LEELA CORMAN ORAL HISTORY

DANIELLE WINTER:This is Danielle Winter, and today is June 16th, 2014.  (laughter) I am here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Leela Corman, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Leela -- and am I pronouncing that correctly?  Beautiful.  Do I have your permission to record this interview?

LEELA CORMAN:  Yes, you do.  (laughs)

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

LC:  My family on both sides comes from Eastern Europe.  I'm pretty sure my father's parents were Russian Jews -- all of them -- I know some of them were, but I'm pretty sure all of them were.  My great-grandmother, who was my father's father's mother, came from Belfast in 1914, but she was actually Russian Jewish.  I guess there was a community in Ireland for a long time.  His other grand-- his mother's father came from Russia, I think, in 1908, and was a painter.  He studied with a student of Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia.  I think he spoke fluent Russian as well as Yiddish, and was apparently a really interesting and very intelligent man -- although he also sounds intriguingly difficult.  My father claims that he spent the last couple of decades of his life eating nothing but burnt toast, orange peels, hard-cooked eggs, and black coffee.  And he smoked a lot.  Played a lot of chess.  Claimed to be a 2:00Stalinist, although that was early on -- I'm pretty sure that ended at some point in the '40s or '50s.  (laughs) My father's parents were from Philadelphia.  And they met in a socialist youth group theater company during the Depression, and were communists until -- probably until the '50s, I'm guessing.  My mother's family came here in 1953 from Europe.  They were Holocaust survivors from Poland -- they were Galitsyaners [Galician Jews].  My grandfather was from the town of Grębów.  And my grandmother was from -- (sighs) -- I've looked for the name of the town on the map and I can never find it -- she said "Sambor."  It was on the border of Ukraine, so there were Ukrainians and Poles and Jews in this town.  After the war, they went to France -- and I can talk about their leaving Eastern Europe a little bit -- maybe later, also -- unless you want to get into that now?

DW:  You can keep going.  That's fine.

LC:  All I know about their leaving was that -- (sighs) -- so, my grandfather was a really interesting guy.  He was a sharpshooter in the Polish army.  And then the war started.  I'm not entirely clear on the sequence of events, but I think he was probably sent home, because the Germans invaded, and I think the army dissolved.  Some of it went into exile in England.  And actually -- so, the Germans invaded.  His family -- a lot of his brothers scattered into different armies, so a couple of them went and fought in the Polish army in exile, one of them went and fought for the free French -- excuse me.  His littlest brother was deported to Auschwitz.  His family -- his parents and his little sister and maybe some others, I don't know -- were murdered in the street in front of their house -- I think.  There's a couple of versions of the story.  One is that he saw it.  The other is that he didn't -- he came home after.  However, apparently -- so, my mother was watching "Shoah" when it was 4:00on PBS many, many years ago.  I haven't seen it -- I don't have the stomach for it.  And he called my mother and he said, "Are you looking at the screen right now?  That's our house.  And those neighbors -- those people in the window are our neighbors.  They always wanted our house."  At any rate, he escaped over the border into Ukraine, and he spent most of the war in the woods in that general area -- you know, probably some of the time he was on the Polish side, probably sometimes on the Ukrainian side, but -- he just kind of melted into the landscape, I think.  But he wasn't alone -- he was protecting a lot of people.  He and my grandmother's brother and a couple of other people, they protected nineteen people who were hiding in a hole in the ground at different times.  Again, I'm not entirely clear on the entire sequence of events, and I know sometimes they were indoors and sometimes they were not -- it's hard to 5:00know.  But at any rate, when the Russians liberated that part of Europe -- (laughs) -- I asked him once, "How did you know the war was over?"  And he said, "How I know?  The Russians come running across the field."  (laughs) So they wanted to conscript him into the Red Army, and he wasn't having any of that, because he really hated communism.  And it wasn't out of ideology -- it was out of experience in Ukraine.  (laughs) This is another example of my grandfather's sense of humor -- and I only found this out posthumously, so -- he told me once that when he got to Ukraine, there was an election.  I said, "Who was on the ballot?"  He said, "Stalin, Stalin, or Stalin.  So I voted for Stalin."  So years later, I repeat this story to a friend of mine from Odessa and she said, "Oh, yeah.  They tell that joke about Putin now."  (laughs) And all this time, I thought he was telling some version of the truth.  (laughs) But he really hated what he saw there.  And -- I'm skipping over the part that 6:00I really wish I knew more about, which is that for about six months after the war ended, he and a friend of his -- who I think was probably a Red Army official -- I'm not sure -- were running black market operations back and forth over the Czech border -- so southern Poland at this point.  So the Red Army wanted to conscript him and my aunt had just been born, and they were not wanting to stick around.  He saw the writing on the wall.  So he went to the CO and he said, "I have a brand new little baby girl and I have two bottles of vodka and I want to go to the American zone with my family."  And the guy said, "Leave the vodka and get out of here."  I love that story.  So he was kind of a badass.  He had a temper, but he was very stoic also.  I mean, I never really saw his irascible temper, except in little tiny flashes, but my mother has told me about it and I can picture it.  He actually got in trouble as a 7:00young man -- a teenager -- for beating up a kid who was beating on his little brother -- a Polish kid.  He hit him on the head and threw him in the river.  And his family was fined six złoty for every bump on the kid's head.  I don't know if I'm pronouncing that word right.  But, you know, I kind of treated it a little bit lightly.  It was actually one of the first comics I drew -- was about that.  Not -- I wasn't making fun of this kid who got his ass kicked by my grandfather, but -- you know, my mom told me later, "He didn't want you to know that story because he almost killed that kid and he felt terrible."  So that was his temper.  And that's how he survived -- pure fuckin' fury.  And he met my grandmother during the war, too.  They were hiding out together, so they were married by the end of the war.  When I asked him how they met and where they met, he said, "Where I met your grandmother?  I met her in a cornfield.  Always I am turning around, and she's right behind me."  'Cause she could 8:00probably tell, like, this guy will keep you alive.  I don't remember your question.  (laughs)

