blouses.  We used to go to the Village for hootenannies; we were smoking cigarettes at thirteen.  I was a Manhattan kid.  I was not going to manage being made into a suburban wife at eighteen, I don't know.  That's what it looked -- felt like to me.  Reed was a little wild, (laughs) and I didn't like it, actually, and I chose not to stay there, eventually.  But -- and it was far, and my parents were very unhappy about that.  But I said that I had one brother already going to college in Massachusetts, and that was five hours by car, and West Coast was five hours by plane, so what was the difference?  Pretty heartless.

CW:  How -- what aspects of your background did you hold onto after you left, 31:00and for that first phase?

JR:  Pursuing learning about art, and the only way I could do that was to get up at four and draw and do calligraphy before anybody else woke up.  But to do that, then, I had to go to bed at nine.  And that allowed me to skip some of the socializing that I wanted to skip.  So, in retrospect, that was an incredible discipline, for a freshman to do that.  But that's pretty much what I did much of that year if not all of it.  I don't really remember.  What else?  I -- there was things I missed.  I missed -- even though I was practically in the country -- I mean, I don't know, the Reed campus is very 32:00bucolic.  I took a part-time job with a professor to work on his garden, and -- that there was another two people that I babysat for, and I had very strong reactions -- the -- well, this gets -- goes on and on.  The psychology professor kept his baby in a Skinner box.  I never went back.  (laughs) The Jewish professor, his wife kept kosher to the max.  I'd never seen anything like that.  And she threatened me if I so much as moved a teaspoon.  So, I never went back there, either.  And the professor whose garden I worked in was very European, was -- he was a German professor and clearly -- and not at all Jewish, and he had a wife who was quite a bit younger, who was nursing a baby.  33:00And he made sure -- this is so interesting, all these people who, at different times, tried to turn me to life.  I mean, it makes a story in itself.  He -- this professor wanted me to go in the kitchen and see how beautiful it was that his wife was nursing the baby.  And I thought it was beautiful, too.  But it's kind of an unusual -- that's a very European attitude about everything, about nudity and nursing and motherhood and the -- what women are for, and -- I mean, you could say it was a retro thing he did, but I liked it.

CW:  Who were your mentors or influences -- major influences in terms of art?

JR:  A professor at Reed called Lloyd Reynolds, who taught calligraphy, graphic design, and art history, and totally got me going on everything that I still 34:00do.  And after I -- it's kind of a checkered story, it'd take too long -- I ended up going to, what, three colleges but graduating six months early.  Anyway, at Portland State, I had a Parisian but Jewish sculptor -- sculpture professor called Frederic Littman, who was a fabulous technician, and who could do stuff in an immaculate grey suit.  He could move plaster without getting anything on himself.  He was pretty amazing, and he was encouraging.  And then, when I finally went, after finishing one bachelor's, when I went and did four years at art school, my sculpture advisor -- thesis advisor there was Manuel Izquierdo who was also, actually, a war -- not Jewish, but a refugee who 35:00got out of Spain by wearing short pants and pretending to be twelve when he was actually eighteen.  And, I mean, just a story and a half in losing his mother and -- anyway -- but he got me -- in fact, he used to -- he would sort of give his opinions, (laughs) and he said that -- what did he say?  He said that when upset, I was like a very little girl.  Really quite a small one, like about four, and that's pretty accurate, and that I had to be in charge.  And so, I have -- if I was going to work at anything, I'd better be the director, 'cause I wouldn't be able to do anything else.  (laughs) I was kind of, "Oh, okay."  But he taught me how to make molds and I have some big things out in the backyard that are made the way I learned in art school, which relates to a family story: both grandfathers made noodles.  But the Paris grandfather, not 36:00the Finnish grandfather, got tired of making noodles.  So, in 1928, he put all his capital into making molds of Edward VIII -- or is it Edward VII?  The one who abdicated.  The one who married Wallis Simpson.  And so, there was no coronation, there was no call for the bust, and he had to go back to noodles.  But I knew that he had made these things out of some form of artificial stone, and I went searching for how did people in the '30s make artificial stone?  And that's what my things in the backyard are made out of.  It's marble dust and rock and cement.

CW:  Wow.

JR:  You can't eat it, so -- (laughter)

CW:  I -- how did you come to Yiddish?

