DAN OPATOSHU ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is March 12th, 2014, I am here in Los Angeles, California with Dan Opatoshu, grandson of Yiddish writer Yosef Opatoshu, and son of Yiddish- and English-language actor David Opatoshu. We are going to record an interview for the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.

Today, we're gonna be talking about your grandfather. Can you tell me his name, and when and where he was born?

DAN OPATOSHU: He was born Yosef Opatovsky, in the Słupsk forest which was around the town of Mława, in Poland. I was only seven-and-a-half when he died, but despite the short years I knew him, it belies how much contact we had, and his influence on me. My father was an only child, and I was an only child, so I was the only grandchild. And, this is one of the little pen-and-ink drawings 1:00that Chagall gave as a gift for my birth. (reading) "Far dovid un zayn vayb" -- for David and his wife. "Un zayn zin" -- and his son. "Mit hartsike grusn" -- with hearty greetings, "fun mark shagal [from Marc Chagall]," New York, 1948. And, as you can see, it's a little infant lying in bed with the nude mother, and the man with wings flying through the air with a bouquet of flowers to her bedside. Mitn blumen [With flowers]. My grandparents delighted in my company, as grandparents are wont to do. And my parents took advantage of this by dropping me off at Opatoshu's house, apartment, every Friday, and leaving me there until 2:00Sunday evening, so that they could have a weekend alone. And every summer, I would spend in Opatoshu's cottage in upstate New York. I hardly ever heard him speak English, because they only spoke Yiddish to me. Opatoshu would read me and Adela my favorite comic books, which were usually Walt Disney comics, or Little Lulu, or Nancy and Sluggo, except they would simultaneously translate them all into Yiddish. And it never occurred to me to question how Huey, Dewey, and Louie suddenly spoke such a refined, poetic Yiddish. He was a huge presence in my life, even if it was only for seven and a half years. Yosef was one of the few Yiddish writers that actually didn't need a day job. So he had an 3:00economically comfortable existence, because of the j-- because of the weekly stories for the "Tog," their republication in other journals -- in Poland, in Russia, in France, in South America -- the sale of the novels, and his very frequent lecture tours. He made enough to have a, not wealthy, at all, but certainly a comfortable existence. I would say probably something akin to a tenured university professor at the time in the '30s, or the '20s and the '30s. He gave the impression -- and probably was -- of a big man, a strong man, a 4:00soccer player, sort of thing, very broad-shouldered. Made reference to, Chagall in letters to him, would always say "upon your broad shoulders lie -- " stuff like that. He had a very distinctive visage, face, with a chin that came out like that and a big nose and an under bite. Sort of a Don Corleone thing. Piercing eyes. And was a very forceful presence amongst people in social situation and on lecture circuits. His most well-known novel, "In poylishe velder," "In Polish Woods," was actually a two-part novel, that took place during the revolutionary period in Poland, during the moral decline of the 5:00Hasidic dynasties in Europe. And actually, that novel got him excommunicated by a number of Hasidic rabbis. There were orgies -- nisht sheyn [not pretty], as some people felt. His novel, "A tog in reygensberg," "A Day in Regensburg," went back to Regensburg in medieval Germany. It took place in a twenty-four-hour period, but a very eventful day in the city of Regensburg, where there is a big wedding going on, where there are political things going on, but his challenge in doing that was he wanted to write the book in what his scholarship and others that he drew upon told him Yiddish would have been like in that historical 6:00period. Therefore, that's about the only book of his that I find completely impossible to read. Because it's almost like reading Chaucer. Both the narrative and the dialogue. He was adamant in terms of rejecting the over-romanticized imagery of the trees, waving like prayer shawls and stuff like that. It was more a modernist thing, and certainly in the stuff about America, his writing was much more erotic than most Yiddish works have been. He wrote about gangsters and charlatans and roughnecks. He wrote about the situation of blacks in America, 7:00one of his more famous stories is called "Lintsheray [Lynching]," about lynchings in the South. So it was edgier.

CW: What was his feeling about America?

DO: His identity was complicated, because he was happy for the economic opportunity, he was happy for the freedom, he was happy for the intellectual life, but it was -- definitely, he lived within a Yiddishist milieu, even though it was New York.

CW: Can you tell me what you know about his family background?

DO: His father was a maskil [non-Hasidic Orthodox Jew], but at the same taught his children himself Talmud Torah, but made sure that his kids went to secular schools. His mother, Nantsha, came from generations of forest-dwellers, and my 8:00grandfather always said that that's who turned him into a writer, because of the stories that she would tell about the history of Poland. They were in lumber, and -- but they were also smugglers across the Polish-German border, and they were horse thieves. And actually, my grandfather's first novella was called "A romants fun a ferd-ganef," "Romance of a Horsethief," and was based on the stories that his mother had told him about her family. He would always delight me, and petrify me, he loved to tell me stories. I mean, because he was a weaver of tales, that's what he did. And the stories that he would tell me as a little kid always seemed to involve little boys, weirdly enough, always approximately 9:00my age, as I got older, being chased through the Polish woods by wild, salivating wolves. And, these stories, obviously, would totally petrify me, and, you know, I would be closing my ears and my eyes at the same time, waiting for the next development in the story. So his imagination often went to that. I didn't know anything, or nor did he tell me anything, about the town of -- small city of -- Mława, but his stories were more of a throwback to a wilder, much more primitive world.

