GARY BART ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney, and today is November 21st, 2014. I am here in Los Angeles with Gary Bart, we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Gary, do I have your permission to record?

GARY BART:Oh, absolutely.

CW:Thanks. So, we're here to talk mostly about your famed ancestor, Zishe Breitbart. Can you just first tell me his name and your relation to him?

GB:His name was Zishe Siegmund Breitbart. He's my father's uncle. And I was first introduced to him as a child. My father would tell me stories about him, which kind of piqued my interest, because it's been a long time since a Jew was 1:00famous for his strength and not his intellect. And we had one book in the house that had one paragraph about him. And it was a book on Jewish folk heroes. And I was fascinated enough with the story as a child that, of course, I wanted to know more. And that's what I've spent all my life researching.

CW:Wow. So where and when was he born?

GB:He was born in 1893 in Stryków, Poland, outside of Łódź. He came from a family of blacksmiths. His father and grandfather were blacksmiths. The story is told about his grandfather that going from one town to the next, the horse became lame, so he picked up the horse, put the horse in the cart, and pulled 2:00the cart to the next town -- that was his grandfather.

CW:And do you have a sense of what the town -- life was like in that town?

GB:Well, it was a shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community]. So he was the blacksmith -- so he did all the work on the horses and anything that was made out of iron. But it was a small town. And life was very difficult for him. He tells through his biography, and by others, that his father was not the nicest person in the world and made his life really difficult. But through it all, he found at a very early age he had this phenomenal strength. And Zishe says in his biography that his strength was nothing compared to his brother. He had an older brother who died in World War I who did not do -- perform feats of 3:00strength -- he just was physically strong.

CW:So can you tell me about, sort of, how he got involved -- how did he first get involved in the circus?

GB:Well, what happened was, so he had this strength. And his parents kept trying to send him to apprentices to learn a trade. But everyone that they sent him to used him for his strength and didn't teach them the trade. And he got fed up with it. And there happened to have been a traveling circus that came to town. And he snuck out and went to see the circus -- 'cause, you know, they came from an Orthodox family -- this was not something they ordinarily would do. And in those days, the way you got to be a strongman in the circus was, you beat the 4:00incumbent in a fight. And so the strongman at the circus appeared and asked, "Are there any takers?" And this young teenage -- I think he was fourteen or fifteen at the time -- they had a fight, and he won -- and he beat the strongman. Unbeknownst to him, the strongman's brother was the bear keeper. And they had talked Zishe into coming back the next night to fight the bear. But what they didn't tell him was -- is that they purposely didn't feed the bear -- all day, all night, all day. So by the time Zishe was thrown in the cage with the bear, that bear was pretty angry. And he won the fight, but he carried scars 5:00with him for the rest of his life from that fight. And that's how he joined the circus and left home.

CW:Do you know how his family reacted? You mentioned he didn't have a great relationship with his father.

GB:Right. Well, not really -- other than I know that at some point, he promised his mother that he would take care of his family, et cetera. And I told you about his father. And even after Zishe's death, I have a newspaper advertisement that his father put in the paper to see if someone could give him money to sue the estate for more money. So that relationship, I think, was pretty sour.

CW:And do you know about his family -- how many siblings he had, sort of who he 6:00grew up with?

GB:Right. He had five brothers and sisters. He was the second oldest. Two of his brothers copied his performances after his death and tried to capitalize on his success. And another brother was an assistant to a famous magician at the time -- I don't remember his name right now.

CW:Can you describe some of the feats that he used in his acts?

GB:Yeah. At an early age, I think he really didn't have the idea of what to do. I know there's a story about him as a late teenager where he would be buried in a coffin under mounds of sand, and he would be able to pull himself out of the 7:00coffin and the sand. As a itinerate in Berlin, there was a contest where -- amongst these strong men -- they rolled up their sleeves and showed they had nothing in their hands, and it was the first person who could make their hands bleed from clapping would be the winner. And he won that. And so from that, he started to perfect his acts and would lift horses -- pick up a horse -- bend bars -- steel bars, 'cause he knew steel and iron from being a blacksmith -- and he graduated into putting together quite a show. And he was in a tent -- a small tent -- kind of like a sideshow -- where he was performing. And what he had was 8:00-- what the other beefy guys didn't have -- was, he had a shtik [act]. He knew how to talk to the audience and build up drama -- on top of taking an iron bar and just bending it around his arm while he's talking, et cetera. And in one of those performances, in 1919, the woman who owned the largest circus in Europe, Circus Busch, saw him and decided to take him on in the circus -- and at a risk -- and put him in the main circus. Up until that point, there never was a strongman in the main circus, but she thought because he had this talent of not just strength but being able to have a showman -- performance. And he became a 9:00sensation. As he traveled from circus to circus throughout Berlin, he became more and more famous. And a matter of fact, one of the newspaper accounts said that they couldn't understand what the fascination was with a strongman, except perhaps the fact that there wasn't a strongman in the political arena at the time, right? So this is the Weimar years, between the world wars.

