HELEN STAMBLER LATNER ORAL HISTORY

HANKUS NETSKY:My name is Hankus Netsky, and I'm in Newton, Massachusetts. It's June 5th, 2015, and I'm speaking with Helen Stambler Lentner.

HELEN STAMBLER LATNER:Latner.

HN:Latner. I'm speaking with Helen Stambler Latner. Helen Huddisman (laughter) Stambler Latner.

HSL:Right.

HN:And the first thing I'd like to ask you is if you can just tell us about your family background.

HSL:Well, my mother and father came from the same little village, shtetl [small Eastern European village with a Jewish community], really, in Russia-Poland, near Mławe. But they didn't know each other in Europe, because there's about 1:00three and a half years difference in their age. And when my father was a senior boy in the -- they went to the same school. When my father was a senior boy there, she was a little kid. At that age, three and a half years makes a big difference. They never even looked at her. My mother confessed to me one day, when we were talking about this, that she always had a crush on my father, (laughs) but he never noticed her. Then, separately, they each came to the United States. And there was one of these landsmanshaftn [association of immigrants originally from the same country] and a Mława society, and they met there again. And at that time, my mother was seventeen. Very beautiful, too. And one thing led to another, and finally he started going out with her, and walking out, as it were. And I'm always fascinated by the picture in my mind of the two 2:00of them walking across the -- must have been the Brooklyn Bridge, maybe the Williams-- you can't walk on the Williamsburg -- the Brooklyn Bridge, to night school, to study English, and walking back home again. That was one of their dates. (laughs) Yes. So, they both had strong Yiddish backgrounds, naturally, living in a shtetl. And my father had a whole kheyder [traditional religious school] education. And he went through the grade schools. And one of the reasons he finally left Europe was that he wanted to go to the gymnasium. And he could have gotten in. He was a very smart kid. But when my grandfather found out that he would have to wear a school uniform, that all of the buttons had these saints' figures on them, he wouldn't let him go to school there. Says, "You can't wear that. Nothing doing." And this was a very Orthodox, Hasid-ish 3:00atmosphere. And my father got a job in Warsaw, I guess. And he would come home a real Warsaw sport with a starch collar and a tie and a regular suit jacket. He had gotten rid of his peyes [sidelocks]. I don't know whether he put them back or really cut them. And (laughs) the thing that really turned him off completely was that he came back one year for the High Holidays, and the shames [the sexton of the synagogue] who knew him wouldn't let him into the shul [synagogue] because he was wearing a necktie, and that's after the fashion of the goyim. "You can't come in here." So, he and his friend took their ties off. Then, they went up to some corner of the balcony and started throwing wet towels at the khazn [synagogue cantor]. (laughter) Anyway, he decided to come to America, and he arrived here when he was about, I don't know, nineteen. Whenever you run away from the tsar. The tsar's army. He arrived here with his brother, and they 4:00really made a very good life for themselves here, 'cause -- I don't want to go into all these stories, but in the classic fashion, my father started out as -- he was going to be a peddler, and he had a horse and wagon. (laughs) For a kid who had grown up in the country, really, he had never handled a horse or a wagon. And the first thing that happened was that when he got into the wagon and, (clicks tongue) "Let's go," the horse ran away and scared the life out of him. And he said, "No, this is not for me." And eventually, he -- well, he spoke Polish very well, and so he had a -- some of these Hasidim didn't speak any language but Yiddish. But he spoke Polish and Russian, and he got a job in New Jersey, in a men's furnishings store that dealt with these Polish immigrants who 5:00lived there. And a woman owned it and ran it, and she was delighted to find a smart, male clerk who spoke Polish and could deal with the men. (laughs) My father used to get a kick out of saying she always measured them for their inseam herself. (laughs) Anyway, so that's their background. When they came here, separately, they started learning English. And, as I said, they went to night school together. And one of the things that amazed me, years later, when I was a teacher and I started looking at these terrible papers I got from my students, I remembered letters that I got from my parents. They never made a mistake in grammar. They never made a mistake in spelling. I don't know where that ability came from, but I guess if you can read and you're intelligent, you know how to spell. I really got a big kick out of that. Then, as I began to grow 6:00up, they were very strong Yiddishists, my parents. And, of course, Zionists, too. And I was sent to a Yiddish shule [secular Yiddish school], a Sholem Aleichem folkshul [elementary school]. And this was one on Church Avenue. The leading trustee was a dentist, (laughs) whom we all used. Don't remember his name anymore. But I was -- you know how long ago that was? I was about eleven or twelve years old. So, you do the arithmetic. (laughs) I'm going to be ninety-seven soon, God willing. And we learned Yiddish. I learned to read and write, and I spoke Yiddish from the time I began to speak. My grandparents, my father's parents, came here when I was just beginning to speak. I was about two years old, and from the beginning I was bilingual. I knew that you spoke Yiddish to bubbie [grandmother] and zeyde [grandfather], and you spoke English at home. 7:00And this stood me in good stead. At this village, which has a lot of Jewish residents, I'm one of the few people that really can speak Yiddish. Most of them know a few nasty expressions in Yiddish, and that's about it. They wanted me to give a course in Jewish curses, I said no. (laughs) We've got to have Jewish conversation. That was nice, too.

HN:So, tell us about your education.

HSL:Well, I went to -- God bless the city of New York. So, I got my entire education, up to a master's degree, with the expense of four hundred dollars in tuition to Columbia University. I went to the public schools, as an elementary school student. I went to Tilden High School of Blessed Memory. (laughs) I was in the first graduating class of that school. And I remember when they were building it, my cousin and I used to walk down to the building site and watch 8:00the guys working with all the different machines and tools they used. And we used to look at each other with such a happy smile. We are going to go to that high school! We finished the eighth grade. I was in the first graduating class from Tilden, and I was class valedictorian. I understand, I never saw it, they put a plaque up on the wall that had the names of the two top graduates of each class, and I made valedictorian the following -- and I did high school in three and a half years. And the following graduation, my cousin Nancy graduated as second in the class, salutatorian. So, the Huddisman name is up on the wall there if they haven't taken it down. (laughs) I went to Hunter College. I 9:00majored in English, and that was completely free. They even gave us our textbooks. I bought one book in the four years that I was at Hunter, and I always resented it because it was an Anglo-Saxon grammar book I had absolutely no need for except in the class. And they really gave you a hard time if you were an English major at Hunter. Very unlike today. You could not major in English to begin with. You had to pick another subject, which would become your minor. So, in the beginning, my major was political science. And, gee, I think I knew Bella Abzug before she was married. She was a teacher -- one of the political science classes. Probably the machinery of politics, something like that. She was the most inspiring person. And the reason that I know she was 10:00Bella Abzug -- she wasn't married at that time -- she had terrible hair. Oh, it looked awful. She was getting bald. And Bella was famous for her hats when she became a representative, Bella Abzug, she always wore a hat. And she had a lot of arguments with the judges who wanted her to take her hat off in court, and she wouldn't and so on. Anyway, she was a wonderful teacher. I had some marvelous instructors at Hunter. And when you became a junior, you were allowed to declare your major as English, and you had to take Latin, which I had never had in high school. At least a year of Latin. Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and finally what I called real English, going on. And when I did my master's degree, I also did it in English literature, English American literature, not education. 11:00People in the faculty of philosophy at Columbia, which I was in, looked down on the education people, and I think justly so. They didn't know enough about the humanities to carry them along as teachers. At any rate, I graduated with honors from Columbia, and I had not finished my thesis when I got married. And I became pregnant almost immediately. It took me twelve years to finish my thesis, finally, but I did. And I went to my own graduation. Everybody was working and nobody had time to come to my graduation. But I determined that I was going to get a cap and gown and go. And somewhere, I have a picture to prove it. I don't know where it is right now, but I do. So, that's my education. After that, I continued taking courses of all kinds, and mostly I took a lot of courses in 12:00Jewish subjects: Talmud, history, Jewish history, things like that. And vos nokh [what else]?