CW: So his father was a maskil, was there --

DO: Well, he was a -- he was a -- I mean that's philosophically, and culturally, 10:00but he was also a lumber merchant. So --

CW: And do you -- did he come -- do you know, did he come from a frum [observant] -- you know --

DO: Yeah, everybody was frum then. And my grandfather also, I believe, did -- didn't do Yeshiva, but certainly did kheyder [traditional religious school], and then the more advanced training was given by his father. First, he went to a Russian-language school in Mława, and then he went to a commercial school in Warsaw. And then he went off to France, to Nancy, to a engineering school. And, after a number of years, a few years there, he ran out of funds. And had to 11:00leave those studies and return to Mława. But he returned as somewhat of an apparition for this smallish town. From what he picked up in France. Very dandified frippery, with long capes, and fancy mustaches, and big hats, almost an Oscar Wildish look. That cuts quite a dramatic figure for quasi-rural Poland at the time. On his return to Poland, he also started writing short stories. And he was observed by my grandmother, Adela Wolfe, who was considerably younger than him, but was totally taken by this dashing, cosmopolitan figure that 12:00suddenly showed up in town. He immigrated to America, and got his certificate of naturalization in 1914. Worked a variety of jobs, while continuing to write short stories. Delivered newspapers, taught Hebrew to kids and then eventually went back to -- went to Cooper Union, to complete his engineering degree. And graduated, and got a job with the firm that later was responsible for the building of the George Washington Bridge. But at the same time that he graduated and began this profession, a new daily newspaper was established in New York, a Yiddish-language paper. And he became one of the contributors then -- the paper 13:00was called "Der Tog." And it was sort of considered, and its aspiration was, and it became sort of the neutral, responsible paper, sort of the "New York Times" of the Yiddish press, which at the time, there were many dailies and they were very influenced by the yellow journalism that simultaneously was going on in the American press. And there were scandal sheets, and they all had huge political differences, and were always feuding, and were always doing investigative exposés of each other, and stuff like that. And the "Tog" was just gonna be the news and nothing but the news. But his job was to write a short story for the "Tog" that ran every week, a weekly short story, which he 14:00continued to do, consistently, for over forty years, until his death. New York was the center for Yiddish journalism, prose and poetry, and certainly for Yiddish theater. It was the biggest mass audience with the most disposable income of Yiddish-speaking Jews. Just like some of the posed photos that were done in Poland, he was still rather flamboyant in some of these, but there was an American touch. One photo of him, stretched out on a white fur rug, that I always referred to as his Mae West picture. But he's in an American suit, and now he's got an American hat, not the big floppy one, he's got a tie, instead of 15:00the big cape with the cravat. There's one photograph of him and his literary circle. They were called by other people, maybe by themselves -- by each other, "Di yunge [The young ones]," sort of revolutionary group. And when I look at that photo, I mean, they look more like hitmen from Mo Eastman's Lower East Side gang, than they do a bunch of Jewish cultural intellectuals. But that's, to them, was "this is Amer-- this is what an American looks like."  My grandmother was also an extremely interesting woman. She was quite striking, blond, blue-eyed, an inveterate seductress. When she ran into Opatoshu again in New York, she still had strong memories of the dashing young figure that was too old and too celebrated for her back in Mława, but this time set her mind to 16:00capture him. They were married in New York. About a year after that, their first son, my father, Dovid, was born. She came from a family of, eventually, six sisters. This was taken before the family immigrated to America, at that point there were five daughters. And once they were in New York, a sixth daughter was born, just about a year before my father was born, which was a great shande [shame] and embarrassment to the parents, that at that age, when their children are getting married, suddenly another kid pops out, and what's going on behind that door?  Nisht sheyn far yidn [Not nice for Jews]. Their parents made sure that they were well-educated. Two of them married university professors, one of 17:00them became an excellent sculptress, one of them became a writer and on-air personality in American radio, not Yiddish radio. And Adela ended up marrying Opatoshu. Their income was also supplemented because she was the only woman to be permitted to teach the upper courses in Yiddish language and literature in the shule [secular Yiddish school] in New York. And that she did full-time during the years.

CW: Do you remember what the name of the shule was?

DO: I think it was the Sholem Aleichem shule.

CW: The shule, like the high sc--

DO: The mitlshul, yeah, yeah. Yeah, when she died -- no, it wasn't when she died, it was when my father died, on the Mendele lists, there were a number of 18:00people who said, Oh, he was a wonderful actor, and they said, But, but his mother was just such a wonderful teacher. And she came in with this air of elegance and seriousness. Everybody would just sit up straight, and there were no gaffes.  Because of his background in the woods, he had a tremendous love for nature. And had enough money so that he always -- every place that they lived had a view of nature, which is a tough thing to accomplish in New York City. Luckily, I was able to discover -- came across photos of both of them that were actually in the first apartment. I think this was probably the apartment in 19:00the Bronx that looked out over Crotona Park, in Indian Lake. Then he moved to Manhattan, and Upper Manhattan, 150th street. And the writing desk looked out over Riverside Park and the Hudson River. And, so he could sit there and muse, and suddenly see, instead of the Hudson it became the Vistula. The places seemed very dark. Fascinating, I loved being there, but dark. It wasn't that they were dark because of a lack of light, or because of heavy furniture or something like that, it was because they were so filled with objects. There were floor-to-ceiling bookcases in the living room and in both bedrooms. The walls were covered with artwork. There was a very close connection between Yiddish, or 20:00Jewish, graphic artists, painters and sculptors, and writers at that point, who often did portraits of their writer friends. The number of these that I came across just going through the material amazed me, of how, often, and clearly different artists, but it was like everyone needed to do this also. And Opatoshu had a fascination with Judaica. Hanukkah menorahs, and Shabbos candlesticks, and a substantial ark, with a scroll done on parchment. Every corner of the house was filled, and I would love playing with them, and amongst my favorite were, he had a large collection of Havdalah spice boxes, and I remember one, I always used to go around the house with, which was a little silver fish, with a tail 21:00that moved, and his head would open up, and that's where you could put in the spices.