JR:  Okay, so the very specific story is that my father lingered many years 37:00with a nasty cancer himself.  And he told me that he was making a contribution to the National Yiddish Book Center in memory of his father and that he would like to ask me to keep up a membership in it in his honor, in his memory.  So, thirty-six dollars a year, I could probably manage that.  So, I did that, and so I started receiving the early "Book Peddlers," that's what it was called at first.  And then, I thought it would be interesting to study Yiddish.  And there was a class -- it only happened that once, actually, at a local synagogue, with somebody who had done the Columbia program.  So, he didn't know much more than we did.  He knew -- one year, he was one year ahead of us.  Maybe two years.  And I think I was already pregnant with my younger son.  Anyway, 38:00that's how I can date when did I formally start studying, because he's twenty-- the kid is twenty-one, so twenty-one-and-a-half years ago.  And I sent some of my early written exercises to my father, who couldn't read them 'cause he didn't know the Hebrew alphabet.  (laughs) And I tried to greet him on the phone, but he was so surprised, he didn't -- he couldn't quite relate to it.  Then he became very excited and thought it was very brave, because I didn't have German and I didn't have Russian, and that's true.  I have no German.  I have a tiny bit of Russian, from my grandparents, and I did have the Hebrew alphabet.  So, it wasn't completely impossible for me to begin to study.  What did happen was the first handout in the class, that my corner was bent up, which sounds like -- what is it?  (laughs) It meant that I had a handout that did not have ayen.  It was a list of all the letters, but the corner had been bent up in the 39:00Xeroxing and I didn't have -- my particular piece of paper, I was the only in the class -- and I didn't have ayen.  So, it took weeks for me to understand what was going on with the vowels, because this is pretty critical.

CW:  Do you have any idea why your father -- how -- what the motivation of making that gift in honor of his father at the Yiddish Book Center -- as opposed to other places?

JR:  I think it was partly also dividing up charities, 'cause he told my two brothers different charities, which was very clever.  I mean, he told -- he gave each of us three kids a charity that we might actually want to continue in his memory.  And he knew that I was the big Yid, and -- let me think.  How did -- he had no idea that I was gonna start studying it.  He did tell me the -- that he remembered -- that he thought it was very exciting that the Book Center existed, and that he remembered how happy his father had been, arriving to New 40:00York and having Yiddish newspapers, because he had been living in Finland without Yiddish newspapers and in France without anything he could read.  And, I don't know, anyway, apparently being able to -- that Yiddish as his international language was his sort of passport.  And I have, also, a dip pen from my father's father, and I've tested it in both directions and it writes really nicely, right to left.  And I have some stuff that he's written in both Russian and in Yiddish.  So, certainly the grandparents were literate.

CW:  And then, after that -- I mean, what did you -- what was your first impression of the language when you took that first course, yeah?

JR:  I loved the cognates.  I got the humor right away.  I was filled with 41:00glee, 'cause I was about to start beating my husband at something.  My husband's a college professor, and on our first date, he corrected my pronunciation of something and that was almost it right there.  But we both sing folksongs, and he had a few folksongs he sang in Yiddish.  And he wasn't the slightest bit religious, and I didn't see why he could sing in Yiddish and I couldn't.  So, the idea that I was going to learn enough Yiddish to be able to sing better than he could and more accurately -- and I've now completely outdistanced him, and that's a great pleasure, although he keeps, as a reminder, his diploma from Yiddish shule [school].  He went to afterschool class for two years when he was eleven.  And that's where he learned the letters and the holidays, but no prayers.  And it's kind of impressive to me that he wants it in the dining room.  It used to be in a remote corner, but he's put it in the 42:00dining room, underneath an award he got from Japan.  It's like it's -- so, he's very proud of it, and he's very -- it's been fun to have something measurable.  I grew up with two older brothers, and I married somebody who's the oldest of three.  And to beat him at something is just delicious.  That's a whole lot of it.  And then, also being able to understand anything, and understand more of meshugaas from his father, or there's -- there's some very specific Yiddish meshugaas kind of stuff like -- in this climate, for example, I just told you earlier that here in Seattle, when the weather is good, like on a Sunday you might say, "Okay, we're going on a picnic now!"  Or say it's a Saturday -- because Sunday it might rain.  So, anyway, there was a day when we planned a picnic, planned it on Saturday for Sunday.  And my husband insisted that it 43:00might rain.  And my -- our son and I were saying, "It's really not likely, and let's plan it.  Let's buy the food."  And so, we bought the food and we packed the picnic basket, and we climbed in the car on Sunday.  It was a beautiful sunny day, and we closed all the doors.  And damned if Joe didn't say, "It might still rain."  (laughs) And, I mean, this is a sort of negative thinking that is a -- very specific to the culture.  And until I -- you wanted to talk about how does all this affect my family.  I mean, I couldn't understand my husband if I hadn't studied Yiddish.  And I couldn't -- I didn't understand all this stuff about my parents and how they reacted to things.  And I did -- I 44:00probably wrote the thank you speech for my younger son's bar mitzvah, because he does -- he had, at that time, very little Yiddish.  But I have it there for you to look at.  And he was willing to make his thank you speech in Yiddish, and everybody was -- (gasps) but it must have rubbed off in some good way, because quite happily and totally voluntarily, he's studying Yiddish in college.  And when -- how often does that happen?  I mean, usually your kid says, "That's your thing, I'm not interested."  So --

CW:  So, how did Yiddish play into your family, like the rituals and when -- did you use it with your -- in your family?