HN:And, well, so --

HSL:What?

HN:-- you were in the vanguard of Jewish recording.

HSL:Yes, oh --

HN:Can you tell us how that started?

HSL:I will tell you how that started. My husband, Benedict Stambler, was really a pack rat. He loved Yiddish music and he collected records, the old recordings like the 78s on shellac, Rosenblatt, Vigoda, Shlisky, all the great cantors. And the house was overflowing with records. We lived in a two-family house on Crown Street, and those houses all have big basements. So, our basement was full of 13:00his records, and there were still more coming all the time. We rented another basement from a neighbor, and that got filled up. And he used to bring up an armful of records, and late at night, when the kids were asleep, I had to sit and listen to them (laughs) and tell him what I thought. And I got to know these khazonishe [cantorial] voices very well that way. And one night, I remember it was freezing cold. The heat had gone off in the house and I'm sitting there wrapped in a blanket, trying to listen to a record, and it got me annoyed. I wanted to go to sleep. I have to get up at six o'clock in the morning. So, finally, I said, "Look, this is enough. I'm going to bed. And if you don't do something with these records, I'm going to take them out in the middle of Crown Street and smash every one of them." So, I guess he thought I really meant it. He began to think seriously about this, and he looked into all the ins and outs of the technical side of recording. When we discovered that we could make 14:00records and didn't have to invest a fortune in it, he decided he would go ahead with producing that first record, "Seven Great Cantors," that you like so much. And that has the catalog number of 590 because it was produced in 1959, was our first record. We had a friend who was an artist, so he did the jacket for us. And I wrote all the jacket notes for the records, and I directed -- once we began to do live recording, I directed the recordings myself. And I got to know our -- we had a wonderful engineer named David B. Hancock, who was a genius at cleaning up these scratchy old records. Two things we did that were really unusual in this field -- that we wouldn't let a record go out until the original 78 was cleaned up. That 78 RPMs, the old style of playing records -- until it 15:00was cleaned up. De-clicked, as we call it. And actually, after a while, Hancock got tired of doing it. It's very monotonous. So, he taught my oldest daughter how to do it, and she became a professional de-clicker for a while. Where was I? We de-clicked all the records, and in addition to that, after -- the "Seven Great Cantors" was what you would call an anthology. We did one more like that, and then Ben had a wonderful idea. He was going to take, for instance, the Rosenblatt records and arrange them in the order of the service. Now, we had one record that had a lot of different Rosenblatt Sabbath pieces. So, we made one for Shabbos. We made two for the holidays, and we did this with other cantors, as well. If they had enough of an output to set the records up in the order of 16:00the prayer book, we did it. And, of course, I got to know some of these people. Cantor Kwartin, of course, was gone, but Mrs. Kwartin was still alive. And we went around to talk to her and find out more about Zavel and so on. And that Kwartin record has a special history for us, because it's quite a distinction, I guess. It's not so much money today, but we were sued by RCA Victor for over a million dollars for taking their khazonishe records and reissuing them. And it was thirty years since they had pressed any one of those records, and it really qualified as abandoned property. And I don't think we would have gotten very far with that, except that my husband was also a lawyer. He had a law degree, but didn't -- he taught English. He didn't practice much. He discovered in looking 17:00into the history of their recordings that the Kwartin record, in particular -- Kwartin was one of the cantors who held onto his rights. He didn't sell the rights to his music and his voice to RCA. He just gave them the right to make a recording, and RCA went ahead and reproduced the record several times after the first issue without his permission. So, of course, they were not coming into court with clean hands, and we were able to get that lawsuit dismissed. But I guess it's a distinction to be sued for 1960, million dollars, which today would be a lot more.

HN:That's amazing. You also recorded cantors who were around --

HSL:Yeah, who were still living.

HN:-- like Cantor Ornstein, for example.

HSL:Well, yeah.

HN:Or you made new recordings of cantors.

HSL:We made new recordings of Hasidic music in particular, and we began to look 18:00around for -- well, he had done [Khargi?] and Kusevitsky and all the big names. Some of them were still alive, which was nice. Then, we began to think maybe we could make a live record. So, we looked into that. There were no records of Hasidic music at that time. And we lived on, as I told you, on Crown Street, up the street from Ben Zion Shenker, and also the Rosh Yeshiva [head of yeshiva] of the Lubavitcher yeshiva. It was becoming a very religious neighborhood. And Shenker had -- still has, I guess -- a beautiful voice, and even composed some nigunim [chants, melodies] himself. And we began to go to the Modzitser shtibl [small house of prayer from the Modzitz Hasidic sect] on Shabbos and so on, and their music was really wonderful. So, we approached them and said, Let's make a record of your music.

HN:And when was that? 'Cause I think it was earlier than 1959.

HSL:No. Maybe.

HN:Because it was --

HSL:It might have been in '58. That was the first record we made, that little record. And the rebbe gave Ben Zion permission to record their music. So, we got a group of guys together, they rehearsed, and we made this recording. And when it came out and these other groups, particularly Lubavitch, which pride themselves on their music, began to think, Why don't we make a record? We have lots of music, too. As a matter of fact, the Lubavitch is, I think, the only group that really has a notated collection, a book of their music written down, because one of these, what shall I say, inspirational ideas they have is that you sing to the Lord when you're inspired. And if you write it down, the inspiration is going to disappear, the kavone [intention]. Well, we persuaded 20:00them that they could make a record. And I think in that book of theirs, they claim every tune in the world except "Jingle Bells." (laughs) And we got together a choir of Hasidim who knew the music, and they would come and rehearse in each other's homes, in the dining room. Being a woman, I wasn't allowed to sit in the same room with them. But I used to sit in the kitchen, maybe, while they were singing in the dining room, and listen and make notes and send an emissary in to tell them what I wanted them to do. And our choir director was a young man named Velvel Pasternak. You must know him. He was very big in this Yiddish music field later on. But he was just beginning then. And finally, one day, Velvel said, "Look, we have to have Helen in here. She can't be in the kitchen." So, they finally let me come into the room where they were singing. I 21:00guess my presence wasn't polluting them anymore, I don't know. But (laughs) I started helping them produce their voices correctly. Said, "Sit up straight! You're not davening like this. Sit up straight, open your mouth!" And finally, one day I was in the kitchen and Moshe -- what was his name? Teleshevsky. Moshe came into the kitchen and said, "How did I sound today? Did you like my voice? I did what you told me. I sat up straight and I opened my mouth." And I said, "You were wonderful, Moshe." Well, finally we got to the point where we thought we were ready to make a record. And we had planned a program, and they were anxious to sort of do it in front of people. So, one night, they got a date somewhere, maybe in Lakewood, to sing. And the whole choir were -- ten guys, I think it was, piled into the station wagon. And being a woman, I had a seat to myself in 22:00the front next to the driver. And all the others were jammed into the back of this big station wagon. And I think it was Ben Zion who said, "Hey, be careful! You're sitting on ten rabbis!" (laughs) And they were a big hit. So, we decided that program would work, and we went to the recording studio. That was when we discovered David Hancock. No, he did the [Mosheshevsky?] record, too, yeah.

HN:Was this the "Nichoach" record?

M:I'm sorry?

HSL:What?

HN:Was this the "Nichoach" record? The first Lubavitcher record that you're talking about?

