DAVID MAZOWER ORAL HISTORY

HILLARY OSSIP:This Hillary Ossip, and today is February 28th, 2011. I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, with David Mazower, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. David, do I have your permission to record this interview?

DAVID MAZOWER:You do, absolutely.

HO:Wonderful. Thank you. So, can you tell me a bit about your family background?

DM:Sure. My great-grandfather was the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch. And I didn't know him. He died two years before I was born. But I grew up knowing his daughter, who was my grandmother, obviously extremely well, and we would go 1:00'round there for regular weekend family lunches. And her flat in London was, in a way, a sort of -- like these house museums of great writers, you know, you have in Russia and around the world. And her place was full of his books, his paintings, the remnants of his Judaica collection, his photographs. And so, somehow we absorbed as children this atmosphere, really. And that sparked my interest, I think, in all things Yiddish, which surfaced later on. So, that's on my mother's side.

HO:And what about your father's side?

DM:On my father's side, there's also an interesting Jewish and indeed Yiddish connection, because my grandfather, my father's father, was an active Bundist. He was born in 1875 -- Max Mazower. You'll find his short entry in some of the Yiddish encyclopedias of Bundists by Hertz and so on. He was active in Vilna in 2:00the late 1890s, early 1900s. And then became -- reinvented himself after a spell in tsarist prisons and on the run, became a representative for British companies in Russia, and then emigrated in the early '20s and came to London. And that's my father's side of the family. So, Polish and Russian roots on the two sides.

HO:And how active was your family growing up in the Jewish community or the Yiddish community or -- either/or?

DM:To be honest, not at all, really, in either of those communities. And I had very little sense of being part of the organized Jewish community, shall we say, growing up. My father was a rationalist humanist, a member of the Labor party in 3:00Britain, a liberal, and, to an extent, somewhat mistrustful of religion, I think including the Jewish religion. And my mother grew up in not really an observant -- a Jewish home, yes. But neither of my parents were synagogue-goers. We weren't bar mitzvahed, neither myself nor my three brothers. And so, really, there was very little connection to the wider Jewish community. My parents' friends were largely Anglicized, assimilated Jewish leftists -- you could say, liberals. But none of them were observant. And so, I then studied history and Jewish history and sort of rediscovered Yiddish culture through my academic studies. But it hadn't really been transmitted through my parents' generation.

HO:So, then how did you find yourself in Jewish studies, and what exactly drew you to it?

DM:Well, I studied Russian history at college. And then, I joined the Jewish Museum in London. And it was in the very early days of what was at that stage the Museum of the Jewish East End, subsequently the London Jewish Museum. And it had said it -- that organization was founded as museum of immigrant history, as a modern social history project -- in a way, in opposition to the old established Jewish Museum, which had been existing since the '20s or '30s, which had a fine collection of religious objects and Judaica. And I spent three years there. And I spent most of that time working on an exhibition about Yiddish theater in London, actually -- sparked through, obviously, my connection with my great-grandfather. But I was -- but also focusing on the East End and 5:00Anglo-Jewish history. And very little work had been done at that time -- and in a way, still has yet to be done on Yiddish culture in Britain. It's a small chapter of the bigger picture, but an interesting one, nonetheless, and influential in certain key respects: for example, at the anarchist and socialist history of the roughly 1880s to First World War period. A lot of the American figures passed through London, were active in London. So, it's an interesting story. I explored the theater aspect of it. And that drew me into Yiddish culture more broadly. And I became fascinated from that moment on, really.

HO:Did you encounter your great-grandfather's work as you were learning about the theater?

DM:I'll tell you, the first encounter I had with his theater work was when I 6:00went to Israel with my grandmother. And that would have been, let's see -- late '70s, I would think. And we saw a performance of "God of Vengeance," his controversial, famous play, by the Batsheva Theatre, in Hebrew, but with a very nice music soundtrack, original score. And that was the first time I'd really seen my great-grandfather's work on stage and really sort of had an exposure to it. And I was very, very impressed. And I didn't really understand it, it being in Hebrew, but it was a very good production. And I've seen since then, I suppose, four or five other productions of that same play, in English. So, I began to then rediscover him and read his works in English. I did a lot of work -- my grandmother had a large archive of his letters and family photographs and so on, which, in the last few years of her life, we went through in a lot of 7:00detail together. And I began to speak about him and lecture about him a little bit. Yeah. So, that sparked it, in a way.

HO:In what ways did you connect with him or learn about him in your youth, and then were those different than when you were learning about him in other scenarios?