CW:Can you --

GB:Oh --

CW:Oh, sorry --

GB:-- so, acts of strength. So, he would take a railroad wheel on a rope, get up on top of a ladder, and hold the wheel with the rope, and four or five people would dangle from the top of it. He would hold back two horses with his arms that were whipped to go in opposite directions. He would lay on his back and on 10:00top were boards, and on top of the boards would go a car, an elephant, a parade of oxen -- all balanced on his chest. He had the circle of death, where he had this apparatus that housed two motorcycles racing around each other -- while he balanced all of it while he was laying down on his chest. In Bavaria, he was talked into going into a circus ring -- I'm sorry -- a bull ring with a bull. And the newspaper account says that he was wearing red shorts -- that's it -- and he had a small dagger inside his pants just in case. But the newspaper account says that the bull stared at him and approached him, and with his fist, 11:00he hit the bull right in the head and knocked the bull out -- and you could hear that thud throughout the whole arena. He was the kind of person that didn't know how to say no. It's not that he had the ideas for some of these -- the other people would dream it up and say, "Can you do this?" And he said, "All right. Why not?"

CW:Can you sort of set the stage of what this scene was like in Europe -- you know, with the circus and the vaudeville? What was --

GB:Well, this is before television and this is at the infancy of radio, and live performances were the thing. So, especially in Germany at the time, the cabaret and vaudeville houses were the chief sources of entertainment for the public. 12:00And he kind of skirted the issue of being Jewish and not being Jewish. Because he saw that what was going on -- here is this Polish Jew that comes to Germany, becomes famous in Germany. And at the time, Germany is looking for some sort of strength, and they have this vision of this Nordic strong person. And so what he does is interesting -- he dyes his hair blond. He happens to be a blue-eyed -- not anything like what people would think a Jew would look like. And so the Germans idolized him. They thought he was the prototypical German. And at the same time, when he would go to -- visiting cities, on a Friday night, he'd go to the services at the synagogue and perform there. And a matter of fact, there was 13:00one story in Koblenz, where he was in the synagogue on a Friday night, and these -- the early predecessors to the Blackshirts -- the Hakenkreuzlers, they were called -- these kids, these young ruffians, were screaming for him. They knew he was in the synagogue. And finally, everybody in the synagogue is looking at him, and he's just ignoring them -- until they throw a rock through the window. And then he gets up, he puts his book down, he goes to the front doors, slams open the doors, stares at the crowd of kids, and starts trying to attack one of them -- and they all run away. Interestingly, I wonder what kind of an effect that had on the people that watched it. And I had this encounter with an Orthodox 14:00rabbi here in Los Angeles, Yitzchok Adlerstein. And I studied with him for many years. And I had asked him -- when I moved to Los Angeles, he called me, and he said, "I'm gonna make you a deal that you can't refuse." And I said, "What's that?" And he says, "You come to me once a week, once a month, whatever you'd like, and I'll teach you whatever you want to know." So I made an appointment and I went to see him. And we chatted, and I told him I was working on trying to put together a film about Breitbart and the strongman, et cetera. And he says, "Okay, so now, what would you like to study?" I said, "I think it would be a good idea if I knew the real biblical story of Samson." He said, "You know, for that, I'm gonna have to prepare. Is there anything else we could do today?" I said, "How about my haftorah? I'd like to know what that was about." And he says, "Well, what was it?" And I repeated to him the first ten words -- "Vayehi 15:00ish echad mitzrah mimishpachat hadani u'shemo manoach [And there was one man from Zorah, from the family of the Danites, whose name was Manoah]." And he said, "Oh." And he goes to the book, and he's turning the pages, and he says, "You don't know what this is about?" And I said, "I don't remember." And he stops, and he says, "It's the birth of Samson." That was my haftorah. Well, I don't know if it's giving you chills -- it's giving me chills. And I thought for sure, from that moment on, that I had a purpose -- that I had a mission. And my mission was to try and unearth this story that had been virtually completely disappeared, along with almost all the people -- all his people that disappeared. And so it made me even more determined than ever to get this story done.