It's a part of a torah, but I don't know which section. Obviously it's not big enough to be the entire one, but, as you can see, it is parchment, and at one point I did have someone with more of a religious bent than I have take a look at some of these paragraphs and identify it, but it was years ago and I no longer remember what they told me it consisted of. Yeah, I'm not sure the purpose of this. It's got a bottom that opens up (laughs), and I don't know 22:00what's kept there. Let me see if there's any -- there's a tiny little man in here, that I've never seen before. I don't know what he is. He looks more Mexican Indian than Jewish. I don't think that he was collecting Inca art at the time, so. Opatoshu and Adela's world revolved around -- was completely enmeshed in Yiddish culture. Opatoshu always had hosted a secular shabes tish [Shabbos gathering, lit. "table"], where his collaborators, fellow writers, poets, artists, would come around. And, would come by on Friday night, and they'd all 23:00sit there, and they would discuss and debate the cultural and political developments of the week. And amongst the regulars that I recall being there every Friday was Leivick, the poet, and Glanz, Glanz Leyeles, a poet, and Shlomo Bickel, actually was Theodore Bikel's uncle, who was a prominent critic then, of Chagall, during the years that he lived in America. And I would be there, but I would spend my -- all of my time under the table. I wasn't able to understand that much of the highfalutin Yiddish that was going on above me. I would spend my time under the table, usually untying the shoelaces of the assembled guests, 24:00untying Leivick's shoelaces. The voices above me were often very contentious, and impassioned, during these discussions, but there was lots of laughter. The only time I remember piping up and contributing to the conversation, was one time, I'm busily at work under the dining room table, and I keep hearing this word being thrown out, and thrown out, and thrown out. And the words around it I could not understand, it wasn't -- the language was on a higher level than "Huey, Dewey and Louie."  But my ears pricked up, and I got up from the table, and in a loud voice, admonished all of them, "that's a bad word, you're not 25:00supposed to use that word, that's a word you should never say."  And they all looked at me, and broke out in laughter. It turns out they were having a debate about a recent critical column published in the newspapers by the famous Yiddish critic Shmuel Niger. First names were not used in the Jewish world. So everybody was -- Leivick or Niger, or Glanz, or Opatoshu. But the closest to him called him Oppen. How he got that nickname from Opatoshu I don't know, but it was Oppen. But I as a little kid, couldn't -- didn't say Oppen, I said Oppie. And, so that's what he always was to me, was Oppie, until his death. There was one 26:00group that were particularly close, personally and as collaborators -- creative collaborators. And that was Leivick and his wife, Glantz-Leieles, and, in the early years, in the 1920s, the three families, every summer, would rent a large house in Upstate New York together. The Leivicks had one child, Danny Leivick, who I might have been named after. The Glantzes had one child, Dina, and Opatoshu had one child, David. D-D-D. And they, and the parents, would spend the summers in this house as this extended shabes tish, where they would write, and 27:00debate, and collaborate, on editing publications, and stuff like that, all together. The one wrinkle in the relationship, was that for the course of the summers, the Glantzes and the Opatoshus would switch mates, and my grandfather would have a bedroom with Fanya Glantz, and Adela, my grandmother, would share a bedroom with Glantz. That relationship only would exist for the course of the summer. When they would go back to the city, at the end of the summer rental, they'd go back to their own homes. However, the wives still remained the major 28:00muse for the other. And when Glantz would write some poem that he wanted criticism of, or was particularly proud of, the first person to read it would be not his wife, but Adela Opatoshu. And when my grandfather wrote an essay or a short story that he wanted to share, the first person to read it would be Fanya Glantz. Now, when I first heard this story, from my mother, in my later teens, I was rather skeptical about this, I said, is mom making this up, what is she just trying to get back at -- but then, a number of years later, a few years later, my father reluctantly confirmed it. And then, a number of years after that, 29:00while killing a bottle of vodka with Dina Glantz, who was then Dina Levitt, a very successful film editor, documentary film editor. She supplied me with more of the salacious details of it, and said that she was shocked in later years to find out that this wasn't the most normal of family living arrangements, because it's all she knew, and everyone just accepted it at that point. Nowhere did I hear, when I began to hear these stories, or did I sense growing up, did that relationship lead to any friction between Adela Opatoshu and Fanya Glantz. They 30:00remained almost like sisters, and were each other's closest friends. Even though when you see them in formal photos they're -- they look rather straight, and formal in suits and ties, and things, the pictures in the country have a different look. And you see the pictures of the children there, the children are always naked, running around and playing. And it always gave me the feel that, looking at these, that this was almost like a hippie commune in the '60s, and you didn't know that the same sort of thing went on in Yiddishist intellectual circles in the 1920s, but apparently it did. Again, another photo from those years, in the summer, obviously the photo was taken by Glantz, because he's the only one not in it, so it's Opatoshu, and Fanya in the center, Adela and my father, and Dina Glantz, the Glantz's daughter. My grandmother, in addition to 31:00being a seductress, and an intellectual, was a very difficult woman. She was always getting baleydikt, insulted, by everyone around her. That would lead to feuds. And my grandfather spent a lifetime working to patch up these feuds. And, at ti-- I mean, the feuds extended to, she -- my mother, she would be insulted by my mother. One time, coming to the house, or something, and she was bringing flowers, and my mother said, "Oh my God, I don't have another vase to put them in," because it was a big party, and all the vases were -- and my grandmother became so insulted that she stormed out and would refuse to set foot in our home again. And this happened at least on three occasions, it would go on for a year, year and a half. The upside for her, of this self-banishment from our home, was 32:00it meant that my father and I would have to independently make visits to her home, because she wouldn't ever come for family gatherings or anything. So that she'd be able to be the only female presence in the room. My mother was out of the picture. Now, Fanya Glantz and my grandfather died in pretty close proximity to each other. And so Adela, my grandmother, obviously assumed that, okay, now, me and Glantz -- I don't remember who died first, whether it was my grandfather or Fanya, but, Adela said "Okay, well now, we'll become a couple. Officially, we'll marry, me and Glantz. This has been going -- this relationship and this close thing, and I'm his muse, and it's been thirty, forty years" -- but Glantz 33:00instead married another woman, and to add insult to injury, he was introduced to this woman because she was a very close friend of my maternal grandmother, who never -- she and Adela, were water and oil. Hated each other from the first day they met. And here Glantz goes and marries this woman Sonya. Well, of course my grandmother had a fit about this, and not only did it mean total estrangement from Glantz, but also it meant total estrangement from the Leivicks, because they refused to cut off all communication with this adulterer (laughs) Glantz. 34:00So she basically, in that fell swoop, lost the pillars around her. And it kept going on with friend after friend, and when she didn't have my grandfather around to work on patching it up over the course of the year, when the relationship would be over it would be over. And she was alone. But she always still -- there were a couple of women friends that were there up until the end, or until they died. And she always had gentleman callers, friends, lovers. When the last one of those died, my grandmother told me that she had no more reason to go on living. She was very particular about who -- which men will get her favors. And there was no one left, of sufficient intellectual and cultural 35:00weight to deserve her. And she said that life without a gentleman coming, even if it's just once a week, and arriving with flowers at the door for some lovemaking, and some dinner, and some intellectual discussion, and without that, life just isn't worth living anymore. And sure enough, within about three months, she committed suicide, with a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

