ROGER MASON ORAL HISTORY

ISAAC MOORE: This is Isaac Moore, and today is February 11th, 2015. I'm here in Boca Raton, Florida with Roger Mason, and I'm going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Roger, do I have your permission to record?

ROGER MASON: Yes, that's fine.

IM:Great, thank you. So, first, I want to start out by talking about your parents and their background. Can you tell me more about your parents and their background?

RM:I could probably tell you a lot about them. I probably should make an effort to be as brief as possible, because I was obsessed with my parents and their background for a long time, because they never told me anything about their background -- anything significant. They were part of a generation of parents 1:00that grew up around the Second World War that did not believe in talking about the past. My father left his home in upstate New York, which is a tiny town that nobody'd ever heard of in Appalachia, the northern part of the Adirondacks. And he was fifteen when he went to New York City, in the middle of the Depression. His mother had died in a mental hospital, and he and his brother had taken his mother to be committed to the mental hospital when my father was eleven years old. He never had a meal with his father in his life. His father hired out their kids to work in the fields. Kept the money and pulled them out of school to do that. He's a very interesting man. My grandfather, my father's father, wrote books about upstate New York history that are still used today. But he was not --

IM:Can you tell me the name of your grandfather?

RM:Howard Calvin Mason, okay? And he was not a great father, apparently, but my father was still loyal to him. And my father went to New York. He worked in the Depression delivering pinball machines and slot machines for the mafia, and working as an elevator boy on Wall Street. And he put himself through college and night school at NYU, where he met my mother. My mother was the son [sic] of Jewish immigrants. My father came from a Quaker family from upstate New York. My mother came from a Jewish family that had immigrated to the United States after the revolution of 1905 in Russia. They had come through Poland, and my grandmother came from Vaukavysk, a town in White Russia, and Szereszów, which 3:00is another town, a little -- these are tiny towns. And my grandfather had come from Polotsk, a town in Latvia, Jēkabpils, which is on the Dvina River from Riga, going down. And they had both immigrated to the United States. My grandfather came from a family of musicians, liturgical musicians. Several generations. Had no training whatsoever, so the Depression kind of was pretty cruel to him. He went bankrupt and their marriage broke up and he ended up homeless, my grandfather. And his nickname on the Bowery was Caruso, because he had a big voice. The other homeless nicknamed him that way. My mother grew up, 4:00particularly as a teenager, with this problem, and so she was very much a determined woman.

IM:Where did she grow up?

RM:She grew up first in Far Rockaway, and then in Brooklyn, and then in Forest Hills. But she put herself through night school, as well, and worked at the same time, during the day, and then became one of the first three Jewish women that were admitted to Syracuse University to do her master's degree. My father was drafted into the army. This was the Second World War. He and my mother got married while she was still at Syracuse, and they became global nomads, traveling for the rest of their lives, pretty much. And they did travel a lot. Not just in the United States, but all over the world. And, I mean, I don't know 5:00how much you want me to get into that, (laughs) but --

IM:That's great. Can you tell me where you were born?

RM:I was born in Maryland. I lived there three days. My father was stationed in Pennsylvania, and there was no hospital in the town, so they went across the border to Maryland. And I was born, and three days later, they went on to the next army base that he was assigned to.

IM:Yeah, with that, I want to move into the atmosphere of growing up. So, can you describe the atmosphere of the base growing up?

RM:Okay, I didn't just live on army bases, and the ones that I did live in -- I lived on an army base in Japan for five years and I lived on army bases in Germany for four years. But I also lived in Monterey, California, in a suburban house, and I lived in Arlington, Virginia in a suburban house. So, the 6:00atmosphere on the army bases was that of a small town. It was overseas, in both cases for me, both in Japan and in Germany. It was postwar. The United States had fought Japan, so you can imagine what an army base in Japan might feel like. The defeated enemy was on the outside and the conquering army was on the inside. And it was a very privileged existence in many ways, but a very peculiar one. The best I can describe it is, imagine a small town with lots of aircraft (laughs) and lots of arms and a huge support system. They printed their own money in Japan called script. So, we didn't use Japanese yen or dollars. We used military money. The army base in Germany was similar, except that the defeated 7:00people were Germans. I was two years in a little town called Oberammergau, which is right out of "The Sound of Music." It's a little town in the Bavarian Alps with a -- it was a playground for Hitler during the Second World War. The Americans took over all of Hitler's places and turned them pretty much into army bases. And then, I was in Frankfurt for two years, which was a big city. And the atmosphere was, in Frankfurt, particularly -- maybe because I was in junior high school at the time, which is always a peculiar age, but it was violent. I mean, violent in the sense that the kids were, in the high school and the junior high school -- they were tough kids. It was very much like -- inner city. There were 8:00knife fights and there was -- kids would steal things off munitions trucks, and that was the way that you had fun. And so, it was a peculiar -- and at the same time, it was extremely -- it was a funny combination. I mean, there was a lot of really wonderful things about it, and for years I was very dismissive of that and of my identity as an army brat. And as I've gotten older, I realized there is a lot of really good things about it. I mean, it was a tough, tough thing, but if you survived it, it was good.

IM:Can you --

RM:I don't know what else you need to --

IM:Can you tell me how you felt as an American kid growing up in these different places, in this atmosphere?

RM:We had almost no contact with Germans, except for maids. My parents had more 9:00contact than I did, because my parents spoke German much better than I did. I learned German. I took several years of it, and I still can speak it. But we had a support system of Americans in Germany, and as a kid growing up, that was pretty much it. Japan was even more so. I mean, outside of domestic help, there was very little exchange. And my parents, particularly my father, was an exception to a lot of rules for American military. I have a cartoon that was drawn of the troops, General MacArthur reviewing the troops, and he comes up to my father, who is standing in the troops dressed up as a samurai. And General MacArthur says, "How long did you say this guy Mason was in Japan?" 'Cause my father was fluent in Japanese, and one of his jobs was to make speeches in 10:00Japanese in little towns throughout Japan, selling democracy to post-Second World War Japan. So, my parents were more involved in not being ghettoized, culturally, and just being with Americans. But as kids, it was not the same thing, even though -- I don't know if that makes sense to you. But as kids, you had your friends and you stuck with your friends and you had American movies and you had American food and you had American clothes, and you were very conscious of your privileged existence as Americans in post-war Japan and post-war Germany.

IM:So, who were the people in your family growing up?

RM:I had a very small family. It was a very nuclear family in more ways than one, that -- I only had one grandparent that I knew, really. My father's father, 11:00my grandfather, I met him once or twice in my life. But my mother's mother, who was the Jewish connection in my family and her husband who had been homeless, was homeless, I never met. [break in recording] And then, my sister was born, but she's eleven years younger than I was. So, I had already gone through eleven years by the time -- and when she was born -- I stopped living at home when I was fifteen, so I didn't really spend a lot of time at home with my sister, either.

IM:What languages were spoken in your family?

RM:My father spoke eight languages and my mother spoke five languages. And we spoke English at home. But my mother was a language teacher and my father, he loved foreign languages.