DM:Well, I suppose from my grandmother, we derived a very strong sense of a European life in the sort of fullest sense. I mean, the family moved between Paris and Berlin and Warsaw, and Asch himself traveled to Saint Petersburg and Moscow, and they lived in the south of France for a time. And he was really a kind of quintessential European. We still have an image of Yiddish culture and Yiddish literature as, in some sense, a world apart -- which, when you come 8:00here, to the Yiddish Book Center, any idea of that is just blown out of the water by this huge wealth of translations of world literature and so on. But in the Jewish world more broadly, there is still this sense of Yiddish as being -- you know, there's some sense, a poor relation. But I think from my grandmother, I got this incredible sense of my great-grandfather who was friends with Einstein, with Chagall, with Stefan Zweig, with -- you know, a lot of writers writing in German, in French, in Polish. And here was somebody who it was self-evident, really, was part of a sort of European mainstream. And that was something I was very interested in, and I'm still very interested in. And this sense of the creators of Yiddish culture as people who were at home in a minimum of three languages, and in many cases four, five, or six. And they were hugely 9:00well-read, cosmopolitan figures. Many of the Yiddish writers moved all over the place, ending up in America or Israel, usually, but having lived all over Europe and been exposed to all sorts of different traditions. So, that was something that I think -- a curiosity I took from quite an early age, without really understanding somehow in a more mature way what had brought that about. But it was clear to me just from seeing the photographs around my grandmother's apartment that these were -- this was sort of high European culture. And that's an interesting thing to weigh up and explore.

HO:What were some of the photographs of?

DW:Photographs of Asch with Maxim Gorky, speaking at fundraising events for 10:00European Jewry on the same platform as Albert Einstein and prominent American rabbis, photographs with obviously a lot of other Yiddish writers, lots of photographs of him speaking at different cultural events. Yeah. The whole range of different things. He was unusual in that from a very early age, he forged links with Russian, German, and Polish writers, right from around the year 1900, when he was twenty, onwards. He was curious about world literature and made it his business to make the acquaintance of leading Polish writers and Russian writers and so on. So, yeah.

HO:Even though you didn't get to meet him, did you hear a lot of stories growing 11:00up about him, and were there some favorites that you had?

DM:Yeah, he was a hugely dramatic personality. I think it would be fair to say stormy, kind of melancholy, very much at times the life and soul, but at other times sort of -- when he was writing, very much a sense of, you know, the study door was closed, and the children were under strict instructions from their mother never to disturb him and this sort of -- my grandmother still remembered the explosions of temper when they would disturb him in the middle of writing at his writing desk. Stories of what an appallingly bad driver he was. (laughs) I think he probably owned a car for the first time when he was in America in the 1940s. And possibly in France in the '30s as well, but he was, by all accounts, somebody who would never concentrate on the road and always had his head full of 12:00other thoughts. And stories about how he would pick Chagall up at one time in the 1940s, I think when Chagall had come over to America from Europe. And Asch was a terrible driver, and Chagall -- they would sort of joke about whose life was more precious, you know. Chagall would say, "Steady on, slow down," and Asch would -- "Well, you don't think I'm worried for my life too?" Stories like that. So, lots of stories about what a sort of big personality he was. And also, interesting stories, which my grandmother remembered well, about how wounded he was by some of the controversies that blew up around him. Obviously, famously Abraham Cahan, the editor of the "Forverts." But other figures as well. Writers who had been friendly with him at one stage and then snubbed him and didn't want 13:00to have anything to do with him and accused him of going over to Christianity and all these things. And he was -- he was obviously a very sensitive man and took these slights and -- very much to heart. And my grandmother, in turn, took those on as the daughter. And we'd talk about certain writers, and she would still be angry about how they had treated her father, (laughs) you know, fifty years later. So, those sorts of things were very much still around as we grew up.

HO:And growing up, was there -- I don't know if among your friends they knew who your great-grandfather was, or if other people in the community you were growing up in knew, and how did they treat you versus people who were in the Yiddish world?