CW: How did you find out about this?

DO: About what?

CW: About your, about your grandmother's relationships, and --

DO: Because I would meet the -- I was there a lot. I mean, with her too, I would -- actually -- well, that's a different subject, it's my other grandparents, but, both of my gra-- my two grandfathers, who were both incredibly, incredibly influential to me, and important in my life, and they died within six months of each other. My grandmothers, I continued seeing. I would go to Adela's -- especially during the periods where she wouldn't come to our house -- probably every week. On a Saturday or a Sunday. Under the guise of sort of a Yiddish lesson, but it was reading my grandfather's works, would be the textbook, which 37:00is no way for -- to learn a language that you don't know. You don't start, you know, with the -- it's pretty highfalutin stuff. But basically it was just to keep her company and stuff like that. On the other hand, my other grandmother was functionally illiterate. And I would go to see her once a week, once a week and a half, after her longtime lover died, who was a teacher a university teacher. And I would go there to give her English lessons. And the textbook for that was the "New York Post."  And we would work through like two articles every -- but. But Adela would be open with me, I mean she was seductive with 38:00everyone including -- and open about her sexuality, she was seductive with my father when he was growing up, and she was certainly seductive with me as -- as long as I can remember, up until her death. My grandfather's world was -- even though he was living in America, it really was a transnational world of Yiddish culture. He travelled back to Poland twice in the '20s, I believe in '22 or '23, and in '28, and then again in the early '30s. And a trip to the Soviet Union then, and then a trip to Palestine, and trips to Paris, and South America. When he started making the trips to Europe in the early 1920s, it was clearly the successful return of the prodigal son, the man that made good in the new 39:00world. And actually, there's (coughs) a cartoon that, that I saw on many occasions, and I must have, somewhere in storage, but I've not been able to come upon it, in the last couple of years. I believe there might be a copy of it in the YIVO archives, that was published, I believe, in a Warsaw newspaper, and the cartoon shows my grandfather, Opatoshu, lying in a hammock, in a large grove of trees. And it's a great caricature of his face, which was easy to caricature, with the big -- with the nose going down, the chin coming out, and the under bite, and the big forehead, and he's lying there, and his lacksadaisically 40:00picking leaves off the trees that surround him. And every leaf is a dollar bill. And across the canopy of leaves, it says "In poylishe velder," "In Polish Woods," which was his most renowned novel. So, as far as the Jewish community in Europe was concerned, here was just this millionaire with the dollars flowing in from the success of this book. He also kept up, in person, in addition to making money, out of doing it, publicizing the books, and giving lectures, and things like that. This was in Paris in 1925, obviously a conference. Sitting to his -- to Opatoshu's -- right, is Chagall. And I believe that was when Chagall and Opatoshu first met. And this was at Chagall's house in the countryside outside 41:00of Paris. And that's also Chagall, and his family, Opatoshu, and Daniel Charney, who was the brother of Shmuel Niger, the critic in New York. This is Opatoshu sitting for a portrait being done by Chagall, looking very much the cliché French artist with the palate and the striped shirt. That's a sketch that Chagall did of Opatoshu, pen and ink with some coloring, brown and blue. Opatoshu made it a point to visit, spend time, at schools, with young students, and, who I am sure he assumed would be his future audience of readers. This photo with him in the center, was taken at the Peretz school, in Pruzhany, 42:00Belarus, which was then part of Poland. And these pictures are from the '30s, and you look at them, and you know it, as a matter of four years, or five years, and these kids are no more.

CW: I'm wondering if you could say a few words about his politics, meaning his connection to the Soviet Union, and, you know, the leftist world that he was a part of in New York and Europe.