DW:  No, no.  I was just asking a little bit to know briefly about your family background, and I'm now curious to kind of bring that into your own life.  And I'm -- you have so many stories about your family.  In what context were they passed down to you, and were -- did you have to ask as a kid to learn these stories or were they just told to you?

LC:  Well, that's an interesting set of questions.  I mean, I think every kid kind of absorbs family history by osmosis.  No one ever said, Hey, we're Holocaust survivors, for example -- it was just in there.  I don't remember anyone telling me.  And it wasn't like I put two and two together and, Oh, they're X number of years old and they're all from Poland.  I never thought of that.  We just knew.  But by the time I was around, they didn't really want to talk about it.  And I'm not sure they ever did.  Although my mom says that occasionally, when they were kids, they used to ambush them where, like, they'd 9:00be driving -- you know, pulling out of the gas station in New Jersey or something, and suddenly, my grandfather would say some awful thing about the past.  But when it came time for me to start being interested -- actually, I was really obsessed with World War II for a long time before I even really asked them very much.  And I never really told them how interested I was in the war in general.  And it wasn't only the Holocaust I was interested in -- it was so many other things.  Always civilian matters.  I was interested in the Pacific also -- just in the effects on civilians.  That's something that's always interested me.  But I was really also obsessed with the Holocaust.  And I didn't really want to bring it up with them, because I didn't want to cause them any pain.  There were things I started to realize as an adult -- you know, I 10:00was thirty-two when my grandmother died and thirty-three when my grandfather died, so I had them for a long time.  I was able to be a conscious adult with them, which was nice.  There were times, though, as an adult that I would ask them.  My grandfather was a little more forthcoming, and sometimes he would just let stuff drop.  My grandmother was completely locked down.  In retrospect, there were some things that I saw -- like -- okay, so when I was a kid, there was this really trashy miniseries called "V" -- which was remade a few years ago and I didn't see it, but -- I mean, it's like supreme '80s trash science fiction -- I don't know if you've ever heard of it.  Okay, so in the show, these aliens who look exactly like us and speak our languages and are really nice come to earth.  And everybody's super psyched and, you know.  But quickly, things start to kind of go a little weird, right?  There are some people who are suspicious.  It turns out these aliens are just dressed like 11:00humans -- they're actually lizards.  Now, I didn't know about the whole lizard people conspiracy whack job thing -- and I'm not sure that it has anything to do with it, it's just trashy science fiction.  So there's this very dramatic scene where the commander lizard man is unmasked, right?  This resistance fighter goes and tears off his skin and there's this big flap of fake human skin hanging off and there's these scales underneath.  And there's these great scenes of pre-digital special effects where they're standing around casually chatting and eating parakeets.  (laughs) It's really funny.  It's like bad Harryhausen special effects -- like, they couldn't afford Harryhausen, so they hired some hack to make her jaw expand and look like a snake jaw.  This sounds like a digression, but I'm getting there.  So there's a scene in this show where there's a lot of gunfire.  And I don't remember if it was a raid or what, but 12:00-- you know, I was a dumb, selfish nine-year-old, and I wanted to watch this show.  And my grandmother was very indulgent of me, and she was like, "Yeah, sure.  Watch your show."  And we're all sitting in the living room and this scene starts with the gunfire and my grandmother starts to freak out -- in what I now realize is a PTSD reaction, because I know what they're like -- I have them myself.  So -- I didn't get it.  I hope I shut the TV off.  I don't remember.  Probably.  If she asked me to, I probably did -- I hope I didn't argue with her.  But now I understand, because -- okay, so I know, like, one or two stories about my grandmother.  And one of them is that she witnessed the liquidation of her ghetto -- from the synagogue where she was hiding.  I think she was in the attic.  It was 950 people in the graveyard of the synagogue.  So no wonder she was having a flashback -- the poor woman!  Most of the time she just really wanted to watch wrestling and soap operas and game shows -- (laughs) -- and be my grandmother and putter around, you know?  And she had this horrible stuff she was carrying around inside her.  Another time, when I 13:00was a teenager -- my mother had this beautiful shawl.  It's made out of this Egyptian fabric called "assuit" that's named for the town that it comes from in Egypt.  So any dancer knows what assuit is, and it's very difficult to find vintage assuit -- it's this kind of tulle with these patterns made of metal that's hammered into it.  And vintage assuit is very heavy and well-made.  And so my mom had this beautiful assuit shawl from the 1920s.  And she was kind of throwing it around her neck one day, and my grandmother said, "Oh.  My mother had a scarf just like that, and she was wearing it the day they took her away."  And I didn't see that shawl again until last year -- more than twenty years.  My mom gave it to me because I told her it was Egyptian and antique.  And I guess she didn't want any part of it.  But my grandfather was a little bit more forthcoming.  You know, you could tell it was a job for him to talk 14:00about it, but it wasn't -- it didn't seem like it was traumatizing to him.  And he would just kind of like -- offhandedly, sometimes, he'd say stuff.  I said something to him once about how the government of Poland had apologized for a pogrom that happened after the war and he said -- (laughs) -- he had a pickle halfway to his mouth and he goes, "Poland?  Poland should drop dead."  Okay.  (laughs) Come to think of it, I think I only heard them speaking Polish once, even though they were native speakers of it.  But it was a Polish farmer who kept them safe and hid them -- and was his friend.  And then I know some other stories from -- fragmentary stories from my mother, some from a cousin -- like, my mom told me that his Polish friend gave him his Saint Christopher's medal so that he could pretend to be Christian.  And it definitely got him out of a couple of scrapes.  So I don't think he harbored animosity towards individuals 15:00like that -- I think he just had a very ripe distrust based on experience.  He told me the Ukrainians were the worst.  He didn't want me to know stories about violence -- violent acts that he had committed, even in the act of self-defense.  He told my mother that he didn't want me to know.  He never told me, "I don't want to tell you this."  And it makes me wonder what he was thinking about me, because I don't know why he would want to hide that from me.  I'm not gonna judge him.  I know he didn't kill anybody, but I'm sure he could have.  He wouldn't have forgiven himself.  Yeah.  And then they moved to Paris.  They lived in Paris for maybe six years, I think.  My mother was 16:00born there, in what was then called Villejuif.  And they lived in the third arrondissement, which is where -- I don't know if you've been to Paris, but it's where the Centre Georges Pompidou is now -- the big modern art museum -- very touristy and fancy.  At the time, Les Halles was still there -- the big marketplace.  It's moved now.  When my mother told me that, I said, "Oh, that must have been great."  And she said, "No!  We had Les Halles-sized rats!"  But also, the street that they lived on is the Rue Quincampoix, which I've now been down many times, but -- and it's shmancy, gentrified -- although there's a -- let's see, there's a fancy calligraphy shop and gallery, there are some fancy restaurants, a couple of boutiques, and there's a kinky sex emporium right across the street from my mom's old building.  But -- (laughs) -- I came across an old Jules Brassaï photograph in which he discusses that street, and he says, "That was where you went if you wanted a fat prostitute."  So -- (laughs) -- I mentioned this to my grandmother, and she started laughing, and she said, "Oh, 17:00yeah, yeah.  They were all over the place.  You should have heard this one lady.  She was so loud and so fat."  So, yeah.  Street of the fat prostitutes.