IM:Could you describe the culture of the home?

RM:Of our home? Lot of music, lot of opera. There was a lot of appreciation for 12:00humor. I would say sort of American frontier poetry kind of humor: Robert Service, "Casey at the Bat." They loved words. Both my parents loved words. They loved languages, and that was the biggest thing. In terms of religious culture, it was a -- that was always a big question. My parents were moralistic. My mother was spiritual. My father, hardly at all. My father was more conscious of cultural differences between -- his coming from an upstate New York, Christian, 13:00Quaker background and my mother coming from what had been a quite religious Jewish background. My father was more conscious of this. My mother was pretty much concerned about fitting in. And fitting in on an army base -- there wasn't a lot of Jewish presence on the army base, at least there was not a lot of conspicuous Jewish presence on an army base. In Japan, my memory is it was pretty much Southern Baptist. I mean, it depended on who was in the army at the time, who was being drafted. And so, those things changed. But in general, you ask about cultural atmosphere in my family, and in the sense that religion reflects not just spirituality and moral education, but it also has a cultural 14:00element that's strong, my mother never denied her Judaism. She had a menorah in the house, and there were certain things where -- she was a very superstitious woman, but she never --

IM:Will you tell me any stories pertaining to that?

RM:Well, she would make wishes on the star, and the first star, she wouldn't say anything until somebody asked her a question. And she had all kinds of sayings. See a penny -- most of them were American sayings, I would imagine. But if my grandmother were alive and if I had another chance to ask her, I'm sure that there were some of them that came straight from shtetls [small towns in Eastern Europe with Jewish communities]. I would just guess that. My mother was superstitious. Her sister, my aunt, who was a presence in my life, as well, even 15:00though she lived in New York. But she was a presence in my life, and she was very superstitious, as well.

IM:Did your mother know any Yiddish that you recall?

RM:Probably, yeah. Yeah. But very little. I mean, I remember she would say that her grandmother said, "Gey, gey, narishe kopf [Go away, go away, silly head]." She had a couple of sayings. But she didn't embrace it. And so, if she knew it, she probably -- like I said, the closest I can say is she didn't deny it, but she certainly didn't embrace it. She was very typical in one sense. She wanted to be a modern American, and she wanted to forget about the past and just think about the future. And at one point in my life, I was critical of that, saying, 16:00"This is your past and you have family and you need to share these things." But she had a very painful past, and --

IM:Can you tell me more about your being critical of that and --

RM:Sure. Having grown up on army bases and as an army brat, and particularly with the situation of my parents, who were always interested in eight foreign languages, I wanted to feel my own identity. I didn't want to just feel that I was part Japanese, part German, part Russian, part French, part -- I wanted to feel some kind of continuity. And so, finding out, particularly my mother's 17:00family -- and I did the same thing to my father, 'cause he had embarrassments about his background, because his mother had died in a mental hospital. And he didn't have tremendous esteem for his father, so both of them had -- in my mother's case, her mother was barely literate. Her father was homeless. Family and heritage and genealogy, that was the last thing that she was interested in. She wanted to be a successful, happy, American, modern woman. So, I was critical of the fact that she couldn't transmit and she couldn't share this. But up until the end of her life, and she just died less than a year ago -- and right up to the end, she had just blocked these things out. And it wasn't that she knew them 18:00and wasn't sharing them. She had just blocked them out for herself, and this became part of my obsession to try and find out for her where she came from. So, does that make sense?

IM:Yeah.

RM:Okay.

IM:So, can you tell me about if you had any important holidays or events growing up that were important in your family?

RM:Pretty much standard WASP American holidays: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, but more in a very secular sense, that -- occasions to have dinner, occasions for decorations. We had a Christmas tree in our house. That was always a big thing. We always had Thanksgiving dinner. We never celebrated a seder, we never celebrated Passover, we never celebrated Hanukkah. We never celebrated any 19:00Jewish holidays. My mother probably was aware of them. My father was aware of them, but as an outsider.

IM:Did you have any favorite holidays growing up?

RM:Did I? (laughs) Yeah, anytime you got presents or anytime that you had something good to eat. It was pretty much Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. It was not -- I'm trying to think if there were any other holidays. No. Not really.

IM:Can you describe your knowledge of Jewish culture or Judaism while growing up, like what exposure you had?

RM:Zero.

IM:Zero.

RM:I mean, next to zero, except in one sense: that both of my parents had a 20:00sense of injustice and they made a point of taking stands against any anti-Semitism. Both my parents did. And those things would come into the family -- for instance, when we were in California, I remember they were looking for a house and the real estate agent said, "We don't want any Jews here." And that was a big subject of conversation with my parents. And growing up, that was something that was transmitted to me, that you didn't deny your Judaism, you didn't accept anti-Semitism. You didn't accept prejudice, and you tried not to reflect those attitudes towards other people, as well.

IM:How important was that for you growing up?

RM:Very important.

IM:Can you tell me more about that?

RM:Yeah, I think that, in a lot of ways, I was -- until I started getting 21:00involved in Jewish music and I married a woman who comes from a Jewish family, I think I had very conflicted feelings about my own Jewish identity. That -- little things like, I wanted straight hair when I was a kid, and my hair was curly. My mother was even worse. Her hair, it was always an obsession with her. And I think she was always ill at ease with her hair. And this, for some reason, became a symbol of her Jewish identity, a little bit like African-Americans might look to straighten out their hair so they don't look -- and it's ridiculous, because there are a lot of people who are Jewish that have straight hair, too. But it just happened to be one of those things. And I remember being 22:00sensitive anytime I would hear the word "Jew," wondering if it was said -- how it was said, and being sensitive whether it was directed against me. And I ran into situations racially, anti-Semitic attitudes, as a musician in France. For instance, there was a journalist who told me that I shouldn't be involved with Cajun music from Louisiana, that I should go to my own music, which was Jewish music. At the time, I didn't have a clue as to what Jewish music was, and I was thinking of myself as being perfectly fine being involved with Cajun music. There was no reason not to be. It wouldn't have occurred to me, at the time, 23:00until I ran into this attitude, that you would have to be Cajun to play Cajun music any more than you have to be black to play a blues. There are a lot of people that play the blues that aren't African-Americans. And so, this attitude was something, whenever I would run into things like that, that was a sensitive spot. I think now, I feel much more at ease with those things. Not that I agree with them, but it's just they don't bother me personally anymore. But growing up, they did, they --

IM:How did it make you feel about yourself?

RM:Now, you mean?

IM:I mean, when you were a child --

RM:When I was a child?

IM:-- experiencing those remarks?

RM:It made me feel like -- it's a good question. It made me feel somehow that I wasn't equal, that I wasn't a human being in a full sense of the word, that I 24:00was kind of a subcategory, and that it was something to be ashamed of. Attitudes like that growing up, those were things that would cross my mind, I think.

IM:Looking back on your childhood, what values or practices do you think your parents were trying to pass down onto you?