DO: It's certainly nothing that I know from immediate experience, I mean, as a six-year-old, I didn't talk about Leninist theory with him. I have -- he did write essays that touched on the political, and I have read the work of scholars 43:00that have looked at that closely, particularly Gennady Estraikh, the conclusion they come to from it, and there was a big push by the Soviet writers for him to leave America and come to the Soviet Union, which he did entertain, but never did. Their interpretation is that although he had socialist leanings, leftist leanings, he was never a committed communist. However, he found that he was impressed by the possibilities during a certain window of time for the 44:00development of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union, when it was being promulgated, supported by the Soviet authorities. And that's what he kept hearing from his colleagues that were there, Markish, and the others, in their letters and when they saw him, saying listen, we have our own publishing houses, we have our own union. We have schoolbooks for children, we have -- and Birobidzhan, and the government is completely supporting it, and it -- think of an autonomous Jewish region within that, and it's a place where Yiddish could live, because my grandfather cared greatly about the language and the cultural tradition, and had no illusions that it would remain as an intrinsic part of 45:00American Jewry, knew that it was gonna disappear here, and, so, was thinking -- was impressed by, well here's someone offering us fertile soil to continue growing Yiddish identity, Yiddish culture. He would get together with the circle that he constantly corresponded with and collaborated with. This is a photo with the Khalyastre, the Gang, that Opatoshu worked very intermittently for them, and in almost all of their publications, there was a contribution from him. Second from the left is Markish, ended up in Soviet Union and was always trying to convince Opatoshu to make the move there. He was a poet, a playwright, he was 46:00one of the founding members appointed to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and actually, in -- as happened in the Soviet Union in 1946, he won the Stalin Prize for his contributions to the state, and by 1952, he was executed, along with all of the other Yiddish intelligentsia, in what's called the Night of the Murdered Poets. This was in 1934, it was in the Soviet Union, and it was the conference of Soviet Yiddish writers. Opatoshu just came as a guest to that. And you can see, the close relationship he had with Peretz, with Markish, seems to almost have his head on Opatoshu's shoulder. Did you notice that?

CW: Mh-hmm. Yeah, I did.

OD: It's so cute.

CW: So cute.

OD: Everybody else so formal-looking, Soviet-looking, straight ahead. Then 47:00clearly, when the -- all of -- Yiddish writers were slowly murdered, and these people that he had been having correspondence with for thirty years, and he would write his weekly letter to them, and the letter would come back, and it would say, "no such person, no such address."  At the same address for Markish, or for the other ones. Then, he knew it was, it was over, what was going on. One of the things that amazed me about him is that after the war, when the calamity of what had happened, and the disappearance of his natural audience, combined with what happened to Yiddish, and the Yiddishists in the Soviet Union not that 48:00much later and the disappearance of those dreams as a place of -- that, he never seemed to lose his enthusiasm and belief in the importance of its continuation. And, so, the trips changed to other countries, but he still seemed to have the same vigor about it. After the Holocaust occurred, he switched the locale of his 49:00works, and no longer was he writing about moments in the history of Eastern European, and Western, Jews, but he started writing novels that took place in old Israel, Jerusalem. Novels about Bar Kokhba, and Rabbi Akiva, about heroic Jewish figures fighting against tremendous odds against non-Jewish enemies. His favorite place was a small cottage, a dacha, in a place called Croton Falls, New York, in Westchester County, which is now like the fifth- or sixth-wealthiest suburb, or wealthiest community in, in the United States, but at the time was still really rural. The way he happened to get this place, there was a very 50:00wealth Jewish builder in construction, who was a great devoté of Yiddish culture. And he envisioned a community made up of artists, and writers, that -- and he would build them all these little places, and they could all spend the summer there, and create together and commune. And, had this large chunk of land, and divided it into half-acre, one-acre plots, and he built these little un-weatherized wooden homes, it was well water, and, and the pipes weren't weatherized, so it was only -- they would freeze in the winter, so it was only good from late May, early June, until late September, early October. And this 51:00guy just set out and constructed this stuff, and by the time all the wells were dug, and the, and the little dirt roads were paved, and electricity was put in, the only one of the Yiddish artists and writers that could actually afford the key money to the bungalow was my grandfather. And the other ones were bought by people that did have the money, which were poshete arbeters, simple workers, union workers. There was Dovid Torsky was a house painter, and Fischl Bernstein was a furrier. But these were very highly intellectual and political 52:00individuals, and Opatoshu enjoyed their company thoroughly, as much as he did his fellow writers. The town of Croton Falls was a one-street town that consisted of Jimmy's Grocery Store, and a post office, and a drug store with a soda fountain, and a one-room library, and I think a barber shop, and there was a little stand, a taxi stand, that was two brothers with one car between them. It was two bedrooms, on the left side. One was theirs, the Opatoshus, the other one would be my little bedroom. His writing desk was up against the far window, there was a big porch on the other side, this would be the front entrance of the house. And, when you'd walk in that front entrance, you went into a small 53:00kitchen first. One bath, and that's the rear of the house, the big porch, and in the expansive, usually unkempt lawn that he would set up his chairs on, for him and his friends, and sit and read, and now --

CW: So who would he go up there with?

DO: Well, it would be him, and my grandmother, and me, during the summers. Sometimes my mother would come along, sometimes my father, also. There was other kids that -- the Bernstein kid, the Torsky kid, and we would just made our little group that would play together. They were all Yiddish-speaking families, and so all of us were quasi-bilingual. It was -- the pathways between these houses and stuff were not paved, and it would be muddy, just like the shtetls 54:00[small towns in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community] used to be after rainfalls. And he got just great joy out of the small vegetable gardens that he would plant, and picking wild -- taking me to go pick wild berries in the bushes, all around the property. And building these infernal fires, of, there was no garbage men coming to collect things, you would burn your own garbage. And he had this big pit, surrounded by rocks, that he had dug, and the garbage would go in there, and he would just feed it and feed it, newspapers and this -- and the flame would be up, and I would just sit there, just, terrified, but loving watching it. I did get to see him work there, because he still had to write the weekly story. And that's when I would have to be quiet, or play outside, or go away with my friends or something like that, and he would sit there and do it. And, what he loved about that place was, aside from that 55:00worktime, he would finish the story and the rest of the time he could lay outside on the hammock, or in a chair, and read, or sit on his high porch, and read, or take langer shpatsirs, long walks. And I used to love accompanying him on these walks. It would be the walk into town a couple of times a week, where he would get his mail, get the three or four Yiddish newspapers, the mail that was forwarded from Russia, from Poland, and stuff from New York to Croton Falls. And he would drop off the story at the post office, it was about a mile walk, I think, each way, into town. And then there would be walks, just around on these dirt roads. I remember one of his favorite was a weekly walk we would make to a farmer -- about a half mile or so up the road -- to get fresh eggs and whatever 56:00vegetables happened to come up that week. And, the walk was nice, but then we would always spend an inordinate amount of time there, hours, because he loved talking to this farmer, and his family. And, as far as I can recall, it was the only black family in this area of Westchester that managed to buy there. I don't know for how many generations this farm was in their hands.