DW:  Oh my.

LC:  Yeah.  Maybe some day I can actually quiz some old Parisian about it, you know?  Ask them.

DW:  So yeah, let's now move forward a little bit, and I'm curious to know about the home you grew up in and where you grew up?

LC:  I grew up on 105th and West End in Manhattan -- a little north of the Upper West Side, I like to say.  What kind of home I grew up in?  Kind of post-'60s, lefty Jewish home.  My dad is a carpenter and martial arts instructor and construction project manager and musician, and my mom is a 18:00therapist and social worker and also potter and painter.  So I was raised in New York City in an apartment overlooking the Hudson -- like a lot of people I knew at the time.  And yeah, I mean, it seemed like the most normal thing in the world to have grandparents who spoke Yiddish to each other at home -- especially when they didn't want me to understand what they were saying -- and parents who had kind of multiple disciplines, you know?

DW:  In what ways did you feel Jewish growing up, if at all?

LC:  Well -- no, that's interesting.  I wasn't raised religious at all.  And I -- I'm not a big fan of religion in general -- any religion.  So I'm grateful that I wasn't raised religious, because I was a very rebellious kid, and if I'd had to go to Hebrew school, I would have probably been kicked out.  So (laughs) it wouldn't have been worth anyone's time.  But I feel culturally pretty 19:00Jewish.  It's interesting.  We're all multidimensional people, you know?  I don't -- I think that's your fate as an American.  Unless you grow up in a very small, isolated place, it's your fate to be a multidimensional, multi-identity person, isn't it?  Because we all have interests that are outside of the culture that we were born into.  But then there are some things that are irreducible, right?  Like, I don't know any goyim who like gefilte fish.  I love it.  I can't get enough -- okay, I could get enough, but -- yeah, that kind of thing.  And I think that the love of books -- see, but when I say something like that, then I think about, Well, of course, people all over the world have books and intellectual discussion and movies.  But there's something particularly Jewish about a certain attitude, right?  I'm not going to be 20:00arrogant enough to define it, but I feel it.  And certainly -- like, being here, I feel like I'm among my people (laughs) in a way.  But I would feel like that in a different way if I was in a different setting -- if I was among a bunch of belly dancers, for example, or with a bunch of cartoonists, right?  Who your people are shifts depending on what the context is.  My grandmother tried to get me to go to Hebrew school, and I didn't dig it.  They were basically just talking about selling enough raffle tickets to win a trip to Israel and I was like, this is not for me.  I'm not interested in going to Israel.  I'm happy here.  (laughs) You know?  (laughs) Like, cool.  Let's just not do this.