DM:That's an interesting question because it was such a generational thing. So, if I was going to Israel with my grandmother, you know, as a teenager, one felt 14:00like royalty meeting the sort of last generation of Yiddish journalists, Yiddish writers, that had known her father -- people like Tsanin and some of -- I can't remember even the names of some of the other journalists. But -- and also Itche Goldberg in New York, who I met when he was in his nineties. And he clasped my hand and said, "Let me shake the hand of history." (laughs) These fabulous kind of experiences, you know, which was such a contrast to -- I mean, my friends and parents of my friends barely heard of my great-grandfather. He was, of course, better known in America anyway than he was in England. But I would have this sudden sense, meeting the sort of over-sixty generation, of this really major personality, somebody whose books they had read, who they had followed in the 15:00newspapers, whose controversies they had followed closely. And that was a sort of magical experience, in a way, to suddenly become aware that he was this really considerable figure for the older generation, but, of course, whose name had faded very much from view for my generation and people even a bit older than me.

HO:And did you grow up speaking Yiddish?

DM:No. I spoke -- I didn't study Hebrew; I didn't go to kheyder [traditional religious school]; I didn't speak any Yiddish. My parents spoke no Yiddish at all. The only member of my family who spoke some Yiddish was my grandmother, and whose Yiddish was -- especially passive knowledge -- was very good. So, she could understand everything that was said to her, but -- and she could make herself understood in Yiddish, certainly. But I think it's -- I'm still not entirely sure what language her parents spoke at home. (laughs) I think a 16:00mixture, actually, of Yiddish, Polish, and possibly broken English, towards the end as well. But certainly it wasn't really passed on. No.

HO:And how did your family end up all the way in England after all of the many travels of --

DM:Because my grandmother met -- okay. My grandmother was at school in Germany as a teenager, was put in a boarding school, and was a friend of my grandfather's sister. So, when my grandfather came to Germany to visit his sister, they got acquainted. And he was quite a few years older than my grandmother, and I think met her for the first time when she was fifteen, and apparently said, "That's the girl I'm going to marry." And after a few years, he did. So, they settled in England because my grandfather had a business in Manchester. The rest of the family ended up in New York, her three brothers, all 17:00ended up in America. So, the bulk of Asch's family is in America now.

HO:And growing up, and even now, how would you define your Jewish or Yiddish identity?

DM:Well, Yiddish is a very big part of my Jewish identity. I'm -- I try and write on aspects of the Yiddish theater still, and aspects of Yiddish culture. A lot of my intellectual interests are in Jewish history and Jewish literature, Jewish theater, and so on. I'm not religious at all. I'm not observant. But I'm -- I suppose I have a fascination for all things Jewish, really. I collect 18:00Yiddish books, to a certain extent. I also collect Judaica from North Africa and the Arab world, so copper and brass and tin and tin-silver objects. So, I have very strong interests in Jewish communities of the Arab world, but also very strong interests in East European Jewry, Ashkenazi Jewry. I've traveled quite a lot in Poland and Russia, and I'm always very interested to -- to a certain extent, I've followed in my great-grandfather's footsteps, in terms of visiting his hometown of Kutno. I've been to Kraków, where he was active for a time. So, I have a very strong and comfortable sense of Jewish identity, but it's primarily cultural and intellectual, I suppose you could say.

HO:And what was it like visiting the hometown of your great-grandfather? Did that provoke any feelings, or --

DM:I understood immediately why Kutno is always referred to in Jewish literature as a sort of godforsaken (laughs) place where nothing ever happens. 'Cause it's rather like that today. It's interesting because in Kutno, like many of the former shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community] towns, the geography of the core of the place is absolutely as it was. The street layouts, many of the old buildings -- not, of course, sadly, the Jewish ones -- not the synagogues for the most part, anyway. But the towns are recognizably what they were a hundred years ago. And around them you've got the new towns and, in some cases, Soviet-style suburbs that have grown up. But it's fascinating. It's absolutely fascinating. And you can see just how integrated in the everyday life of those communities the Jews were, and just how important they were in the 20:00economic life of the towns and the region and so on. And it's fascinating. So, this sense that everything was sort of swept away by the Holocaust or -- you can go back, and a lot of stuff was swept away by the First World War, as well. Yes, in terms of the people and so on, of course. But in terms of an understanding of those communities, it's -- I get a huge buzz out of going to Warsaw and traveling around Poland and -- haven't been to the Ukraine yet, but very much want to do that. It's moving, it's fascinating, it's troubling -- to some degree. This sort of whole question of Jewish memory is very contested and difficult in a lot of these towns. Not so much -- Poland now has changed dramatically, but in other areas it's still difficult.

HO:Are there any pieces of your great-grandfather's work that you particularly connect to, and why?

DM:Well, I connect to some of the short stories very much. I think some of his early short stories -- in a way, some of them that deal with women's lives, I think, are interesting and possibly groundbreaking for that time.