RM:Tolerance. Mostly tolerance. The value of education. The value of being open to other cultures, I guess. Well, that's part of tolerance, too, but being interested, actively, in them. Service. Both my parents were very much into service, volunteering and community kind of things. Those, I think, were pretty 25:00much the -- and then, there were some basic moral attitudes like, don't steal, be honest. Both of my parents, in a peculiar way, were very moralistic and very straitlaced in some ways, and I reacted against that, I think, as a young man. And I've probably become just as straitlaced as they are now, as I've gotten older.

IM:You're a professional musician, singer, songwriter.

RM:I was. I'm a music teacher.

IM:You're a music --

RM:I have been now for quite a while. But I was a professional musician and a singer-songwriter for a long time.

IM:So, when did you start to play?

RM:When did I start to play music at all? I must have been three or four years old -- that I started playing the piano.

IM:So, what was your training?

RM:I like to say my best training was my mother singing in the car. And there's really some truth to that, because I grew up all over the world, and I didn't have a lot of successful professional musicians, at least in the classical field. They have a very consistent type of training. They get trained very young and they go to the right music schools and they get the right music teachers and everything. I didn't have any of that, and I was involved in classical music for a good bit of time. I had -- German music teacher in Germany who might have been different from the other one, the one I had in Japan or from different -- and with completely different attitudes. And as I say, my parents liked a really 27:00broad kind of spectrum of music, which is not always the best thing to become a professional musician, because professional musicians work in a world of specializations just like doctors. And doctors that are general practitioners, they don't make big money. It's the specialists that -- you try to become a specialist. And musicians, it's pretty much the same thing. If you're a singer and you have a song that works, you want to do the exact same kind of song the next time. You don't want to change styles. If you're in country, you're not going to record a jazz album or a classical album. And you might be somebody like Yo-Yo Ma that gets to the top of the peak as a classical musician and then can afford to do fusion of one type or another. But it's rare, and even for 28:00people like Yo-Yo Ma, that's not where success, commercially, lies. So, my training was really the opposite of what I would have needed to be a well-trained professional musician. And one of the reasons I think I'm happy being a music teacher is because I can use -- I have a pretty wide range of interests in music, and I can use that as a music teacher. And I used it in France, as well, for what I did. But if I had stuck to the two or three things that I did that were really successful and only done those, I probably would have been even more successful in France.

IM:Why is it important to you to use music in that way? (UNCLEAR)

RM:In which way do you mean?

IM:You mentioned being open when you teach.

RM:Oh. I mean, music, it's really been my life professionally. I've done music for as long as I can remember, and it's the only real jobs that I've ever had. And I tend to be a little bit overly intellectual when I think about it. But I really do think that music is -- first of all, it's a fantastic thing, it's a fantastic gift that human beings have, and that it really is like a miniature model for everything in life if you look at -- deeply enough and hard enough. So, music, it's a way to get through to people and to communicate things that are really hard to communicate sometimes otherwise, and openness and tolerance and these things, that's just all part of the same thing, I guess, is the best 30:00answer I can give you.

IM:Great. So, you studied at Brown University.

RM:Yeah, for two years, I studied there.

IM:Can you tell me more about that?

RM:(laughs) Yeah. It was the '60s, it was the beginning of the '60s, and I was there. Kennedy was assassinated, and the marches on Selma were -- I don't remember if it was while I was there, but the Freedom Marches had started and it was a very violent time. What had started in just a -- innocent raids on the girls' dorm in the springtime turned into riots, and the police came into our dorms with guns drawn. And there were a dozen or more colleges on the East Coast that had similar experiences, and nobody knew why. It was just in the air, and I 31:00had been outside of the United States for almost my entire life. And I had come back to the United States thinking I was going to find paradise. And I got to Brown, and I was very unhappy there. I was unhappy probably mostly because of the times. And I had some good teachers at Brown. I had some good experiences there, but it was really clear that I was totally in a state of delusion in terms of trying to find some kind of paradise in the United States. And I was nineteen at the time, and I decided I was going to go to France and I was never going to come back to the United States. And I went to France when I was nineteen. And it was my junior year abroad, and I stayed thirty-two years on my junior year abroad. (laughs)

IM:Can you tell me more about the feeling of coming back to the US?

RM:After thirty-two years?

IM:No, when you went to Brown.

RM:Oh, when I came back. Yeah, my father was a military attaché in Moscow, and so I had been in Moscow. I'd been going to an international school in Switzerland for my senior year in high school. And this was when the Berlin Wall had gone up and the Cuban Missile Crisis was happening. And so, it was a tough time in terms of world events. And like I said, coming from Moscow and Switzerland, I thought I would come back to the United States and I was going to be home free and it was going to be wonderful. And it turned out that I had no experience that was worth much as an American living in the United States. I'd been an American abroad, which is not the same thing. And there are millions of Americans that live overseas their whole lives, and I was just part of that crew, and I didn't realize it at all. I thought that I was an American, I was 33:00going to come back to the United States and everything was going to be fine. And I had gone to a high school in Arlington, Virginia for my sophomore and junior year in high school, and I loved it. And I thought Brown was going to just be just like that. What I didn't realize was that in Arlington, Virginia, half of the population of the high school were kids whose parents had lived overseas or kids whose parents were in the military. So, it was a completely different culture. There was a side of Brown -- you're from Providence, you -- there is a side of Brown that was real Providence, then there was a side of Brown that was just prep school. And, at the time, it was a drinking school. Its reputation -- and there were a lot of good things about it, but there were a lot of things that were -- I wasn't meant to fit in there at the time.

IM:Yeah. Earlier, you mentioned the term "illusion." Can you tell me more about 34:00why you felt that way?

RM:About the States?

IM:In terms of your identity and coming back.

RM:Yeah, because growing up as an American abroad, you eat American food, you get American food from the PX, you get American records, you listen to American music. You get American clothes, you celebrate the American holidays, your friends are all Americans. So, the illusion is, you're an American. And you come back to the United States and it might have been Providence, it might have been Bellevue, Nebraska, it could have been Miami, Florida or anyplace else -- that it's just not the same thing, being an American overseas and being an American in a town in the United States. And, I mean, I have friends that have moved around inside the United States. People move. It's not just people that are army 35:00brats that move overseas. A lot of people move inside the United States. But at least there's some kind of thread that's a little stronger that holds you together if you're living in the United States, I think, than if you're an American abroad. And there are a lot of Americans abroad that stay Americans abroad. I have a lot of friends in France now that are Americans that have been there their whole lives, and will probably die there. And they come back to the States on vacation to see family or to see friends, but their identity is really over there. And it could be France, but my son was in China for seven years and there were lots of Americans in Beijing, and I imagine every country overseas, there's a similar sort of thing.

IM:Forty years ago, or over forty years ago, you made an interesting discovery 36:00about your family background. What was this discovery?

RM:The discovery was that I had several generations of Jewish musicians that -- I didn't start with several generations. I started with one or two people: my great-grandfather, who was a cantor, and he was a world known cantor.

IM:Do you know his name?