DW:  Was there any specific way that your family celebrated holidays?

LC:  Not so much holidays.  Well, they were very Americanized -- like, my mother's parents were much more observant.  They weren't that religious, 21:00either, but when they were younger, they would still go to shul for -- probably Yom Kipper, a couple other times a year.  And they would have Shabbos dinner, and that was always nice.  But -- my father's parents celebrated Christmas.  And we always had a Christmas tree when I was growing up, too.  And it just felt like this really American thing to do.  And by the way, I have no idea what my father's parents' rationale was for anything that they did in that way, because they died when I was a teenager, and I was not smart enough to know to actually get to know them as an older person -- I didn't have that privilege.  I know they were atheists, and I think that they were not -- I think that they felt very assimilated, and I think that that was important to them.  But I don't really know -- I don't think it was a big deal to them that they had a Christmas tree.  I think that was just, like, par for the course.  I don't know.  They were big Anglophiles, too.  Anyway, in my own house, we didn't 22:00really celebrate a lot of holidays -- although when I was a kid, we would light candles for Hanukkah.  (laughs) My main memory of that is that one year, my mom and I ran out of Hanukkah candles, and the only candle that I could find was this Halloween candle that -- (laughs) -- it was a scarecrow with a big pumpkin head and a wick stuck up out of the top of the head.  So we lit it, and then about an hour later, (laughs) one of us was walking through the living room and the candle had split open, and all of this red wax had dripped in this pool -- it looked like blood -- it was so grisly -- I wish we had taken a picture.  And I think I was nine or something, and my mom and I just laughed.  Like, we are the worst Jews.  This is ridiculous.  We failed.  (laughs) But I think -- you know, we would go to cousins' bar mitzvahs and stuff like that.  Like, the rest of the family is more observant.  I feel like some of the left-wing politics I 23:00was raised with are very in line with being a modern Jewish person in America also -- certain values I was raised with that seem to be part of our culture, right?  Not religious necessarily -- just -- when you say you're culturally Jewish, I think it often includes that.

DW:  What are some of those values?

LC:  (sighs) A very broad humanitarianism.  A reflexive distaste for war and aggression.  (sighs) A disappointment with people who commit it.  You know, I'm not going to -- (sighs) -- I have moral arguments with some of the things we do also, so I'm not one of the people who claims that we're the only nonviolent people on the planet.  We're not.  No one is.  But I feel like there's definitely just a kind of general liberalism -- progressivism -- that's part of 24:00our experience, and I was definitely raised that way.  Maybe that's also a New York thing.

DW:  So tell me a little bit about your education.

LC:  I went to Massachusetts College of Art for illustration.  I also -- I kind of bounced around from one major to another for a while -- painting, printmaking, different things -- before settling on that.  But as a cartoonist, a lot of one's education is also self-education.  But not very complicated -- my education -- yeah?  Unless you want to know about my elementary school.  (laughs) Upper West Side progressive schools full of little shark-like cliques of girls.  Yeah. (laughs)

DW:  Did you explore Jewish life at all in college?

LC:  No.  Not officially.  But in my comics, yeah, I was already starting to kind of work with some family history in some of my earliest comics.  Yeah.  I'm not actually sure that my college even had anything like a Jewish cultural association, because it was an urban art school.  Also, I was in the Illustration Department, and when you study any design discipline, you are really under the gun all the time.  You don't have time to make friends.  You don't have time to leave the house.  You barely have time to sleep.  So I was up all night working, listening to every Devo album back to back -- because it was very energetic -- drinking coffee and trying to keep myself sharp and finish all these projects all the time.  So even if there had been, I wouldn't have been able (laughs) to be a part.  But I think I've always held myself apart from that stuff -- because I don't have any connection to the religion.  And 26:00it's funny, when my non-Jewish will ask me stuff -- like, Hey, so -- they'll ask me some religious question or some historical question, or they'll be like, Hey, there's pork in this -- like, you're really barkin' up the wrong Jew here.  But I do it with my Muslim friends, even if they're totally not religious, too.  Like, Hey, do you want a beer?  Or, like, Hey, you shouldn't order that sandwich -- it has bacon in it.  (laughs) And most of them appreciate it, you know?  With the beer, a lot of them are like, Pfft.  With the bacon, they're like, Yeah, no thank you.

DW:  Can you talk about some of your earliest work where you did explore your family history?