CW:So how did you go about it -- the research?

GB:As a child, I grew up in Rockaway, in New York, and I took the bus to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, and learned how to do research. And 16:00they had some great books. And they -- everything would -- I would find small little articles -- first, his obituary in the "New York Times," which would lead me to something else that I found and would read and then would lead me to something else. Then I started writing letters. I'd write letters to archives and museums across the world. I published advertisements in Jewish and German Jewish newspapers throughout the world that I was looking for information. And I got first-hand accounts from people. There was one elderly man in Sweden that had an original photo postcard of Breitbart from the '20s. And he wrote on the back of the postcard, "I remember seeing him do the ba-ba-ba," and put a stamp on it and mailed it to me. I had a wonderful personal account of someone of 17:00Zishe coming to a small shtetl and what it was like to take the day off and to see this great folk hero, this Jewish folk hero. And he said that the children started copying the way he walked, and would try and do things that he did. So, like I said, one thing would lead to another. I found circus archivists, circus museums, strongman collectors. And one particular strongman collector who was very knowledgeable in the field was also one of the organizers of the strongest man in the world competition that's on ESPN. And he was the one that helped us find someone to play the part of Zishe in "Invincible," the film that I produced -- which is a whole 'nother story.

CW:Right. So in -- I want to talk about the movie, but in terms of the research, were there things that, you know, looking back over all these decades of research, that were just surprises -- you know, that you didn't think you were gonna find or -- stories?

GB:Yes. There were many -- some that kept me up at night wondering if I would ever find more about that. There was a story about him performing on stage and the manager decided that he thought it would be f-- enhance his show by having a midget -- and the midget would do the same thing he did, but in smaller barbells and smaller things, you know? And it was more -- antagonistic to the midget than it was enhancing the show. And in one of his acts that Breitbart was doing, the 19:00midget got hurt, and he picked up the midget and promised him that he would never allow him to do that again. You know, heartfelt stories like that. Stories about -- in Germany, he didn't keep the fact he was Jewish a secret, but he didn't publicize it to the German public. So he led these two lives -- of performing in the Germans and performing for the Jews. But some people knew. And when he would ask people, "Come up," and he would lay on his back, and they had this big platform with huge stones -- and they'd have stonecutters with huge sledgehammers flail away at these rocks while it's all on his chest. Well, some guy decided he was gonna aim at his head instead of the rocks, and that led to a big melee in the theater. And, on his way home, his car -- he had an estate 20:00outside of Berlin, in Friedenstal, and on his way home, his car was ambushed, and they tried to beat him up. And so from then on, he needed to have bodyguards. And he had bodyguards with him.

CW:Yeah. Are there other stories about sort of the -- I know the -- German reaction to his Jewishness? And this Jewish strongman in the --

GB:Well, there was a lot of anti-Semitic publications that made fun of him and said that he was a fraud. And there was a very famous hypnotist -- clairvoyant -- by the name of Erik Hanussen, who decided that he was gonna make himself even 21:00more famous by defaming the strongman. And so what he did was, he took a twenty-year-old girl and trained her and went on stage and said that he was going to hypnotize her, and in her hypnotic state, she would duplicate the same feats of strength that the strongman did. And basically, here's what happened. He would stand up on the stage with her, and all the chains, the metal bars -- everything was on the stage. And he would ask people to come up and examine all of them to make sure that those are the real things. And they did, and they sat down. And then all of a sudden, the house lights went out. There was a spotlight on his head, and for, like, fifteen minutes, he talked about hypnotism and Mesmer and the story about how strong hypnotism is, and the power, and blah, blah, blah. And while this is going on, underneath the curtains, they're pulling 22:00the real metal and replacing it with fake metal. Now comes the time for her to perform, the lights come back on, she picks up the iron bars, wraps it around her arms, and does this whole thing -- and just amazes the audience, that he's done it through his hypnotism. Well, the newspapers caught on to this, and said, This is amazing! We're gonna have to go from Breitbart's performance to Hanussen's performance, and we'll be the judge and we'll decide, et cetera. And so they do that. And what they discover is, Breitbart's performance is mostly women who are attracted to him and what he's doing with his body, and Martha Farra -- the woman -- and Hanussen are mostly men attracted to the scantily clad woman that's doing this, right? And Breitbart really does not like the idea of making fun of him. And so what he does is, he hires an engineer. And the 23:00engineer, just before Hanussen is about to go on stage, takes all the stagehands and gives them a free beer party downstairs in the basement. And they all go with food, et cetera. And he locks them in. So this time, when Hanussen's finished speaking about Mesmer and the lights come back on, those are still the real implements on the floor -- and she can't perform. And the city of Vienna, which is where this all happened, banned Hanussen from performing for ten years in Vienna because of his fraud. That didn't stop him. He followed Breitbart to New York and tried to do the same thing in New York again -- only this time, this was a different Martha Farra that he called by the same name. And she got hurt in performing -- which didn't stop him. He hired a third woman to do it and 24:00called her Martha Farra -- all for the purpose of making him famous.