JR:  My family here in Seattle?

CW:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JR:  Well, it gets a little mystical.  I told the story to someone, and she hasn't spoken to me since, so I don't know.  But let's see.  Where does one even start?  Well, I'll start with the Yiddish part, because the other part is 45:00-- came earlier, how did I marry this man at forty and all that.  But anyway, I'll get back to that if you really want.  So, we wanted to have a baby, and we weren't.  And so, we started singing Yiddish lullabies as zemirot [Shabbos hymns sung at the table] on a Friday night, and we did that for quite a long time.  A couple years.  Plus, we performed Yiddish lullabies at Folklife, which is a local area folk music deal.  So -- and I did a whole dossier for Zach when he started studying Yiddish, that he should know how early this all happened.  I started with the prenatal influences, and then I pointed out that he broke the water when I was at a Yiddish singalong.  And this man with a 46:00horrible voice was singing in Yiddish, (laughs) and the baby objected, and that started the labor.  So, I think that's pretty amazing, actually.  And then, we took him to his first klezmer concert when he was, I don't know, less than seven months old.  He was -- he could sit and he could clap.  We actually, in advance, arranged that we'd get our money back if we only lasted a few minutes, and then that baby sat up and clapped the whole thing.  (claps) So, I don't know.  I don't know where -- you can really take yourself around here with the Yiddish souls and -- who are -- I'm going to fast-forward to something that just happened this fall.  So, both kids have grown and gone, and I was really feeling the empty nest stuff.  This Sukkot, I had made a nice sukkah, and I saw 47:00a notice somewhere on an email from the university or something that there was a minyan, mostly of graduate students, that was looking for a place to hold a Shabbat potluck, preferable someplace with a sukkah.  So, I volunteered.  And I was standing outside.  It was kind of foggy in the backyard, near the sukkah, and these lights started coming down the street, and they were bicycle lights.  And the first five or six people to come were on bicycles.  And they were clearly contemporary.  I mean, they had Lycra outfits and helmets and -- but they started taking off their helmets and their parkas, and they had Yiddish names and biblical names.  And it was like, who are these people?  And it was pretty amazing.  And the lead cyclist had a knapsack and took a Bundt cake, an 48:00entire apple Bundt cake out of a knapsack.  And it's the same apple cake that I make, that my grandmother used to make, and, who's this guy?  Guys cook?  And anyway, it was -- to me, it was like a -- this is Hebrew, but -- "am yisrael chai [Hebrew: the Jewish people live]."  It was -- they aren't all gone.  And there are lots of new people coming to Seattle all the time who are not attached -- this is mostly a group of mostly single people and mostly grad students.  Some of them are working in local tech things, but -- so, what made them comfortable in our home was -- it certainly wasn't the religious stuff.  I mean, Joe didn't participate at all.  And I couldn't keep up with their Hebrew.  But there was -- what was there?  There was the -- there were the letters, there were the cookbooks, there were the regular books.  There was the hospitality, that we, you know, even let them come.  Forgot how we got into 49:00that.  Oh, you wanted to know how Yiddish was affecting the family.  Yeah, it's nice to have something to hang it -- hang your -- oh, like -- again, when my younger son was ready for camp, it was, oh, we can't send him to religious camp, 'cause that won't be okay with Joe.  And we can't send him to a super Reform camp, 'cause that won't be okay with me.  And anyway, we ended up sending him to a Labor Zionist camp.  There is such a thing in -- just across the border in Canada.  So, that's sort of a more socialist thing.  So, what I'm finding and have found is that the well-placed word of Yiddish helps to keep the circles together, that -- and, in fact, I get really upset when -- the gal who cuts my hair uses Yiddish when she talks to me, but she uses it wrong.  