JACK HOFFINGER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is December 28th, 2015. I'm here in New York City with Jack Hoffinger, and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

JACK HOFFINGER: You do.

CW:Thanks. So, first of all, where did your family come from?

JH:Well, my mother came from Poland. Warsaw, actually. My father came from Austria-Hungary. Therefore, the name Hoffinger, which is Germanic, it's never changed. He came here when he was two years old. My mother came here when she was eighteen, under circumstances that are interesting. Because my mother lived a fairly good life in Warsaw, which was the capital of Poland. Her father, m-- 1:00when I speak of my grandfather and grandmother, I speak only of my maternal. I did not know my paternal grandfather until many years later. Or my paternal grandmother, who died early, anyway. But my grandfather had a wood-turning factory. Wood-turning, as you know, was carpentry, with the base of lamps and all. He was essentially a cabinetmaker, and they were fairly well-to-do. My mother went to gymnasium. She spoke, at home, obviously, Yiddish. But she also spoke Polish and Russian, because the official language of the gymnasium was Russian. We're talking about when she was -- she came here when she was eighteen, in 1922. And during the First World War, as you know, Poland was part 2:00of Russia. My grandfather was in the Russian army. So, the street language was Polish. The official language was Russian. And the Jewish language was Yiddish. So, Yiddish was the medium of communication for the family. Now, I would just say one thing, which is fascinating. My maternal grandmother was Hasidic. My maternal grandfather was a misnaged [Orthodox Jew opposed to Hasidism, lit. "opponent"]. A misnaged was non-Hasidic, because Polish Jewry in those days, in the 1920s, was essentially Hasidic. My grandmother was -- never learned how to read or write, but she was a brilliant woman and she ran the family. She was -- very wise woman. In 1922, she announced to my grandfather, "I don't want to bring up my children in Poland." That's 1922, seventeen years before it all 3:00began in Poland. It had begun in Germany earlier, but in Po-- seventeen years. And she persuaded two of her brothers to come with her. Five brothers and sisters were murdered. They were left behind. They didn't come. But that was 1922. My belief is (laughs) that my mother never forgave my grandmother, because my mother, who was quite beautiful and very intelligent, learned, arrived at the Lower East Side, took one look at it, and said, "This filth?" Compared to Warsaw, where she lived like a princess. Anyway, so that's how they came to America, and that's how I'm here.

CW:So, what is your idea, from stories, of what Warsaw was like for those eighteen years of your mother's life?

JH:Not much. Unfortunately, as you heard from Bunny, we didn't know that we 4:00should get the oral histories that you people are involved with. We didn't know that then, and we didn't know to ask that many questions. So, we picked up bits and pieces. All that I know is that my mother was -- and her brother were the only two survivors of five children. Three children of my grandmother died. Two survived: my mother and my uncle. All I know is that my mother led a very interesting life. I keep saying she was quite beautiful. She really was. She was a (laughs) very beautiful woman, and very desirable, and could -- she was fairly intelligent, too. I don't know how street smart she was because she came here when she was young. But she was very intelligent, and she was very learned, also. So, their life was very good. They owned their own house, they had servants and all. They never lived as well in America. Never. When my 5:00grandfather got here, wood-turning was on its way out. So, he got into the fish business and became a fish seller, of all things, which I remember quite well. But anyway, so --

CW:Did they ever --

JH:-- I don't really know much about their life in Warsaw other than the fact that they were very well-to-do and they had servants and they lived the grand, high-class middle life, middle-class life of Polish Jews. And Warsaw was not the Ghetto. Warsaw was a very cosmopolitan city, so -- but that's all I know about them. What I do know, also, is that my grandmother's father was what was called a rebbe, teacher of some sort. And her mother died when my grandmother was quite young, and my grandmother then became the mother to the rest of the family, and once in a while lamented the fact that she couldn't marry another Hasid, that 6:00she had to marry, so to speak, below her, because Hasids married Hasids. But they were married for a long time, and they both died in their high eighties, so that was -- but they never had the life -- nothing near the economic life. None of the things that go along with being well-to-do in America. None of it.

CW:Did you ever hear about the journey? The trip here?