CW:And was there also a trial?

GB:Yes. The trial had to do, early on, with Hanussen claiming that Breitbart came to him and was so angry with what he was doing that he hit him. And that he sued Breitbart for being a fraud -- that his performances were fake. And so in court, Krupp Steelworks brings in their chains that they manufactured in front of the court. Breitbart pulls them apart, breaks them -- case dismissed.

CW:So in terms of the press coverage, I know that you've seen a lot of the -- 25:00what kind of coverage did he get in the Jewish press?

GB:Right. I hired researchers in both Vienna and in Berlin to go through the newspapers of the time to find -- and I found a lot. There was a lot there. In the Jewish press, he was idolized -- mostly by the Ostjuden -- the Jews that came from Poland that lived in Berlin. The German Jews kind of looked down on those people and really didn't have much to do with them at all. But interestingly enough, the rabbis were very interested in what Breitbart was doing. And the [Redziman?] Rebbe had him come and perform in front of him. And 26:00the rabbi bestowed blessings on him that hadn't been invoked since the time of Samson -- that he was to be the defender of the Jews. The Jewish press -- there were some in New York, when he performed at the Jewish -- not much here in this country. More in Europe -- and not just Germany, but in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. I was very fortunate early on, when I lived in Orange County, that there was a gentleman -- elderly gentleman -- that lived in Leisure World who was a linguist -- a Yiddishist and a linguist. And I don't know how many languages he had, but he translated maybe nine or ten different languages for 27:00me. You know, it's one thing -- almost everything that I received -- the research -- was in another language. So I would get it and I'd sit on it and not know what it said. I'd have to have it -- all of it -- translated.

CW:And can you explain a little bit about sort of his relation to the Jewish community in terms of Breitbart wanting to start sort of self-defense organizations and --

GB:Um-hm. Yeah. First of all, he was a very generous person. He gave away a lot of money. And he gave away a lot of performances to raise money. But he had this idea that there must be a reason why God has given me this strength. More than being a strongman and being popular and making money, there has to be something 28:00else. And he was a staunch Zionist. And so there was a point when he was in New York in the '20s, where he met Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky and he hatched this plan that Breitbart was going to go back to Palestine to recreate the famous feats of strength of Samson to gain worldwide attention, so that Jews could become strong, he was going to start a physical culture course to teach them how to become strong, and that he would be the general of this whole Jewish army that would oust the Turks from Palestine. This was his vision. Unfortunately, he went back to Europe, and in the town of Radom, he had a performance where he would 29:00take a huge railroad spike and, in his bare hands, break it in half, and then have five one-inch oak boards with sheet metal in between, like a sandwich, and take what was left of the railroad spike and plow through all of it on his knee. And it got into his knee, and he developed blood poisoning, and he died from septicemia -- blood poisoning. Well, everybody knows what happened to Jabotinsky. He went on and did exactly what -- that they wanted to do, was to help overthrow the -- first the Turks, then the British.

CW:Wow. And do you have a sense of what his religious faith was? And sort of -- you mentioned he went to services, but in his -- maybe in his autobiography, or --

GB:Well, he went to heder [traditional religious school] as a child. He was kind of adopted by the Yiddish writers. They loved him. Because he was so unique -- that here was someone who was Jewish who was famous other than his intellect. And they wrote about him. And he became very popular with them. As far as his religion is concerned, I know that he greatly respected the rabbis. He helped raise money for a lot of causes -- not just Jewish causes, but all causes -- as a matter of fact, to the point where he had to put an advertisement in the paper for people to please stop asking him for money. (laughs) That's how much he gave. And unfortunately, at the time of his death, there was no money left.