50:00(laughs) It's "schmaltzy" this and "schmaltzy" that.  And I think as a private language, it's -- has amazing possibilities, everything from pet names for each other if you -- my husband Joe's certificate is made out in the name of Yosl, and he loves it, to be called Yosl.  And my Yiddish name is Taybl.  And I just found out recently that my grandfather's sister was called Taybl.  So, now how did I get Taybl?  Pesach Fishman gave me that name, but he gave me that name because someone in Israel had given me the name Yona.  But Pesach was more nuanced.  He said, Taybl, yeah, change one letter, you've got Taybl.  So, you go from sweet dove to devil.  That's -- (laughs) that's kind of interesting.  51:00And I had dragged Zach and sometimes Joe to every Yiddish program there is around here.  I mean, I actually found a map.  I didn't find it for today.  I'll -- I'd have to dig again.  But I made a map at the time of Zach's bar mitzvah to explain that we'd been to Disney World once, but we'd been to Yiddishland fourteen times, 'cause we'd been to this program and that program -- and it takes, unfortunately, a little money to do that, and the leisure to do it.  But -- and it's so funny, people in the East seem to think that Ohio, yeah, that's West.  (laughs) Wisconsin, yeah, that's practically the West Coast, but -- (laughs) for people on the West Coast, unless it's maybe San Francisco, it's not the West.  And even San Francisco, I can't think of anybody from around here that I know that went to the KlezCalifornia stuff.  I did, at least once, maybe twice.  But -- and I've been to CIYCL in Los Angeles.  So, 52:00I've planned a fair number of family trips, either with Joe or with Zach or with Joe and Zach, or -- when I went to KlezKanada, Zach had already left for college, 'cause I didn't succeed in getting Zach to KlezKanada while he was still in high school.  He was more interested in going to his Labor Zionist summer camp.  And by that time, he was employed, he was a counselor.  But I went to KlezKanada, by myself.  I enjoyed it less than I would have thought, partly because, to be frank, people would not leave me alone about how I was getting around on the site.  And I was doing fine, thank you, and I didn't trip and I didn't fall and I wasn't in danger.  But the -- (laughs) the -- again, another Yiddish meshugaas, the sort of angst about, "She'll fall, she'll fall, she'll fall!"  Or I can remember at that KlezCalifornia conclave or whatever, weekend in San Francisco, when Adrienne Cooper was still alive, Steve Weintraub, 53:00I think's his name -- actually, I'm not even positive he was there, but there was a bunch of Yiddish dancing.  Maybe it was with the Strauss -- Warschauer-Strauss couple.  Anyway, there was dancing, there was lively dancing, and I -- there is a way that I dance on crutches, and I'm pretty secure doing it.  Maybe less so the last ten years, but -- I don't have much opportunity lately -- but Adrienne Cooper's mother was like this.  (laughs) She was just, "Stop her!  Somebody stop her before she hurts herself!"  (laughs) And I give Adrienne a lot of credit for saying, "It's all right.  She's fine.  She's doing well."  (laughs) But anyway, that's the kind of -- so, this is another thing that's very true.  It was a piece of what drove me west and it's a piece of what keeps me from going east, is the further west you go, the more tolerance and acceptance there is for American pioneer values, for independence, 54:00for doing it yourself, for doing it your own way, for women doing whatever it is -- one of my first visuals when I came to Oregon as a freshman was a gas station where -- it was a ma and pa gas station, and they were both wearing coveralls and they were both pumping gas.  And in Manhattan, believe me, a woman wearing coveralls -- I mean, you did not see -- we were still carrying gloves.  I'm just older enough for you that it probably sounds real foreign, but I'm serious, so -- but the closer you get to the East Coast, "You can't, you shouldn't, you oughtn't, you mustn't, it's dangerous."  I mean, there's a reason why "nisht geferlekh [not dangerous]" is such a common phrase, because some things really were dangerous but some things really are not dangerous.