JH:Not much. They came over on the boat. First my grandfather, as Bunny said. This is the way it was. My grandfather came first. Sort of established himself somewhat, but within the year, my understanding was, my grandmother and her two children came. They came on -- I forget the name of the ship. It was a famous ship. But they came -- they weren't in steerage. They were well-to-do. They had 7:00money, luckily.

CW:And so, where did you grow up?

JH:Well, that gets into a whole other story, 'cause I was born, I understand, in the Bronx, in my grandmother's and grandfather's home. I am told that Yiddish was my first language, because my grandparents did not speak English. My grandfather knew, perhaps, twenty-five English words. My grandmother probably didn't know more than five. So, Yiddish was the only language, and that was presumably my first language. My parents separated a number of times when I was a child. So, I spent most of my first six years, until they divorced, with my grandparents and my mother. They divorced when I was six, so I was the only Jewish kid in the universe whose parents were divorced. That was 1932. In those 8:00days, people didn't get divorced. They couldn't afford to. So, then, I lived with my grandparents, from the age of six until eleven, and my mother -- until my mother remarried. And we stayed -- and first, I lived in the Bronx, primarily, with my grandparents, and then I lived in Coney Island with them for five years until my mother and stepfather married, when I was eleven. And she married a man who was, obviously, Jewish, but who had come from Russia. He'd been in the Red Army. He was a communist, and he spoke Yiddish almost entirely at home, although he could speak English. So, we continued to speak Yiddish. Yiddish was the method of communication, the way of life in my home, where I lived primarily until I was eighteen in the Bronx. East Bronx. But the first six 9:00years, I lived in what's called the Irish -- well, then, the Irish West Side. So, most of my friends were not Jewish. Most of my friends were Irish. Lived on the West Side of Manhattan. And when I moved to the Bronx -- to Coney Island, we lived in the Jewish part of Coney Island. The universes were then ethnically separate. And Coney Island, the first part of Coney Island, was Italian, the lower part. The upper part -- by upper, the upper streets -- were Jewish. And we lived among Jews, primarily. And so Jewish that, in fact, my grandmother would go to a grocer who was Italian who spoke Yiddish fluently. He was a Sicilian. All the Italians that I ever met -- I grew up with Irish as a kid and then Italians. All the Italians I knew were all Sicilians, because the Northern Italians didn't migrate to America. They were well-to-do. It was the Southern Italians, Neapolitan and Sicilian. We spoke Yiddish. We lived in a Yiddish 10:00universe. Imagine? (laughs)

CW:So, what were the streets like? Do you remember particular businesses?

JH:Dangerous.

CW:(laughs) Dangerous?

JH:Dangerous. Well, on a personal level, which has nothing to do with being Yiddish -- my way of survival, since I didn't have a father to back me up -- but I was lucky, 'cause I had two things going for me. One is I was bigger than most kids. And I was stronger than most kids. And I also was smarter than most kids. So, I would find out who the toughest kid on the block is, and either I'd beat him up or I'd become his best friend if I couldn't beat him. So, nobody bothered me when I was a kid. I grew up very young. Well, my father -- my classic story is my stepfather met me, I was eleven. He said, "You're not a kid. You're a man," which was good and bad. He always treated me like an adult. Never treated me like a child. And I grew up -- I had to grow up very fast, for reasons that 11:00have nothing to do with -- it was just that way. So, when I hear stories about Bunny's childhood, (laughs) it's one of my only regrets is that -- I was very lucky, 'cause I wasn't supposed to make it. I was a bad kid, for reasons that are obvious to most psychoanalysts. But I did make it. But it cost me something. So, anyway --

CW:So, can you describe a little more about Coney Island and what that neighborhood was like?

JH:It was like heaven, because it was really a poor person's paradise. In the winter, we'd play football on the -- I was very athletic. We played football on the beach and all kinds of things. In the summertime, we didn't go to the beach on weekends, 'cause the tourists all came in. So, in the summertime, I would get 12:00up in the morning, put on a pair of bathing -- they called bathing suit. They didn't call them trunks, yeah? And I'd run around. I was always brown. I was lucky, 'cause I had a lot of melanin in me, so I tanned like that. (snaps fingers) But I would run around and we'd play. I played ball. I was on a punchball team when I was seven years old. So, we did all of that, and on weekends, we would stay off the beach, because it was too crowded. We'd sneak into the movies, things like that. Steeplechase was great. I had a friend of mine, we used to sneak into Steeplechase on weekends. It was fun. But it was wonderful. Coney Island was great for me, because first of all, I was free of my parents' constant separation. First six years of my life, I was shuttled back and forth between the Irish West Side (laughs) and the Jewish Bronx with my grandparents and so on. So, at least I had a home, and it was secure. Because my 13:00grandmother and grandfather were wonderful people. And my grandmother, who was always sad, she was rather depressive, she had a terrible life. Was an extraordinarily wise woman. I never realized how wise she was until later in life. She said things that I wish I had understood better. But I understood them later in life. She said marvelous things.