CW:Can you tell about the -- buying lunches for the --

GB:Oh, yeah. So I went to visit his estate. I was in Berlin at the Berlinale to raise money to make this film about him. And all I had was the name of the town where he was from, and I had a postcard of what his house looked like, and a long line of people waiting to get into the house. And so I hired a driver, and we went to Friedenstal. And I stopped a woman on the street and I showed her the postcard, and she said, "Oh! Villa Breitbart!" So I had a villa. And she pointed, and the name of the street was "Breitbart" -- they named the street after him. And I go to the house, and there on the house, on the gates, are the iron bars that he bent around his arms on either side of the gates. And there's a plaque on the wall with his name and the dates and everything. And I knock on 32:00the door. And through the driver, who was my interpreter, there was a minister that opened the door -- this was now part of church property. And when I told him who I was and why I was there, he started to get tears in his eyes. And he dragged me into the foyer, and there he had on the wall pictures of Breitbart and his various performances. And he said that he brings the local children in here from all the different schools so that they would know who he was and what he did for the town. And I showed him the postcard, and he told me that during the height of the worst economic times, Breitbart fed the entire village every day for lunch -- even when he wasn't in town. That's the kind of person he was.

CW:I want to talk about the film. How did you first come up with the idea that you wanted to do a film?

GB:Well, I think it all started with, when I saw that I had this enormous amount 33:00of research, the idea was that, Okay, I want to revive the memory of this person so that people can understand what their heritage and history was -- and maybe by being able to revive him, that would kind of give other people the idea to do the same with other people, and we'd get to know and understand more of what the life was like before the war -- World War II. So I thought first about a book, and I know enough about myself that I'm not the writer. So I was looking for a writer, et cetera. And then I had a business that I sold and retired at forty-four -- I was very fortunate -- and I pursued it full-time. And I thought, Okay, let's make a movie. And I went to UCLA to their -- in their film 34:00department, and I started taking classes and meeting people, et cetera. And if I was able to get into a studio or meet a producer, et cetera, they all said the same thing: This story has three strikes against it. Number one, it's a period piece, which makes it expensive. Number two, it's a Jewish story -- and up until that time -- this was before "Schindler's List" -- nobody was making money making Jewish films. And number three, it's not an American story -- it's a foreign story. And they said, you know, if you really want to be a producer, why don't you do something a little bit more commercial, you know? So I kept persisting and I kept going to every venue I possibly could to meet people -- and you know, it's all about who you know and what you know. And fortunately, a 35:00friend of mine was at a film festival where Werner Herzog was presenting something, and afterwards, he went over to Herzog and said, "You know, a friend of mine has a story about a Jewish strongman in pre-Nazi Germany." And he said, "Oh, that's interesting. Here's my card. Have him give me a call." I called him. I flew up to San Francisco, where he was meeting. And, you know, directors are not sitting around waiting for you to tell them about a story -- they already have three or four projects in various stages of development. And so it was kind of trying to get him pregnant -- to get him interested -- which he was. And I sent him all the material. And he said that he would write the script himself, if I paid for it, and try to put it together -- which we did. And we raised the 36:00money from the German government to make a story about a Jewish folk hero.

CW:Did you -- I mean, what was Herzog's reaction to sort of the -- you know, here's a German director --

GB:Uh-huh.

CW:-- you know?

GB:Well, I was apprehensive, to be honest with you. But a man of his caliber who's interested in doing this story -- I had to pursue it to see how far it would go. One of the first things he told me in one of our meetings was, "I'm not gonna make this a political film." I said, "What do you mean?" "Well, we're not gonna talk about Zionism and whether there should be an Israel or not and a Jewish state or whatever." And I said, "Okay, well what are you gonna do?" He said, "Well, we're gonna make it a more personal story." I said, "All right. I understand that." It would be difficult for him, I think, to bridge that gap and 37:00go that way. But interestingly, there's a scene in the film where Breitbart is performing in front of an audience that's Jewish and German together, and they're not getting along too well. And as a matter of fact, when Breitbart lifts up this enormous weight, you hear a voice in the background saying, "It's unthinkable that a Jew could be this strong." That happens to be Herzog's voice. (laughs)

CW:Wow. What was it like when you were actually shooting the film? You were shooting in Germany, right?

