ANNETTE BERKOVITS ORAL HISTORY

ZE'EV DUCKWORTH: This is Ze'ev Duckworth, and today is Sunday, 28th of June, 2015. I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Annette Berkovits. And we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Annette Berkovits, do I have your permission to record this interview?

ANNETTE BERKOVITS: Yes, you do.

ZD:Thank you. Okay, so, we're going to start the interview just talking about your family. So, can you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

AB:My family background. Well, I hope you're ready for a long story, Ze'ev. Actually, I know most about my family background on my mother's side. Someone 1:00traced the history on my mother's side back to fourteenth century Spain, and subsequent expulsion. And somewhere back there in history, there is a rabbi -- a grand rabbi, actually, in Italy. And there are some rabbis in Germany. And more recent times, in eighteenth century, the Gerrer Rebbe family, my mother is related to that family. So, she grew up in an Orthodox home. My father's family, most likely, comes somewhere back in history from Germany. But we don't know very much about his family. We haven't traced it. He comes from Poland.

ZD:Where was your mother born?

AB:My mother was born in Warsaw.

ZD:Okay. And do you know anything about her parents?

AB:Yes. Her father was a deeply Orthodox man who dabbled a little bit in business, but he was not a successful businessman. He passed away. She thought he was a really old man, but he was only in his early forties. Her mother took in a lot of sewing at home and supported the family. And my mother left home at eighteen to start her own business so she could support the family with many children. The family had thirteen children.

ZD:Wow. What was her business?

AB:My mother's business? My mother was a maker of exquisite lingerie and corsets 3:00and bras, which is a long-lost art. Now it's done in factories. She did it all by hand. She did the design and the sewing. And she started the business when she was eighteen years old. She opened a shop with her girlfriend on one of the main streets in Warsaw. And her business became very successful. And for a young woman coming out of an Orthodox home, that was a very unorthodox way to live.

ZD:Do you know how that affected the family?

AB:How it affected -- well, it certainly helped with the finances. But a young woman leaving the Orthodox life was probably stressful. I don't know. Her father had passed away by then, so I think that caused less trauma than it otherwise 4:00might have. And then she left for Israel, when it was still Palestine.

ZD:What year was that?

AB:It was in the mid '30s. I don't know the exact year. And she came back from Palestine to Warsaw just before the outbreak of World War II, because her mother had gotten ill. So, she came back, probably early 1939, she came back from Palestine to Warsaw to care for her mother.

ZD:Wow. What about your dad? Was he also born in Warsaw?

AB:No. My father was born in what you would say in English as Lodz, but it's really Łódź. He was born in Łódź. If he were here, he would be the first to say he was actually -- his passport says Przedbórz, which is a small village 5:00in Poland, less than a hundred miles from Lodz. But he was actually born in Lodz. And I've always questioned him about that disparity, about what -- where he says he was born and what his passport says. And he told me that Jews, in those days, had a variety of strategies to record their birth in such a way as to minimize the chances of a male child going into the military. So, they recorded his birth at Przedbórz, where his family did come from. His parents were born there. By the time he was born, they had moved on to the big city. And the ironic twist in this is that my father wanted to go into the military. (laughs) So, that's a whole story of its own.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:So, can you tell me a little bit more about what life was like for your parents before the war?

AB:Yes. My parents lived lives that were very socially engaged. My father was a Bundist. He joined a Jewish Labor Bund because he went to a Jewish Labor Bund sponsored school. And so, he was very much steeped in the philosophy of the Bund. And he participated in political rallies, and that got him into trouble, because he ended up in prison.

ZD:Could you just briefly explain what the Bund is?

AB:The Bund is -- the Jewish Labor Bund is a socialist party that fought for worker's rights. That's just giving -- very short summary.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:And what about your mother? What did she do?

AB:My mother -- gee, my mother's much harder to explain. (laughs) She was a very 7:00complicated person. But she was very open-minded. She read a lot of psychology and philosophy and politics of all stripes. She was not a Zionist, however, even though her sisters were. But she went to Palestine to get a taste of life of building something --- building something larger than yourself. She was sometimes even attracted by anarchist philosophies. Everything that was very far away from the Orthodox teachings of her home.

ZD:Did your parents know each other before the war?

AB:No, they did not. They met during the war, under very unusual and stressful 8:00circumstances that I can talk about later on if we have a chance.

ZD:Yeah. You mentioned that your father was briefly imprisoned --

AB:Yes.

ZD:-- for his political affiliations. What exactly happened?

AB:What happened is that he attended a socialist rally that was sponsored by the Jewish Labor Bund, the Polish Socialist Party, and it was a time of great political turmoil. And the government was very repressive, very terrified of communist influences. And the rally was very -- how shall I say, fraught with risk for the participants, because the police stormed the rally and they tried 9:00to arrest the speakers. And my father left, started walking away to get away from the madness that was going on in the hall. And he was followed by two secret police agents. He wasn't aware of it. And they pushed him into one of the gates, and they planted on him a communist flyer, and they accused him of being a communist rabble-rouser. Now, the irony of it is that the Bund was a great opponent of communism. So, if you were a Bundist, it was just an impossibility to be a communist. And he tried to explain it to them, but they would have none of it. And they dragged him to the police station and threw him in a prison cell. And he was thrown in with the communists. And so, a very long period of 10:00incarceration for him ensued. He was twenty, and I think he was in prison for about seven months. And there was a big trial. And he was defended by two very famous Bundist attorneys, Ehrlich and Alter.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:Do you know anything about them and their relation to your father?

AB:Well, they took his case on a pro bono basis, because they knew that anybody who was a Bundist couldn't be possibly accused of distributing pro-communist literature. So, they took his case.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:Do you know at all what prison was like?

AB:Yes, I do.

ZD:Yeah.

AB:I do for a number of reasons. I do because my father told me. I know because my father left narrated tapes of his experience. And I also know because I went 11:00to visit the prison in 2007, I believe, in Poland, which is now a museum. And the director took me around, and I learned some more about it. I'd written about it in my book, because it was a horrible experience for a young man. For anyone.

ZD:Could you tell me about it?

AB:Well, the prison cell was tiny. And it housed about two dozen men. There was no room to lie down. There was no room to stretch out. There was no air to breathe. They were beaten regularly. There were gallows right outside the window if they weren't satisfied with the interviews. People were hung. It was a brutal, brutal prison.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:Do you know if the prison experience was any different because he was Jewish?