CW:Can you give an example?

JH:Pardon?

CW:Can you give an example?

JH:Well, yeah, I can give you a few examples. My grandmother purportedly -- well, first of all, to tell my grandfather, when they were well-to-do, to go to a foreign country where they had grown up in Eastern Europe. To say, "I don't want to bring up my children in Poland" was quite a decision, in 1922, when they 14:00were well-to-do. But the thing that I tell on occasion, for a particular reason, is -- my mother told me this story, that my grandmother once said to her, seeing a pious Jew run to the synagogue, she said -- in Yiddish, of course -- she said, "He prays every day for himself. But the Jew--" (coughs, crying) She said, "The Jew gives to charity and prays for the world," which I never forgot. She was extraordinary. Also, what happened was when I was six years old, my grandmother took me to the local Talmud Torah. You know Talmud Torah? 'Cause you raised a question about the difference between Hebrew schools and shules [secular Yiddish 15:00schools]. Hebrew schools -- is where they taught you religion. Shules were socialistic. Shules taught you Yiddish, but they were not observant. They were the non-observant, more secular Jews. So, I went to Talmud Torah when I was six years old. Now, how did I get into Talmud Torah? My grandmother took me up, I'll never forget this. My grandmother took me up to meet the principal, Mr. Bashuk, I'll never forget this. And she said to him, in Yiddish, "This child is an orphan," meaning me, 'cause I had no father. She said, "If you don't take him in, he won't be Jewish." So, every month, they would hand out a piece of paper to the kids to bring home to their parents, to pay the dues. They never gave me a piece of paper. So, many years later, Bunny and I established a fund at our synagogue for poor kids who couldn't afford it, in my grandmother's name. What 16:00do they say? What goes around comes around. But she was a very tough person. She was an unhappy woman. Having lost three children and survived, having lost her mother when she was a kid, and it was -- and having lost all of her siblings in Europe was really terrible. But she was very difficult, but very observant, and unafraid to die. As a matter of fact, she woke up in the middle of the night, according to my grandfather, at the age of eighty-six, and told him she was dying, and prepared her clothes, her funeral clothes, and died. Yeah.

CW:What was their home --

JH:But I had my problems with being Jewish, because of the observance part, not with being Jewish. I never sat around and wondered, Should I or shouldn't I be 17:00Jewish? I am Jewish. I always was Jewish, and I never doubted that. When a friend of mine who had converted to Catholicism once said to me, "How can you say you're Jewish? You don't believe in God?" I said, "Why are you asking me the question? Are you defining me? I define myself. You don't define me. That's not a question for you to ask me. That may be a question for me, but it really isn't, for me, a question." I didn't believe that being Jewish was something you picked up in FAO Schwartz. You either were or you weren't. And that was the world in which I lived when I was a kid. Also, I lived with a lot of anti-Semitism, so that being Jewish was not like, Do I shampoo my hair every other day? What are you talking about? I am Jewish. I mean, when I was in the army, guys would talk about the Jew-nited States. Talk about the Jews had cushy 18:00jobs and so on. My response was, "They have cushy jobs 'cause they're smart. And you'd have one if you were smart. But you're stupid." That was my response to anti-Semitism. So, they would say, "Well, how come you're in the infantry, Hoffinger?" I said, "'Cause I'm dumb, like you." (laughs) Well, anyway, that was the way --