LC:  Yeah.  I think it was even in my first mini-comic, I just did a little story about my grandfather -- what I knew about my grandfather beating up that kid.  I don't think I ever showed it to him.  I didn't really want him to see that.  I think it would have made him really uncomfortable.  And it would have 27:00made me uncomfortable to see him reading it.  But I think that -- what I know about them, like I said before, is so fragmentary that I feel like any version of their story I tell is equally fragmentary -- it's just -- it's a little bit speculative.  I mean, I'm hewing to what I was told as much as possible, but I don't really know -- people's lives are so complex -- but I don't know enough to really speak with authority beyond a couple of words here and there, you know?  That's how fragmentary they were.  They really didn't want to talk about it.  (sighs) And I understand.  Because I think that I know that when you've experienced a trauma, it is impossible to convey to someone who wasn't there.  And so it's exhausting to try, and so a lot of trauma survivors don't try, because -- you just throw up your hands.  How do I explain this to you?  28:00You'll never understand unless something like this happens to you, and then it'll be your version of this.  But I was upset when I was younger.  I really didn't understand why they wouldn't talk about it.  I still wonder to this day if they talked about it with their friends who had been through it with them -- or if they all kind of silently agreed not to.  They must have.  How can you go through something like that and never discuss it with your wife or your best friend from your town back home?  His best friend from Grębów was -- I don't know if they were neighbors, but he was still alive when I was -- hell, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, so -- and lived in the Bronx.  Yeah, that's the other thing -- they left France for the Bronx, and my mother still hasn't forgiven them.  (laughs) So -- yeah, I've only used their stories a little bit.

DW:  How would you describe your knowledge of Yiddish -- to bring that into a new -- it's a new question, new topic, yeah.

LC:  Spotty, at best.  How about you?  (laughs)

DW:  Well, in "Unterzakhn," which I read -- (whispers) and I really liked -- (laughs) -- you use a lot of Yiddish -- and with the language there, even as an example.

LC:  Yeah.  Well, I mean, I certainly heard it growing up, and my grandparents spoke it freely around me all the time.  But my feeling is that the grandparents speak it, the children understand it, and the grandchildren can curse.  So I can curse -- a few curses.  I don't really understand phrases in Yiddish.  I never learned it.  And I have trouble learning languages in other alphabets because I just didn't start learning that kind of thing early enough.  So it's hard for me to recognize letter forms.  And also, Hebrew, 30:00Yiddish, Arabic, they're very difficult to learn to read.  Most people who speak them as second languages learn to speak them, not read them -- or many, anyway.  But I found a lot of it coming out -- and I think it comes out in my speech patterns and in my thought process -- like, in the way that I write dialogue.  A lot of that stuff wrote itself.  The Meyer Birnbaum character -- he wrote himself.  He came in like an angel from heaven and spoke through me with his foul little mouth.  He was great.  (laughs) I swear.  I mean, I want to say I didn't create him -- I really felt like he arrived fully formed.  I catch myself using a lot of Yiddishified English -- like, Yiddish syntax -- a lot.  I heard this interview with Nathan Englander where he was talking about that, and he said something about having been educated first in Yiddish-speaking schools or in yeshivas or something and then having had to -- I mean, having that syntax beaten out of him.  Ah!  That must have been so hard.  I prefer 31:00to just leave it in there.  It's fun.  It's like the last vestige of that language, for me.  But I had to ask -- I mean, I had people that I asked for Yiddish help.  Like, if I wanted to know, "Okay, so how would this person in this context say this to someone in Yiddish?  Or, What's the Yiddish word for blank -- whatever?"  I got it wrong in a couple of instances, too, and had to edit it.  And it's interesting, I think that's how I began to realize that the kind of Yiddish that people learn in an academic setting is really different than dialect.  My family all are Galitsyaners and spoke Yiddish at home.  And so there's two layers there, right?  There's the dialect layer and then there's the context layer.  So my mother knows domestic Yiddish.  She wouldn't know -- for example, having a discussion about a philosophy book is something that she would be able to do in English, but not in Yiddish, probably.  But she could talk kitchen -- she could talk house stuff in Yiddish -- but just because that 32:00was -- you know, in the street, she wasn't speaking Yiddish, she was speaking English.  But there were a couple of times when I would get an academic word from my academic Yiddish friend, and my mom would be like, "What is that?  Take that out.  Nobody says that."  But then her cousin would pipe up -- "Yeah, she would just say 'oy gevalt.'"  (laughs) (pause) Oh -- one more thing about that.  So a lady came up to me -- I was doing a reading at Miami Book Fair a couple years ago, and this, like, older lady -- older Miami Jewish lady starts coming towards the table and I'm like, Oh, no.  I'm in for it now.  (laughs) And she proceeded to tell me that she didn't know the word "unterzakhn 33:00[underwear]."  And she made it very clear -- "I speak Yiddish fluently.  I've never seen that word."  (laughs) She wasn't mean about it.  She was just very matter-of-fact.  I said, "Yeah.  I think it's an academic word."  My mom doesn't know it either.  (laughs)