AB:I don't think so. Well, I don't know it for a fact, but the interesting thing 12:00about my father is that he was born an optimist and remained an optimist until the last day of his life. So, when he talked about the prison, he was more likely to talk about his cellmates who were communists and the way he respected their right to differ in their opinion, and talked about them as people. And some were Polish communists, and they taught him their songs. And they actually -- he related to them, not politically, but as human beings. And he was more likely to talk about that than about the beatings. I always wanted to know about how he was brutalized in prison, 'cause I wanted to understand it better. But he wouldn't talk about that very much.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:Could you describe the physical appearance of your parents?

AB:The physical appearance, yes. Well, they were European Jews, so they were 13:00short. (laughs) My family is short. Nobody was more than five-three, let's say. Their physical appearance was very different. My father was blonde and blue-eyed. He could have easily passed as a Pole, which probably helped his relations with Polish people, because they didn't immediately assume that he was Jewish. My mother had what people say -- the classic Jewish look. She was more olive-skinned, dark hair, dark eyes, different. Very different.

ZD:Did they have anything that particularly stood out?

AB:As far as what?

ZD:Any kind of physical marker that you see and you're like, Oh, that's just like my dad, that's just like my mom?

AB:Physical markers. Well, my father had piercing blue eyes, okay? (laughs)

ZD:That's good. I meant defining features, the blonde and blue eyes.

AB:Blonde and blue-eyed.

ZD:Okay, so that's your family. How 'bout you? Where were you born, and when?

AB:I was born in Kyrgyzstan, in the former Soviet Union, now an independent Muslim country. Just one country away north of Afghanistan. Very remote area. I was born in 1943.

ZD:Can you describe the circumstances of your birth, how you ended up being born in Kyrgyzstan?

AB:Yes. Both my parents were refugees, wartime refugees from Poland. Each of 15:00them was the only member of their family who undertook to escape Poland when war broke out on September 1st, 1939. The rest of their families thought it was insane to try and escape across the river, Bug, which was the border, because the Nazis had occupied one bank of the river, and the Soviets were on the opposite bank, shooting at each other. So, trying to steal across the river in a little boat was considered to be suicidal. But each of them, in their own way, had reasoned that it was not a good idea to stay. And they each begged their 16:00family members to join them, but they wouldn't. So, they each made their way across the river. It's a whole complicated story about how they actually made it across. But they did. They made it across into the Soviet Union.

ZD:Could you tell that story?

AB:I could tell the story, (laughs) but it'll take a long time. Well, I'll tell you my father's story, 'cause I know it in more detail. I know my mother's story was similar, but I don't have as much detail about it. My father, at first, tried to meet up with his friends, his school friends, who decided to undertake this escape. And they found some farmers who lived in the area of the river, who promised they would take them across. They took most of the -- they didn't have a lot of money, but whatever money they had, they paid most of the money they 17:00had for the passage. The passage was supposed to be done at night. And they boarded this little boat, and they got about halfway across the river, where it was intense shooting. And they saw there were other little boats trying to get across. People were getting killed, and the man who was going to -- the farmer who was going to take them across changed his mind and went back to the Polish side, which was now occupied by the Nazis. And decided he wasn't going to go through with it, and he didn't give them their money back. They decided at that point that the three of them crossing together would be riskier than each of them trying to do it alone. So, my father made his way further up north on the 18:00river and found another farmer willing to do it. And he put him in a cart and horse to ferry him towards the river, when they were attacked by Polish thugs who took away -- my father had a satchel with some provisions. They took that away and they took the remaining money. And the only thing my father had left to pay for his passage was a watch. So, he gave the farmer the watch, and he took him across. When he came across, it was the -- pitch dark night. And he had to follow -- there was some train tracks when he disembarked the boat. And he 19:00followed them and went through a deep forest at night. It was frightening, it was a very disconcerting experience for somebody so young. He had nothing. He didn't have even a bag of clothes with him. And he finally made it into the town of Siemiatycze. And the most shocking thing to him was that when he approached the town, he heard singing. And the singing was in Yiddish. And he felt as though, Where am I? What has happened here? And it turned out that the town of Siemiatycze at that time had a huge number of refugees like him. And things were quiet there. There were a lot of young people. They were singing, they were in a very fine mood, which was such a shock after coming from the Polish side that was occupied by the Nazis. It's a very strange experience, and dangerous. But he 20:00made it.

ZD:And this village was in the Soviet Union?

AB:Yes.

ZD:And how old was he at the time that he made the journey?

AB:Let's see, he was twenty-nine.

ZD:So, at this point, your father's in Siemiatycze.

AB:Yes.

ZD:We still haven't got to Kyrgyzstan.

AB:We haven't, and it's a very long -- I guess, if anybody wants to know his peregrinations between that and Kyrgyzstan, you'll have to read my book, 'cause it's -- that's why I wrote the book. It was very complicated. But he wandered around different parts of the Soviet Union, trying to get to Vilna, because word on the street was that if you were a Bundist, you might be able to get an exit 21:00visa abroad to Brazil or to Argentina, or to somewhere away from the war. But the borders closed and he never made it across. In any event, he was gathered up along with all the people that had crossed from Poland by the Russian police. And they did something that, in retrospect, seems so typically Russian. They asked these people whether they wanted to maintain their Polish citizenship or whether they wanted to accept Soviet citizenship. Now, the great majority of the people didn't want Soviet citizenship. Certainly, my father didn't want it. He was not a communist. And they didn't know how long the war would last. They thought, Well, maybe a few months, a short time, we'll go back home. So, of course they said no. Most people said no. My mother was one of those people who 22:00said no. She had a similar path. And the Soviet authorities said, "Okay, you can go." They released them. That same night, they came back with dogs and police, 'cause now they had their address where they were staying, and they arrested them. They arrested them and they sent them to gulags. My father was sent to a gulag way north of Moscow and my mother was sent to a gulag in Siberia. To extremely harsh conditions, yeah.

ZD:And then, how did they meet in Kyrgyzstan?

AB:And at some point during the war, the date escapes me at the moment, but 23:00Stalin made an agreement with the Polish government in exile, which was based in London at the time, to release the Polish prisoners, because I think there was the expectation that they would join the Soviet army to fight the Nazis. So, they released them from gulags. And since the gulag conditions were so horrible, mostly -- not mostly, but one of the features of their imprisonment was that they were in very, very cold climates. They were frozen. They had no clothes, they had no shoes. And all these people, all they wanted to do is to warm up. And they wanted to go as far south, where it was warm, as possible. Well, of course, on the west, the war was still raging. And so, there was really not many 24:00options. But they wanted to go south. And a very, very long, arduous, painful trek -- they made their way as far as Kyrgyzstan, where they were at the foothills of the Himalayas. They couldn't cross the mountains, so that's where they stopped. That was a last stop on their trek towards warmth, and that's where they met.

ZD:Wow. So, you were born in Kyrgyzstan in 1943.

AB:Yes.