CW:  Can I ask you about your Yiddish teachers?

JR:  Well, I had lots.

CW:  Pesach Fishman?

JR:  Yeah.  He was probably the best, although his comment to me was not so flattering: besides the Taybl and the tayvl [devil], he told me that I murder the language, but that I make myself understood.  And that's probably still true, because on -- in my eagerness to communicate, I will just change the word order or not care if something agrees or whatever.  But we were recently in Japan, Joe and I, when Joe got this award.  And I had to function in Japanese.  I don't know any Japanese.  And I functioned almost exclusively with gesture.  And it happened to me once in my single days, to be out dancing, communicating only with gesture -- very loud disco music -- and it turned out I was dancing with somebody who was actually deaf and expected to continue the conversation in sign language.  (laughs) So, I was that good with my -- whatever.  So, anyway, Pesach was a very gentle and loving soul.  He, again, 56:00somehow extended to so many people a warmth and -- he was strict, too, and he came here once for a Mame-Loshn conference, and we had a blizzard.  (laughs) And he told me later, sometime when I saw him in New York, that he tried to explain to them in New York that there came a vint, there came a wind.  And it's true, I mean, we went from nothing to enough quick sleet snow that the van carrying the food for our Loshn dinner couldn't get down the hill.  I mean, it slid sideways off the road and we had to have somebody with a four-wheel drive go and rescue the dinner.  So, I had the experience of Pesach teaching in our 57:00own home turf, and he was terrific at making things approachable for people.  He'd say, "You already know some Yiddish.  This is your finger, this is your noz [nose]," and -- or maybe he -- without even the joins, "Finger, noz."  And much is being made about different ways to teach language, whether it should be immersion or this book or that book or whatever.  But whatever I did with teaching children in children's programs, I did -- even though I never saw Pesach work with children, I did sort of as if it was Pesach.  I mean, I would have an actual -- oh, let's see, I don't know, a child's plastic teacup and a 58:00spoon.  And I would mime whatever I was doing, and they could understand me -- they could've understood me even if I didn't say anything at all.  But eventually, with repetition, I worked with a vocabulary of about 250 words with young children over two years, and they did retain something.  So, I'm all for an immersion style, without using English and with a lot of -- just some sort of faith that they're gonna understand, that you're communicating.

CW:  Is there another teacher in particular that was meaningful to you?

JR:  Well, several.  I'm sure you'll be hearing about Ruth Peizer, who was very strict and organized and orderly.  And she also made pronouncements.  She 59:00told me that I could not be in her intermediate class until I learned to write, 'cause I didn't know how to write.  I didn't know the script.  So, that was actually the beginning of the Yiddish murals, was I figured it's going to be such a drag to learn how to write, I might as well do something useful.  And so, I learned how to write by repeating the words of those songs over and over again.  'Cause I didn't just learn how to write.  I learned how to write with a brush, and that's actually not trivial with an -- getting some kind of an edge to that.  So, I did study with Ruth early on, and some with Rita Katz.  I think it -- I know it was me that organized Rita coming to one of the smaller congregations to teach an evening class.  That was -- it wasn't as long-lived as Ruth's class, but it was very useful, because Rita's accent is so good and her expressions are so accurate and authentic.  So, she's my go-to person for 60:00pronunciation.  And then, just last spring, I did a quarter with Paula Teitelbaum, the online Yiddish learning.  And there are a few wrinkles with using Google Hangout -- and for me, a few wrinkles about the secular world versus the religious world, because -- as if I haven't made it more complicated -- enough for myself, I'm religious enough that I'm -- I don't fit with secular Yiddishists and -- but I'm not above making fun of them.  (laughs) So, in one of those Google Hangouts, somebody was complaining that I was too dark.  I was 61:00back in the guestroom there with a small netbook.  They couldn't see me.  I should close the curtains.  So, I closed the curtains and I came back in.  I said it was just the light of the Shechinah [Hebrew: feminine aspect of the Divine], and I hope that suitably embarrassed them.  (laughs) But anyway, let me think if that's all on the teachers.  That's pretty much --

CW:  There -- maybe -- can you talk a little bit about the -- sort of what you learned through the language?  What values -- and how, yeah, what you learned through the language itself?

JR:  Oh, the proverbs are a great mainstay.  When I have had to deal with 62:00family trouble, illness, death, any of those things, I always go back and read different kinds of proverbs, and sometimes they're funny and sometimes they're right on, and I'm --

CW:  Any particular ones that --

JR:  Oh, there are just a whole bunch drifting -- rippling through there.  But I guess in terms of my own life, if you can't go over, go under.  So, that's my current challenge, is I have an art exhibit all ready to go, and I did a Kickstarter lookalike to have the funds to install it, and I cannot get the city agency to commit to the install date, or even to an install at all.  And I'm going nuts, so if I can't do it that way, they're not gonna get rid of me, I'm gonna do it that way.  (laughs) And so, I think persistence and resilience are 63:00two things.  And then, are you familiar with the psychological studies about survival, that -- well, you can get into mystical stuff about the Havdalah candle with this, too, but -- that all qualities are paired.  The Havdalah candle has paired wicks.  So, you can be soft or you can be powerful.  And if it's no longer the time to be powerful, you have to be soft.  And if it's no longer the time to be soft, then you have to be -- and, I mean, for some people, it's like schizophrenia.  But it's actually -- it's the biggest lesson for rolling with what happens.  I mean, those grandparents who went from Odessa to Paris and then got out of Marseilles a week ahead of the Nazis, do you know that 64:00they had their passports stamped for going to Thailand?  They had a visa for Thailand in case my father didn't come through -- and got them out -- and didn't get them out of France to New York?  I mean, I'm glad they got to go to New York, but who'd even think of getting a visa to go to Thailand?  I don't know.  Maybe everybody got one.  But I was kind of charmed.