DW:  So tell me more -- yeah -- about "unterzakhn" -- the word, I mean --

LC:  I'm trying to remember.  My thought process behind the title was so long ago, it seems, now -- I wanted it to be the Yiddish word for underthings, so I just started looking up Yiddish words for underwear, underpants, underclothes, underthings.  And that word was so great.  It was so heavy.  It was so Germanic, you know?  I love the sound of German, I love the sound of Yiddish.  And it's a good language to employ if you're feeling serious.  And I'm also a big fan of the German avant-garde, so -- that has nothing to do with the word, but my attraction to the culture (laughs) is an attraction to that art.  And 34:00actually, that style of art is very influential on how I designed the book -- the cover design and some of the art inside of it, too.  But that's beside the point.  I'm sorry.  I might have asked my mom.  I don't think I asked her about it at the time.  She had hooked me up with a friend of hers who was an academic Yiddish person, and she confirmed for me what the word meant.  So she knew it -- but, see, that's a clue that it's an academic word.  And I don't really know enough about the history of teaching Yiddish in an academic setting to understand why they're so different.  Like, what was the decision that was made?  Did they pull from a bunch of dialects and create kind of a new institutional dialect?  The one time I took a Yiddish class, everybody made fun of my Galitsyaner accent.  But the way they were pronouncing things was just bizarre.  (laughs)

DW:  So tell me, in what context did you take a Yiddish class?

LC:  Oh.  (sighs) I started to take this class at NYU that was a month-long, 35:00daily intensive, and I ended up bailing on it because it was -- I mean, I was having to get up so early every morning and it was exhausting.  And I realized -- well, actually, I had a kind of complicated emotional reaction to it.  At the time, I remember describing it to my husband as being like putting on an ancestor's moth-eaten old coat.  I also realized, this is a vanity thing.  I know that sounds terrible, but I'm not gonna use it.  And if I'm going to invest in speaking a language, it should be French, because that's a culture I actually have a lot of contact with, and French will actually get you around a lot of countries.  I love Yiddish, but I couldn't justify on a practical level staying there.  Not to mention, like I said, I was exhausted and I wasn't able to get any work done in this program.  But it's a great program, and I -- I 36:00don't know if it still exists, but if it does, I encourage people to do it if they really want to be in a Yiddish immersion program.

DW:  Have you seen your interests in Yiddish grow?

LC:  I'd say they've stayed the same.  They've always been there.  I mean, it's my culture.  I love my culture.  I'm happy to see that interest in it is thriving.  I don't know where it's going in terms of, Are young people learning it?  Are you guys learning it?  Are you learning to speak it?  Do you feel like you can carry on a conversation?

DW:  I'll tell you after.  (laughs)

LC:  (laughs)  Well, so, what's interesting to me also is that in the Hasidic community in New York, people are speaking Yiddish, but I would hear them and I 37:00just wouldn't even be able to pick out a word, because their accents were so weird.  And I'm still not sure what that accent is.  My mom said it's American.  Maybe it's a Brooklyn accent.  I don't know.  But it doesn't make any sense to me.  And my mom can understand them a little bit, but even she's like, "They sound weird."  But it's good.  I'm glad they're keeping it alive.  I'm really, really glad that people are speaking it.  It makes me very sad to think of it disappearing.  It's an amazing language.  But I also don't know what happens when a language loses its home base and the culture that it's built up over a thousand years -- is -- has the heart cut out of it.  I don't know.  Then, you've got to build it from the ground up, so it doesn't become a museum piece.  And that's the challenge of speaking Yiddish outside of the Pale of Settlement, isn't it?  I'm sure you struggle with that -- I'm sure that you 38:00who are learning it now as a group probably face it.  I don't know if it's discussed in your classes, but how could it not be?  It also makes me wonder what happened to Ladino.  I think there are three hundred thousand speakers of it now, is that right?

DW:  I'm not sure.

LC:  Well, I think there's more Yiddish speakers than there are Ladino speakers.  I don't know if there's as big a movement to keep that alive.  There were a lot of Jewish versions of different languages that sound like they were interesting.  It makes me sad to think of them all disappearing, because that's a very big, rich culture.  But languages disappear all the time.  I do think it's permeated our culture.  I'll tell you two little anecdotes from my last trip to France, because I think they're really funny.  (laughs) Let me 39:00preface this for -- I don't know who watches these videos, but I don't want anybody to think I'm talkin' smack about the French, 'cause I happen to really love them.  They've been good to me.  But -- (laughs) -- I coined this term, "Francesplaining," when I was there last year.  (laughs) So the first story is that I was being interviewed by a TV presenter from Toulouse, and in the middle of the interview he looks at me from behind the camera and he says, "You know, in America, I think you do not have Yiddish humor.  In France, we have this."  And when I recovered myself from laughing and almost falling on the floor with laughter, I think I gave him a very brief explanation of the entire American entertainment industry, starting with vaudeville and probably ending with "Seinfeld," with a big heap of Woody Allen in the middle.  Like, our entire entertainment industry is based on Yiddish -- at least initially, right?  And then that night or the night after, I was with Sarah Glidden, actually -- who 40:00you may meet if you go to any of these events -- she's a great cartoonist.  We were having dinner with her publisher, and when you go out to dinner at a French comics festival with a publisher, it's an entourage.  So we're all at this table.  And I find myself sitting across from some well-known internet comics editor.  And after first getting into an argument in French with Sarah about how there is no left in America -- his assertion, which made her really mad -- he looks at me and he goes, "Have you ever heard of Harvey Kurtzman and 'Mad' magazine?"  And I cracked up.  And he starts to blush.  And I said, "Do you have any idea where I'm from, what I do for a living, my ethnic background, and who I'm married to?"  You know, my husband was an adjunct professor at SVA for a decade -- where Harvey Kurtzman taught.  Also, I'm an American.  I grew up on "Mad" magazine.  Like, you don't have to be a Jew to have that in your 41:00blood.  It's in our DNA as Americans -- if parents knew what was good for you, you know?  My dad brought home "Mad" magazine every month with the Sunday paper.  One Sunday a month, it came with a "Mad" magazine.  I was just, like, "What are they teaching you people here?  And why are you asking me that?  That's a crazy question to ask a Jewish person who's a cartoonist from America."  (laughs) I can't even remember your question that led me to that.  (laughs)

DW:  That's awesome.