CW:So, can you --

JH:That was what Jewish, in some of its manifestations were, when I was younger, 'cause I lived in an anti-Semitic world. America -- not the government, but America was an anti-Semitic place back in the 1930s and '40s. It was openly anti-Semitic. I grew up with "Christ killer." My two close Italian friends called me a Christ killer, between themselves. "Matacrist." I said, "Somebody had to do it, so you could bow down to him." I said, "I know, I know, I know. 19:00Romans did it, but the Jews were handing them the nails and the hammers, right?" So, they said to me, Well, you're crazy. I said, "Well, wouldn't you be if you killed God?" So, I grew up with that, and I wasn't the only one. In the Army, all the Jews grew up with that. So, being Jewish was not -- I mean, I never met a Jew that I had anything to do with who said, I wish I weren't Jewish. Never. We were Jewish. So, that was the way it was. That's on the question of Jewish, not on the question of Yiddish. Yiddish is a whole other question. Opens up different ideas. But I just wanted to give you an idea of what it meant to be Jewish. Not to be arrogant, but most people don't know, because that's not what it is anymore. It has changed dramatically. Israel changed it all. Israel 20:00knocked the hell out of anti-Semitism. So, you now have a different anti-Semitism, which is, the Jews are now the victimizers. So, that's the anti-Semitism now, but it's different. Anyway, I'm sorry to digress about --

CW:No --

JH:-- what it means to be a Jew in America then and now.

CW:I want to hear a little bit more about your grandmother. What was she like at home?

JH:Tough. (laughter) Very tough. She was a very principled person, although I disagreed with her, ultimately, which I shouldn't have, on God. But she didn't speak much. She advised -- rabbis would come to her for advice. No, she was an incredible woman, which I took for granted. But she was very tough. She saved my 21:00life, but she was tough. My grandfather was -- and usually in these marriages, you get the tough one and the nicer one. If the woman is tough, the guy is easy. If the guy's tough, the woman's easy. It's a way to survive. But they got along very well, and they were very connected for over sixty years of marriage. My grandfather died six months after she did. I don't think he wanted to live. But she was tough. But a lot of what I am, I think I ingested from the way she was and from the things I heard from her and from her commitment to certain things. That's what I think. I don't know. She never sat down and lectured me. Nobody lectured me, actually. I don't know that it was me. I don't think people -- in 22:00the days when I was growing up -- we grew up extraordinarily poor. When I was growing up, survival was critical: if a kid had enough to eat and some clothes -- I didn't own a suit until I was sixteen. I was bar mitzvahed in my stepfather's suit. We didn't have any money. And it was a way of life. So, there was really not much time for philosophizing, because you can't get to philosophy until you have bread and land, and the Russians understood. You've got to have your belly full before you can be a philosopher. Survival is everything at the beginning. But it's not the end-all. But it's the beginning of life.

CW:Do you remember any of the yontoyvim with your grandparents? What was that like for you?

JH:Not much. I did not have -- I don't mean to sound depressive about 23:00everything, but I had fun on the street. I lived on the street. I was always --- I always ran around with a bunch of guys, and we played ball, and I loved school. I was a smart kid in school, so school -- I was bad. I got thrown out of public school, in junior high school, in high school. And I was acting out in a lot of ways. But we didn't have -- I mean, if you listen to Bunny's home life and you listen to my home life, you would say that these are two different universes -- and it's true, it is. I don't miss any of it. But I don't remember a single seder. We have magnificent seders all the time, primarily because of Bunny's background and all. But I don't remember any of it. There was no singing 24:00at all. My grandparents -- I'm talking about the first eleven years, which were the formative years of my life, there was no talk about Israel at all. I went to Talmud Torah. At the age of eleven, I was told to go to yeshiva because I had -- I was graduated. I'd gone through the five books of Moses. I was a fairly bright student. We did not learn Yiddish, but the teacher spoke in Yiddish to us, and I could read Yi-- but we were taught only Hebrew. And I didn't care that much for it. I mean, I went too young. I didn't understand it. If I had known better, I would have gone to yeshiva, to have rounded out the theological part of my life. But I didn't, then. I did it later on, but not then. What I had, as best I can 25:00remember -- and memory is what it is. I'm not Proust, so I do the best I can with memory. But what I remember was that we just took it that Jewish was the way you lived. I mean, 'cause I was Jewish. That was it. And Yiddish was our language. And as you understand, it's not just a language. Language is the way we communicate. But you don't communicate through language alone. You communicate in a variety of ways. And language is not such a perfect communicator, anyway. So, Yiddish was a world. And the world that I understood and lived in and didn't question, up until I got much older, for other reasons, was the Jewish world. And it wasn't a happy world for me. But that was not because we were Jewish. And I don't know that it was only because we were poor, 26:00'cause Bunny's family was poor, too. So, that wasn't it. What it was, I guess, is that apart from my grandmother's brilliance, there really wasn't any intellectual discourse at all for the first eleven years of my life, other than whatever intellectual discourse there was in public school when I was a kid. That came later. My stepfather was a communist, so -- and his friends were communists, as many people were in those days. If you were committed to any kind of philosophy, politics, you were either communist or a fascist. And so, for Jews, being a fascist was hardly an option. So, then I got into the whole political economy of socialism and communism. And I was an economics major and I went to City College. City College was known as a place -- a hotbed of communism. Of course, communism and socialism were the only real philosophies 27:00that were available to intelligent people, especially Jews. What were you going to be, Nazis? There was no other. It was always that clash. There was no in-between, then. So, intellectual discourse at home came much later, when I was older. And I entered college at sixteen. So, by the time I was into philosophy -- thinking, political economy and so on -- so, that raised a lot of questions beyond -- never the question of Jewish. Again, Yiddish was the accepted medium of communication, and it was never questioned. That's how we communicated. That's who we were. I never talk to people about, How come you don't speak Yiddish? It never came up. So, that was where we were.