CW:  I -- can I -- can you tell me a little more about the -- some specific art pieces, maybe, about the mural pieces that involve Yiddish that you've worked on?  The --

JR:  Okay, well, let's see.  I actually painted a total of eight murals for the city bus/train service, which is called "Metro."  And these are -- there are wooden bus shelters all over town to stand in out of the rain.  And there 65:00was a beautification project to cut down on graffiti, inviting artists to make paintings in them.  And I thought it would be really interesting to define a Jewish corner.  So, I made four -- north, south, east, west -- from a certain intersection in northeast Seattle.  And they were up for, I think, about fifteen years.  They weather, and so eventually, they get taken down.  And people liked them, and they missed them.  And I think it helped convey a sense of place.  The subject matter was Yiddish folk songs, and the words and the music were painted, as well as some illustration illustrating the song.  And I painted them warm and dry in the garage.  Well, actually, not so warm.  Dry in the garage.  (laughs) And then, they were installed in place.

CW:  And I know that your -- many of your pieces have Yiddish titles.  Can you 66:00explain --

JR:  Yeah.  Let's see.  So, I've been titling everything in Yiddish since 2003, and some things as far back as '91.  Often, things that I felt couldn't be said in English, that were either too personal, too emotional, too -- remember back to the three-year-old who didn't know what language to say "ow-ee" in?  So, I found that I could say things in Yiddish that I didn't want to say otherwise.  And mostly, I was just lifting things out of songs.  I'll show you a couple big, big figures in the back yard.  One that comes to mind, when I was really looking to have a second child was -- du bist geborn gevorn in mayn harts [you were born in my heart].  So, you were born in my heart.  It's actually a 67:00phrase which is used in the adoption movement for explaining to a -- adopted child what their origin is.  But to me, what it meant was the loss of recurrent miscarriages, which I couldn't speak about, but I could make sculptures of women and bundles or women and children.  And there are some other titles, as well, but that one came to mind.  And then, oh, the proverbs get in the act, too.  I have a wonderful photograph of -- I couldn't find this photograph, but I -- it'll turn up.  I have a photograph of my father, seen only as a shadow, taking a photograph of two of his sisters and an unnamed woman.  And they're leaning in -- they're gossiping.  They're leaning in.  And so -- and that one I 68:00thought was interesting enough that I did cast it in bronze, and the foundry wrote "Gossip" on the order form and on the mold, 'cause you could see that's what these ladies were doing.  But to me, the Yiddish title, "Vos dray kenen iz nisht keyn sod" -- "what three people know is no longer secret" -- has -- it might -- it has much more meaning, much more resonance than "Gossip."  It just isn't enough.  And I have a more recent sculpture in terra cotta, which shows -- old couple.  They seem old.  She -- they're wearing hats and long trench coats, and they're sort of arm-in-arm, and they're sharing one umbrella.  So, two old people sharing one umbrella.  Now, it could have a title, "Two Old People Sharing One Umbrella," abi gezunt, right?  But I call it "Shtarkayt un 69:00eynikayt [Strength and unity]," and this is a phrase that I know, as an old Yiddish leftist cry, and it appears in a poem that I have somewhere, and it's been adopted by, I think, the World Zionist Congress or somebody.  But it's a lefty slogan, and it means solidarity.  And, to me, this sculpture of these old people are -- they're people that I actually know, and they really were amazing, supporting each other.  They were walking in the rain to the polls, to vote.  I mean, that's where I saw them, where I got the pose and the hat and the -- so, "Shtarkayt un eynikayt" -- I mean, strength in unity.  It wouldn't -- in English, it wouldn't mean anything much.  You'd have to know all sorts of stuff about the origins of the phrase to make too much of it, I think.  Does that make sense?

CW:  Yeah.

JR:  And then, as part of our family practice, besides bentshing the likht -- bentsh di likht, we do Havdalah, and I read "Got fun avraham [God of Abraham]" 70:00in Yiddish every Saturday.  Sometimes I read a different poem.  I have a nice book of poems.  Several books of poems.  But within the "Got fun avraham" poem, there's a lot of great lines, that the hungry should be satisfied and the -- should be amply fed, and the naked should be clothed and the -- all sorts of things.  So, I started lifting lines from that poem and other poems, and sometimes I'd make a sculpture to fit the line instead of just finding a line to fit the sculpture.  So, I believe that, like this upcoming exhibit that I'm trying to get together -- of works with titles all in Yiddish -- will have the effect of combining language and making language visible, which is tricky, and make -- to some degree, making culture visible, because all my recent figures, 71:00certainly the last ten, fifteen years, are -- they're connected figures.  They're three people on a bench.  They're two people leaning against each other.  They're mother and child.  They're -- when you think sculpture, think one statue, all alone.  And so, the fact that I'm choosing to make connections between people -- I mean, you don't have to be Jewish to understand them.  When I had -- I've had a couple one-woman shows in this area, with Yiddish titles -- nobody batted an eye.  Could have been Swedish titles.  Mother and child, I get it.  But if I could have mother and child with a Yiddish title, that's more complicated than just mother and child.  There's something about that relationship -- and have that in sort of a Jewish context, to me that would be -- that would mean more, yeah.