LC:  Sorry.

DW:  No!  You're good, you're good.  It's great.  So that does kind of bring me in to my next question.  What role do you think the medium that you write in -- how it transmits to wider audiences and --

LC:  Well, there's certainly a lot of Yiddish that I think wider audiences hadn't heard, in my book -- because a lot of people were asking me for a glossary.  And -- especially people in other countries.  Oh, and somebody on the internet, where all the smartest critics congregate, criticized my book -- 42:00they liked it, but they said that I used, quote, "'Mad' magazine Yiddish."  They criticized my use of the word "farshlogener [frickin', lit. "rancid"]" pre-1950s.

DW:  And what does that word mean?

LC:  Ah -- I mean -- you know what, I couldn't tell you the dictionary definition of "farshlogener," but contextually, it's like, Ugh, look at that farshlogener guy.  There's a great -- I think it's a Diane Neuman cartoon where she's talking about her past -- it's, like, late '60s, early '70s, and she's got this hippie boyfriend who incessantly plays some Leonard Cohen song about a river.  And she's in the background going, "Oy, I wish he'd jump into that farshlogener river already!"  That kind of thing.  But when I talked to my French translator about it, he said, "Well, I have to leave that in there, because you know that I am a huge fan of 'Mad' magazine, and there is no way that we are not going to put 'Mad' magazine language in your book.  If it is 43:00already there, I am not going to take it out, because I love 'Mad' magazine."  (laughs) So, yeah.  But a lot of my foreign editors definitely were like -- I think they had a few conundrums.  Like, how do we -- do we translate this?  Do we not?  And actually, I've been really clear with them.  If a word looks German to you, leave it -- don't translate it.  Because I can't -- I mean, the purpose of having Yiddish words inside of the English is so that you feel like I did growing up -- where, you know, Yiddish is sort of like one word out of sixty in a paragraph that someone speaks, right?  And I couldn't imagine that taken out in the book -- like, have it all be in Dutch.  What would you translate that as?  I haven't actually seen the Dutch translation, though.  It's coming to me.  I think they were smart enough to leave the Yiddish in there.  We'll see.  My French translator is an amazing language guy and knew exactly what he was doing.  I don't think I've seen the Spanish translation yet, or the Italian 44:00one.  And I haven't seen the Swedish one.  My Swedish comics publisher is actually from Germany, and I think Germans know the difference between Yiddish and German.  Yeah.  (laughs) But I think works like that keep it alive, but they do it in this fragmentary way, right?  I'm guilty of that -- very guilty of that.  I'm not speaking Yiddish.  I'm not transmitting accurate Yiddish.  I'm just using it in this -- in whatever small way I can.  But if that keeps it alive in some small way, then I'm glad.

DW:  Out of curiosity, the Yiddish names that you used -- did they come to you from somewhere bigger, or are they based off of people that you know --

LC:  You mean, like, Fanya, Bronia --

DW:  Yeah.

LC:  They just came to me.  But it's interesting -- there actually was a Bronia who worked for Margaret Sanger -- I read later.  And when I looked up the meanings of the names of some of the characters, "Minna" means "bitter" -- the mother's name -- and she's a very bitter woman.  "Esther" means "star," which I should have guessed -- aster -- and also relates to Queen Esther, and she's a very queenly character.  And I can't remember what "Fanya" means, but I did know at one point -- I had it in my notes.  No, it just came to me -- it came to me.  I'm trying to think if there were other names.  The littlest sister -- the one who dies -- Feyge, right?  Yeah.  Bird.  Yeah -- no, they just kind of came.  (pause; Corman sips water) But notice, none of them are 46:00religious-based names -- they're not Hebrew names -- which I know would be more realistic.  I mean, certainly, you'd find those names, but there would have been characters -- like, Isaac Bashevis Singer would have written characters whose names were related to Biblical characters, right?  Because he knew his Torah.  And I don't.  So that's what's missing, right?  In some ways, I'm just faking it.  I'm faking it all.  Just like I faked the Lower East Side in that book.  I mean, I was waiting for a critic to complain that I never show the characters going to Coney Island, for example -- or that I never show the Third Avenue L.  I didn't -- that didn't come up, you know?  I had reasons for not doing Coney Island.  I love Coney Island.  I would totally put it in a comic if it was necessary.  (laughs) But I wanted to show that the characters are so serious and so involved with their lives and so in a hole that they 47:00didn't have time for frivolities.  But I did worry about that.  (laughs)

DW:  Do you think there is some bigger connection between comics and Jews?  I mean, there are just so many -- this is kind of a personal question that just came to me.