RM:His name was Aryeh Leib Schlossberg. He had several different names. It was sort of like bluesmen. They would have, for publicity's purposes, they would have -- his name was the Voice of the Lion, shagas ari. He was called Leon, which is like lion, or Harry, which was like Arye, A-R-Y-E. He had all those names, but he was -- when he came to the United States in 1904, "New York Times" 37:00had a long article about him. He was paid very well, he was very well-off. He was well-off and he was well-known in Russia and in Europe. He sang in all the major cities of the world.

IM:Do you know -- where did he come from in Europe?

RM:Originally, he was born in a little town called Jēkabpils, which is in Latvia. It's actually -- one side of the river is Latvia, one side is Lithuania. And then, he moved to Polotsk, which is in Lithuania. And his wife made shoes, had a shoe factory. And the anecdote is that he would travel all around the world as a famous cantor. And in his suitcase, he always had a sample of shoes, and he would always say, "I'm really here as a shoe salesman," and that was the anecdote. And he died in Seattle, Washington, and he's buried in Providence, a 38:00little bit outside of Providence. And some of his family lived in Providence.

IM:So, what did you learn from that discovery?

RM:I learned that I didn't know anything about my family, and I learned -- I was in shock, mostly, and it took -- what I learned took me a long time to learn, and I'm still learning. It was a life-changing kind of discovery. First of all, I'd never been exposed to any kind of Jewish music, particularly. I mean, I'd heard "Dona, dona, dona" sung by, I don't know, The Weavers or, I forget -- The Kingston Trio sang it or so -- but I had never really had any exposure to Jewish music, and here, this was cantorial music, and sometimes with no accompaniment and sometimes in very, very -- my great-grandfather, he had a huge voice. And he 39:00hung around some very Orthodox Hasidic personalities in Eastern Europe. They were very close together. And so, he was coming from a very foreign place from me. And music captured that, whether I knew it or not, it captured a lot of that. And then, little by little, there was my grandmother, who sang, that I discovered at the same time. My grandfather's brother, who sang, that I discovered at the same time. And then, I started discovering other people in the family. I started getting interested in genealogy, and I started finding recordings and living people to fill out this story.

IM:How did you discover this?

RM:I was stuck in New York. I had been given a contract to write a book about 40:00Louisiana, about music in Louisiana. And I'd been in the States for three months, and when I came back to New York -- a friend of mine had bought my ticket for me, and when I got to the airport, it turned out somebody had used my name on the ticket. It was like an identity theft thing, and I had no way of going back to Paris, and I was stuck in New York for about a week or more with almost no money. And so, I stayed with my grandmother, who was -- it wouldn't have been my choice to stay with my grandmother if I didn't have any money. I mean, realistically, I loved my grandmother, but it meant I had to share a bedroom with her in an apartment where the Long Island Railroad went by and shook the whole building. The Union Turnpike was on the other side. There were 41:00robberies all the time. My aunt, who was a very unusual character, was in another bedroom, and I stayed there for the whole week. And I recorded my grandmother singing, and she's the one that told me, "You like music. Your great-grandfather was a famous musician." And I hardly believed her, because she would invent stories very easily. She was a very good storyteller. And it turned out that her story was absolutely true, and I followed it up, since I had nothing to do. I found four recordings at Lincoln Center, in the Stambler Collection, which is a -- Benedict Stambler was a collector of Jewish music, an early collector of Jewish music who assembled a big collection. And there were 42:00four recordings from the 1920s in his collection.

IM:And can you tell me more about that, the recordings and what you learned about them?

RM:Well, these recordings were cantorials, and two of them had no accompaniment and two of them had small chamber groups on them. The most impressive one was the one of my great-grandfather, mostly because he sang with so much emotion that whatever key he was singing in made almost no difference. He would slip through keys with absolutely no respect for the rules of music. But he had a very powerful voice, and he was known for that. And so, it was a little overwhelming. And then, his son, who was my grandfather's brother, my 43:00great-uncle, Nathan Schlossberg, had spent his life trying to follow the image of his father, and it didn't work out very well for him, both on a personal level and professional level. I mean, he got some recognition, but it was a lot of -- it's the story of a lot of musicians. There's a tradeoff of whether you want to devote your life to be a commercial success or whether you want to devote your life to be a happy, fulfilled person. And Nathan, unfortunately, had problems with that balance. But there were others, as well, in the family. My grandfather was one of them, and he was homeless, and his -- on the Bowery, his 44:00nickname was Caruso. The other homeless -- mostly men, I would imagine, but there -- probably some women, too -- that was his nickname because he had a big voice. And I never met him, but there were others -- there was one in Riga, who was a musician who went mad, and the Germans took them all out of the mental hospital into the woods and shot all of them during the Second World War. His brother, Isaac Schlossberg, was probably the most successful, and he was a composer and a conductor in Warsaw. Wrote the music to about eighty operettas and operas. He was a wonderful musician, and many, many people -- Rimsky-Korsakov complimented him. Almost everybody that was anybody in Jewish 45:00music knew of him, and yet the peculiar thing was, when I bumped into his story, not only was he unknown, his memory had disappeared completely, partly because of the Second World War, partly because much of his music had either been -- he never bothered to publish anything when he was alive, and many people had stolen his music and used it. And I know this sounds like sour grapes, but it happened to be true. And I took on, as a kind of a mission, to try and rehabilitate his memory, and with a little success. I mean, there was a big performance in Boston, at Harvard, a couple -- three years ago that I did all of the -- I found the music, I transcribed it, and I worked with a musician, a well-known Jewish 46:00musician named Zalmen Mlotek, and they put on this opera called "Shulamis" at Harvard, and they had four performances of it, and they used my great-uncle's music as the orchestra, and they had a big orchestra that played it. And it was a lot of fun, it was a --

IM:Yeah. Can you tell me more about how you felt when discovering your great-uncle's music?