HSL:Well, that was, yeah, that was the first Lubavitcher record. And what do you mean by co-op?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

HN:So --

HSL:Okay.

HN:So, you're talking about the first Hasidic --

HSL:Yeah, we decided we were going to do a recording. I'm trying to remember, does that have an orchestra on it? I haven't heard it in a long time. No, I don't -- I think it just had piano. Poor Elliot. We had a young man who was doing the piano for us, and he died suddenly during the course of the recording. 23:00We had two sessions, and in between, poor Elliot, he wasn't feeling well. He had his friend -- and he lived up near Columbia University, and he had his friends take him over to the hospital up there. And they checked him out and sent him home. And when he got home, about an hour later, he died of a massive heart attack. Young guy. That record is dedicated to him. At any rate, in the recording session -- (laughs) Velvel Pasternak has produced a little book about that, too. He couldn't get over what was going on there. They came to the studio independently from wherever they were working or what -- and they arrived with bags of food, extra sweaters, all kinds of impedimenta, which they piled up in the corner. And when you opened the door of the recording studio, the clock starts to tick. And they're sitting there eating oranges and having a shot of 24:00liquor, I suppose, and whatnot. And I said, "Come on, fellas, we have to start working. This costs money." So, they said, Oh, we can't make a record without a l'chaim [cheers]. So, I let them have the l'chaim, and then we started the recording. And at one point, I stopped the whole thing, I said -- I dashed out of the booth onto the floor and said, "Look, you're not doing that right. You're singing ay-ay-ay-ay-ay and I want to hear that kneytsh [nuance]. I want to hear AY-ay-ay-ay-AY when you sing." And one of the guys calls out, "Please! You'll have to refrain from singing!" I said, "I'm not singing. I'm instructing you on how to do an authentic record." And I looked rather annoyed, I guess, 'cause I walked back into the booth, and we finished one half of the record. And I'm talking to the engineer, and Moshe runs up to the booth and he says, "Oh, don't 25:00be offended, Mrs. Stambler." Said, "These men don't know anything. I've been to Paris, and I know what you were after to get us to do it right." "All right," I said, "don't worry. I'm not that offended." So, I think that took -- oh, yes, and then we come into this -- when we come into the studio, in addition to this picnic, they're -- we didn't realize that there was a door in the rear of the studio that really led to another small rehearsal room. And we just finally got everybody lined up in good order, ready to sing, when the back door opens and four ballet dancers in leotards come out. They had been rehearsing a ballet in that studio. And I'll tell you, when these guys saw these girls with their skintight ballet costumes on, (laughs) it flipped many a beard, what can I say? That was really hysterically funny. So, everything broke up and I had to start 26:00getting them in order again. At any rate, the record -- oh, that's only the beginning. Dealing with the Lubavitcher, particularly -- should I mention his name? The rabbi who was in charge of their music at that time was very difficult. They at first did not understand what we wanted to do. We finally made that clear. Then, we had to arrange the financial terms. We wanted them to pay the recording expenses plus a fee for us, for my husband and me, for directing the recording. And then, they could have as many records as they wanted, because they were going to send out shlikhim [representatives] carrying records with them to show what the music was like, and so on. And they usually have that pilgrimage, I think, after -- either between Pesach and Shavuos or right after Shavuos. The guys go out on the road, as it were, with some records 27:00and so on. And we had to push to get it finished in time. So, finally, we had a Lubavitcher Hasid design the jacket. Lieberman, his name was. He got to be known as a Lubavitcher primitive painter. And that cover is one of Lieberman's designs. Anyway, we're ready to deliver the record, so my husband went around to the rabbi -- not the Lubavitcher, but one of his lieutenants -- and said, "These are the bills. Here's the bill for the arranging, here's the bill for the musicians, here's the bill for the studio time, and here's a bill for our direction." So, he looks over the papers, says, "Well, I will pay for the musicians and we will pay you right now for the arranger and so on. But we would appreciate it if you could wait for your fee." So, I said, "We worked so hard on 28:00this." I wasn't there to look at him in astonishment, but my husband was astonished. He said, "Oh, no. You have to pay all of these bills before we will release the records to you." So, they came to a standoff, and we decided hell with it. We're going away. We went to Israel that summer, and we actually made a deal to have the records distributed in Israel by the newspaper "Haaretz." And they were furious, of course, because we locked the records up in a storeroom and went off. They couldn't even reach us for a while. And they are difficult people to deal with. Finally, they broke down and gave us our check, which maybe was for a thousand dollars, for weeks and weeks of work. And this'll be loshn-hore [gossip]. Maybe I shouldn't put it on here, but I have not mentioned the rabbi's name. I won't tell this story. Or should I? (laughs) He was a 29:00disreputable character. A lot of these religious people had related businesses, like one would be in -- have a knitting mill and make sweaters. Another one imported yarn from Europe, and they dealt with each other and so on. And this rabbi had some kind of connections in the sweater business, and he owed people a lot of money, and he didn't pay anyone. And all of his creditors were after him. So, one day, I'm sitting in a bus in Israel, and I look across the aisle and there is this rabbi sitting there. He had decamped and gone off to Israel where his creditors couldn't follow him. I don't know whether he ever paid people or not, I never found out. But he sure was hiding out at that time. I didn't even say hello to him, I was so mad at him. And he wouldn't have said hello to a woman anyhow. So, didn't matter. What else about that? Oh, then, of course, we 30:00had shown them how to make a record. So, like all these stories you hear about Jewish businesses, they went into business for themselves, and they made all the other Lubavitcher records on their own. And I'll say it without shame: I think our record was much better than anything they ever produced, because I really knew how to draw that music out of them and get them to sing the way they would sing in shul, and I --

HN:Can you talk about your music background?

HSL:Music. I don't really have a music background. I love music. I used to play the piano when I was a girl. I had piano lessons. And I've listened to a lot of music in my time. So, that's my musical background. I read music. I read it better at that time. I could follow what they were singing -- along in the script. But I'm not what you would call an educated musician. I'm self-trained.

HN:What I wondered was: you and your husband used to go to the melaveh malkah [evening meal marking the end of Shabbos] --

HSL:Yeah.

HN:-- for the Modzitser Rebbe, and I think they didn't even know who you were. I mean, they --

HSL:No. Well, I --

HN:-- you would show up -- and so, I wonder, can you talk about those, what that was like?

HSL:We weren't anybody then. (laughs) That was before we made the record. We used to go to the melaveh malkah, and we knew a number of the people who lived in the neighborhood. And it was very -- it was a small shtibl [small Hasidic house of prayer]. I doubt that there were a hundred people there. But the place was jammed, it was so small. And they weren't so particular about women. We did have a separate room, but it wasn't upstairs or around the corner or something. It was right behind the men's section. And you could mingle pretty freely in between -- after all, it wasn't a religious service, melaveh malkah. So, we got 32:00to know everybody, and that helped a great deal in setting that first record up. As I say, they never knew who we were. We weren't anyone then, till after we made the record. And I think Ben Zion made one or two records himself after that. Also went into business for himself. But those were records of some of his own recordings. And he was -- very talented person, and had a lovely voice. I don't begrudge him whatever he did, because I know that you cannot make any money in this Jewish record business. And ask me why, (laughs) I'll tell you: the market is really very small to begin with. And one yeshive-bokher [yeshiva student] buys a record -- and then he copies it for all of his friends. So, you sell one record and ten people, maybe, may have copies of it. But that cuts the market down even more. And, of course, this was a while ago. I think the whole 33:00-- shall I say, craze for sound, for sound recording, for fooling around with your own equipment and so on first took off in the late '60s. And today, I mean, everybody has an expensive outfit. When my grandson went to Hollywood to try to get into the movie business, he gave me his nine-hundred-dollar television set. Said, "I'm not going to cart it out to California." And there it is, right there.