CW:  Yeah.  What do you see as the role of these gatherings that you've been 72:00to and sort of sought out in maintaining, sustaining a Yiddish-speaking community today?

JR:  A lot of the connections, for me, have always been the teachers.  I didn't mention Miriam Isaacs is very gifted.  Where did I see her?  I think in KlezKanada.  But as far as recurring connection with people, unless I brought my own friends with me from Seattle, either accidentally or on purpose, it's not really a long enough connection for anything much to happen.  And for some of the standards, I was really miffed that Steve Weintraub didn't remember me at KlezKanada.  He said he'd never met me before.  But anyway, maybe on some 73:00level he remembered having met me, because I wanted to dance at least one dance -- a partner dance -- and he didn't ask any questions about how we were going to do it.  He just began, which I can do, and which worked fine, and nobody said, "She'll fall, she'll fall!"  (laughs) So, I think the circuit riders who go to all these things, to some degree -- it's all a blur to them after a while.  I mean, I'm not trying to say anything bad about anybody.  But, I mean, how could it not be?  What's kind of neat is when there's -- I think, actually, the social dimension's enormously important.  I don't attend the Wednesday beginning or intermediate class that's happening right now in Seattle these days.  But I do go an hour before to have coffee, to have tea, with a few people that I've identified as people that I want to know more about, and I've encouraged them all to stick with Yiddish, especially one.  I'm definitely the 74:00cause of her studying Yiddish.  So, the social component of finding your group or making your group or staying with your group, I think, is very powerful and very important.  And this is -- that's a downside to the traveling circus kind of stuff.  Well, I don't know.  I mean, if you lived in New York and you went every year to KlezKanada, Klez -- whatever --

CW:  Kamp?

JR:  -- KlezKamp, you'd probably meet the same people after a while.

CW:  As an artist, where do you see the role of the artist in transmitting culture, and particularly Yiddish culture in this case.

JR:  A lot having to do with values.  I mean, I'm no Disney fan, but some 75:00healthy G-rated stuff, whether it's books or -- I have some children's books around here that were here for some -- another reason, 'cause there were going to be children coming over.  But I think the idea that culture's transmitted partly through books and illustrations in books -- you can just take that a little further: paintings, posters, sculpture, I suppose media, now, whatever -- I don't actually know that you get the full experience of something that's essentially tactile in a -- like a website, but it's better than -- certainly better than nothing.  I'm very, very aware of legacy stuff.  I don't know if it's partly my age.  My eldest brother died within the last -- a year ago, and 76:00-- you know, the death of Adrienne Cooper was very difficult for a lot of people.  And a local person, Meyer Rothenberg, who worked on the Mame-Loshn died last summer, and Ruth Peizer died last summer.  So, I went to two funerals with Wendy Marcus in the same car last summer, one of somebody in their late eighties -- okay, happens -- and one of somebody younger than us.  And that was hard, really, really hard.  So, in terms of legacy, I guess there's a -- well, people always want to tell other people what to do.  "I have more wisdom than you do, and so you ought to listen to me."  But there's a lot of wisdom and there's a lot of guidance.  And some of it's kind of neutral.  It's not from 77:00your own parents and it's not from -- and some of it's negative, like this -- everything is anxiety-producing and you're gonna die, and you -- everything is dangerous.  So, I guess trying to transmit something about the goodness of life or what constitutes the goodness in life, I think that's a whole lot of -- actually what Judaism is about, whether or not you convey that through Yiddish or Ladino or whatever.  I mean, it's actually interesting in Seattle that a piece of the Ladino culture is to make Jewish life -- I'm not gonna say Jewish life is more relaxed in Seattle, because this -- among the Sephardim, there's lots of very Orthodox people.  But there's also a -- I don't know how familiar you are with Sephardic -- they're not Litvaks.  Jews who are not Litvaks!  78:00Imagine it!  We're not always going -- yeah.  So, I mean, it's going to be interesting in the future, because Seattle's the -- at the university, Jewish studies is making itself out to be a Sephardic study center, 'cause it's the third largest Sephardic community in the US.  That's the smart thing to do.  I mean, I sort of tried to do that with Yiddish back around 2000, and U-Dub taught Yiddish for three years and it faded away, 'cause there weren't enough students.  So, I don't know, I'm probably too tired now to think of anything more profound about goodness stuff.  I guess I wanted to say about ethical wills, that I have my husband's grandmother's ethical will in Yiddish, in pencil, on scrap paper.  And I have my St. Petersburg grandfather's ethical will written in Russian, with a little Yiddish on the cover page.  So, I guess 79:00both of them have to do with looking for the good.  So, you can either see that as stupid utopianism from people who, by the way, lived through the Depression as well as World War II, or something just more positive.  Trying to think if there's anything else specific about -- I guess literature, with Paula Teitelbaum.  We actually read like a whole story -- couple of them Kadia Molodowski.  And they're wonderful stories, and very colorful language.  And I got Rita to read one aloud for me so I could mimic it exactly, so I could pronounce it really well.  So, you wanted to know what about transmission?  80:00What did it --