RM:Well, the thing that was wonderful for me was that --musicians are superstitious. I think a lot of musicians are superstitious, and I always felt there were certain keys that I liked to work in, and when I wrote songs or played things on the guitar. And I found echoes of my particular musical feelings in my great-uncle's music. And part of it might have been wishful 47:00thinking, but part of it wasn't. I mean, part of it is I really felt -- when you feel like family, you (laughs) -- I felt like family. And it got better and worse at the same time, because his wife was a singer, and she was one of the actresses in this big theater called the Kaminski Theatre in Warsaw, which was the main Jewish Yiddish theater in Warsaw, that -- and Ida Kaminska is the mother of Jewish theater, and Sonia Schlossberg was -- they were family friends. She played in the beginning troupes. They toured together, and then she recorded about thirty records of Yiddish songs. Totally different from cantorial music, totally different from the operettas that her husband was doing. And I found recordings of these things, painstakingly, but I've already found three 48:00recordings and I know where there are another dozen of them. Then, her son became a musician, and he was a pianist, a little bit like in that movie about Szpilman, the pianist in Warsaw. What was it, Polanski that did that movie? And Roman Schlossberg, he played jazz in a famous nightclub. He was the music director in this nightclub, and when the Germans came in -- this incredible story -- along with a lot of Jewish musicians from Warsaw, they went into Russia, which was the Soviet Union, thinking that they were going to be safer there, including people that became the parents of the Soviet and Russian jazz movement. They were Jewish musicians from Warsaw. Well, Roman Schlossberg went into Russia, only to be arrested and put into a gulag by Stalin. And he was in a 49:00gulag for two or more years. After two more years, Stalin discovered that he wasn't such good friends with Hitler anymore, that Hitler had broken the alliance. So, he freed all of these prisoners in the gulag, including Roman Schlossberg. And there was a general whose name was Anders, famous Polish general who was not Jewish. And he started an army, but Stalin didn't have the money to pay for feeding the soldiers. So, he gave the whole Anders army to the British. So, here are these Polish Jews in Russian Soviet concentration camps that are now British soldiers in the Anders army. They go to Iraq, they go to Iran, and then they go to what was Palestine. And Roman Schlossberg was in the 50:00orchestra of this Anders army, and I have a picture of the orchestra on the plains of Iraq. (laughs) I mean, it's totally surreal. And we went to Israel two, three years ago -- I guess, two years, three years ago, and this family member that I've discovered who -- Masha Goldman, who is in Jerusalem, is a wonderful woman. She was one of the librarians in the Jewish library in Jerusalem. She and I went and we found Roman's grave in Tel Aviv. And we retraced his whole story. We got his military records and everything, and it was a very touching story. I haven't finished with the effects that it has. I mean, it still -- it works on me. I still play that music, I still listen to that 51:00music, I still feel that music. And I'm probably going to retire from teaching in the not too distant future, and I already have ideas of things that I want to continue doing with that music.

IM:Can you tell me more about the music itself in terms of the languages that it was composed in or --

RM:Yeah.

IM:-- performed in?

RM:Most of it was -- now, if you're talking about Aryeh Leib Schlossberg and Nathan Schlossberg, it was in Hebrew. They were cantorial pieces that were prayers and they were in Hebrew. And part of the story is that this prayer that is world known in Jewish cantorial music called the "Retsei," it was sung originally by Gershon Sirota at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it was recorded on RCA Red Seal, which was a very prestigious thing. The first 52:00recordings of Caruso were on Red Seal. And this is the first Jewish music that was ever recorded on a big-time record label. Well, it was credited to nobody on the record except Gershon Sirota, because at the time, who wrote the music was not worried about. The performer was much -- important. But then, thirty-some years later, after Isaac Schlossberg died, there's a man named Gershon Ephros who wrote an anthology of cantorial music who credited it to Aryeh Leib Schlossberg, who is my great-grandfather. He was wrong. Aryeh Leib Schlossberg didn't know how to read or write music. He was a great improviser, but he didn't know how to read or write music. But the problem was that Isaac Schlossberg was known for being a theater musician, mostly, even though he wrote many, many cantorial pieces in Hebrew. He wrote most of his music and his words in Yiddish. 53:00But Yiddish was not a religious language, and you couldn't easily -- particularly -- it's the same thing with Christians, that you have the conservative bloc and you have a liberal bloc, and you have everything in between, and they don't always see eye-to-eye. And sometimes, the strongest disagreements are in people of the same family. And so, even today, I'll get comments from people saying, Oh, Isaac Schlossberg couldn't have written the "Retsei" because he drank, or because he did this or he did that, and he had a terrible temper or -- he wrote the music for eighty operas and operettas, and Aryeh Leib Schlossberg could not have written this music. Aryeh Leib Schlossberg was a different sort of animal. He had his own qualities. So, anyway, the point was, you asked about the languages. It kind of opens the door to this, because 54:00Aryeh Leib Schlossberg and Nathan were doing cantorials in Hebrew. Isaac Schlossberg and his wife, Sonia, almost entirely in Yiddish, except for the religious things that he did for the Sinai Synagogue in Warsaw, which was a very progressive synagogue. It was an extremely progressive synagogue. Isaac Schlossberg was also the music director for about a year at the Tłomackie Street Synagogue in Warsaw, which was the huge synagogue for -- it was the one that the Germans bombed and destroyed as the final victory over the Warsaw Jewish community. He was there for a year when Gershon Sirota was on tour in the States. But there was this conflict between Yiddish and Hebrew, which -- I'm not sure what I'm saying, because I'm speaking a little bit as an outsider, but from what I've seen in Israel, there's still a feeling of Hebrew and Yiddish are not 55:00-- it doesn't quite fit. I mean, I have some really wonderful people in my mother's family in Haifa, and one of the sons who's a doctor, and they're wonderful people. And we were talking about Yiddish and he said, "Yiddish is the language of losers." And that's the attitude of a lot of people that I met in Israel, that it's the language of the Second World War, of the Shoah, the Holocaust, the defeat of Jewish culture. They want to go forward. They don't want to look backwards, and it's too bad. I think, personally, it's too bad, because I think that a lot of -- and, once more, I'm sorry to ramble, because language opens the door to a lot of this stuff. But I think they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, that they want to be modern, but at the same time, 56:00there's so much that's of value that's represented to anybody, including me, who wasn't raised Jewish at all. That there's so much of value that's in Yiddish culture and in the Yiddish language, that to call it the language of losers, it seems -- it's sad. It's sad. And I hope that that would change. I mean, if it changed in Israel, that would be a huge change. And in terms of Roman Schlossberg, he wrote things in Polish and probably in any other language. And my grandmother sang in five different languages, even though she couldn't write any of them particularly well. But so, there was a lot of languages, different languages.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

IM:You saw this tension in your family's music between Yiddish and Hebrew, and your discovery --

RM:Not in my family. So, in my mother's family --

IM:Mother's family.

RM:-- in Israel, yeah. In this one family, I got it.

IM:Can you tell me what your response was to sort of just engaging with that, 57:00seeing those two things?

RM:Yeah, I stood up for Yiddish, but it's difficult in the context of Israeli existence, particularly -- these are people in Haifa, and they do their military service every year that they have to, and there are bombs and missiles that come not that far from their house. And so, the notion of being sentimental about a language is the furthest thing from their minds. They're not interested in recreating the joys and treasures of the past. They're interested in surviving, first of all. And modern Hebrew, for them, that's the language of survival. 58:00That's the closest I can come to it. And, I mean, I tell them what I think. I tell them that I think that they're losing something tremendously valuable, but it doesn't have much of an effect. I mean, I would need to be a lot more persuasive.

IM:So, prior to this discovery, you were already an established musician who had traveled the world. So, what was it like to stumble across this bit of knowledge pertaining to your family history?

RM:It was both exciting and confusing. I mean, it was not so easy to assimilate. If I had been raised with this music, if I had been raised with that language, if I had been raised even with that food or with those holidays, it would have made it easier. I was coming into this world as a total stranger. So, that was 59:00the confusing part. The exciting part was that it was flattering to feel that I had people in my family that were musicians. It was comforting to think that I wasn't all by myself, that if I had chosen to become a musician, my sister is also a musician. It wasn't totally by accident that there was something in our DNA, maybe, that had pushed us to that, which was pleasurable. It was satisfying to think that. Whether it's true or not, I don't know. But those were -- so, it was a mixed feeling of confusion and pleasure, you know what I mean?