HN:You --

HSL:He bought a new one. (laughs)

HN:Now, you also, in that first recording, you were working with Vladimir Heifetz.

HSL:Oh, yes. That was fun. Vladimir did the arrangements -- Volodya, as she called him. And we met at his place in Manhattan a couple of times and discussed the arrangement of the music. And one afternoon, we were talking so long that it 34:00was getting close to dinnertime. And I said, "Well, let's all go out to dinner." Figured we owed him at least a dinner for the time we had taken up. And Mrs. Heifetz was fussing around in the kitchen. I said, "Oh, you don't have to make dinner for us. We're all going to take you out." She says, "Oh, I am not cooking for you. I am cooking for my dog." (laughs) And that really broke me up. She had a little poodle who was so particular about his food that she prepared his food herself. But they were a lovely couple. Volodya was a very nice guy, Vladimir. Very loving. Real European gentleman. All but kissed my hand when I came in to meet him. At any rate, yes, so that was our only contact with Heifetz. He really understood what we wanted, and he did a nice job on arranging that music. And 35:00from that, we went into, oh, Rudy Tepel and the Jewish wedding, and he had a lot of Lubavitcher nigunim on his wedding record. And I listened to it a couple of years ago for the first time in a long time, and really, it's a very poor recording. The music's wonderful. But I was embarrassed. I was going to play it for some friends, and we have this high-fidelity fetish now. It is anything but high-fidelity, although at that time, I guess it was. We worked with tape and, as I say, Hancock was a magician when it came to cleaning records up, making sure the tempo was correct and so on. Anyway --

HN:You also did an all-instrumental --

HSL:Oh, yes. We did, yes --

HN:-- Hasidic record. What was that?

HSL:Wasn't all instrumental. It was -- wait a minute, we did a choral record, "Od Yeshome [Od Yishama]" that had an orchestra and a chorus.

HN:This one was --

HSL:Yes, we may have done a Modzitser and --

HN:You did --

HSL:-- orchestral record, yes.

HN:You did, and you called it -- something was the first opera, and this was the first --

HSL:Yeah, yeah. (laughs)

HN:But how did that -- who arranged that and how did that happen?

HSL:Maybe that was Heifetz, too. I really don't remember, to tell you the truth.

HN:Sure, sure.

HSL:Was a long time ago. I had forgotten about that. I remember (laughs) -- I really must have a lot of nerve in me. What do I know about recordings? And I stood there in that recording booth with the whole orchestra lined up in front of me, and I went, "Go," and that started the music going. And I would follow the score a little bit. And Hancock was really a trained musician. So, he followed the score, too. And if there was something wrong, we would stop it and start again, and so on. I really knew very little when I started in in this business except that it had to sound right, and he knew how to make it sound 37:00right. So, we did that orchestral recording, and we did that choral record, as I said: Od Yeshome, it had a choir with professional singers. They were not Hasidim, although most of them were Jewish guys. And something happens to people who made recordings with us. We were very sincere in what we did, and there was no jazzy flim-flam about the work that we did. And again and again, I would have a musician or a singer come up to me and say, you know, I got something out of this recording that I didn't get from any other. There's a feeling in it that just wakes up my Yiddishkayt, that sort of thing. So, we're doing this recording and these guys are singing from a transliteration. And where does that go? P'Zurenu --

HN:V'Karev P'Zurenu [Vekareiv pezureinu]?

HSL:Yeah, they kept saying pizzareno. (laughter) And I said, "This is not a pizza. It's P'Zurenu." And they simply couldn't get it right. And then, Dave Hancock said to me, "Don't worry about it. You won't hear it on the record." And it's true. Since there were so many voices blended, you didn't quite hear this mistake. But it haunted me. All I could hear when I played the record was "pizzareno." But that was a beautiful recording, which we call "Od Yeshome." Very beautifully done, with the most -- I won't say popular. The most frequently sung nigunim among Hasidim. And they did a good job on it, too.

HN:Now, did you also do field -- can you tell us about the field recordings that you did that were not produced? Because I read that when your husband died, which was in 1967, that after that, you gave three thousand recordings to --

HSL:Oh, yes! That's something else.

HN:-- the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. Can you tell us about that?

HSL:That's a new area, yes. When my husband passed away -- in '67, was it? Yeah. He left behind three or four uncompleted recordings, transfers, transcriptions, whatever you call it. Two were Kusevitsky records, and there were a couple of Rosenblatt records in there. And since they were half done and I owed the money anyway for the studio and so on, I went to work to finish them as best I could, not having this whole retinue of artists and people around. So, I got those records finished, and then I decided, No, I can't do any more of this. By that time, I had written almost fifty different articles about Jewish music, about 40:00cantors, about singers, and so on. And I was working hard. I was working full time as a teacher of English in the high schools, and I had four kids. I really didn't need this extra responsibility. And the House of Menorah took care of all our distribution. So, I didn't have that headache, anyway. Now, my husband also left all of these shellac records that he had collected over his lifetime. Now, we had, actually, in the two basements, we had about seven thousand records. And I was also angry with my husband, because he never cataloged anything. He just had them sorted out by stacks, and he knew what was in each stack. I said, "You have to have a catalog. You never catalog these records. You don't even know what you have." So, he put his children to work, his own kids. My son and my second daughter were still home. They weren't away at school yet. So, they sat 41:00down in the basement with these long yellow legal pads, cataloguing the records for him, copying off the title, the number, and so on. And we wound up -- we had four thousand different titles from all the great cantors of the world, in the days when cantors were adored like movie stars today. I remember Mrs. Kwartin telling me a story about how her husband did a cantorial concert -- this was in Egypt, I think, in Cairo. And the crowd was so excited about him that when he came out of the theater after the concert, they were pelting him with flowers and they put him in a buggy, a horse and buggy, which is what they used in Egypt at that time. And then, his wonderful, enthusiastic supporters got rid of the horses and pulled the carriage themselves, back to the hotel. Oh, she was so 42:00proud of that story, but it's true. Rosenblatt was revered wherever he went, and he deserved it. 'Cause there are two parts to khazones [Jewish liturgical music]. One is just knowing the material, and the other is improvisation. And the great cantors improvise beautifully. Rosenblatt, in particular, was wonderful at improvising on the original tune, nigun. And Kusevitsky was very good at that, too. And also, I think, Shlisky. They were marvelous. So, we had these four thousand records, and what are we going to do with them? I decided I had to get -- I couldn't carry that around with me anymore, either. I was on the verge of moving into a co-op on Brooklyn Heights, and I certainly wasn't going to move seven thousand records there, and I wasn't going to throw them away, 43:00either, because by that time, I recognized that this was a great treasure, cultural treasure, that was going to disappear if I threw those records out, for instance. So, I approached the Library of Congress. I had the list that my children had made, and they were interested in getting the entire collection. So, we gave them, for the four thousand original titles that we had, for the Benedict Stambler Archive of Recorded Jewish Music -- and it's still there. And the only people who can listen to it are scholars, come in with a real purpose. Then, there were still three thousand records left that were doubles of the other titles. What was I going to do with those? I went around and I gave them to the Rodgers and Hammerstein -- what is it? Archive of Recorded Music, the library up at, what is it, forty-- somewhere in Lincoln Center.

HN:Forty-Second Street. Oh, Lincoln Center (UNCLEAR).

HSL:Maybe. That's where is -- Forty-Second -- it's not at the Forty-Second Street Library.