ZD:How long were you there for?

AB:I was there for three years. When I was three and when it was safe -- it was thought to be safe to go back to Poland. All my parents wanted to do, both of them -- they wanted to go back home to find their families. And because they were so remote in Kyrgyzstan, a remote village, they had very little news about 25:00what went on in Poland, the concentration camps. There were rumors, but people didn't want to believe it, 'cause the rumors were so shocking. And people said, Oh, that's just stories that people tell. So, at that point, my parents embarked on a journey back to Poland. My mother was pregnant at the time with my brother. There were no regular passenger trains. We traveled by cattle train, sleeping on the floor of the cattle train for weeks, weeks on end, because the train didn't just go a straight route. It would go, it would stop, it would wait. You didn't know when it was going to move next. And surprisingly, maybe, I still remember that journey. I was three. It must have been such a shocking thing for a three-year-old that I remember it. I remember my father jumping off from the 26:00cattle car with a pot to gather the water dripping off the locomotive, the hot water dripping off so my mother could wash me. And the first stop back in Poland, where the gauge of the train track changes -- that's why a train has to stop -- was Auschwitz. That was the first stop. And they heard the guards. They heard it when they were still on the car saying, Who are these people in these trains? Oh, these are Jews coming back. Oh, I thought Hitler finished them all. So, that was their welcome back to Poland.

ZD:Wow. I'm going to ask you a little bit about Poland, but before I do, I want to get a little bit of a sense of what home life was like for you.

AB:Where?

ZD:So, how long were you in Poland for?

AB:Ten years.

ZD:Ten years.

AB:Ten years. I was thirteen when we left.

ZD:And then you left to go to --

AB:Israel.

ZD:Israel. And you were there until --

AB:We were there for two years.

ZD:Would you say you grew up in a Jewish home?

AB:Yes.

ZD:And what about your house felt Jewish?

AB:The discourse.

ZD:What do you mean by that?

AB:Well, first of all, literature and music were very important to both of my parents. So, that was always a part of our lives, and talking about fairness and justice and, when they could, in whispered tone, politics. We had a maid, a 28:00Polish maid that lived with us. A lovely woman. But my parents wouldn't speak Yiddish around her, because they didn't want her to feel badly, not understanding, thinking maybe they were saying something negative about her. And since she lived in our home and our home was tiny -- we had a two-room apartment, and the five of us were living in it. So, it was very difficult. When she had a day off, my parents would speak at home in Yiddish and speak more freely, but in whispers, because this was communist Poland. You never knew who would report on you, your neighbors -- who was listening in.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:What would Yiddish do? What would happen if someone reported someone speaking Yiddish?

AB:I can't tell you exactly what would happen, except it wouldn't be good. (laughs)

ZD:Right.

AB:You didn't want to come to the attention of Polish authorities for any 29:00reason. You didn't want to stand out. And my mother stood out already enough to cause trouble. Why? Because I told you she was a maker of corsets and bras. She was one of the few -- I mean, literally a small handful of private businesses. She ran her own shop. And private enterprise in a communist country was not welcome.

ZD:Right.

AB:So, she was already a mark for the tax authorities, who harassed her regularly.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:Was there anything you did together as a family?

AB:Yes. We vacationed.

ZD:Where would you go?

AB:Zakopane, the mountains, the resorts. Krynica, yes.

[BREAK IN RECORDING?]

ZD:What about religious observances?

AB:No, my parents were not religious. Both my parents were atheists, but very Jewish culturally.

ZD:Can you explain what that means?

AB:What it means to be Jewish culturally? Yes. It's to have Jewish values. It's to be concerned about people. It's to be honest, to be fair, to be open to the world. Those were the things that my parents cared about and taught us to care about. But also, one of the, I think, very Jewish things that my parents, that 31:00my father in particular -- which, I don't know if I understood it that way at the time, but thinking back on it, I do -- we made almost weekly trips to the Jewish cemetery. And we went primarily to attend to the graves of his parents, who he always said had the wisdom to die before the Holocaust. And we would take care of their graves. So, we were little kids. We would sweep the pinecones off and we would bring flowers. But then, we would walk around the cemetery, and he would read all the Jewish names. He would point out symbols on the gravestones. There was a big memorial to fallen Bund heroes, and the letters Bund were -- the memorial was made of the letters Bund, in Yiddish, and he would teach us all the letters and -- yeah.

ZD:So, you said that, a lot of the time, Polish was spoken and Yiddish was only spoken in whispers. Were there any other languages spoken in the house, would --

AB:No. Primarily Polish and Yiddish, and my parents both learned Russian when they lived in the Soviet Union. They were both very quick to absorb languages, so -- but we didn't speak Russian, although Russian was probably -- some of my first words were in Russian.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:Now, can you describe the neighborhood you grew up in in Lodz?

AB:Yes. We lived on Ulica Piotrkowska, which was the main street in Lodz. It was the Fifth Avenue of the city. But it was grim. Interestingly, after the Germans 33:00bombed Warsaw to a pulp, they did not destroy Lodz at all, because they made their headquarters in Lodz. They renamed Lodz "Litzmannstadt," and it was their headquarters. So, it was not bombed out at all. The buildings were old, kind of baroque buildings. Grey. I have to say that Lodz had a nickname of the Polish Manchester, because it had a huge -- industrial-based manufacturing and textiles. So, there -- (clears throat) excuse me. I'll get a sip of water. And there were many chimneys in the sky in Lodz, but they spewed a lot of coal ash, 34:00I guess, and the buildings were grey. And the city always looked grey to me. We lived in a courtyard, in a closed courtyard. It's kind of not typical of buildings in New York, so it's hard to describe it. But our windows faced an inner courtyard, which was grey. We were possibly the only Jewish family in that building. My brother and I, we were young kids. We were always afraid of the anti-Semitic bullies who would hurl epithets at us, and we were always afraid to go out to the courtyard when they were around. It was a grim city, even though it was considered a good address.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:You mentioned anti-Semitism. Well, anti-Semitic bullies. Can you just describe what Lodz was like post-Holocaust when --

AB:In terms of what? If you could be more specific, I'll try to answer as best I can.

ZD:The attitudes of people in general.