CW:Did you talk to your stepfather about communism, about socialism?

JH:Oh, quite a bit. I mean, we believed then, as many -- not just communists, but people who are left-leaning -- I never was a communist. I never joined any party. I had a lot of friends who did, but I was always skeptical of ideology, even communism. Ideologues, to my mind, are dangerous. I just don't -- I'm talking thinking-wise. They're dangerous, because they have the answers. And if you have the answers, then your mind is shut. Questions are everything, not answers. So, no, we talked a lot about -- no, I used to take on his friends who were very communist. I would ask them a lot of questions that they didn't like, because they followed a party line. I was not into that. I had also friends, as I said, who were communists. But they didn't trust me. I did my honors thesis in 29:00Karl Marx, surplus value. Economics was my major. So, I got into communism, and a lot, but --

CW:And was your --

JH:-- but I always suspected it.

CW:At that time, was the connection with the Soviet Union? Was that part of what your stepfather was --

JH:Oh, yeah, up until the pact, and around 1939, you had -- Russia and Germany signed the pact, presumably because they were both going to invade Poland.

CW:Do you remember that?

JH:Oh, I remember very well. I remember exceedingly well. I remember all of that. We were very tuned into what was happening with the Russians in the war. It was always my contention that, whether we liked the Russians or not, thank God they were in the war, 'cause the Russians ultimately, at Stalingrad, beat 30:00the Germans. Then, it was only a question of when the Germans would surrender or make a deal. The Germans couldn't win after Stalingrad. So, yeah, we were very pro-Russian because the Russians were fighting -- America was pro-Russian. We had pro-Russian movies. And the Russians -- we followed that very carefully. And my stepfather was the one who said, "They'll never beat the Russians," et cetera, et cetera. But anyway, he was in the Red Army when he was in the Soviet Union, in the First World War. No, there was a lot of that. A lot of pro-Soviet feeling, until Stalin's craziness came out. But that was much later. Everybody accepted Stalin. It was a war. It was a different time. And it was an interesting time. Very scary time. Very scary. Now, for a lot of us, not just as 31:00Jews, a lot of it was scary, so --

CW:Were the people that you were around talking about the pact in '39, and their reactions --

JH:Well, that's where my father, my stepfather, disconnected from the Communist Party, because he wouldn't accept the fact that the Soviet Union made a pact with Germany. It was always clear that the Germans were fascists, Nazis. There was the Spanish Civil War. I knew some people whose son was in the Lincoln Brigade. The Lincoln Brigade was a bunch of Jews who went to Spain to fight the -- Franco and the Germans, and who were then outlawed in the United States. They were blacklisted. So, yeah, that was the world in which we lived. There was nobody who was pro-Nazi. I mean, I knew some people who were, because I ran a bicycle store with my parents. And we used to rent bicycles to -- I remember 32:00them very well. I remember their faces: two German guys who used to go out to New Jersey to meet with the Bund. Yeah, one of them said to me, in effect, that, The day will come when we would be at risk. I told him, "Anytime you want to try it, try it." But luckily, we could have been at risk. Philip Roth wrote a book, in which the Germans are around and the Jews are not, so --

CW:Yeah, "The Plot Against America," right?