IM:Can you tell me more about how they balance each other out, or they did not?

RM:Yeah, it just depends on what's going on in my life, I guess. That I would 60:00say that -- I've made attempts at times to move closer to Judaism as a practicing faith or as a culture. They have not always been successful. I'm pretty much in a no-man's-land in terms of official religious affiliation, and that has an influence on my relationship with music. I find that I'm interested in spirituality, but I was raised as a Protestant on army bases by parents that didn't particularly care. I have Jewish musicians in my family, including Jewish 61:00religious musicians, and I've worked for Catholic schools for a long time now. So, that's a good recipe for confusion.

IM:Okay. (laughs)

RM:And I deal with it as best I can, but if I'm not totally convinced in one direction or another, it's partly because of that, and I try to do the best I can with it.

IM:Do you have any particular memories or stories surrounding this confusion stemming from this discovery?

RM:Probably not, in the sense that outside of just slurs, anti-Semitic slurs, that would be -- and I would say something if I were the object or even in the 62:00neighborhood of an anti-Semitic slur. That would be an immediate reaction, I think. So, that's part of the confusion there. In terms of the other slurs, sometimes I find myself defending army Protestants, which is a peculiar place to be, because they don't often need a lot of defense. But I don't like it when people characterize them in an over-simplistic way. I find -- I do the same thing about Catholics. And I used to be very anti-Catholic, but I've learned that it's -- I forget who it was, but I think somebody said that, All roads lead 63:00to God, in one way or another, and we just take different roads a lot of times. And everybody has the right to their own road, because it's a big trip. But that's the closest I can come to answering your question, (laughs) so --

IM:How has this discovery about your family's Jewish background influenced, if at all, your connection to Jewish culture and history?

RM:I'm interested in it, and I never used to be interested in it. I'm interested in it. I certainly wouldn't say that I'm very knowledgeable about it. I'm more knowledgeable about the people in my mother's family and in my family that were musicians. My approach to it has been more musical, I think, than anything else. 64:00And if I'm honest about it, that's what I would say, that it hasn't been religious. I mean, I've made it -- and it hasn't been -- I don't know what else to say. For instance, when our children were little, I thought very seriously about raising them Jewish. My wife is Jewish. She comes from a Jewish family. But she came from a non-practicing Jewish family, and she didn't want to raise the kids as Jewish. And so, I didn't know what -- I couldn't raise them as Jewish. And I even tried -- when we were in Paris, the neighborhood we were in was a very working-class neighborhood, and I went to -- my wife probably did, 65:00too -- to some Jewish figures, and we tried to -- but it was so foreign that it just did not feel right. So, we ended up raising our kids in an ecumenical Christian church, the American Church in Paris, where occasionally you'd even have Jews that would come, even though it was a Christian church, because it was more of a community center for Americans abroad than probably anything else. I mean, they had religious services, but it was much more devoted towards this American abroad thing. Does that make sense at all?

IM:Yeah. Can you tell me how this discovery -- what you learned about, generally, just about Jewish history and culture? From this discovery, what did you learn, at all, about Jewishness or Jewish history in Europe?

RM:Well, I learned the history of my mother's grandparents and great-grandparents and [BREAK IN RECORDING] ups and downs that they had in Latvia and Lithuania over -- a period of two hundred years or more. I learned differences between different aspects of Jewish faith, of different cultural attitudes. I learned a lot of stories from the Old Testament. I learned that Jewish culture had changed a lot around the First World War, when the modern times came in, not just in the United States but in Europe, as well. Just in my 67:00own family, I have a great-grandfather who was Hasidic, very religious, a son who was in the Yiddish theater and who was in a progressive synagogue. Another son who was a jazz musician and played in nightclubs. So, just those three generations, just -- and my great-uncle's wife was in the theater and sang, recorded Yiddish songs. Those were things that the generation before -- would have been impossible to do as a woman, for her. So, those are some of the things -- and I could go on, and obviously my appreciation of the Holocaust was influenced by it. And then, seeing my friends and my wife's family in the United 68:00States, I see them now a little bit through the eyeglasses or through the eyes of somebody that is -- learned the history of one family. I tend to look at them through those eyes and see them in that kind of context. I can say, Oh, yeah, they have this attitude maybe because of this or that.

IM:Can you tell me more about that?

RM:Yeah. I could say that, for instance, we have family that live here in Boca, and they're pretty unaware of their background in Europe. They are second-generation Americans, and they have a loyalty to Israel, they have a 69:00nostalgia for where their family came from, but they've never been there. And it's sort of like an idealized idea of, I think, of what it was. I mean, probably I have an idealized view, too, of where my mother's family came from. I can understand that. And then I go to Israel and I see attitudes that people there -- I have a family, they take their vacations in Latvia. They've invited us to go right to the hometown where my great-grandfather came from, and they go there just every summer. They have a totally different attitude, as well. These are the ones that say that Yiddish is the language of losers, and they -- I 70:00don't know if I'm being very clear, but they --

IM:Yeah, that sounds fine. How has music influenced your own sense of identity?

RM:Yeah, I think I probably -- at least professionally, I wouldn't have any identity without music. And as a human being, I work right now with, and I have for a long time, with children, from three years old to eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. And that's a source of satisfaction to me. Music is something that contributes to my identity. It keeps me awake and it keeps me interested and --

IM:Could you describe how your interest in your family's Jewish musical background has influenced your own music, if at all?

RM:Yeah, I've written songs where I have citations of things that -- I've written songs about my family, and I've had instrumental pieces where there are things -- I've put a prayer that my great-uncle wrote, I arranged it for the guitar and I play it on the guitar. I can play it on the guitar, right. I haven't played it for a while, but --

IM:Does it have a particular title?

RM:It's called the "Retsei." It's the same title as the prayer.

IM:What is important to you about that influence in your own music?

RM:I guess the first importance is it's pretty much the only musical family I 72:00have, so it's obviously -- and it's a little bit what I was saying earlier, that it's a feeling more than anything else, just like you could have a feeling somebody in your family that you get along with or you feel comfortable with, that musically -- and then, there's a flattering side, too, as well, which is that as a musician, it's flattering to feel that you come from a family of musicians. And when I started getting involved in music, I didn't know that, outside of my mother who sang in the car. I mean, that was the only connection that I really had. And that developed into something that was much larger. So, that, on just a flattering level. But in terms of actual music, there are also, 73:00I mean, some real things, too.

IM:How has your relationship to music evolved over time?

RM:That's a hard one. I think, probably, I've gone in and out of a couple different kinds of music. I think my first connection with music, as I said, was with my mother's singing in the car. And she sang songs from any country we were in, and any popular song, anything that was in the air, she learned and she sang, and in a lot of different languages. And then, in high school, I was a folkie. I liked The Weavers and The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary, and 74:00Bob Dylan. And I was involved with the '60s, and then folk rock, and that was pretty much the kind of music that I performed in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. But I also was trained -- as a kid, I took piano lessons. And even though I stopped playing the piano when I was eleven or twelve, I picked it up again when I was nineteen, twenty, and I studied the organ, the church organ. And I studied with a French organist who was a master, and so that was a big influence. And after that, my -- I've gone up and down. I was very involved with Louisiana music, with Cajun music. I played a big role in introducing Cajun music in France, and 75:00I -- very interested in jazz. I got very interested in choral music. I did my PhD in music education at the University of Miami. And that's pretty much where I am right now.