HO:Could you give an example of one?

DM:Oh, there's a wonderful story about the torment that a girl goes through when she has to have her hair cut off on getting married, that's so sympathetically written from her perspective. And you can see why Asch had a reputation for empathizing with women's lives and understanding the difficulties that women had 22:00moving from a very traditional world and trying to get an education and often losing out to the boys in the family who were privileged in terms of education and so on. And I think he -- he definitely saw himself as somebody who wanted to write about those sorts of issues. And "God of Vengeance" is, of course, a remarkable play. I'm waiting for the Broadway production or the West End production. (laughs) Still waiting. Or the film. But a lot of his work I don't know, I simply don't know, because I haven't read the Yiddish originals. And even Asch, who was widely translated, only a proportion of his work was ever translated. So, there's a lot of work to do.

HO:In terms of being related to him, how do you or your family feel about that, 23:00or what kinds of ways do you live through that?

DM:Well, I've tried to write about him and understand him, not so much as a great-grandson but approach it with a sort of critical perspective as well. Because, you know, I'm curious about him, and obviously enjoy the family connection, but in the stuff I've written about him, I do try and write with more of a sort of -- an amateur historian's perspective, in a way. And I'm also very interested in Yiddish culture more broadly, and yes, some of the writers that he knew, the Warsaw circle, like Nomberg and Reyzen and Vaysenberg and these guys who were all young, sort of Young Turks together, in a way, forging a sort of reputation for themselves and a new path for Yiddish literature. So, I 24:00read a lot of the memoir literature -- in a way, I use his connections, I suppose, to explore more broadly. So, I've read Reyzen's memoirs. I've read quite a lot of the memoir literature that deals with those early years of the twentieth century. And it sparks interests across a whole range of other areas as well. So, I'm interested in him, but it's by no means the extent of my interest in Yiddish culture.

HO:And is there a reason that you keep sort of a degree of separation and study him more critically or in Yiddish in general, more critically, as opposed to looking at him more as a relation of yours?

DM: Well, I'm in the fortunate position that, in a way, those battles have been fought, I suppose. Maybe for someone like my grandmother, I think it felt very differently, because she was also wounded by what she observed of the way her father was treated, and therefore, I think saw herself always as a kind of 25:00defender of his reputation and of his work and was unhappy with the thought that she couldn't -- he wasn't maybe the greatest Yiddish writer or that not everything he wrote was of great quality. And so anyways -- for me it's -- those are not personal issues, really. I'm, of course, curious about him, but I don't need to be an advocate for him in any sense and fight his corner. So, I think that's why.

HO:Can you speak a little bit about the different controversies and maybe what you know from a more personal side about his reactions to them?

DM:Well, there were a number of overlapping controversies, and I think -- he was somebody who provoked very strong feelings because he was almost the first Yiddish writer who was able to make a living purely through his writing. And it was by no means easy for him; he was hugely well traveled, beating a path to 26:00publishers' and theater producers' doors and so on. But, you know, most of the writers before him held positions in the Jewish community at the same time as they were trying to write, or Sholem Aleichem had a business career that then failed. But none of them, none of the previous generation made a living as professional writers, by and large. And Asch was almost the first. And in many ways, the most prominent. And so, there was a lot of jealousy, I think, associated with that, understandably. And there were a lot of very great writers who struggled hugely to find the time to write and had to earn their living as decorators and painters and shoemakers and all the rest of it. So, that was from the early part of his career. And then, of course, his huge fame from an early age also provoked a lot of jealousy. Later on, there were the controversies relating to his writing, especially the so-called Christological books that he 27:00wrote about the early figures in Christianity. And that was a thread that ran through his writing, again, from an early age; he was by no means alone among Yiddish writers in exploring those themes. But that blew up around the -- obviously the late '30s and Second World War years. And that transformed his reputation, transformed his, I think, sense of his own place in the world of Yiddish literature, and was enormously wounding and difficult for him. And he was accused by many people of selling out, of seeking fame at the expense of his allegiances to the Jewish community and so on. And that -- you know, I heard lots of stories about the -- still, from my grandmother, growing up -- the writers who would practically spit in his face, who knew him very well in the early years who cold-shouldered him, would walk past him in the street. Zalman 28:00Shneour was one that my grandmother -- she would practically spit three times when that name was mentioned because for -- and I have no idea about the historical truth of that sort of controversy, but what I got was a very strong sense of a feeling of betrayal from her of somebody who was very close to Sholem Asch at one time and then split and wasted no opportunity to do him down and criticize him and so on. So, what I picked up, I suppose, was a sense of just how bitter the literary relationships in that relatively small world of writers had become. And that's something we know from other sources and from Cynthia Ozick's stories and some famous examples. So, Yiddish writers were all fighting 29:00for a -- ever-dwindling share of readers, of publishers' money, of fame, and so on. And there were a lot of people who felt they'd lost out and resented the people they felt had risen to the top.