CW:  No, I was just --

JR:  -- as an artist --

CW:  -- wondering to -- where you see yourself in transmitting Yiddish culture.  I guess one other way to ask it is do you consider yourself an activist for Yiddish?

JR:  Yeah, nobody in their right mind would title all -- their entire body of work in Yiddish.  (laughs) That came out a little strong, but -- and, I mean, those Yiddish bus shelters, we had -- I had stories of people from Israel and newcomers from Russia and different people demanding that cars be stopped because they saw Yiddish on the street.  And I think that it really, really was very unusual.  I don't know what the long-lasting effect is.  Well, one possible effect -- so, a lot of this activism was '97 -- well, the first Yiddish mural was '95, so '95 to 2003, maybe -- but somewhere in there, like the year 81:002000, the ACT Theatre downtown put on "God of Vengeance," the Sholem Asch play, and the conventional Yiddish-speaking community hated it, and reacted probably much like they did in 1909 or 1919, that the -- that this is a bastardization of all we hold dear, and it's -- and it makes Yiddish out to be a gutter language, and it's not.  And we are made of finer stuff.  It's a Litvish sort of a thing.  But why did the ACT Theatre even think to put on a Yiddish production, 2000?  It was three years after the Yiddish "Mikado."  (laughter) But -- so, do we want to transmit the culture of things like "God of Vengeance"?  I mean, I'm not gonna say what is literature and what isn't, but I guess the whole thing 82:00is searching for like-minded souls, that there's something about how you use language or how you draw or how you make stuff that either attracts or repels.  I don't know what else I can say about that.  Yeah, I do consider myself activist. 

CW:  Well, I just want to ask one more question before we end this portion, 'cause that's such a nice note to end on.  But I do want to ask if you have any idea about where Yiddish is headed?

JR:  Well, at risk of giving offense, I haven't heard either of you speak any Yiddish.  But I think university-based Yiddish is really a problem, and I see it already in my son's second quarter of Yiddish with Weinreich, even with a 83:00good teacher.  And you'll hear this from Rita, I'm sure, that it ain't Yiddish unless it has some tam [flavor].  It isn't Yiddish unless you're making it up, unless you're murdering the language but you're making yourself understood.  I mean, the whole joy of Yiddish is not getting it right.  The word order can -- the word order -- what does Leo Rosten say?  I -- "she's playing Carnegie Hall and she gave me two tickets.  She gave me Carnegie Hall and she gave me two tickets.  She's playing Carnegie Hall and she only gave me two tickets."  It's all the emphasis and the word order and the -- so, I'm not sure about university Yiddish as the best base.  I'm also really sure that it's too late in people's lives.  And not too late altogether, but, I mean, I still think -- I believed very strongly that the pilot program I did for two years with preschoolers aged 84:00two to five was really important, because it proved to me, anyway, that that's the age when they learn.  And if you wanted to really be part of them, you have to start really young.  And so, instead, we have PJ Library, do you know what that is?  Sending Jewish books to kids.  That's good.  But I actually -- I mean, I got that idea from how native Chinook -- native speakers are trying to preserve Chinook in this area, and they're doing it in daycare centers.  And that's the right place. 

CW:  Yeah.

JR:  Maybe all the university-trained people will have Yiddish daycare centers.  (laughs) With Russians, to teach them Yiddish.  That's not that far-fetched.  [BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:  A hartsikn dank -- thank you (laughter) for --

JR:  Nishto farvos.

CW:  -- for just taking the time and talking about all this.  It's been really a pleasure.

JR:  Oh, good.

[END OF INTERVIEW]