JH:Precisely. Precisely.

CW:So, can you tell me about the bicycle shop?

JH:Well, my stepfather was a housepainter. And he couldn't earn a living. And so, when I was -- and I'm talking from a very selfish, narrow point of view. 33:00When I was fourteen years old, he decided that we needed a bicycle store, because we had a boarder. We had an apartment in the Bronx, and in order to make the rent, we had a guy who used to sleep in one of the bedrooms. I used to sleep in the living room when he was living there. And he ran a bicycle store. So, my stepfather thought it would be a good idea to open a bicycle store, and which would be run by my mother and me while he was a painter. And that's what he did. So, at the age of fourteen, I started working in the bicycle store, so I couldn't play ball or do anything in high school. I couldn't be on any of the teams, because I had no time for it, so -- but it was good for me. First of all, my real father, presumably, was -- couldn't put a nail in the wall. So, since I was my father's son, according to my grandmother, I was supposed to be un-handy. 34:00So, the bicycle store gave me a chance to find out for myself that I was pretty handy, actually. So, I fixed bicycles, rented them. We started off with about eighteen bicycles and ended up with eighty. And we used to rent them out. And that's how we made money. And, the end, there were summers when I ran it all alone, 'cause by the time I was sixteen and seventeen, I could run the store on my own. And if my mother went to the country and my kid brother --- I have a half-brother who is a Ph.D. in philosophy. So, when she and he went to the country, my stepfather would go up to the country on weekends, and I'd run the bicycle store. And I could run it alone.

CW:Now, where in the Bronx was this?

JH:East Bronx, East 180th, between Prospect and Clinton. The dividing line between the Jews and the Italians. The Bronx, above 180th, they made movies of 35:00it: Arthur Avenue, 187th Street. The kids who rented bicycles were primarily Italian and Irish kids. The Jewish kids had bar mitzvah bicycles, so they didn't have to rent. They came in to fix the bicycles. But the others came in, and it was a tough neighborhood. And we had police protection against -- and connection, not because of -- that we were concerned about the people we were renting to. That's not -- but, for example, a local shylock -- you know a shylock? Was an Irish guy. You know what shylocks were? Shylocks were guys who gave gamblers money at enormous interest rates. And the word shylock came out of Shakespeare's play. And the shylocks that I knew happened not to be Jewish. They were Irish or Italian. But it was a Jewish name. So, they came in and said, Give 36:00this kid a bicycle. I said, "Who is he?" Says, "My nephew." So, I gave him the bicycle. Kid disappears. So, I go into the bar where the shylocks hang out, and I said, "Your nephew?" He said to me, "He's not my nephew." I said to him, "Well, I gave him the bike on your say-so." Said, "He's not my nephew." This guy was about six-foot-four and weighted about 250 pounds. I was sixteen at the time. So, I said to him, "You owe me thirty dollars." So, I called up Lieutenant Gilhooley, who used to come around and drink in the back of our store, who was always looking for shylocks so he could shake them down, so that they'd pay, because all the cops were on the payroll in those days. So, I told him, "You want the name of a shy? There's a guy in there." So, when he went in, all the guys flew out of the bar. So, the shylock comes to me, "What the hell are you doing?" I said, "Nothing." I said, "I'm doing what you do." Said, "When you give 37:00out money and they don't pay you, don't you enforce it?" So, he gave me thirty dollars. Two weeks later, I retrieved the bicycle, 'cause somebody told me my bicycle had had a special paint job. So, I picked it up, I went into the -- gave him back the thirty dollars. He couldn't believe it. I said to him, "I wouldn't steal your money. I only asked you for the money you owed me. But you don't owe it to me anymore." So, we became friends. But those are the kinds of experiences I had with -- in the bicycle store.

CW:And then, you were in the service?