CW: Can you mention the walking sticks?

DO: Yep. When we would go off on these walks my grandfather always, there was nothing wrong with his legs, but he always would take a walking stick with him. 57:00And he had this very large collection of rather elaborate, artistic walking sticks. And he did this rhythmic thing with every stride. One, two, up, down, one, two, up, down, whatever. As he'd be conversing with me. And, as we'd begin the walk each time, he would grab a branch and break it into the right height for -- as I was getting older -- for me, so I would have one of these too. And I would try to imitate each one of those rhythmic things as we -- as we strolled along. And, there are photos of when his closest colleagues from New York would come up to Croton Falls to stay for a weekend, or -- you see, all of them have these walking sticks, so it must have been something, of either the Eastern 58:00European background, or something, that, when you're in the country, and you're a lord of the manor, you have a walking stick, that you sit with and -- This one I really like, that's a very pretty and also nice piece of wood, with little gnarly things on it. Someday when I'm old and infirm, I'll be all set to (laughs). When his friends would come up, Leivick, and -- there wasn't room in his little bungalow, but all the other people, the furrier, and the housepainter would put up Leivick and put up Glantz, so that the writers could hang together for the extended weekend. It could just as easily be a dacha in Russia, Poland, 59:00the Pale, as in Westchester County. Once you even see the Chagall-like little goat being fed. I don't know how the little goat showed up. I have strong memories of one summer -- incredibly hot, and there was drought, and it was day after day of humid, sweltering. And there was very little water from the wells. And it's an image that's just burned into my mind, of the two of us, sitting outside, Adirondack chairs, sort of things, with a bucket of water between us. And, two shmates [rags]. And him with that muscular, football player build, and 60:00the little pisher [youngster] sitting next to him, and the ritual of taking these white shmates and putting them into the water, and ringing them out, and wrapping them around our heads. Should be cool. And I would watch him do it and then I'd take mine, and I'd put it in there, and then I'd put it on my head. I should be cool too. And I remember he always used to say this phrase, it had nothing to do with the drought, but the only English I heard him say, was quoting the poem "water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink."  Ah, ah, ah. Which (laughs), I'd go, wow he sounds strange in that language, I wonder what language it is that he's talking. His health did begin to severely 61:00deteriorate. What he suffered from was very high blood pressure. Something that now would have just been eradicated, cured by a pill a day. At the time, there was nothing you could do about it except extremely restrictive diet. And, I remember the meals in Croton Falls, and at the Shabboses, suddenly becoming, this, no salt in anything, it was nothing but broiled, or boiled, unsalted chicken, occasional fish, boiled potatoes, farmer's cheese, just bland -- well, for this lusty sensualist that he was, to have to eat this stuff that even a 62:00seven-year-old found completely unpalatable must have been incredibly painful. I still remember him going eating this stuff and going, "Oh, zeyer geshmak, geshmak." You know, "Oh, delicious, just wonderful." But I'm sure he suffered from it. And he remained amazingly vigorous about keeping that diet, but it still didn't do the trick. And, he died of a sudden massive stroke, it was in New York, said, "I think I have a headache," and went to lay down. At the time, 63:00he was getting dressed in an elegant suit to go to the premier of my father's -- one of my father's first major roles in a Broadway comedy. My father was called, went zipping over to the house in a cab, kissed Yosef on the lips for the last time, left the apartment, got into the subway, and made it for the curtain of 64:00the show. And this was Yom Kippur eve, of 1954, which is almost melodramatic, to add that to the story.

CW: Where were you?

DO: I'm not gonna be able to do this one straight. My other grandfather died not six months before, a couple days before my seventh birthday. And (coughs) I was devastated by that. But so was Opatoshu. They became incredibly close, basically 65:00just about me. They would talk every day about "do you know the brilliant thing he said today, I have to tell you the story I heard, oh, the kid's got brains, he's got -- oh."  Every day they would just speak to kvel about me on the telephone. And Opatoshu was just shattered when Weinberg died. And that's when he began looking like a corpse. So my parents send me to school the next morning, they don't tell me anything about it, that he had died. And they get a call from the school, saying, some of the other students read the obit, or their parents did, and said something. And so they had separated me. So I knew something was weird, I'm alone in the playground, and then my parents show up. 66:00And I told myself, I don't want the other one to die. Wouldn't listen, just kept swinging, harder and harder. So, that was a blow, at seven-and-a-half. I mean, to lose both, that were just such pillars. It's what both of them gave me, was just such a sense of self, and self-importance, that's so hard to get, and it's harder to get from parents, because they're still struggling, even with their own self-definition at the time, and the responsibility of having you day in and day out, and work, and this and that. But here were these two giant figures that everybody seemed to respect and treat with kid gloves and stuff, and listen to. 67:00They were always willing to listen to me, and always just kvelling about any stupid thing I said. When my grandfather died, my grandmother, with my father's assistance, went through all the materials that filled the house, and all the books and stuff. And about half of it went to the YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Research Institute in New York, to their archives. Then, when my grandmother died, my father went through all the stuff. My grandmother just kept what was most personally meaningful to herself. When she died, my father went through the same process, and culled them again, and half of that material went to the YIVO, and he kept what he considered the most personally meaningful. When he died, all of the material that had gone through those two previous cullings ended up in my 68:00possession. I was unable to read a word of Yiddish. There was no way I was gonna be able to cull through it and decide what's meaningful, and what isn't, and I didn't want to burden someone else with that task. I rented a big storage space, and, about 20 boxes went in there. I did keep a number of boxes -- when I opened them up, I just saw that they contained either photo albums or there were a lot of them that just had loose photos, and loose pieces of paper and, some correspondence, and things like that. Which I just brought, and put into storage in big closets in my garage. The photos document my growing from an infant to a toddler in his arms, on his shoulders. The little head and the big head, I love. Big head.