GB:Yes. It was like a dream come true. I was in a fantasy world -- that I had to pinch myself that this was actually going on. As a matter of fact, the first days of the shooting was in Lithuania, in Kuldīga, which is a small town about 38:00two hours outside of Riga -- I'm sorry, in Latvia, not Lithuania. And this was for all intents and purposes a shtetl. It looked just like the photos you see from the '20s and the thirties. And I desperately went around town looking for mezuzahs on the doors -- mezuzah holes. I couldn't find any. But incidentally, where we did film one scene -- it was supposedly a Jewish hospital -- it was an old hospital -- there was a Jewish star up -- way up on top, on another building, 'cause this was the Jewish hospital. So anyway, so we started filming and we needed to see the dailies. There's only one movie theater in town. And I go in the movie theater, and the movie theater is upstairs and I begin to realize -- this was the synagogue. Upstairs is where the -- and where the bimah 39:00was is the curtain -- I'm sorry, is the screen for the film. And here, we're projecting on this screen stories of a Jewish folk hero in a synagogue -- that was a synagogue -- from the time, from the era. It was an amazing, amazing experience. There's another story. When making the film, we were in Holland at the wharf -- there's a scene where the Nazis are going on this boat and -- it was the coldest day of our shoot. Anyway, from across the quay, there's a guy honking his horn and screaming and hollering at us, and we couldn't film. So Werner says to me, "You better go over and talk to this guy, 'cause he could ruin our day here." So they drive me all the way around, and this guy is really 40:00hot under the collar, and I said -- he says to me, "How dare you bring the Nazis here to this place? This is where they executed all the Jews! Right where you are! Right where you are! Right there! How could you possibly do that?" And I said, "Um, well, this is not a film to glorify the Nazis. It's the story of a Jewish folk hero who stood up to them." And he said (imitates him, huffing and puffing), "Do you have a permit?" (laughs) I said, "Yes, we have a permit." So we kind of satisfied -- but it gives you an idea of the sense of what was going on at the time of trying to film this story.

CW:Yeah. I mean, for you, just -- again, personally, what was it like to sort of be on set sort of in -- with people in Nazi uniform and --

GB:Scary. It was really scary. I mean, I knew these people -- they were nice 41:00people -- but you see these uniforms. And there was one scene where we filmed in the back of the opera house in Berlin, and we put up these kiosks with Nazi posters on them to authenticate the scene. And a bus pulled up with Jews from Chicago that were on a Jewish tour, and they get out of the bus and they see all these Nazi posters (laughs) and they start getting all apoplectic about what's going on in Germany, and we had to explain to them what was happening. It was really funny. But there was a really striking story. That day -- this is what reminded me -- there was a writer there from "Haaretz" in Israel -- a newspaper. And he told me a story that I've never forgotten. I asked him, "How long have you been in Berlin?" And he was there for seven years. And he told me, his first 42:00night in Berlin, late at night, he's sitting in a McDonald's reading a Hebrew newspaper. An elderly German drunk comes in and looks at the paper and says, "I know what that is." And he says, "What?" He says, "That's Hebrew." And he says, "How do you know Hebrew?" And he starts saying Shema [Jewish daily prayer] -- because he had heard it so many times during the war when -- that's the last words they would say, right? Yeah.

CW:Did you, in the process of making the film, sort of talk to Herzog about what -- how he was approaching the film? What was your relationship with him in terms of the story and how much --

GB:Let me tell you something. Werner Herzog is a man very devoted to his art. 43:00And he told me on the first day that we met, "I don't collaborate." And he didn't. And it made it difficult at times, because obviously, I had a different view than he did. He's the auteur, this is his film, et cetera. And I had to try and figure out how, within the scope of what he wanted, I was able to at least let him know how I felt. Like, there was one scene in the circus, very early on, when Zishe is fighting the strongman. And he wanted to make Zishe feel like -- I forgot exactly what it was now, but Zishe was gonna pick up the strongman and 44:00drop him -- and in some way be a negative hero. And I really didn't like that. And that led to really the only real fight that we had, because I felt, I have to protect the image of this man. And it was softened in some way, so it didn't come out that way. But you don't tell Werner Herzog what to do -- Werner Herzog tells everybody else what to do. That's what makes a great director, is that he knows how to get people to do what he wants. And as he said, three-quarters of his job is in casting. If you cast the right people, you don't have to worry.