IM:And since the discovery of your family's Jewish musical background? Could you just maybe elaborate a little?

RM:Yeah, it has added melodies, it's added harmonies, it's added character. It also has made me realize that -- the connection between traditional Jewish music from Eastern Europe, and how that turned into Yiddish theater music in the United States and Jewish orchestral music with people like Rumshinsky or Leonard 76:00Bernstein or a whole host of other Jewish composers that took themes, feelings, attitudes from their past, or at least from Jewish culture, whether it was directly their past or something that they just felt in harmony with. And, on a much lesser level, I mean, I'm not a world-famous musician by any chance, by any means. I'm a -- elementary school music teacher. But I'm proud of it and I think I'm a good elementary school music teacher. And I still write music and I still play music outside of teaching. And so, I still have some of these influences, and the music that I learned from my family has been instrumental. It's opened 77:00me to other Jewish musicians, as well.

IM:And what about that is important to you?

RM:What about that is important to me? Why do you like a song? I mean, what's important about when you like something? Can you always understand why you like something? [BREAK IN RECORDING] Why do you like it? Because it's in your family, you're supposed to like it? Not always. But there has to be some kind of spark for it to work. And part of it works for me. Part of it doesn't work for me. I don't think I'll ever practice the Jewish faith, but I'm not sure I'll ever practice the Christian faith in an organized fashion, either. As a friend of 78:00mine said to me once, being Jewish, to him -- and this is a Jewish comedian in France who is a fairly well-known comedian in France and who's a close friend of mine. And he said, for him, being Jewish was more cultural than anything else. It was not really about what kind of religion he had or not. I mean, he obviously has his own beliefs. But that's a very personal thing.

IM:How does your connection to this specifically Jewish family history, this discovery you made, fit into your broader sense of identity as an American musician?

RM:Oh! I don't think I can answer that one. I wish I could answer that one. I 79:00already don't feel entirely -- I guess my identity as an American already is something that I'm still building, even though I've been here now seventeen or eighteen years, since I moved back from France. But there's still sides of me that feel like an immigrant. If I add to that, the Jewish side to it, it's the same thing, but it's even more so, in a sense. And I guess the closest thing that I could say is that, I tried hard and hopefully succeeded a little bit in being a good part of my wife's family, who were Jewish Americans. And so, we shared things together, and that probably comes the closest to answering your 80:00question about becoming a Jewish American. It was through my wife's family, probably.

IM:I guess I wanted to see how -- just looking at yourself as a musician, an American, how you see this discovery just in general.

RM:Well, every now and then, I'll hear Jewish-American musicians that I like, and I feel some -- I'll listen to their music, but there's a lot of them that I don't feel anything. (laughs) There's a lot of them, I don't feel anything, and that's the best answer I can give you. And it's not that I don't like them. For instance, this guy I know, Hankus Netsky. I don't know if you know Hankus, but 81:00he's a real figure in Jewish music, and he and Isaac -- what's his name? The violinist. Perlman. They played an arrangement of my great-uncle's song, the "Retsei" on their last -- this record that they did, which has been pretty successful. And I loved it, but I loved it, probably, partly out of vanity because it's my great-uncle's music. And some of the things that they did, they did it with a cantor from New York. What's his name? My memory is going. He's a great cantor. He has a beautiful voice, and they played a concert here in Boca just this year, I think. And we went there and we went backstage and talked to 82:00them and everything, and I've corresponded with Hankus. But I still feel foreign to a lot of what they're doing, because it's not really all my story. And they have their story and I have tremendous respect for it. So, some of the things I like and some of the things I don't. And it's very spotty, I mean, in that sense. And the only thing I can say is that I try to be honest about it. And I couldn't pretend that I'm right in the heart of Yiddish music, because I'm not. But it has an influence on me.

IM:Can you tell me about your family's reaction to your discovery?

RM:My mother was totally indifferent. She was very proud of the fact that I was interested in her and her family, but mostly just for name-dropping purposes, I think. I mean -- and that's a little harsh, sounds a little harsh, but she was very sweet about it. And she was not capable of doing much more in terms of her particular story, where she came from. She didn't have any particular connection to it. She didn't have any particular understanding of it, and outside of the fact that I was her son and that anything I did that made me happy or that I was successful at, she would think was good. But it pretty much stopped there.

IM:And how did that make you feel?

RM:Awful. (laughs) For a while, at any rate. I mean, I kept hoping that at one point I was going to get her to make some kind of tremendous revelation and some 84:00kind of awareness, but it never happened. And there was no way that it was going to happen. It would have been -- and I was like a little boy. I mean, I was trying to please my mother, but she had her own agenda and she had her own life.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

IM:How, if at all, has this discovery changed the way you thought about raising your own children?

RM:First of all, my kids are in their thirties and they have children of their own. So, how I think about raising them has absolutely no importance. But I am concerned about their lives, and I have a number of grandchildren, as well. And one of my sons is married to a Jewish girl from a family. Her mother teaches in 85:00a Hebrew school in Philadelphia, little kids, and they're very involved in Jewish culture. And my son, who was not raised Jewish, is now in a family, and he lives right outside of Philadelphia, so they're close together. I mean, geographically, they're close together and they get along really well. They really adopted him and he's very comfortable with them. And they have two sons. And so, I don't know how they're going to raise their kids, but I'm happy that if they raise them as practicing Jews or if they raise them as culturally aware Jews that I'll have a little bit of fodder. I'll have a little bit of something in terms of music that I can provide as a contribution. And that's a source of 86:00satisfaction to me, that they -- how it happens, I don't know, because their oldest son is only four. And so, they haven't really gotten to the point where they're going to -- have made a lot of decisions about that. But I suspect that, knowing them and knowing my daughter-in-law and her family, I suspect that that's going to become an issue. Not a bad issue, necessarily, but something they're concerned with.

IM:So, what about that knowledge of your family history would be important to transmit to your grandchildren you mentioned?

RM:Well, first of all, I guess, out of loyalty to my profession, just that music is important. And that's already something. There are a lot of families that 87:00don't have very much music in their families. And I think that it contributes something, no matter what. I think music is just like good food or good art or whatever. And in addition to that, there's quality music in the inheritance that -- the musical inheritance that I have received and that my family and my grandkids have received. It's not just junk. It's music that has themes, it's well put together with good craftsmanship. It's put together with love. It's put together with reverence. It's put together with a sense of moral values. It's 88:00put together with a sense of the importance of history. It's put together with a lot of those things. And it's fortunate that there's a body of music that's -- I may not be able to discover it in my lifetime, but I know that it's there in that body of music, and I have played a role in at least bringing it together so that if they choose, it's there for them. And I'm proud of that, I guess.