HN:No, it's Lincoln Center. It's the --

HSL:It's a new structure.

HN:Yeah, yeah.

HSL:So, we gave them those records. And they had it set up so that you had to request permission to listen, but anybody who wanted could listen to it. You couldn't handle the records. They put them all on tape, and they would play the tape for you. All right, good. So, then, I still had the original recording tapes and many pages of music that had been transcribed and copied and so on. And what did I do with those? Well, the first fight I ever had with my husband -- I was going to give them to Yeshiva University library. And he had a big -- this was my second husband -- David had a big grudge against Yeshiva. And we had already been married maybe a year and a half at that point. Said, "If you give those things to Yeshiva University, I'm going to leave you." I said, "What?" And 45:00then he explained to me how he felt about this, and he thought he hadn't been properly treated by them. And I don't want to go into all of that, but anyway, he didn't want me to give those things to Yeshiva. So, I gave them to -- I was trying to remember the name. I gave them to some -- name a folksinger. Not Ruth Rubin. Another well-known Yiddish folksinger. I gave her all that material because she was running a sort of music school in Manhattan for folk music and singers and so on. And she has had all this stuff. I don't know if she still has it. Don't even know if she's still alive, but it's there.

HN:Maybe Ethel Raim, or Masha Benya or --

HSL:Not Masha Benya.

HN:Yeah, I can't -- I'm not really sure.

HSL:Was there somebody named Rubin? Maybe I have the first name wrong.

HN:Well, Ruth Rubin, obviously, was very important for teaching --

HSL:Yes, well she was --

HN:-- Jewish folk songs.

HSL:-- the person whom I contacted, and was glad to have -- she was glad to have all that material as a sort of goldmine, shall we say --

HN:Wonderful.

HSL:-- to dig out material and work with it and so on.

HN:She would have given it to City Lore. That's where she gave her stuff, so --

HSL:She would have given it to who?

HN:City Lore, or also -- she had thousands of recordings she gave to Columbia University. So, they --

HSL:Yeah.

HN:-- that was a good decision.

HSL:Yeah.

HN:But you kept recording, because I know Richard Neumann --

HSL:Oh, yeah.

HN:-- also recorded Ladino, and then you recorded --

HSL:Yeah, but that was while Ben was still alive.

HN:A-ha.

HSL:The Ladino record is one that I'm really proud of. It's rare music. It's out-of-print, of course. And I don't -- the Sharfsteins at Menorah Records put a few of my records on cassettes. The Moze--, no, the Bostoner Rebbe, we had songs 47:00of the Bostoner Rebbe on an LP. And they made a cassette from that, and they may have -- they did two or three of my records, I don't remember which, as cassette tapes to sell. And then, of course, they finally shut the business down. I don't know who's running it now. Velvel has a brother, Velvel Pasternak has a brother in Washington who sells a lot of this stuff. And he deals with whatever he can find of Collectors Guild, because, of course, not being produced anymore.

HN:I think the last one I saw was the New York Klezmer Ensemble?

HSL:That's not anything I had to do with.

HN:Uh huh. Okay. (UNCLEAR)

HSL:No, these modern klezmer groups, the -- I haven't done anything in the Jewish music field since probably 1969 or '70. When I cleaned up all the 48:00leftover material that I had and all the records and all that stuff, I just quit. I'm still looking for someone to publish those jacket notes, because you can't find that material easily anywhere. We did a lot of research into biographies of the cantors, and sometimes with the Ladino, the history of some of the songs --

HN:How did you do that?

HSL:You find people. (laughs) You talk to people. And actually, I had somebody give me a word-for-word -- what is it, a literal translation. (coughs) Excuse me. A literal translation of the Ladino lyrics. And then, I turned them into song lyrics on the back of that record. Beautiful. I love that record. And the 49:00cantor who did it was a real Sephardi. I think he's -- no, he must have died. His son called me. He had a congregation out in maybe Long Beach, somewhere where all the rich Sephardim live. And he had given us the right to make the record. And one day, the son calls up and says, "Who gave you the rights to make this record?" I said, "Your father." He said, "Well, the record's out of print. Can't you make some more?" I said, "Well, I'm not in that business anymore, but if you want to produce more of these records, you have my full permission to use our recording tape to make new records." And that was the last I heard of that. (laughs) I don't think they made new ones.

HN:Was that --

HSL:Elnadav, well, he --

HN:Yeah, Raphael, yeah, Elnadav.

HSL:Raphael was such a nice person. I really enjoyed working with him. Very pleasant.

HN:So --

HSL:And we did -- so, I say this was all while my husband was still alive. 50:00Richard Neumann's records, he also -- we consulted with him a lot on the cantorial stuff. And what else do you want to ask me about that?

HN:Well, the only other thing, I think, would be about the Bobover [a member of the Bobov Hasidic sect] Hasidim.

HSL:Oh, the Bobover Hasidim. That is a story and a half. Some of the things that happen in the Hasidic world are absolutely unbelievable to people who don't live in that world. Now, the Bobover had a rebbe who has created a lot of nigunim. Very nice ones, too. The original Bobover Rebbe died in Europe, and we had a wonderful photo of a crowd at his funeral. And in the center of that picture was a Hasid who became sort of the successor in the music area to the rebbe. And we 51:00used that for a cover. And when the rebbe saw that, he said, "Oh, you can't print a person's picture, a rebbe, on the cover of a record! Who knows where it's going to be dragged around. You'll have to do it over." Well, I wasn't going to run that printing over again. And we discussed it with the artist, and we figured out a way to make a design of flames going up in gold. I'm sure you've seen the cover. And that obscured the face of that person he was objecting to. Then, of course, the Bobov group, like any -- that's the other shul. They broke into two groups, and the fellow -- fellow, the cantor who was going to do the Bobov record for us was in the rump group (laughs) -- the group that separated from the main group. And they were so incensed by the idea that somebody would make a record without the rebbe that they started trying to get even with this poor Halberstam. They did the most outrageous things. At one 52:00time, they sent in a false death notice -- the Jewish newspapers -- that the funeral was going to be held at a certain time, leaving from that house where he lived. And a crowd of people showed up to attend the funeral of a person who was very much alive. They sent a load of lumber to his house that was dropped off on the street in front of the house. And you can't do that in New York. So, not in the country. They had endless trouble with that. But we finished the recording, and I think it's a very nice one, too, "Songs of the Bobover Hasidim." We also did "Songs of the Bostoner Rebbe." There's two Bostoner rebbes. They're twins. And one is the Bostoner in Boston, and the other is the Bostoner Rebbe in New York. And I got to know the one in New York quite well. They lived in one of these huge four-story brownstone houses on President Street. One block on 53:00President Street had real mansions that very wealthy people lived in, and the next block had very fancy but not quite as extravagantly expensive brownstones. And this one had four stories, and the whole upper floor was like a dormitory. And the rebbe used to have anyone who wanted to stay with him for Shabbat could come and stay there. It was a fantastic house. They had two whole kitchens, a milkhik [milk dishes] and a fleyshik [meat dishes]. And he was such a sweet character. He would sing for me and get excited, and his little peyes would bob up and down. He was really adorable. I liked him very much. Well, his son, Avreml, sang on the record, which was the main reason he wanted to do it. And so, we recorded the Bostoner music, and that record went very smoothly. We had 54:00no problems with it. It was nice. And what else can I tell you about this?

HN:This is great. I mean, thank you. I --

HSL:Oh, it's my pleasure, and --

HN:I mean, you talked about everything that I have on my list, so -- (laughs)

HSL:I've gone into a whole area of my life, which is like a life of another person.