JH:Yeah. Luckily, I didn't get killed. And, in retrospect, luckily, I wasn't sent overseas, because I was in the infantry. I became cadre. You know -- cadre was in the army? I used to teach soldiers how to disarm other soldiers. Judo and stuff like that. They would keep behind, out of every -- I did fourteen weeks of basic training, and after basic training, in the infantry, they would hold back 38:00five, six guys to teach the new recruits, 'cause they needed -- and I was one of them. So, that's what I did. I spent almost two years in the army, all over the United States. And luckily, I got out of the army safe, physically secure, and I had the G.I. Bill. The G.I. Bill helped to change my life, because I went to City College. City College was where smart Jewish boys went who didn't have any money. It was a terrific -- very difficult academically. Not for me. I didn't have that much trouble academically in high school or college. I didn't. I could do it. I could work, and I used to cram, I'd get decent grades. Anyway, so with the G.I. Bill, I went to Yale Law School, out of City College. Yale Law School had the highest tuition in the country: $650 a year. (laughs) But that was a lot 39:00of money in those days. And I had scholarship money from Yale and so on. But the G.I. Bill helped me get through -- go to a lot -- I couldn't have thought of Yale Law School. It was either Yale or Columbia. Those were the only two law schools I applied to. And the story I tell is my stepfather said to me, "What do you want to go to Yale for? You spend" -- I had saved up two thousand dollars in the army, gambling. So, he said, "Why do you want to go to Yale? Columbia, stay home, you have your girlfriends, you have the car." We had a car. I said, "This is my chance." He didn't know what I meant. I wanted to get the hell out of the life I was living, and I did. So, I went to Yale, and it was a good thing. If I hadn't gone to Yale, I wouldn't have met Bunny. If I hadn't gone to Yale, my life would have been totally different, 'cause I met Bunny -- anyway, it's a long other story, but one thing leads to another. So, the G.I. Bill was good for me. It was good for a lot of -- 'cause it democratized graduate education in 40:00America. Guys like me -- fifty percent of my class were veterans at the Yale Law School, 1948. Fifty percent. It was only 150 students a year that they took at Yale Law School. So, I was very, very lucky. I've been lucky my whole life. But that was very lucky, so -- that I, A, was in the army, B, I didn't get killed, C, I grew up, and D, I had the G.I. Bill. Everything went for me. It worked very well. Luck. As my grandmother said in the famous phrase, "You don't have to be beautiful or smart. You need a dark luck." In Yiddish, a finster mazl darf men hobn. You understand what that means? Sheyn darf men zayn? Gezint darf men zayn? Klig darf men zayn? [Do you need to be beautiful? Do you need to be healthy? Do you need to be smart?] [shakes head] Finster mazl [Dark luck]. She knew that to be true. She had such terrible luck in her life, terrible. But anyway, she saved my life, so --

CW:Looking back now, what did you learn from her? Your grandmother?

JH:From what?

CW:Your grandmother?