HO:Did you hear any -- more on the brighter side -- any fond memories of your grandparents or your parents about him?

DM:Yes, I mean, there -- I think my grandmother had a sense of having had a fantastic childhood, I mean, incredibly privileged. But, of course, for her as a child and for her brothers, no doubt, they simply experienced it as what they were used to. But it was, I think, a very, very pleasant, privileged, exciting, interesting time. There were always people coming around. They were great 30:00entertainers, and the house was always full of people and parties and -- especially, I think, in Paris in the -- when was he in Paris? -- the '30s, and also for a time just before the First World War as well. I think that was a very happy time. Asch was a very sociable, sort of collegial guy. I mean, he knew most of the Jewish painters who made their name in Paris from Poland and, in some cases, helped support them financially, bought their work, was very interested in them. Even later in London, would go around to the studio of Josef Herman, a younger painter from Warsaw. And just hang out! He loved to hang out with painters, chat with them, ask them about their work, was very knowledgeable about art. The children were always going to museums with him. So, I think he 31:00was probably a fantastic guide and somebody you could explore all sorts of things with. He loved going for walks; he loved going for long walks with other writers and friends. He had lots of nice memoirs about rummaging for antiques in Paris and in New York. He would hang out in the cafes where the Yiddish writers went -- Café Royal in New York and others. I suppose that my sense of it is a man who obviously was hugely prolific and would shut himself away writing -- when he was working on something, he would work probably fourteen-, fifteen-hour days for weeks or months at a time. And then, he would sort of emerge from this bubble and rejoin his friends and literary acquaintances and be very, very sociable. And hugely well-traveled. So, yeah.

HO:Let's see. Going back to you, can you tell me a bit more about what you do now and what -- you said you worked in the Jewish Museum in London. Can you talk about a bit more about that and where that's led you since then?

DM:That was almost my first job, was working for three years in the Jewish Museum. I did walking tours of the Jewish East End. I did quite a lot of oral history interviewing. Worked on some exhibitions, notably the Yiddish theater exhibition. And then, the money for that program ran out, and then I joined the British Council as an exhibition organizer, worked on a big exhibition about British fashion in the 1980s. An unlikely subject, my friends would tease me. And then, I joined the BBC at some point after that, and I've been in the BBC for a good many years as a news journalist, program-maker. And now, my job is 33:00really international news and current affairs. I help run a department of daily news shows. That's my day job. Obviously, I have strong interests in the Middle East and Jewish matters, to an extent. Jews in news -- it's as true in the BBC as anywhere else. But outside work, you know, I still try and carve out some time for writing and pursuing my interests in Yiddish culture.

HO:And how do you strike a balance between those --

DM:I don't! (laughs)

HO:You don't?

DM:I wish I could. There's no balance to be struck, because daily news is a kind of demanding job, really. But I do a Yiddish conversation class with a few friends in London. Once a fortnight, we meet and we chat and we read -- we're 34:00currently reading Bashevis's Nobel acceptance speech in Yiddish. So, I try and keep up my language -- which I basically picked up from working with the last generation of Yiddish actors in London, at a time when I was putting together this Yiddish theater exhibition. Sadly, most of them have passed away, so I can't speak Yiddish with them. But I read reasonably regularly in Yiddish. I read a lot in translation. And -- less so now, but at times, I do try and write on things that interest me to do with Yiddish literature or Jewish art or the theater or Anglo-Yiddish culture and so on.

HO:What does it feel like when you're studying Yiddish, or what is that like for you?

DM:I love it. First of all, I have this sense of a huge continent still to be discovered, I mean, both in terms of my language knowledge but mainly in terms 35:00of my awareness of the culture in its broadest sense. And so, coming here, which is a pilgrimage without equal -- again, you have this sense of this sort of huge body of literature, of which what we know in translation is just the tip of an iceberg. And there's so much still to be discovered. So, it's a very exciting field to be an amateur in, because there's so much work still to be done. It's very easy to find things which other people haven't really covered and focused on. So, that's exciting for that reason as well.