AB:The attitudes. Well, I think the attitudes of the majority of the people were, We thought you were all gone, and here you are again. They were not happy to see us. There were exceptions, of course. For example, the woman that worked for us was just a marvelous human being. Trusted her like a family member. But to give you an example of the attitudes, which probably best exemplifies -- my father was an outstanding administrator, and biggest or probably one of the biggest businesses in Lodz, which was called Centralna Tekstylna, it was Textile 36:00Central. Had hundreds of employees. And my father was up for promotion, and his boss came in and told him how well he had done and how the production was up, and all the numbers were great. And therefore, he was up for promotion, except for one small thing. He would have to change his name. Why? "Because we can't have such an obviously Jewish-sounding name on your name plate in front of your office. Libeskind. That would be too embarrassing for the company." Well, of course, my father turned them down and turned down the promotion. But that really says a lot. Also, something that sticks out in my memory that always provoked enormous anxiety and fear: around Christmas -- no, it was at Christmas. 37:00I don't know if it was on Christmas Day or few days before. I can't remember that. There was a tradition, I don't know if it's still there, where people made these small -- I don't know, I'm going to call them dioramas of Jesus being born and the stable and the whole little -- crèche. That's what it is. It's a creche, a diorama. And they would carry it from door to door. They would bang on the door. If you were Polish, I assume you opened the door and they sang carols, and you gave them some money. And they would come to our door and bang and call epithets and, Stinking Jews, open or else we'll break down the door. And -- was a regular event around Christmas. So, to this day, Christmas evokes great anxiety in me.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:This is going to be, perhaps, something you've already answered, but can you remember the first time you felt particularly positive about being Jewish?

AB:Positive meaning that I knew I was Jewish? Is that what you mean? I don't -- or feeling good about it? I don't know?

ZD:Yeah, feeling --

AB:Yes, I do, actually. I was probably five at the time, and when we used to walk on the street, my mother and I, there were various neighbors or acquaintances or just people that my mother would, for one reason or another, stop to chat with. And people would pat my head or point to me and say, Oh, your daughter is so pretty. She doesn't look Jewish at all. And so, not looking Jewish was considered to be a big compliment, and they would always say, And she doesn't look anything like you, to my mother --

ZD:Yeah.

AB:-- which meant that they singled out my mother for being Jewish and not attractive. And I was so close to my mother, and I was so pained by that, even at five, that I always affiliated with her side, so to speak. So, maybe that answers your question.

ZD:It does. So, you said after Lodz, you went to Israel.

AB:Yes.

ZD:How old were you then?

AB:Thirteen.

ZD:Thirteen. And what was the motivation behind that move?

AB:Well, (laughs) the motivation was to leave communist Poland. All those ten years that we lived in Poland, my parents wanted to leave. Who would want to 40:00live in communist Poland? Both my parents were so adamantly, politically anti-communist that it was just something they couldn't tolerate. But the Polish government at the time made it a very kind of regular harassment policy to periodically allow Jews to apply for exit visas. They would wait -- after you sold your apartment or rented your apartment, gave up your job, sold your business, whatever, packed yourself up, get ready to leave, then they revoked the visa and you had to start all over again. That happened to my parents five times. So, in 1957, when there was a slight political thaw and they were able to 41:00apply for the visas, they got out of there as fast as humanly possible before the visa -- they were worried that the visa would be revoked. And, of course, another motivation on my mother's part was that she had two sisters and a half-brother who emigrated prior to World War II. They were Zionists. They went to settle Palestine, and they were living in Israel. And I forgot to mention the most important fact: when my parents came back to Poland, they found no one. Everyone they left behind was killed. So, rejoining the remaining fragment of my mother's family was a very big motivation on her part. My father's motivation? He wanted to go to a place where he could speak Yiddish freely.

ZD:When you first moved to Israel, where did you go?

AB:When we first arrived, it was actually on the day of arrival, we were put on a bus and taken to -- I want to say, a refugee colony, which was in an area that was -- looked like nothing but desert. It was the government's attempt to settle the refugees. There were huge numbers of refugees coming into Israel at the time. But the conditions, the living conditions were abysmal. And my mother's sister, who was a founder of one of the kibbutzim in Israel, Kibbutz Gvat, she and her family were waiting for us. And they followed the bus. They took us to 43:00this remote place, and she took one look at it and she just knew my mother couldn't live there. It was a barrack. It was a barren barrack in the middle of nowhere. And the irony of leaving Poland and coming to Israel was that because my mother owned a private business, we lived under better economic conditions than many people. Now, we had a very small apartment, as I said. Only two rooms and a kitchen. But we were able to go on vacations, and we didn't lack for anything except the things that were not available to anyone, like oranges, for example. I never had an orange until I came to Israel, or a banana or -- those things were just not available in Poland. But our lives, economically speaking, 44:00in Poland, were fine. It was all the rest of it. It was emotionally difficult to live there. So, when my aunt, my mother's sister, saw the conditions that they would put us in, she said, "No, you've got to come with us. Come to the kibbutz." And they piled us into their car. Was not their own car. They didn't own anything. They were kibbutzniks, but there was the kibbutz car, and they took us up north to Kibbutz Gvat, which is in Emek Yisrael. And my mother had been a businesswoman and someone who worked for herself her entire life. And she just could not see herself living in a kibbutz. It reminded her too much of the Soviet Union. (laughs) My father was ready to stay in a kibbutz. He had a completely different persona.

ZD:Right.

AB:As a socialist, he was all ready to live there. But my mother said no, so my brother and I were left in the kibbutz with my aunt. And my parents went to Tel Aviv to try and find an apartment and make a life.

ZD:And how did that work out?

AB:Well, in some ways, it worked out well. In other ways, it worked out very, very poorly. Why? My mother set up her corset business at her home. She couldn't afford to rent a shop. My father, on the other hand, had terrible disappointment in Israel. First of all, Yiddish was not welcome. When he spoke Yiddish, there was a chorus from every corner saying, You must speak Hebrew. Let go of this 46:00language. My father was horrified. It was his mother tongue. He expected, in Israel, that he would be able to speak it freely, and to have it relegated to the dustbin was just horrifying to him. Plus, he was now over forty. And at that time, in 1957, '58, Israel was a young country. Was just ten years old. You had to be young to build Israel. If you were forty, you were way over the hill. He couldn't get a job. He couldn't get a job, even with so-called connections. Moshe Dayan's wife was my mother's client, and Shimon Peres's mother was my mother's client. So, they theoretically had access to connections. Couldn't get my father a job. He was over forty. He was told he was too old, time and again. 47:00So, being too old and not being able to speak Yiddish, that didn't sit right with him. And he discovered that one of his sisters was an Auschwitz survivor in Pennsylvania. And that became his goal, to go and find her and to leave Israel. My mother, on the other hand, had her sisters, and after ten years of having no family in Poland, she now had her sister, she had a half-brother, she had her business. She didn't want to leave.

ZD:So, what happened?