HN:Yes.

HSL:'Cause I am not that person anymore.

HN:Yes.

HSL:Yeah.

HN:Since, really -- right, and since going out of that. And so, I mean, when you think back on -- what do you feel like your legacy is with all this?

HSL:In the beginning, I did this mainly because I felt, Well, we ought to do something with these records. But by the time I had finished those last three records that I had left over when he died, I began to realize that this was really an important piece of Jewish heritage, that it was a yerushe [heritage] 55:00that people needed to know, and that I was very happy that my husband had persisted in doing this. But he was very stubborn, (laughs) to -- talking about collecting the records, he went all over the city looking for people who had old 78 records. We at one time had three different Victrolas, because people said, If you want to take the records, you have to take this Victrola out of my house, too. And I even -- (laughs) I got one reward one day. My husband found a whole trove of records in the home of a woman who was running one of these businesses on the stoop, and it doesn't exist anymore: corset store, with lingerie and corsets and stuff. And she gave him her father's records. She wanted to keep the Victrola. They were going to make that into a bar. People did that in those days. The top lifts up and that's the ice chest in there. Anyway, she said, "Listen, I gave you the records. So, buy something." So, (laughs) he bought me a 56:00very sexy black slip. That was my reward for all the work I had done in this field. As I say, one thing that I have not been able to accomplish is that I've been looking for someone to publish those notes. And I can't get anyone terribly excited about it. It wouldn't cost a lot of money to make it into a book, and it would be a very wonderful reference.

HN:I'm very interested in that myself, so I --

HSL:Yeah.

HN:-- I can be in touch about that, because now it's very easy to put these things online.

HSL:Yeah.

HN:But publishing is a whole other story. That's, for instance, there's --

HSL:Well, you can do it with Amazon where --

HN:Yeah.

HSL:-- it doesn't really cost you very much.

HN:Well, we should talk about that at some --

HSL:Yeah.

HN:-- sometime very soon, then. I think that would be great. And, I mean, all that research that you did. Just maybe one more question.

HSL:Sure.

HN:You worked with -- you did the Hasidic wedding and Lubavitch wedding --

HSL:Yeah.

HN:-- with Rudy Tepel. How did you pick Rudy, and what was that like?

HSL:Well, Rudy was kind of a well-known figure in the Jewish neighborhoods that we lived in. You went to a wedding, most of the time it was Rudy's band that was playing. And we went to several weddings just to audition his orchestra. He had a wonderful trumpet and a great clarinet. The band was really very good, and they had quite a collection of interesting music that they played. What did he call it? The backbeat. (laughs) Some backbeat nigun that he always played at weddings, which referred to the structure of the music itself. Was very syncopated in that way. It's great. So, after we had auditioned him for a while, 58:00we said, "Rudy, would you like to make a record?" Well, of course, his eyes lit up. Of course he'd like to make a record. So, we did a record, two records with him, and I just regret that the recording and pressing technique was not modern. I don't think that that record would stand up to any kind of modern processing --

HN:There --

HSL:-- although it may have been released on a tape, a cassette tape, I don't know. But, yeah, where is all that material now?

HN:His son released them on CD, actually.

HSL:On CDs, yeah.

HN:Neal put them out on CD.

HSL:Well, I'm glad.

HN:Yeah, yeah. I mean, you put this stuff out there, and now it's kind of there for the world. (laughs)

HSL:Well, exactly.

HN:That's kind of what's going on.

HSL:That's what we wanted, really.

HN:Yeah.

HSL:I started to say before that you can't make money in the record business. I told you, they copy the records freely. They give them to each other. (laughs) We had a cover, oh, I guess it was one of the Hasidic records, I don't know 59:00which one, had a cover that had people in it. Maybe that was the one that Lieberman made for us. And among the very Orthodox, you're not supposed to draw pictures of people. They would peel the cover off the jacket, the artwork, and then, they could keep it in their room and play it. I mean, they really turn handsprings to observe not only the letter, but the most minute dot in the law. And I guess you have to respect that. I think it's a very restricted way to live in that it -- you put on blinders and you only know this world. But it's very devout. They're very sincere. And I told you, something happens to the musicians when they play this music, which is unusual. They get a, sort of feel a -- suddenly wakes up the Jew in them, which they've been hiding in business all 60:00this time. You're not to be too Jewish. Who was it? Mandy Patinkin had one show that was called "Too Jewish." I just saw him recently in -- oh, what was that program? Over at the Harvard, the Brattle Theatre. Oh, I was just there two weeks ago. I don't remember the title right now, but --

HN:One final thing. Not so long ago, you basically gave permission to the Florida Atlantic University Archive --

HSL:Yes.

HN:-- to put these recordings out on the internet. And, I mean, that is amazing, because now anyone in the world --

HSL:Can listen to them.

HN:-- can listen to pretty much all of your major recordings. And it's not --

HSL:Right.

HN:-- that many, but it's --

HSL:Yeah, well --

HN:-- what you had at the time. And can you talk about that for a minute?

HSL:Well, let's see. Yeah, this is an interesting story. One of the people who works a lot with this Jewish music is Benji -- what's his last name? Anyway, a kid that we called Benji, he was the son of a rabbi in Manhattan. And a nebekh, a bit of a lost soul when he was younger. And he knew how to repair pianos, and we had a reproducing piano, Duo-Art reproducing piano that was beginning to fall apart. It was very old. Beautiful piano, by the way. And all of the keys underneath -- the usual piano has a harp, and you see the hammers and all that. Well, underneath that mechanism, (coughs) excuse me, a reproducing piano, 62:00there's some kind of pump that pumps air through these little tubes that are connected to all the keys. So, you can imagine how many little pipes there are under the harp part of the piano that puts air into all of these tubes and pumps them up and down as the music roll dictates. If you've ever seen one where you work it with your feet, it's the same process but it's done electrically, pumping air into the places where you want the piano to play. And we had this beautiful Duo-Art piano that Ben Stambler, my first husband, acquired during the Depression for two hundred dollars from a piano store that was going out of business. I didn't know him at that time, but one day he came home and he said to his mother, "Mom, they're going to deliver a piano this afternoon." Said, "Who needs a piano?" But they brought him the piano. Nobody in the family played 63:00the piano. I don't know why they had it, even, but he had it. Then, he moved -- when we got married, that was his dowry, the piano. (laughs) So, we always had to look for a house that had a living room big enough for the piano. And it was wonderful. It played beautifully on a good piano. The recordings were made by the original artists, like Gershwin playing the "Rhapsody in Blue." That tape, music roll -- you had the tissue music rolls. It's a miracle that we didn't wear it out, because my kids loved it and they played it day and night. The neighbors all thought I was a concert pianist that was practicing, 'cause they heard it so many times. Anyway, Benji knew how to repair these pianos, and the pipes were beginning to fall apart under our piano, after all, it was very old. So, he spent a lot of time in my house, lying on the floor, under the piano, fixing these little pipes. And he knew that we were interested in Jewish music, and his 64:00father was kind of -- what the heck was his last name? Benji something. He's with Gainesville people now. Ultimately, I don't know what happened to him in between, but he wound up in Florida, working in this music archive. I guess he knew a lot about recordings and tapes and things. And he called me up one day and asked me about my records. Of course, I was glad to have somebody hear them, play them. I knew I was never going to get any money out of it, so, okay. Oh, yes, I know one other story I wanted to tell you. I gave them permission to use whatever they wanted, as long as no one was allowed to copy them. They could listen, but that was it. Now, what was it that came to my mind? Let me think for a minute. Oh, yes. I got into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, among 65:00other things, because, as a widow, I deducted from my income taxes the value of this recording collection. And I put a rather high value on it, because, for one thing, it was complete. It wasn't just a Rosenblatt record. It was all he had ever made, including the European recordings. I don't know how my husband found them. But he even found the old European recordings of some of these European cantors. Oh, Hershman is the one that hurts me. He was such a beautiful cantor, and he came to this country and people idolized him, but he felt it wasn't religious enough for him here, and he went back to Europe. Of course, he was sent to the gas. He was exterminated during that whole Nazi thing. At any rate, I get into this trouble with the income tax people, and they don't want to allow the deduction at all. And a fellow who was hearing my appeal said, "Well, I 66:00found a Rosenblatt record in a bin for two dollars yesterday. How can you expect to get a forty-thousand-dollar credit for this?" I said, "Well, it isn't just one record, it's four thousand records." Said, "Well, I'm sorry, I can't allow it." "So, can I appeal this?" He said, "Yes, you can." So, I appealed the thing once more, and I see this top supervisor, and I explained to him why I thought this thing really was invaluable. You couldn't put a value on it from a cultural point of view, because it was so rare. And he listens to me, and then he calls me in about a week later, two weeks later, and he said, "I wasn't going to give you any credit for this, but I was driving home to my place in Westchester, and I had WQXR on. And they played a Collectors Guild recording, and I've never heard anything so spiritual in my life" -- told you, they -- transforms people 67:00-- "that I decided I was going to give you some credit. You can take off whatever you already deducted, and maybe another ten thousand dollars. So, I said, "Well, then I don't owe you anything, right?" He said, "Right." "Ah, thank you." But I couldn't get over it. I wanted to give him some records. He said, "Oh, you can't give 'em to me. That's not allowed. I can't take a gift from you."