CW:I understand you did a seder, when you were in Germany.

GB:Oh, yes. We did.

CW:Can you tell me about that?

GB:Yes. Well, we were there during Passover. And I've never missed a Passover in 45:00my life. And I didn't find any Jews in this small town where we were filming -- outside of Bern -- so I decided to bring in and make a Passover service. And I brought in kosher food from Cologne. And I had everything we needed for the Passover service. And the only three Jews that were there was me, Herb Golder, who was the assistant director, and Anna Gourari, who played the part of the girl, Martha Farra, in the movie -- who was from Russia, who only knew she was Jewish, but that was the extent of her Jewishness -- you know what happened to 46:00the Jews in Russia. And then we had Werner and some of the other people from the film. It was quite an event, because the part when we got to the afikomen and buying back the afikomen -- Anna had it, but Werner became her representative to negotiate the price. (laughs) And although he's never done it before, he was very good at it. (laughs)

CW:Wow. I want to go back a little bit. Can you tell me a little bit about your -- the world that you grew up in and your father -- just briefly, who he was?

GB:Yeah. Well, I grew up in Belle Harbor, Rockaway, New York. My father was a 47:00child cantor from Poland and he had -- the most popular radio show in the thirties was "The Major Bowes Amateur Hour." And at fifteen years old, he tried to get on that show, and they wouldn't take him. So he went down the hall, found a piano, started playing and singing, and people started coming in, including Major Bowes, and put him on the show that weekend. And he won. He won the -- you know, it's like "American Idol" today. And he won. And they had -- at the time, the winners would then go on a national tour. This was before TV, right? So when this tour came to a town, it was a big thing. They took over the theater and they had performances, et cetera. And he did this for three years, and supported his family during the Depression. Then, he happened to be in Miami -- now in the 48:00early '50s -- and was one of the founders of the Israel Bond movement -- the first Israel Bond meeting. And he sang and performed. And they liked him so much, they kept asking him to come and do that -- which he did. And in over twenty-four hundred Israel Bond meetings in, I don't know, twenty-some-odd years, he raised over one-and-a-quarter billion dollars -- by singing, telling jokes, stories, and not letting the first person leave without buying a bond. (laughs) He was very good at it. He also had his own radio and TV show in New York, "The Jan Bart Show," on WEVD and on the radio, "The American Jewish Caravan of Stars," "Yiddish Swing" with the Barry Sisters -- this is the milieu that I grew up with -- this background. And he was a staunch Zionist, and 49:00instilled in us a great love and support for Israel and --

CW:Was Yiddish around? You know, did you --

GB:I grew up with my grandparents. We lived in the same house -- they had an apartment upstairs. And my bedroom was right at the foot of the stairs. And they were hard of hearing. So the first thing they would do in the morning, right at the top of the stairs was the refrigerator with the radio on top, and they would turn it on -- loud. So I woke up with Yiddish. I spoke Yiddish with them and tried to listen to them and understand more and more of it, because they spoke very little English. So I speak somewhat. I understand more than I can speak, as most people did. It was hard for my parents to talk Yiddish behind my back like a lot of them did, but they did it anyway. Yeah.

CW:Do you remember any particular phrases from your grandparents that stick in 50:00your mind that they would use a lot?

GB:Yes. My grandfather's favorite expression is, "Eyn mentsh getrakht, un got lakht" -- "While man plans, God laughs."

CW:So how -- I mean --

GB:And the other one is, "Keyner nisht getantsn af tsvey khasenes mit eyn tukhes" -- "You can't dance at two weddings with one ass." (laughs)

CW:(laughs) So as a kid -- obviously, you mentioned you had this interest in Breitbart --

GB:Yes.

CW:How did that sort of shape your Jewish identity as a kid and then sort of through your life? What's been the --

GB:Well, my Jewish identity as a kid -- I grew up in a virtual Jewish ghetto. I mean, I didn't know one non-Jew until I went away to college, except one neighbor across the street was Italian -- but everybody else was Jewish. The high school that I went to was probably seventy-five percent Jewish. So I didn't 51:00have any other identity than that.

CW:And did you share this -- the stories about the Breitbart to your fami--

GB:Everyone.