AB:My father left, after a lot of maneuvering on his sister's part, in Pennsylvania, to get him a visa, because there was a quota. You couldn't just buy a ticket and come over. People don't realize that. So, he was able to come, but he got only a visa for himself. The US government would not issue a visa for 48:00the whole family. So, when he left, we had no idea if or when we would see him again. It was very traumatic for us, 'cause we were very close to our father. I, especially. It was very dramatic when he left. And I was so torn, because I loved Israel and I wanted to live there forever. But I also wanted not to be deprived of my father.

ZD:So, how did you end up coming to the States?

AB:It took -- offhand, would say it took about, I don't know, nine or ten months. And my father did manage to get an entrance visa for me, my brother, and my mom. And we came.

ZD:And you were how old when you arrived in the States?

AB:It was a week before my sweet sixteen birthday.

ZD:And then, English would have been the fourth language you learned?

AB:Well, I didn't know any English when I came.

ZD:Right.

AB:And that was tricky, because -- well, I didn't know any Hebrew when I came to Israel, either. But it's a sink or swim situation. I learned it quickly, and I was completely fluent when I left Israel. And then, the idea of being sixteen and having all the teen angst and having to get used to another country and another language and another school, that wasn't any fun. And (laughs) I arrived just -- as I said, was a week before my sixteenth birthday. It was late August. It was time to register for school. And oddly enough, I know this is going to sound like one of the oddest stories, you ever heard -- I don't know if you've ever heard of the Bronx High School of Science in New York, but it's a school which you can be admitted to only after taking a special entrance exam.

ZD:Okay.

AB:And I'm told by the principal there that I'm the only student in their history ever to have gotten in without an entrance exam. That's a whole other story. I wrote a whole book about that. (laughter)

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:How would you compare, having lived here since your sixteenth, how would you compare Jewish life here to what you experienced beforehand in Israel?

AB:It's a tough question. It's very different. When we came to Israel -- it's kind of trying to explain the mindset of a thirteen-year-old. When we were growing up in Poland, especially in my school, where there was just a handful of Jewish children -- and in our building, big building where we were the only Jewish family. Then, when we came to Israel, we're saying, Everybody here is 51:00Jewish! It was so shocking to us. My brother and I walked down the street and said, Look, all these people are Jewish! Look, the policeman is Jewish! The mailman is Jewish! Isn't that amazing? We were sort of in an alternate universe. And then coming back here, of course, things were different. So, we were introduced to the kibbutz life early on when we first came, as I told you. From the first day, we were in the kibbutz. And so, there was a tremendous camaraderie among the residents, and the young people, especially, there was -- every Friday, everybody would shower, put on the white shirt, and there was a 52:00big Shabbat meal, and a kumzits [evening gathering] and sitting, singing, stories, and a big bonfire. It was very moving for an impressionable thirteen-year-old. So, I was pulled right in. And, of course, participating in Israel's tenth anniversary, where everybody was out in the streets all night, dancing, was such a meaningful experience for me, and very important, very formative. Formed a really, really strong bond to the country, and participating in all the holidays fully for the first time, 'cause we couldn't do that in Poland. But in America, that all kind of fell away.

ZD:Has it fallen away up until this day, or --

AB:No. No, it hasn't in the sense that, of course, we celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Pesach. And my grandson, who lives in Italy, just had his bar mitzvah education via Skype with a rabbi from Florida, and came to have his bar mitzvah in New York last summer. So, we follow the traditions, and they're meaningful. But it's just not the same, because we're not affiliated with a synagogue. As I said, we are very Jewish culturally, but not religiously. So, without having that kind of institutional affiliation, it's harder to participate in a larger kind of sense.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:Do you have a sense of what immigrant life was like for your parents, for example?

AB:Yeah, I do. It was very difficult. When my father first arrived, before he brought the rest of the family, he had gotten a series of really menial jobs making very little money. And he thought that we could make it as a family on the meager income that he was making. He worked in a belt factory for a time. Eventually, through a series of friends -- actually, his old school friends from Poland who are living in New York. That's actually an interesting story. When my father first came here, he, of course, had no money to stay in a hotel. But his friends from the Medem School in Lodz were in New York. These were people that had gone with him from first grade to the sixth, to the seventh grade. And some 55:00of them were here, and they all took him in. And he didn't want to impose on anyone excessively, so he would stay a week with this one and a week with that one, and then he would -- they would rotate him around. They were all thrilled to have him, but he didn't have his own place. And they were all trying to find him a job. So, he had a succession of factory jobs. But eventually, one of his friends who worked for a printer got him a job in a print shop in Lower Manhattan. The print shop was owned by a rabbi who printed a lot of Yiddish literature for yeshivas, for Yiddish publications of all sorts. And he needed someone who knew Yiddish. So, they did a process in printing called photo offset stripping. And if you knew the Yiddish characters, you could do this job a whole 56:00lot better. So, my father got a job there. And the job paid very little, but the fact that he could deal with Yiddish and Yiddish letters and that the boss spoke Yiddish, to my father, that was wonderful. His initial experience with the job -- he had to ferry little truckloads of paper through the streets of Lower Manhattan. It was very difficult, and my father had been -- not a blue-collar worker in Poland. He managed an office of three hundred employees himself. So, doing this kind of physical work had a lot of immigrants extremely depressed and upset. My father was thrilled. He was in New York. He was free. He didn't care. He would do any job. And he made very little money, and he naively thought that a whole family could survive on this. So, in a while, when we came over, it was 57:00clear that -- couldn't make it on his salary. So, my mother had to go to work. And there was absolutely no -- we lived in the Bronx in a sublet apartment, and there was no way she could open a shop like she had in Poland and in Israel. So, she ended up working in a hideous job, in a fur factory, where she sewed fur collars. And she came home covered in fur and dyes from the furs, and it was just -- the work was so horrible. It was dirty, it was hot. She led a revolt in one of the sweatshops she worked in, because the conditions were just inhumane.

ZD:Can you tell a little bit more about that?

AB:Well, yeah, she worked in a fur business shop where the majority, probably all the employees that sewed the furs were Greek and Hispanic. And they really, 58:00really welcomed her, because they all thought she was Greek by her appearance. She was dark-haired, olive-skinned. They all started speaking Greek to her (laughs) until they realized she didn't understand. And they had no bathroom for the women to wash. It was very dirty work. They had fur all over, and ink all over. They had dyes all over their hands. And there was no women's restroom, and my mother demanded that -- there was a storage room she asked the boss to make into a women's bathroom. And he was rude. He pooh-poohed her. He told her she would be fired. But she organized the work stoppage. And all the workers, they took off their aprons one day, and the boss was completely incredulous. He didn't believe that she would do this. And he did eventually install a bathroom with a sink where they could wash their hands. I mean, it wasn't an outlandish demand.

ZD:Right.