CW: Were you always interested in Opatoshu?  Have there been times in your life 69:00where you returned or became more interested?

DO: Well, I was always personally interested, like people are about -- if they're close with their grandparents, and if their grandparents are an influence, and a presence in their lives. I certainly was not interested in Yiddish language, culture, or history. For most of my life. I mean, I paid lip service with my grandmother, to make her feel good and stuff. I did have a sort of sentimental attachment to, I love to hear it, and there were some favorite records, and stuff. Moishe Oysher, and things that I heard as a kid that always retained a grip on me, some of Lebedeff, and things. My father was always -- 70:00Yiddish was always around, because my father was completely -- remained steeped in that culture, and kept trying to go back to it. I mean, he started in the Yiddish theater, and by the time -- after he got back from the army, the Second World War, he quickly went into the American stage, he didn't -- even though Yiddish was his first language, he was born in the Bronx, and went to public school, and -- so he didn't have a Yiddish accent, he was able to make, to break through where a lot of the other people that were with him in the Artef were not, because they were born in Europe and they were -- they could only play old Jews, because of the Yiddish accent. But (coughs), but later on, my father achieved a certain level of success as an actor, and was above the title on Broadway, when he would do plays what he would choose to do, or always was 71:00willing to do, was go back and do Yiddish theater, if it was possible. And, so, it was always there. But at the time he was doing that, it was, you know, it was the '60s, and I was in a very different sort of world that interested me. But I would still go, if Leo Fuchs would come in and do, at that point, they were drek [filth], I mean, the musicals they were doing, and they were -- the Yiddish would be the punchline. And it would be shlimazl, shlemiel, drek. You know, I mean, that would be -- but I would still like to do it. With friends whose parents also came out of Yiddish theater and something like that, and we would do it with a sort of cynical attitude, but it would be like, you know, going to shund [theater of inferior quality]. I mean, going to see funny trash that sort of like, reminds you of the old time. But the a -- there were still good people doing it, I mean, there was Fuchs, and there was Rexite, 72:00Seymour Rexite, and Molly Picon, and. And I grew up with them too, different than and, and certainly for a longer period of time, because of my father's involvement with them, I knew those people my whole life. I mean, Molly Picon used to chase me around, she had a big estate up -- it wasn't far from Croton Falls, and actually you would have to -- when my father would be starring in live TV, nobody had, when we were in Croton Falls, nobody had a TV, we didn't even have a TV in Manhattan, I mean -- during the years we'd have to go to neighbors to see his performances when I was a kid. In Croton Falls, there was nothing, so we would drive up to Connecticut, to Molly Picon's to see him. But we would go visit her often. And, and [Mikhail Groyn?], and a number of those Yiddish actors were always a part of my life. And, Picon, I remember, used to 73:00chase me around her living room, with me squealing in delight, singing the witch's song from "Kishef-makherin [Witch]," (singing and gesturing with his hands like a witch) "Kim, kim, kim aher, kim aher tsu mir in shtibl [Come, come, come over here, come over here to me in my little house]," you know, like ahhh, and I'd run under the piano, and -- so there was this sentimental attachment, because I really loved these people, but it wasn't that I was gonna go crusade for Yiddish, or subscribe to the "Forverts" or even speak it, or know it. And, I didn't get back into any sort of interest in Yiddish. In a very roundabout way, I was, I had gone back to school late in life, after working as a screenwriter for twenty-odd years. And when I started graduate work, it's a convoluted story, but in any case, what I was working on, I realized, required a great deal of 74:00original sources were in Yiddish. And that meant I had to delve into Yiddish. And I didn't know the alef-beys [Hebrew alphabet], because to listen to my grandparents speak I didn't need to know the alef-beys really, you know. So I started taking introduction to Yiddish at UCLA, and then I did what everybody who's interested in Yiddish does, which are the summer programs at YIVO and, Vilna -- Vilnius. And, ended up just falling in love with the language again. And then that sort of brought me back to continue learning the language, and delving deeper into it meant joining leyen-krayses, reading groups in Yiddish, 75:00and then you start reading other writers, and then that led me to start reading my grandfather, and then a different interest came up, it wasn't just in Oppie, but it was in Opatoshu for the first time. But before that, and it's literally just in the last twelve years or so -- I was pretty ignorant, except for the, you know, pop stuff. And I did a good Yiddish accent, and stuff, you know?  But I think that came from my father's milieus as much as my grandfather's. When I started on a project to -- invited to a conference in Regensburg about Opatoshu's work, an academic conference, with about twenty scholars, and I was asked to present a more personal side, not just something -- everybody else was writing about various aspects of his work, his critical reception and things 76:00like that. And so I said, well, you know, I'm not gonna write an academic paper and present it, but I'd be happy to just talk, and put together a slide show, which motivated me to say, you know, I'm gonna go through all these pictures and start pulling things out. And so, this is the fruits of that search.