JH:I'm not sure of any one thing. I mean, as I say, I think it was more ingesting. I think what I learned from my grandmother is to be as principled as is humanly possible, not to live for yourself if it's possible, to -- look, my grandmother, according to my mother, when they were in Warsaw, they never sat down to a meal that my mother wasn't sent out to give food to all the people who couldn't afford it. Secondly, when my grandmother and grandfather decided to come to America, my grandmother gave her house to her sister, who was later murdered. My grandmother always gave almost a half of what my grandfather earned 42:00to charity. That was who she was. (coughs) There was a point in my life where my kid brother said to me once, "Why do you give so much money to charity?" 'Cause I've always given -- I mean, when I say I, Bunny and I have always done it. I made the money we have at this point because Bunny gave up her career to run everything, to take care of three kids and take -- to do every-- my clich is she took care of everything while I was out hunting buffalo. But the point is that my brother once said to me, "Why do you give so much money to charity?" And I said, "Because I choose to." A question is, why do I choose to? It's like most 43:00other decisions: where does that come from? I don't have to rationalize it. I don't have to say, "Because it's the right thing to do." Why is it the right thing to do? I mean, my belief is that a lot of what I think and am, in terms of whatever principle that Bunny and I try to live by -- lot of it came from my grandmother. It didn't come much from my mother, and none of it came from my real father, whom I hardly ever saw. In terms of thinking, I know it's going to sound very arrogant: I don't think I was able to learn much or that I had much to learn from my parents, because my parents always treated me as if I knew what to do. I made all the decisions in my life, from the time I was a kid, about how 44:00to live. What high school to go to -- I went to a very elite prep school called Townsend Harris. But everything that I decided, I don't know why I did it, and it's not because I was smart or anything. It was because that's the way my life was. And it was good for me, because the best thing that my mother and stepfather ever did for me is to tell me, in words and in action, that I could do anything I wanted because I was smart and I was tough and I wasn't dishonest. So, I had that going for me, 'cause my mother was not a Jewish castrative (sic) mother the way Philip Roth and others have fooled around with the concept. My mother was just the other way. My mother was not a good mother in that sense. She was not a real Jewish mother. But what she was, for me, was -- that she 45:00never criticized me one day of my life, ever. As far as my mother was concerned, there was nothing I couldn't do. And that was very clear to me. And my stepfather, too. So, they both made it easy for me to be confident, 'cause in the end, all decisions are arbitrary. And I never had a problem making decisions. I really didn't. And I don't know why. And I spent my whole life professionally making decisions, usually for other people's lives. It's a way of avoiding your own depression. You talk about other people's problems so you forget about your own, which is what I -- now, I didn't do it consciously, by the way. It just happened to turn out that way, that that's what I do as a lawyer. My specialty is criminal law. I never thought I'd be a criminal lawyer. 46:00Never did that, but that was just the way it was. I fell into it, for a lot of serendipitous reasons, which was good for me. But I had a lot of trouble -- and this is not Yiddish. This is, again -- 'cause you raised a question of Jewish. I have always been a secular Jew. Bunny came to it later, because she grew up in a very warm, observant Yiddish home. I didn't. When my mother and stepfather married, they never went to synagogue, because he was a communist. I disconnected completely. I was bar mitzvahed easily because I knew all the tropes, that -- how you sing everything, because I'd studied it, and I knew 47:00Hebrew very well. And I knew it all. I'd been going to Hebrew synagogue with kids. We had our own services for five years when I was a kid. I knew it all. And I was told that there was nothing more they wanted to teach me, I should go to yeshiva. And I'm sorry I didn't, but -- the age of eleven, I wanted to play ball. I was delighted (laughter) that I didn't have to go Hebrew school anymore. And my stepfather and mother would never suggest to me that I should go to yeshiva, 'cause that was too Jewish. By too Jewish, I mean too observant Jewish, 'cause they were real Jews. My mother and stepfather were not un-Jewish. And they never thought about how bad it was to be Jewish. Never. Never. But they were not observant, and neither was I. And that brought me, to some extent, into conflict with my grandmother, who believed that everything was God willing. And so, I confronted her, which I shouldn't have done, on the concentration camps, 48:00which she said, "Of course." And like most ultra-Orthodox people, she made the mistake of explicating what very clever Orthodox people try to avoid. Said, "Why would God want to murder so many Jews?" And she said, "Vayl di yidn hobn gezindikt [Because the Jews sinned]." It's right out of Exodus. "You do My bidding, you'll be My Chosen People. But if you don't do My bidding, seven generations -- how many children." So, I asked about the concentration -- she said, "Di yidn hobn gezindikt." I said, "Even the innocent children that were being burned in ovens while they lived?" She said, "That's the way God works." So, it's unfortunate. So, I said to her, "Well, we can kill an Adolf Hitler who burns innocent children in ovens, but how do we kill your God?" And, of course, 49:00she -- but a part of me, which I realize was my own resentment against the so-called Jewish God. I think so, because I don't believe that there is a God or anything like -- we create God. God doesn't create us, so -- but there's a part of me that just didn't want to -- 'cause I spent all those years being bullshitted about God, and here comes the Holocaust, and everything is God willing. And unfortunately, I questioned. How can this be God willing? So, it was a bad scene, and I shouldn't have done it with my grandmother. It was all she had, so -- and that was sort of -- I've never equated Yiddish with God. I 50:00always understood, from my point of view, that Yiddish was not necessarily observance. That Yiddish was an appendage of it, but it was not essential to observance, because there were many Yiddish-speaking people who did not believe in God. I mean, Yiddish-speaking people were in the forefront and among all of the socialistic, communistic movements that were pro-women, which is not the Hebrew testament, and so on and so on and so on. So, Yiddish stands on its own, and is a whole universe which includes observant Jews, but doesn't depend on 51:00observant Jews. Some people think so, but I don't think so at all. You're not an observant Jew, and you're interested in Yiddish. Yiddish is something else, so --

CW:Great.

JH:-- it is what it is.

[END OF INTERVIEW]