AB:But that was my mother's personality. She had a very hard life. They worked in Lower Manhattan. We lived in the Bronx. They had long work hours, traveled by subway. And then when they would come home, they went to Clinton High School for English classes. So, they were very intent on learning the language. I know many immigrants continued to kind of survive using monosyllabic English, but my mother, strangely enough, had the dream of writing. She always wanted to be a writer, and she wanted to write in English. She didn't want to write in Polish, not in Hebrew. She wanted to write in English. So, she studied English voraciously, but at night. And then, early, at work -- she'd have to be on a subway going to the sweatshop. So, their lives were hard. Lives were very hard.

ZD:Do you remember their attitudes about becoming an American?

AB:Yes, I do. My mother was not happy to be here. She had left behind her sisters and her business and the life of Tel Aviv. That was very, very hard on her. My father couldn't be happier. He wanted to become an American. There was nothing wrong America could do except discrimination with black people, what you call now African-Americans. He had a good African-American friend who worked the same print shop he did, and he told him stories of his families back South, and that was the one thing that pained my father about America. Other than that, America could do no wrong.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:And when you moved, did you start hearing Yiddish more often?

AB:Oh, yes. When we came to the States, my parents spoke Yiddish at home all the time. All the time. Exclusively, almost.

ZD:And what about you? Did you speak Yiddish?

AB:Well, I really wish that I had had the opportunity to study Yiddish. But, as I said, I arrived my sophomore year in high school and I had to learn English. So, there was no time to be learning Yiddish. But I understood everything they were saying. So, they would speak to me in Yiddish and I would reply in Polish. So, to this day, I understand Yiddish completely, but I really can't speak it. If I had to, if I had to survive, I would speak it. But I would speak it badly, 62:00and butcher the language. But I love the sound of Yiddish, because it's the sound of my parents. (laughs)

ZD:What about your father's political affiliations? Did those continue after the war and in Israel?

AB:Okay, good question. Actually, the Jewish Labor Bund in Poland was disbanded, and the remnants that were reconstituted in US, my father was -- and at that point, his goal was to survive. He worked very long hours. He went to English 63:00classes, and he was a member of -- both my parents were members of the Arbeter Ring. But he did not engage politically anymore when he came here.

ZD:Okay. Well, we're going to close up on your childhood and your parents. But looking back, what values or practices do you think your parents were trying to pass on to you?

AB:What values? Well, I think, to sum up, everything that you would consider Jewish values.

ZD:Okay. So, we've just been talking about the early part of your life. Let's 64:00fast forward. Can you give me a snapshot of your life today and how you got here?

AB:My life today? Well, today, I'm retired from my professional career at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. And today, I guess I consider myself an author. I've written three full book manuscripts since I retired. One book was published. And I'm working on a novel.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:What drew you to wildlife conservation?

AB:What drew me to wildlife conservation -- it's an interesting question 65:00because, initially, it was a bit of a happenstance, as a lot of careers happen. But later on, it became much more of a conscious choice. How I got my job at the Bronx Zoo Wildlife Conservation Society's headquarters -- headquartered at the Bronx Zoo in New York. And my first job out of college, actually, was working at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Institute doing cancer research. And I worked in a sterile lab, irradiated room. And it was a very lonely kind of work, and I'm more of a people person. So, I didn't like that job very much. And then, when my children were born, we were living in the Bronx, and I really wanted to get back into the world of work. But I didn't want to work far away from home, because my kids were still very young and I wanted to be near enough should 66:00there be a problem or an emergency. So, I sent out my resumes in response to -- there was a campaign, there was an ad campaign in the subways. I got my job through the "New York Times." And I read those while I was commuting by subway back and forth when I was still working in Manhattan. And I thought, Well, let me see if I can get a job through the "New York Times." So, I saw an advertisement for a job in a Bronx cultural institution. It didn't say which institution, it didn't really say what the job was about, but it involved working with volunteers. And so, the words volunteers and cultural institution really resonated with me, and it was in the Bronx. So, I thought, okay, and I sent my resume out along with a bunch of others. And not too much later, I got a call from the Bronx Zoo. And I said, "The Bronx Zoo? Why are you calling me?" 67:00And they said, We have your resume. And I was very puzzled. So, they read the ad and I said, "Oh, yeah, that one, okay." I came in for the interview, and I ended up getting the job. So, I was very pleased. It was -- very respected cultural institution and a scientific institution, and I'm a scientist by training and by inclination. So, that was very pleasing for me. Eventually, a series of career moves and changes, I went from being an instructor, a zoology instructor -- so, when I retired, I was a senior vice president. But over time, the work became extremely meaningful to me in terms of saving life, really. And given the history of my family -- now, true, it wasn't human life, but wildlife being such an integral part of the world --

ZD:Right.

AB:-- and of ecology, and it was a very life-affirming kind of job. You would come in and there would be a baby gorilla born, or a sea lion born, and it was all about life. It was very life-affirming, which was very opposite direction of what we had lived in Poland. Those weekly trips to the cemetery, dad would talk about the Holocaust, 'cause my father, especially, is one of those people that talked about it all the time. I know some families, the subject was not broached to children, but I knew about the Holocaust from the time I could speak. So, my life before was so steeped in death, and the zoo was so life-affirming. And working toward preservation of it was very meaningful to me.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:So, how long were you involved with wildlife conservation, then?

AB:Thirty-four years. Another aspect -- I said the other points about why I found the job very meaningful, but also there came a point in my career where I had enough freedom to bring the awareness of the importance of wildlife and wild habitats and wild environments to people elsewhere in the world. So, it began a very wide-ranging program. First, it was nationwide in the United States, and then the program went as far as China, Papua, New Guinea, and Cuba. And I was able to negotiate the first ever agreement with the Chinese minister of education to bring environmental education to Chinese schools.

ZD:Wow.

AB:And that was very meaningful to me, because environment in China was disappearing at such an alarming rate, that you make even a tiny dent in it -- meant a lot to me.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:So, you mentioned that you wrote a book about your father, whose stories you know from first-hand accounts and also from recordings that he left.

AB:Yes.

ZD:Can you describe finding those recordings?