HN:It's bribery.

HSL:But when he said, "I heard it on the radio, and I haven't heard anything so beautiful in a long time," I really got a thrill out of it. It got me out of a scrape with the income tax people. So, there you are.

HN:Now, I know if the director of this project was here, she would ask you: do you have any favorite record of all time, then, that you've produced?

HSL:Of these recordings? Well, to tell you the truth, it's a long time since I have listened to them --

HN:Yeah.

HSL:-- for that matter. In fact, I wanted to do a concert of my recordings here, and I couldn't find a turntable anywhere to play what we used to call long-playing records. And finally, I ran into someone who was a good friend who gave me that machine in the hall. But then, I never got around to the concert, 'cause I have my records so arranged that I could do High Holiday music or Passover music or something. What is my favorite record? It's hard to tell. I like the music on "Od Yeshome" best of all, really. But I'm not that crazy about the performance. Overall, I'm trying to think. Well, I love those wedding records, but they're -- I'm sorry that the recording is so poor.

HN:They're really better than you think. I mean, they're --

HSL:Well, maybe I had it on a crappy player, that's --

HN:Yeah. They're really very good.

HSL:Yeah.

HN:And those are favorites of (UNCLEAR).

HSL:I love the wedding records, both of them.

HN:So do I, and so do a lot of people. Well, thank you so much.

HSL:Oh, it was my pleasure.

HN:This is fantastic, to get this story, and -- just great, and thanks for --

HSL:Yeah.

HN:-- spending all this time, and I'm just so grateful that you're willing to (UNCLEAR).

HSL:Well, your principle interest in this -- as it concerns me, is about the record collection, right? So, okay, we did it. (laughs)

HN:Yeah.

HSL:Yeah.

HN:Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, if you -- would you like to talk about other aspects of your teaching career, though? That would be definitely fine. I mean, if you'd like to tell us about that, and your writing and your books on -- oh, I want to hear about that. Why didn't I ask you? My God! You wrote a book on modern Jewish etiquette, and you wrote a book on --

HSL:Two books on weddings.

HN:-- two books on Jewish weddings. So, tell us about that.

HSL:And then, I did an advice column.

HN:And the advice column for "The Jewish Week," so --

HSL:And is a piece of --

HN:-- we've got to cover this, I'm sorry.

HSL:All right.

HN:(laughs) Thank you.

HSL:Well --

HN:Are you okay, Adrian? Do you still have some time?

ADRIAN: Yeah, we're good.

HN:Excellent, okay.

HSL:I retired from teaching when I was fifty-eight, and I thank the Board of Education with all my heart for having put through a special retirement category at that time. There was a teacher shortage, and there was also a glut of these teachers on maximum salary that they wanted to get rid of. So, they set up a fifty-five/twenty-five, and otherwise you had to reach the age of fifty-five and have taught for twenty-five years to be eligible to retire. And, of course, you had to be able to live on your pension, too. So, I had twenty-five years when I was fifty-eight years old. I also have to thank the legislator who put through a bill giving substitutes time credit towards retirement, 'cause I had been a sub 71:00for six years before I took the regular exam. And that six years put me over the top so I could retire. And there were so many other things I wanted to do. And I want to tell you, being a chairman of department in the Bronx, in this school, was no picnic. I was responsible not only for the instruction, but all the serious matters of discipline in my department, and all my teachers who needed discipline, too. I knew that some of them were on drugs, and you could find a fix in the school. We knew -- you could recognize the drug peddlers. At that time, it was terrible. It was like an infestation. These guys were so young, they still had to go to school. So, they were prancing around in our corridors wearing long coats down to their heels, and very fancy hats with a feather in the band and all that. One of the guys had a coat that had a fur collar and a 72:00fur lining. I still remember him. And they had lots of money because they were doing something illegal. In addition to that, their followers were a plague on the neighborhood. Roosevelt had -- one side was on Bathgate Avenue, which faced a row of private houses that had these high stoops, you know how the brownstone is, with -- the parlor floor has a high flight of stairs leading up to it. And the kids used to cut school like crazy and sit on the steps of those houses and sing and play music. And their little tape recorders -- a couple of the kids had guitars or banjos, and there was music there all afternoon, but nobody was in school. (laughs) And it was really hard to get them out of the building, these people, but we had one -- and the dean of boys had a special duty to ferret out these pushers and get rid of them. And there were some days when there was so 73:00much marijuana around that if you walked up and down the stairs in certain parts of the building, you could get high on the air of the stairwell, the smoke that was in the air -- stairwell. Anyway, I retired at that point, and I started working. First, I had a project that I wanted -- I really wanted to be a writer at that point. And, well, my husband had passed away already, and I wasn't that excited about the Jewish record field anymore. A lot of people in it that are like leeches. They steal from each other. Anyway, I wanted to do some serious writing, and I had an idea for a textbook. (laughs) Good comes out of evil, I guess. I had a chairperson who hated me before I became a chairman. And she used 74:00to give me the worst classes in the school. And I became the world's greatest living teacher of G students, the general students who went for a general diploma. Didn't get an academic one. And in dealing with these kids, I began to realize that the books we were using had no frame of reference for them. They didn't know any fairy tales, except maybe the story of Cinderella. So, you get into a book like "Moby Dick" -- has a million references to different classical and fairy tale characters, and you can spend two periods explaining it to them when you want to get ahead with the book instead. So, I decided I'd make a textbook. We had one, (laughs) a biography book for slow readers that had a two-page biography of a prominent person, picture, and then all kinds of 75:00composition topics. (laughs) One of the people in this book was Spiro Agnew. (laughs) He was supposed to be a great example of an immigrant who made it to high places. And I recall, when he got involved in the scandal with his vicuna overcoat, they had to recall all the textbooks and take that article out of it and put somebody else in instead, 'cause he couldn't be a hero anymore if he got involved. So, I doped out a plan for a fairy tale book based on the classical stories, plus a lot of tales from all over the world in addition to that, with fairy tale motifs. And I sent that book out. I knew all the publishers of the books for slow students. I shouldn't call them slow. For disadvantaged students. That really was their problem. I sent it out to twenty different publishers and 76:00I couldn't get anyone to even discuss the proposition with me. So, I put that away, and my husband and I -- Ben and I had often discussed the idea of doing a book for the Am Ha'aretz [uneducated Jews]. In fact, I started to call the book "Am Ha'aretz Says," and there used to be jokes around about the maharajah says, and then there would be some ridiculous thing after that. And I began to think about it again, and I thought, Well, gee, maybe there is a market for this book, one that is not so abstruse, so difficult, but that covers all of these main points, really how to live a Jewish life. And I had a friend who wrote art books, and she said, "I think my agent would be interested in this book." "All right, I'll send him a summary." I did. I sent him a sample chapter and he liked the whole idea very much, and he succeeded in selling the idea to Schocken 77:00Books. So, at this point, all I had was an outline and one chapter. And now I had to write the book. (laughs) And I was still working full-time. Oh, no, I had retired. That's right. Thank God, I had retired by the time they decided they wanted to do the book. So, I spent close to a year working on it, all by myself. I had no staff, even, but I researched everything. I'm a very fast writer. It's no problem. If I know something, I can write it up very quickly. It's no deal. So, I did this book, and it was published and it was very successful. In fact, they've resold the paperback rights to Harper & Row.