CW:Everyone?

GB:(laughs) As a matter of fact, after the movie was made, people would say, You know, the first day I met you, you told me about that story. (laughs) Yeah, everybody. Anybody that would listen. As a matter of fact, I told the story so much as a kid that the kids used to call me Zishe.

CW:And what does that yikhes [legacy] mean to you?

GB:It's very endearing. It's part of my identity. It gives me strength. Not the 52:00physical strength of Breitbart, but the strength of being a strong Jew. I'm attracted to that. Like, I would read books about the Jewish resistance to the war and learn more about how that was. And there was a proliferation of Jewish fighters -- boxers -- in the '30s and '40s -- that we -- we're not all these people that just went into the gas chambers. A lot of people resisted. And a lot of people don't know about that.

CW:So for people who don't -- hadn't heard about Zishe, what do you think they could learn from him?

GB:(sighs) I think determination. What that took at the time to be able to break 53:00away from your Jewish Orthodox background, have a sense of purpose, and stand up for what you believe is right -- 'cause one of the things we haven't discussed is what Zishe would say when he was performing in front of a Jewish audience. As he's wrapping the bars around his arms, he's talking about anti-Semites. And he said, "Let them come to me. I will take care of them." And he takes a horseshoe in his hand, and he said, "If I meet them" -- and he pulls the horseshoe apart, and he says, "I'll break them like a match." And with this -- this one account that I had in this Jewish folk hero -- said that these tailors who were in the audience seeing him perform in Brooklyn all of a sudden stood up a little 54:00stronger and felt a little more like they had something they didn't have before -- by seeing him. And I often wondered -- you know, he died in 1925. What would happen if he didn't, and he was alive as the war started to progress and maybe either resisted there or went to England and broadcast about Jews to become strong and -- what would have happened then? But he was snuffed out too early. You know, one of the things that Rabbi Adlerstein told me about Samson -- that one of the things that made Samson so great to the Jewish people was the fact that he did not cause any -- what's the word? -- he did not cause any activity 55:00against the Jews because of what he did. Everything he did, he did on his own, and if there was any retribution, it came to Samson -- not to the Jewish people. And in the same way, I think the same thing happened with Zishe -- that he stood up and tried to defend them and do what he could in his words and his actions, but there was nobody behind him. There was nobody really following him. He had a physical culture course that he'd teach people how to become strong, but you didn't see them join. You don't see -- and I've yet to find a Jewish sports organization that was named after him. I have a picture of him with them, but I don't see any of that. And so there was something where they were proud of him, he was their icon -- when I went to Israel, I hired a driver -- an elderly man 56:00-- to take me to the archive. And he said, "Why are you going to the archive?" And I said, "To do research." "On who?" -- of course, he had to know. And I said, "Zishe Breitbart." And he said, "Zishe Breitbart?" And he starts singing a song in Yiddish that he remembered singing about him as a child. Well, he treated me like royalty, came with me to the archive, and spent the day translating for me what we had found. And he told me that the shtarkers [strong men] -- the big, strong Jews that carried the luggage in Warsaw from the train station to the carriages were these big Jews -- strong Jews that had Zishe's picture pinned to their coats. And he said that the shopkeepers had Zishe's picture up on the wall behind them. This is who he was to their people. But there was nobody else that was wanting to emulate him. They liked him, they enjoyed his performances, it endeared them. But in the same way, Sandy Koufax 57:00was a great Jew and he didn't perform during the High Holidays, et cetera, but you didn't see a lot of kids say, You know what? I'm gonna become a baseball player, just like Sandy Koufax. Or --

CW:Yeah. Do you see any ways, in looking back over your life, that you sort of followed him or were inspired by him in your life choices?

GB:Hmm. (sighs) I found that in times of stress, times of trouble, when I could have doubted myself and doubted what my abilities were, I thought about the strength that he showed -- not just in his physical strength, but in his determination. And I came to believe that the people who succeed are the ones 58:00that never give up.

CW:Well, a sheynem dank [thank you very much].

GB:(laughs)

CW:Thank you very much --

GB:It's my pleasure.

CW-- for taking this time.

GB:What a great opportunity it is for me to be able to share this story -- not just with you, but hopefully other people who might become interested.

CW:Yeah. And thanks also from the Yiddish Book Center for doing this.

GB:You're more than welcome.

CW:Great.

[END OF INTERVIEW]