HO:Yeah, how has your experience been here? What have you thought about the way the Book Center runs or --

DM:Listen, I've been a massive fan of the Book Center from the moment I was first aware of it, which was in the mid-1980s, when I was trying to find books to research the Yiddish theater in London exhibition that we put on at the 36:00museum. And through a chance acquaintance, I discovered the Book Center existed, which I hadn't known. And I then was sent Zalmen Zylbercweig's theater lexicon, which was a huge aid in my researching the exhibition. And then, other books, other memoirs and so on. That's when I first became aware of it. And the first time I came here, I mean, it was mind-blowing. I had no idea it would be that impressive and exciting. And I love coming here. It's just sad that I can only make relatively few visits because I live in London. But it's always a fantastic experience. It is the address for Yiddish, in my view, now. There isn't any other.

HO:Here's a question: how did you learn Yiddish, or --

DM:Well, I wish I could say I did learn Yiddish.

HO:Yeah.

DM:(laughs) I wouldn't claim to have learned Yiddish. I've barely, not really, studied the language formally. I picked it up through my friendships with some of the actors. I played the piano for them at times, and so I would hear the same sketches and the same monologues, the same pieces, over and over and over again. And so, I picked up vocabulary through that. And then, I began reading it -- and really, because there were things I wanted to read that were only available in Yiddish -- and that's still very much the case, as it is for anyone who's got some interest in Yiddish culture more broadly -- you have to get to grips with the originals, otherwise the information just isn't there. So, I can read enough to make sense of what I need to know. I still struggle with reading fiction. And I wish I had more time to really work at my language skills, 38:00because that's the key to the kingdom.

HO:Let's see. What advice do you have for future generations of people studying Yiddish or trying to learn about Yiddish literature, culture?

DM:I would say follow your interests and follow your instinct, and be aware that the received wisdom about what we know and about the contours of our understanding of the literature and the theater and all these areas probably will look very outdated in fifty or a hundred years' time. So, if you think someone sounds interesting, you read a stray line in an encyclopedia entry about something, go and follow it, because the chances are it will be interesting, 39:00even though it may not be well-known.

HO:What about advice to people reading your great-grandfather's work?

DM:Translate it quickly so that I can read it! (laughs) That would be my advice. And hopefully, somebody will work on a serious biography. I mean, I think, you know, the field of Yiddish needs biographies. We have very few reliable biographies of any of the major figures. I've just bought Gabriella Safran's book about Ansky, which is a -- he was a major figure, obviously. And it's a great book. And there are so few good biographies. We don't have a good biography of Sholem Aleichem. We don't have a good biography of Peretz. We certainly don't have a good biography of my great-grandfather. And it's difficult to do because you have to have Yiddish; Hebrew; Polish, probably; Russian and German, preferably. And there's a huge amount of material out there in the periodical literature and elsewhere. So, they're not easy things to do. But I think biographies are a much-needed field in Yiddish studies, and there's 40:00endless scope.

HO:And before we end the interview, do you have any fun stories or stories you think we should include about your great-grandfather? Or about you, in general, learning about him, or your Yiddish life in --

DM:I don't think so. I can't think of any that (laughs) immediately --

HO:No other crazy driving stories?

DM:-- spring to mind. Oh, there are -- I mean, there are numerous stories. One of the things that I -- if I had more time, I would pull together and maybe try and do a compilation of some of the memoir literature about him. There are all sorts of just stray anecdotes. There was a piece I came across written by a guy who had been a bank clerk in a Warsaw bank when Asch had come in to cash a check 41:00or withdraw some money or something. And he remembered and wrote this piece forty years later about how Asch was pacing up and down, and the manager was busy so he couldn't see him, so there was more time to wait. So, he stripped off, took his jacket off, and started doing press-ups on the floor, 'cause at a certain time he was very into the idea of physical culture and doing his exercises. And then, someone else came in, and he started arm-wrestling with him. You know, it wasn't enough for him to do his press-ups; he wanted to show how strong he was, (laughs) and he challenged some random stranger to an arm-wrestling match, you know? And this guy was observing this and wrote a very funny piece about it many, many years later. And there are a lot of stories like that that are just sort of gems in their way, just hidden in the newspapers that are turning brittle and turning to dust in the archives. But that was one I did enjoy.

HO:It's just a testament to what needs to be translated.

DM:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

HO:All right. Well, thank you.

DM:Pleasure. My pleasure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]