HN:What are the main points in it?

HSL:What?

HN:I mean, what are the main topics?

HSL:Oh, everything. It covers -- the sample chapter I did was on funerals, 'cause that was easy. Mourning and funerals, because it's a very circumscribed 78:00topic. There's not much to argue about in how long you have to be in mourning and blah-blah-blah. How you sit shiva [seven-day mourning period] and so forth. So, what's covered in it is weddings, from which I got that spinoff for the wedding books. Weddings -- had wedding invitations and wedding etiquette -- take up a large portion of that book. It's the one thing guaranteed to start a fight in a family, is a wedding. And all the other things, like the mitzvah [commandment/good deed], visiting the sick. Bar mitzvah, but it was short. It was not about how to make a bar mitzvah. It's just a -- what is the bar mitzvah, and what does it stand for? Of course, I have a big editorial against these splashy bar mitzvahs, and they've gotten bigger and bigger as the years go on. And now, the parents don't even know anything about Yiddishkayt, let alone the 79:00kid. What else? Naming a baby. Oh, there was a whole thing about hospitality and the theory of Sabbath hospitality. We have an orekh [guest] for the Shabbat. And what else did we have in it? Name something, I'll tell you whether I know it.

HN:No, I get it. It covers everything.

HSL:Yeah.

HN:And then, the next thing was the advice column? Or the --

HSL:Oh, yes. Then, as a spin-off of this book, the editor said to me, "We've got to give you some authoritarian background. What makes you an authority on this?" I said, "Well, how 'bout if I write a column?" He said, "Well, if you can get a column, that would be good." And I knew someone at "The Jewish Week," so -- and my daughter knew him very well. So, we went around to speak to him about this, and he said, "Good, we'll run a column, 'Ask Helen Latner.'" By that time, I was 80:00Helen Latner already. And I wrote that column for twelve years of the craziest kinds of queries. Mostly, it was older people who wrote to me. I guess that's their audience, "The Jewish Week," about things like, "I've been invited to a wedding of my niece who is marrying someone who's not Jewish. I don't want to go to the wedding, 'cause I don't approve of this match. Do I have to send a wedding present?" (laughs) How do you answer that question? First of all, I told him it's not his place to judge. He shouldn't offend the girl's parents if they're close relatives of his. He should go to the wedding. He doesn't have any -- always hate that. I got many of those queries, different variations of the same question. Who made you an authority and gave you the right to approve or disapprove of this wedding? It's up to the parents. And if you like the parents 81:00and they're close friends of yours, you really have to go to the wedding. And, as a matter of fact, my wedding -- no, my daughter, my oldest daughter married someone who was not Jewish. In Israel -- I have one cousin who lives in Israel, and she solved the problem very nicely. I never thought of that. She came late for the ceremony, so she was only there for the dinner, the congratulations, and that sort of thing. She didn't have to sit through religious ceremony that she didn't approve. I don't approve of those two-faith wedding ceremonies. I guess I'm not an interfaith person at this point. I got questions about, oy, "There are two nights of Passover. My wife's family always invites us for the first night and my family for the second night. And my mother feels that she's being slighted because I ought to come to her for the first night sometime." I mean, 82:00it's narishkayt [foolishness]. All sorts of things, then I -- to me, the most rewarding thing of all was once, I had nothing else to write about. Somebody had written me a query about an idiomatic expression. "Opgeton af terkish" [done in a Turkish way]. I had never heard this, didn't have any idea what it meant. So, I put it in a column and said, "Anyone ever heard of this? What does it mean?" And I put a few other ordinary expressions that are easily explained. And I got a couple of letters back saying that the Turks were reputed to be very, well, ganeyvish, (laughs) thieving merchants, that they were wicked people, that they could kill you for a rug and so on. Well, I edited that down and I printed the reply. It means you got revenge on someone the way a Turk would. Well, I got a 83:00letter from the Turkish American Society complaining that I had libeled the Turks. I got a letter from the Turkish embassy. So, I just published all the letters and let it go at that. (laughs) But that idiom column produced so many other letters giving me different Yiddish idioms, some of which I had never heard before, that it was material for at least three other columns for me. And the interest in it was what amazed me. People really cared. They wanted to know. And so, I wrote that until -- and it was every week. And after a while, I began to feel very constricted by that, because it was the same thing over and over again, first of all, to which I had to find a new answer every time. And if I wanted to go away for a couple of weeks, I had to write four columns ahead for 84:00myself to meet that weekly deadline. And then, I just got tired of the same -- was a very, very mean-spirited feeling to a lot of these questions, which I tried to correct. (laughs) I lost one of my papers because of a column I wrote. It was being syndicated in seven different cities. And Baltimore was one of my cities, so when it came time for Purim, I decided to write something different. And I wrote a column called "Score One for Vashti." And I brought up the fact that Vashti was probably the first feminist. She stood up for her right not to be displayed in the nude by her husband. And because of that, she was beheaded and she really was a heroine and should be respected as the original feminist. Well, I didn't know at that time that the paper in Baltimore had been taken over by a rabbi, young rabbi. And he was offended by this column, and so he dropped 85:00his connection to the advice column. Well, since I got paid the amazing sum of five dollars a week for each syndication, I didn't care very much. (laughs) But it's funny that that should have caused him to break off the whole thing. "Score One for Vashti." Like to run it again someday. Think I'm going to send it as a letter to the editor someplace. (laughs) "The Jewish Advocate." I never got the Boston paper. I don't know why. Maybe it was too -- well, "The Jewish Week" in itself is not -- it's a very liberal paper.

HN:Yeah, the "Advocate" is owned by Hasidim, but it is --

HSL:Yeah.

HN:-- they have some good writers. They have some --

HSL:Yeah. Well, "The Jewish Press" is owned by -- I was so outraged by that paper appearing in English and presenting itself as the voice of Jewish people. Its grammar was atrocious. There are millions of spelling mistakes in each 86:00issue. I wanted to go over it with a red pencil and send it back to them. And they had the most antiquated positions --

HN:No, it's the most right-wing -- I mean, Meir Kahane used to write for that.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

HN: Sharing these stories is -- this is going to be great, and they will edit this into a beautiful interview.

[END OF INTERVIEW]