AB:Yes. My father and I were very close. After my mother died, we became more than a father and daughter. We became really good friends. He knew a lot about my job. He gave me some of the best advice I had ever gotten about my work relationships, and I did whatever I could to nurture his career. He became an artist late in life, after my mother passed away. So, we had a lot of good 71:00conversations about everything. And so, I felt I knew a great deal about him. I knew him as a person, not just as a parent. And he was ninety-two years old when he passed away, and a lot of people say, Well, he lived a long life. Well, yes, he did. But that didn't console me. I was devastated, heartbroken. And for three to four years, I couldn't tackle his closet. He had moved in with us when he was ninety. We had wanted him to move in with us after my mother passed away, and he refused. He said he wanted to keep his apartment in the Bronx. He called it his headquarters. He wanted to maintain his headquarters. In the winters, he used to go to Florida. But when he was ninety, he finally agreed to move in with us. So, we bought a bigger house so that he could have his painting studio and his music 72:00space, 'cause he played music. And when he passed away, I just couldn't tackle his closet. It was just too painful. I finally heard him in my mind saying, "It's a shande [shame]. You've got to donate all my clothes and all my things." So, I tackled his closet, which didn't have much. He was -- very modest man. He didn't buy a lot of clothes. And so, I was almost done with the job, and way at the back of the closet, there was a shoebox. And I open it, and I thought there was a pair of old shoes in it. And it had tapes, neatly labeled with his perfect hand. A full box of tapes. And I was stunned, because -- the reason I was stunned is that I didn't think he was recording them. Quite a few years before he passed away, my husband thought it would be a good idea to send him to Florida with a tape recorder to record his stories. And he tried to teach him 73:00how to use the tape recorder. We bought a small one so it'd be very portable, but the buttons were very small and he got aggravated, he didn't know what to push. And he said, "Oh, this is so annoying. I've told you everything already. What else is there to tell?" So, we didn't know whether he took it. We didn't know whether he was recording anything. And when I found those tapes, it just took my breath away, 'cause I didn't think he was doing it. Then, I searched high and low to find the most reliable service to transfer them to CDs, because I thought the tapes were dried out, and I was so worried about losing anything that was on them. And I sent them out to this company that did the job, and I got a call from their technician. And I was so upset, I thought, Oh, something happened to -- they broke the tape. And the young technician said, "Oh, I have 74:00to call you because I had the most delightful experience listening to your father sing." And it just stunned me, because he was singing Yiddish songs into the tape. He knew hundreds. He didn't sing them all into the tapes, but he sang a lot to the tapes, and I just couldn't wait to turn it on, to listen to it. And felt like he was right there at the other end of the phone, telling me the stories all over again. And he recorded them twice, and both versions are slightly different. One's in Yiddish. There's a complete set of tapes in Yiddish, and one's in English, 'cause he said, "If my grandchildren don't know Yiddish, I still want them to know the story." So, when I found the tapes, I felt like it was my marching orders to write that up into a book.

ZD:Yeah. And then, after that, did you do more research, when you were writing the book?

AB:Oh, yes, I did a lot of research, yes, because I wanted to provide the readers with the historical background. Of course, when he was speaking the tapes, he assumed knowledge of the historical context. But I felt I had to provide that as a backdrop. And interestingly, my editor -- I had some Yiddish words in it, because it's the way my father spoke. I couldn't avoid putting some Yiddish in my manuscript, in my earlier drafts. But when my editor looked at -- he said -- and he wasn't Jewish, and I found that very surprising. He said, "You've got to put more Yiddish. You've got to get across more of your father by putting more Yiddish." So, I did use as many Yiddish phrases as I could in the book. And that got me into a lot of trouble at the end. I didn't realize that there would be so much controversy about transliteration. (laughs) And at some point, my editor at the press said, "Do you want to take the Yiddish out?" And I said, "Oh, no." (laughs)

ZD:What was the controversy?

AB:Well, I think there are different Yiddish speakers that are in favor of certain transliterations and not others. And I sort of don't know the whole transliteration universe, so I was kind of caught in between a rock and a hard place. And I used one set of transliterations and somebody looked at them and said, "Oh, that's wrong. You can't do it this way." It was quite a to-do about the Yiddish that I included, but I'm glad I did.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:Were there any difficulties in making your father the subject of the book?

AB:No. I included myself, as well, but only to contrast the generational understanding of that whole period that I cover in the book. So, my father and I made a number of trips together, trips back to Poland. And his observations and his attitudes were different than mine. And I wanted to kind of show that.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:As we've covered, you've learned four languages in your life, and at some point have spoken them all fluently. How, if at all, has language influenced your sense of identity?

AB:That's a fascinating question. I will answer that question by actually 78:00sharing with you a question that my son asked of me a couple of years ago when he was reading the drafts of my book. He said, "Mom, you have lived in all these countries and you've spoken all these languages." It was kind of a similar question. "Do you feel fully American?" is what he asked me. And I reflected on it and I said, "I'm not sure." And he became very upset. He said, "Mom, you're an American! You have American children, you have an American husband. You live in America all these years, you're an American." And I said, "Well, in many ways, I am. But I have all of these other selves in me." So, it's hard to answer. And so, your question is pretty much the same.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:So, I'm going to move onto the third part of the interview, which is about 79:00transmission. How does your connection to Yiddish, Yiddishkayt, and Eastern European Jewish heritage fit into your broader sense of Jewish identity?

AB:Hm, that's a very big question. Well, I'll put it this way, that after the Holocaust, with the loss of so much family -- my children remind me of this very often. They say, Even though, mom, you grew up without having a lot of your Jewish family around you -- especially when we were in Poland. We had none.

ZD:Right.

AB:But in Israel, I had aunts and uncles and an extended family and that entire Jewish environment. So, my children say to me, You had this Jewish environment 80:00around you as you were growing up. You were able to absorb that sense of Jewishness and Yiddishkayt. And it's different for us, because we're not religious and we don't have our grandparents around. You grew up in a home after you were sixteen that was speaking Yiddish almost exclusively. We don't have that. So, how do you transmit that? And so that we end up following the traditions and the holidays a lot more assiduously than we did back when my parents were alive, in an effort to transmit the Jewishness to our children and grandchildren. My daughter discussed with me extensively about whether her son that's my only grandson, whether he should have a bar mitzvah. And I said, "I'll 81:00tell you what. Your grandfather will probably turn in his grave, because he was not a religious man, and he wouldn't be happy about Michael having a bar mitzvah. But I think you should have a bar mitzvah, not because I'm religious, but because it'll give him a sense of Jewishness, especially because he lives in Italy and he's not surrounded by a Jewish community." So, I was instrumental in finding a rabbi who was open-minded and wanted to take on a family like ours. And Michael studied Hebrew and studied the chanting and he read the Torah. And we didn't go to a synagogue, because we're not members of a synagogue. But we 82:00chose an Italian restaurant in Manhattan to have his bar mitzvah. And he wore his father's -- his grandfather's tallis, that -- the grandfather on the other side, not my father -- and we did it to transmit a sense of culture and identity. And when our children were young, they went to the Yiddish schools, the Arbeter Ring Yiddish schools. They went to Camp Hemshekh briefly. They didn't seem to be very well cut out for camp life, I think, my daughter especially. But they did go, and we did our best to get that across.

ZD:What is Camp Hemshekh?