CW: Who do you think his audience is?

DO: My grandfather's?  I have absolutely no idea. I mean, one of the reasons that these academics felt the need to hold this conference is that he's sort of gotten lost from the high, high, high prestige that he had during his lifetime and a few years afterwards, even for those whose field of expertise is Yiddish 77:00literature. Opatoshu never cared about translations. He -- the audience he cared about was the Yiddish-speaking audience. And he was translated into twenty, thirty languages, I mean, into Japanese and into Russian, into Polish, into French, into Spanish, into German. But what he cared about was oh, a check is coming. But not -- had no involvement with who the translator was gonna be, or what it was, or reading proofs of something even. And so, the English editions, the English translations of his books, of "In poylishe veldl [In Polish woods]," and "Romance of a Horsethief" and stuff, are atrocious. They're just really terrible. They're almost -- they're unreadable, and they have nothing to do with what even I can understand of his style and his book. They just miss the point, basically, of everything -- of characters, of dialogue, of descriptive 78:00settings, whereas Sholem Asch really rode his translators.

CW: They were sort of literary rivals, were they -- what was their relationship in person?

DO: That this photo was taken shows that they were personally polite to each other, and did hang out. They were, however, publicly critical of each other. I know that Opatoshu did not have great respect for Asch. He respected him as a writer, and he thought he was a very inferior and irresponsible historian. I don't remember how he came down, but I mean, the entire Yiddish establishment really came down on Asch once he started writing the Christian books. But I think that Opatoshu and Asch's intellectual and cultural friction predated that. It was even based on Asch's earlier works. I've heard many debates about -- of 79:00that gen -- of the next generation after, you know, Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and the next generation. Who was great, Opatoshu, or Sholem Asch?  And then you go down a generation to Bashevis Singer, who's well-known. His reputation was all, Singer in English, that made it. But he's there, and his brother, who all of the Yiddish writers of the time considered the -- infinitely greater talent.

CW: Yud Yud.

DO: Yeah. Nobody knows about him, because he didn't care about the translation. He didn't have, you know, Saul Bellow translating him. So, I don't know, his -- the name is known, and when I would attend these -- the summer programs and things, the higher-level students would "huh, Opatoshu?" So, somebody's reading 80:00him, and I do get queries from people, and I get asked for permission to do something with it or to translate it to that, about four times a year, five times a year, "Can we do a collection of short stories in French?  Can we do these four stories in English?  Can we do this novel in a new translation in English?"  And of course, I always say, "Absolutely, you don't owe me a dime." If someone wants to read him, that's great. But I don't know, who's the audience for all those Yiddish writers? How -- what percentage of the Yiddish books at the Book Center have been translated into English?  And how many people can read -- are fluent enough in Yiddish to read high literature in it?  And not just the lyrics to a klezmer song or something. So.

CW: Yeah. I guess, why should someone read his work?

DO: Well, for him in particular, I think the two -- there are two reasons. One is that it's an insight into important literature from -- that's reflective of the time that it was written, which is interesting for that, just for that reason alone. The other reason is that he was very much a historian, and very punctilious about. And therefore his books deliver on something else too, on what life was like in medieval Germany, of Jews. What life was like in the 82:001830s in Poland, and in the Hasidic courts at the height of, or the fall before the new, recent height of Hasidim. Or the books that take place in Judea -- it's, I find it really interesting of, what did people eat?  And how did they eat it?  And how was it -- and did they use plates, or did they have knives and forks and spoons?  Or what -- and what did they wear? And what -- and all of that, he throws in there. Carefully, carefully researched. So, there are two periods of history, both -- the periods that get illuminated by his work. Both 83:00the periods he's writing about, and the period in which he wrote it, because you learn something about the sensibilities of that half-century of the flourishing of Yiddish culture. I also was amazed at how prolific Opatoshu was his whole life, even starting in 1928, Kletskin, the leading publisher of Yiddish books based in Vilna between '28 and like 1935 or '36, published a fourth collection, the collected works of Opatoshu, which at that point was fourteen volumes. And considering that was, you know, ended in late '30s, I mean early '30s, mid '30s, 84:00and his work continued apace into the mid '50s with most of the major novels written in the later period, that the collected works would now probably be thirty-five volumes.

CW: Are there any of his books that you personally like more than others?

DO: I always really enjoyed -- for my birthday every year, the week of my birthday, his story was, for " Der tog" was a story about me. And my father, or he, would then read me the story. And the protagonist of the story was Donele, and one of my favorites of those was called "Lima-gugu," and "Lima-gugu" was actually the name I had given to my little hobby horse that lived in Croton 85:00Falls, but this is -- "Lima-gugu" is a real horse, who comes to the window of Croton Falls, and says, "I'm here, let's go riding."  And, a number of these stories were then each published as slim volumes to be children's books. And in "Lima-gugu," I know it's a front piece of -- it's a photograph of me, on a horse, when you used to be able to put a kid on a horse, and for ten cents they'll take a picture and give it to you. And I've got to say that those still have a warm place in my heart, to come across that, more than trying to struggle through Rabbi Akiva. (laughs)

CW: Yeah. For you personally, what is it like to be Opatoshu's grandson?  Does it come into play in terms of when you think of your identity, your Jewish 86:00identity? The yikhes [ancestry]? 

DO: Yeah, absolutely. Because my Jewish identity is definitely based on something different than most self-defined Jews base it on. I mean, it's based on a language that very few people identify with, and it's based on a culture that very few people are familiar with. And it's not based on liturgical texts, and it's not based on the state of Israel. And it's not based on never forget the Holocaust. It's, it's based on a inner identification with a vibrant world 87:00that existed before the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the terrible last chapter of it, but it's not what made it important. It had its own life and richness and validity, so.

[END OF INTERVIEW]