IM:In terms of looking at identity, what about that transmission do you find important and --

RM:In terms of Jewishness, I guess just that I think Jewish culture is a very moral culture, that a lot of our values in the Western world that -- our core 89:00values come from Jewish culture, I think. The religious books of the Old Testament, that's already a big thing. There's also in Jewish culture -- lots of education service. At least in my way of thinking, those are things that I've noticed that are really important in Jewish culture, the concern for taking care of others in community, the concern for learning, for being open to the world. Humor. There's a lot of good jokes (laughs) in Jewish culture. And those are all 90:00things that are in the music, as well. You can't separate them out that easily. When you say something is good music, when you talk about Mozart, for instance, it's because he's got humanity, he's got tolerance, he's got fun, he's got craftsmanship. He's got a lot of different things that are all together in his music. Even if you don't even put any words in it, it's there. And I feel this body of music, with the Schlossbergs in my mother's family -- she was a Schlossberg -- that there's a lot of good stuff in there, though. Does that --

IM:Yeah, that's --

RM:Okay.

IM:So, to what extent do you see your family's Jewish musical background as influential in your own life?

RM:Yeah, I think I've pretty much answered that, that -- how it's affected my own life, if only in the time that I've spent researching it and driving my wife crazy with being -- I've been obsessed by it. Is she out here? (laughs)

IM:So, we're nearing the end of our time, but I'd like to ask if you have any stories you would like to share or any topics you want to touch on?

RM:Well, let me think for a second. (pause) Yeah, I had an aunt, my mother's 92:00sister, Sylvia. She had a really hard life. Really hard life. And the end of her life, when her mother died, she had been living with her mother as a recluse. And she shaved all her hair off and she was as thin as a rail and she would scare me. And she had 250 pairs of shoes from the good old days when she had married somebody that was wealthy. They broke up, but she had all of her shoes and she'd had them for years, piled from the floor up to the ceiling. She transmitted some of my family's Jewish culture to me, despite the fact that she had been in total denial about it. These cultures are funny things, and they 93:00don't go away, and they're part of you. And it really is a safer thing to try and come to terms with it, no matter how distant it is and no matter how difficult it is. And everybody has a different way of doing it, I think. But denial is not a good thing. I guess that's the only other thing I wanted to say about it, that the world is changed so much now that everybody is a mix of something or other, and it's hard to know exactly who we are anymore because of all those mixes. But if we can come to terms with the different parts of who we are and not be in denial of it, it's pretty cool. It's really a source of 94:00enrichment, and we don't have a lot of choice, anyway. You can cut off all parts of your family, but the French have a saying that, If you refuse nature, it'll come back and it will bite you. It will come back on the gallop and it will -- you're safer trying to deal with all of these issues, I think. And it's fun, in the long run. It's fun and it's enriching, so --

IM:Do you have any --

RM:-- at least that's my wish. (laughs)

IM:You mentioned your aunt, you said, transmitted some -- do you know what the -- sort of the --

RM:Yeah, she did. She gave me a picture of my great-grandfather with all of their family members that had been stuffed in a closet. She gave me a seder 95:00table cover, which was extremely ornate, beautifully -- tapestry kind of thing. And this is in a place -- I mean, this is the last place in the world you ever would have thought of it. And she gave me stories about her mother, and she filled in little things. When I was stuck in New York, there -- but we saw her every year. With my family, we would always go to a Chinese restaurant with her, and she was a special person, my mother's sister.

IM:Do you have any favorite songs from your family's Jewish musical history?

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RM:I don't know if it's Jewish or Russian or American. It's a Tin Pan Alley song, and it went something like this. (singing) "When I came to this country, I 96:00was very poor. I couldn't make a living, and now I make for sure. I was peddling with a pushcart, I couldn't make a cent. My wife took in a couple of boarders, they had to pay my rent. But my wife and the boarders are all right, and I have to be from them satisfied. My wife and the boarders went to the court because I didn't want my wife to support -- my wife and the boarders are all right." (laughter) Okay?

IM:Thank you for sharing that. (laughs) What do you think is important to transmit to the generations after you about your family's musical background, this history you've discovered?

RM:Music is as good as the people that make it. And so, if you live a loving 97:00life and you play music, your music is going to reflect that. And that's probably the most important thing. And it's pretty simple to say, at any rate, but it really does have an effect on your music. Music is not just about how fast you can play or how complicated or exotic or -- music, in the long run, it reflects a lot of just basic things. And the quality of music, in the long run -- in the long run -- that's what people listen for. You don't have to be very smart to listen to music. People know just instinctively if it's --

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IM:Just what do you find interesting about the specific discovery you made -- important to just pass on to the rest of the world?

RM:To the world?

IM:Is there any --

RM:Well, first of all, that there's a bunch of musicians that have been unjustly 98:00forgotten, and I really believe that. I mean, and even if they're not in the same class as Mozart or Beethoven, they're really musicians that are worth hearing, and for anybody interested in Jewish music or music in general, they provide a link between the Old World and the United States in terms of Jewish culture, the Schlossberg -- all of these various Schlossbergs. They really do provide a link. And the music is good. It's fun, some of it is beautiful. It represents concerns of the time, very often. There are a lot of reasons that -- there's a hole there in terms of -- what I see, as an outsider once more, I see 99:00in the United States there's this whole interest and passion for klezmer music and Yiddish music, and rediscovering it and rediscovering the joy of it. And that part is wonderful. But there's a lot of it that stops at the border of the United States, that it's recreated music from Jewish musicians that came to the United States, and there's not a whole lot of awareness of what the music was in Latvia and Lithuania, in Russia, in Poland, in all the Eastern European countries. And there really was a lot of music, and it was really alive. It was really worth at least a passing -- and more than a passing notice. And a lot of 100:00the American Yiddish music composers like Rumshinsky, for instance, who was a very famous Jewish theater composer, who was a close friend of Isaac Schlossberg's, and he wrote an obituary of his, a long one in the "Daily Forward" when he died in 1930. [BREAK IN RECORDING] The connection -- Rumshinsky is a good person to look at, because he was the one, more than any other American Jewish musician that I can think of, at any rate, that really captures this transition to what it meant to become an American Jew from an Old World Jew. And if you look at -- you asked me what was important about -- of these people, that's from the American side. From the other side of the world, whether you're in Israel, where Yiddish is the loser's language, as my mother's cousins say, whether there's a refusal of acceptance of 101:00the Jewish culture that was destroyed by Hitler, or whether you're in -- place like Poland, where they're trying to piece it together with Band-Aids. I mean, there's a lot of effort and there's a lot of wonderful things going on. The new museum that's there in Warsaw is spectacular. What's her name? Barbara Kirshenblatt, she's doing a tremendous job there. But when you're there, you realize they have almost no means and there's nobody left there. There's nothing left there. I put the Schlossbergs in this context, and they have, to me, at any rate -- and once more, I hope that it's not just family pride that makes me say this, but I really think that there's -- they had something interesting to contribute.

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IM:Thank you again for --

RM:Thank you, that was very interesting.

IM:-- speaking with me tonight.

[END OF INTERVIEW]