AB:The word "hemshekh," as you know, in Yiddish means continuation. And the remnants of the Jewish Labor Bund in New York -- and not just New York, there were Canadian Jews there, as well -- organized a camp called Hemshekh, continuation. And they had a socialist Jewish camp in the Catskills. My brother went there. My brother was a counselor. It's where he met his wife. And my kids went there briefly.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:You mentioned the bar mitzvah. But what has been most important for you to transmit to the generations after you about Jewish identity?

AB:Our history. Transmitting our history is very important, and that's something, as I said, I learned very early on from my father. He was, in my social circle, one of the few parents who was very open about talking about Holocaust and what happened to his family, where peers I know -- parents never 84:00said a word. As a matter of fact, his sister, who was the only survivor from his large family, who survived Auschwitz, never told her daughters that she lost a husband and a child in Auschwitz. She remarried after the war. And a really dramatic circumstance, I organized my father's ninetieth birthday. It was very interesting that he actually wanted to have it in Israel, 'cause I gave him a choice of anywhere in the world. And even though he left Israel not feeling very happy, he wanted to have his ninetieth birthday in Israel, in the kibbutz. So, we had well over a hundred people, including some people who were in first grade with him. It was an amazing event. And it was attended by my cousins, the daughters of the sister who survived. And when I put together the program, I 85:00read various poetry and other things, pieces that showcased parts of his life. And I chose to read -- the worst moment of his life was when he found out that his whole family was wiped out, when he got a letter from his sister. And the sister in this letter described the death of her husband and her child. And my cousins were in the audience. I didn't know that they didn't know this. And as I was reading and I saw somebody run out of the room and I heard the sound of weeping -- and I look in an adjacent space, and it turned out it was my cousin who's -- the first time she had found out that her mother had lost her first husband and a child. And by that point, her mother was dead. So, in my own family, there were members that didn't talk about the experience and transmit the history. My father was at the opposite end of the pole. So, I learned that from him.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:Just quickly going back to being in New York in the mid-twentieth century, 86:00did you ever experience anti-Semitism or negative attitudes towards you for being Jewish?

AB:Where, in New York? In a very subtle way, yes. In a very subtle way. I'll give you an example. I happen to be a very successful fundraiser for my program at the zoo. I was awarded every National Science Foundation grant I ever applied for. That was the reason why I was able to do a lot of the programs that I managed to do around the US and around the world, because I had the funding to 87:00back my initiatives. But there were administrators at my institution who would, on the one hand, be delighted with my ability to raise the fund and give me compliments that were very close to anti-Semitism. Having grown up in Poland, I have a very good nose for anti-Semitism. But when they would say, You people are so good at this, I knew what it meant.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:Are there any particular works of art that remain important to you or have taken on new meaning in your adult life?

AB:Yes. It's my father's works of art. They have great meaning to me. My father became an artist at the age of seventy-two. He had promised my mother, on her deathbed, that he would paint. She made him promise. And everybody knew he had 88:00talent from the time he was a young boy in school. When he was -- think it was the third or the fourth grade, his art teacher went to Paris, and she visited all the galleries, and she wrote a letter to the children back home in Lodz, in Yiddish. My father always quotes from the letter, because the principal came in to read the letter to the students, and getting a letter from Paris was such an amazing event for the school. And she described all the sights and sounds and the music, and they were enthralled. And she ended the letter by saying, "I hope all of you one day in your lives will get a chance to visit Paris. But most of all, Nachman, because I think one day, his artwork will hang in a museum." And, in fact, my father's works made their way to the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and he had many shows, even though he started painting when he was seventy-two. And 89:00some of his paintings -- in particular, he painted one painting called "I Remember Zina." Zina was his dance teacher when he was in elementary school. And he talked always about how she opened up the world for him, the world of music and dance, and how that broadened his outlook on life. And I have that painting hanging in my living room, and it's very meaningful to me.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:To what extent do you think language plays a role in transmission between generations?

AB:Well, language carries the whole culture within it. So, it's an essential role. And I know sometimes when I tell my children or my grandchildren something, sometimes I feel like I have to throw in a word in Yiddish, even though I'm not a Yiddish speaker, because I say, "I can't get the flavor of it any other way." Well, what is it like? What is the synonym for this word? They 90:00would say. And I have to use sometimes half a dozen words to say, "It's all those words mixed in" that would be contained in one Yiddish word.

ZD:How do you think the identity of younger generations of Jews differs from yours?

AB:I guess that would depend where these younger generations of Jews are raised. If they are raised in America, it would be very different, because these young people would have grown out in a very free environment, generally free of anti-Semitism, but not uniformly and not, for the most part, steeped in Yiddishkayt. If they grew up elsewhere -- there are some parts of Russia, I 91:00know, where they speak Yiddish, young people speak Yiddish on a daily basis. So, that would be different, I think. It depends. If they grew up in Israel, would be all different still. So, I don't think you can make one statement about young people everywhere.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

ZD:What does Yiddish mean to you today?

AB:Yiddish means a world that's disappeared. Just the concept of Yiddish sometimes fills me with sadness, because some people say it's a dead language. I don't think it's a dead language yet, and I think there are a lot of people 92:00working against that. But the chances of it being spoken widely and having new works of literature in Yiddish are fairly remote. I know that in recent years, there's been a bit of a revival of Yiddish in Israel. I don't know it from first-hand experience, however. So, I don't know. But if Yiddish were more widely spoken, there would be greater opportunities for Yiddish works, of important Yiddish works of literature to emerge. But I'm not aware of many that have. I think a lot of the literature in Yiddish is based on works that were written years ago, many years ago, in a different era. And that's unfortunate. And the Yiddish that's spoken on a daily basis is primarily spoken by the Orthodox, with a very limited worldview. So, I'm sure that Yiddish doesn't even have words that pertain to modernity.

ZD:Okay, so this is the last question I'm going to ask you. What advice do you have for future generations?

AB:Oh, my goodness. That's a big question. (laughs) About what? (laughs)

ZD:About -- just any advice?

AB:Any advice? Well, the one bit of advice that I have that could possibly be useful would be to inquire of their parents and grandparents about their lives, because individual stories carry a lot of history that's lost. And if you don't ask and if you don't think about it and don't ask these things while these 94:00individuals are still alive, you lose a lot, and the culture in general loses a lot. I know my mother -- in retrospect I know this -- must have had unbelievably important and interesting stories to tell. But I never asked her, which is why I was so dogged about asking my father a lot of questions, and having so many conversations with him, because I felt I had lost an opportunity.

ZD:Well, thank you, Annette, for doing this interview with us.

AB:Thank you, Ze'ev.

[END OF INTERVIEW]