LC:  That's a good question.  You should definitely talk to Chris Couch, who's the organizer of this whole thing, because that's his whole work.  I personally -- I am not sure.  I mean, yeah, I guess so, right?  Because I'm not a superhero person, I don't have any thoughts on that matter, but certainly a lot of the superheroes and action comics were created by Jewish people from the Lower East Side -- Harvey Kurtzman, also -- a lot of the great satire.  But what the larger implications of that are, I don't know.  Jack Kirby -- I think his real name was Kurtzberg -- he was from the Lower East Side.  And actually, 48:00there's a great comic that he did that's kind of autobiographical about that -- about his youth.  I think his -- it was all a little bit later than my book, but -- a lot of fighting.  So that shows up later in his work.  Stan Lee -- what's his real name?  I can't remember.  Jewish?  Yeah.  Do you think it has to do with our position in the entertainment business maybe?  I've wondered about that.  But that's a question I have, as well.  I think for me, I'm not part of that tradition -- I'm just another American making comics.  But it's nice to be able to cross over and be welcomed into that tradition, because it's already there, if that makes sense.  But I mean, my biggest influences growing up were Archie Comics and Harvey Comics.  I don't even know if Harvey are still 49:00coming out -- Casper the Friendly Ghost and Hot Stuff the Little Devil, stuff like that.

DW:  Well, we are nearing our time, so are there any other stories or anything that you feel --

LC:  (sighs)

DW:  -- that you would like to talk about?

LC:  Only that I'm very grateful to my parents for never dissuading me from this path of being an artist.  (laughs) Because it's been a really good ride.  (laughs) Yeah.  And I will say, my mother's parents certainly did not want their kids to be artists.  (laughs) Okay, here's two little anecdotes for you.  My mom wanted to be a ballerina, but my grandmother always told her, "Dancing is for gypsies and shikses."  So my mother was invited to take a company class at ABT as a teenager, but my grandmother locked her in the house -- which I think is a horrible, horrible story.  But the counter to that story 50:00is that my mom's sister, who was three years older, when they had -- yeah, I think they had been in this country a couple of years -- they were still little kids -- they were walking down the street in the Bronx, and they passed a music store.  And there was a sign in the window that said, Piano lessons: Inquire within.  And my grandmother -- I mean, my aunt -- immediately -- "I want to take piano lessons."  She must have been nine or something.  And my grandmother's reaction was, "Ugh?  For what you need this?"  Like, "Of course not!  Of course you're not gonna go to piano lessons!  Why would you take piano lessons?"  And my grandmother -- I mean, my aunt -- I keep saying my grandmother when I mean my aunt -- my aunt, I like to say, gave her first opera performance that day.  According to my mother, she flung herself to the floor and threw a tantrum of such intensity -- (laughs) -- my grandparents were forced to capitulate eventually, because they just kind of went, Okay!  Anything to get you to stop.  My mom was not a tantrum thrower.  What was she gonna do?  51:00She was locked in the house.  She couldn't climb out -- it was an apartment building.  But (laughs) you know, I always appreciated that story about my aunt.  Meanwhile, my mom was very supportive of any dream I wanted to pursue -- me and my brother both.  So she learned.  From that immigrant experience of survival and practicality.  Yeah.  And when the world ends in a fiery apocalypse, I won't be able to save anyone -- much less myself, (laughs) because I didn't have any survival skills -- because I'm an artist.  (laughs) Yeah.  Is that in the interview?  You don't have to leave that on the tape.  (laughs)

DW:  We'll make sure.  (laughs) So -- this is a question we ask everybody -- what is your favorite Yiddish phrase or word or song, and what does it mean to you?

LC:  Oh, God!  I've never thought of that before.  Well, I say "oy vey" all 52:00the time.  "Oy vey iz mir [Oh dear me]."  And it's not to be funny -- it's not ironic.  That's how we talked in my house growing up.  I say "gezundheit" all the time, too.  My ten-month-old loves it.  (sighs) I love 'em all.  I can't pick.  That's like asking me to pick a favorite child.  They're all wonderful.  I mean, it's such a colorful language.  The meaning is so deep in Yiddish.  How about you?

DW:  I don't know.  What did I -- I had said "bashert [predestined]," I think when I -- yeah.  I like that term.

LC:  Some things I only know in translation.  "She's like a big horse, clopping and shitting all over the place."  That's a good one.  It's so descriptive, right?  We all know that lady -- or guy.  Yeah.  I had a friend who married a guy like that.  We're not friends anymore.  (laughs) Oh -- the only other thing I wanted to say -- you were asking about my -- what I feel my connection is with Yiddish?  Food.  Isn't that how so many of us connect with 53:00it?  Even if you can't speak the language, right?  I make kasha and I feel like I'm connected with my ancestors.  And every time I make chicken soup.  Yeah.  That's all.  (laughs)

DW:  (pause) Well, then, on behalf of the Yiddish Book Center, I want to thank you so much for sharing all of your insight and all of your stories and all of that.

LC:  Thank you for having me.  I really appreciate it.

[END OF INTERVIEW]