ELLEN PERECMAN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is March 8th, 2016. I'm here in New York. And can you pronounce your name correctly so I don't screw it up?

ELLEN PERECMAN: Ellen Perecman.

CW:All right, Ellen Perecman. 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?

EP:Yes, you do.

CW:Thanks. So, where does your family come from in Europe?

EP:My mother and father are from -- well, my father's from a town called Mikhalishik, which has a different name in Russian or Lithuanian, whatever they speak now there. The borders, as you know, always were changing. You didn't know what country you were in from day to day. And my mother is from a bigger town -- 1:00well, a city, really. My father say, "Well, she came from a city. They had sidewalks." Because I've been to Mikhalishik now and to Pastavy, which is where my mother is from. And they are very different. Mikhalishik was apparently a resort town. A lot of bigwigs from Vilna would come and spend their summers there. And, yeah, both are not far from each other and not far from Vilna. But that's, of course, because we were in a car in the year 2001 or something, and you can get around very easily, whereas in those days it seemed much further. And they didn't know each other. They met in a DP camp after the war.

CW:Do you have a sense of what life was like for them before the war?

EP:I have interviewed him, written down -- forced him to answer questions he didn't want to answer, (laughs) that he thought, Why would anybody care about that? Like, "How big was your house in Mikhalishik?" Which to me is a very interesting question. But he didn't think it was important. Eventually, I got him to answer the question. (laughs)

CW:So, how big was it?

EP:So, I don't remember offhand. But people were -- they were a well-to-do family, but they were squeezed. They had only three children. I saw where his house was. We went to Mikhalishik and a friend of his made a map of exactly how we should find where my father's house was, 'cause he's from that same area. And so, we knew -- we were told there were two big oak trees in front of the house. 3:00So, the trees have come down. But you'll see the stumps of the trees and you'll know that's where the house was. And we found that. And I know about the trees because I have a cousin, Dovid Katz.

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His father spent some time -- his father is the poet, Menke Katz. He spent some -- Menke spent some time in Mikhalishik with my grandfather, learning how to fix watches. I guess he thought maybe he would do that at some point. He never did. But he's written some poems about watches. There's one, I think, that's called "Der zeygerl," "The Watch" -- and about my grandfather. And anyway, so Dovid had told us the trees had been cut down but that we would see the stumps there, and we did. So, that was kind of exciting. My mother's house, we believe we found. 4:00Again, we had the advice of people from there, but sort of where it was. We have one photograph that's of her older siblings in front of their house, and you can see two little faces in the window. And that was my mother and her younger sister. And I think we found the house. So, we -- on this trip, I wrote this little ceremony we would do at each place we thought was important and we said Kaddish at each place and we lit a candle. So, we did it at this house. I hope it was the right house. But it certainly looked like the one in the photograph. And we asked if we could do that, and the people then invited us inside, which 5:00is fascinating. But the house has been broken into two parts. So, it was this big originally and now there's one family here and one family here, and -- but it was wild to be there. The very first time I ever went to Poland, I went there to give lectures. I'm a linguist by training, so I used to give lectures. And I remember looking up at the sky and thinking, This is the same sky that all my relatives saw and this is the same ground they walked on. The very first time you do something like that it's hard. It's beautiful, but it's hard. And so, going into the house and believing very much that this is the house --

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CW:Were your parents still alive?

EP:My mother passed away, oh God, sixteen years ago, of brain cancer. My father is (knocks wood) still alive and well. He has some medical issues, but he works every day.

CW:Biz hundert un tsvantsik [May he live to 120].

EP:Well, he's almost there. (laughter) He's a watchmaker, too. His father not only taught Menke Katz about watchmaking, but taught him from a very young age. And so, he owns a jewelry store in New Haven, Connecticut and still fixes watches, clocks.

CW:And can you tell me a little bit about the house you grew up in?

EP:Okay, we moved a lot. As with refugee families, the minute you have another 7:00few dollars, you move up. And so, I was born in one place. I can't remember the name of the street. But then, when I was probably just two or so, we moved up a little bit, then we moved again. And then, again, so -- but the house that I feel was the one I grew up in is in New Haven on -- right in New Haven on Ellsworth Avenue, because that's where I spent my formative years. My grandfather was still alive and lived there with us, which people today don't quite understand (laughs) what that was like, you know, one bathroom and, say, seven people. (laughs) I mean, it was a nice flat -- the second story of a 8:00two-story house that we -- my father rented it first and then bought the house from the other people. So that the house that he's now in, I didn't spend all that much time in. And so, I feel it was a very -- all Holocaust survivor community, practically. You can laugh, but I guess growing up, I thought, Everybody speaks Yiddish and everybody's a Holocaust survivor, because those were the people I knew. So, it was really like a shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community] community, people dropping in and out constantly. 'Cause my grandfather was the only grandfather in the neighborhood. Actually, more than just that neighborhood, but in -- probably in all of New 9:00Haven, I'm not sure there was another grandfather. There were a couple of grandmothers, but -- so, he was zeyde [grandfather] to everybody. And it was a very -- your aunts and uncles were like your parents and your cousins were -- and even friends were like your relatives. Sam Kassow -- and I mention him just because I'm taking his class at YIVO on the journals of the people who were in the ghettos, which is enormously fascinating. And he'll turn to me and he'll say, "Oh, do you remember so-and-so," and "Do you remember so-and-so?" So, it's kind of nice to have that. You know, there are very few -- I would just add this. There are very few people in this class, I was horrified. When I signed up to take the class, I was sure it would be packed, that it would be in a lecture 10:00-- in the auditorium at YIVO, that there would be lots and lots of people. And I walked in and there were three women and myself and Sam. And, let's see, three of the women, including myself, are related to Holocaust survivors. I think the fourth one is not, or maybe it's a further -- it's a more distant kind of relationship she has to the event. But there were no young people, nobody who just wanted to know what was life like on a day-to-day basis. And that's what the materials we're reading are about. And it's related to why I founded my theater company, because people think about the -- what life was like before the 11:00Holocaust, and they think it was like "Fiddler on the Roof."

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There were so many different kinds of people, different levels of society, different levels of education, different levels of sophistication. But people don't recognize this. They have this one image, and this is what Jewish life was like. So, that's why I founded my theater, because these are intellectual plays. They're not silly comedies that play on stereotypes of Jews, essentially.

CW:Did you go to theater when you were younger?

EP:Oh, yes, you wanted more about that. No. (laughs) My theater experience growing up was I was the only girl in my Hebrew school class of -- at the Young Israel, which is an Orthodox synagogue. And so, I was Queen Esther every year. 12:00(laughs) That was my experience of theater. But I loved it, and I am reminded by neighbors that I used to direct little plays in the basement. I sort of remember that. Not really. I mean, people who were in them tell me, Oh, yeah, you did that. (laughs) And then, when I was a junior in high school, I somehow got -- I met someone who knew about a Dramat at Ezra Stiles College at Yale. He was tutoring my friend, and I guess I mentioned that I was interested in the theater. And he said, "Oh, you should come and audition." 'Cause at that time, Yale didn't have women. "You should come and audition for their plays. They're always looking for women." So, I did, and I got very involved with them and this 13:00was amazing. Yeah, yeah.

CW:But you hadn't seen Yiddish theater much?

EP:Never. Did I ever see anything? I don't think I ever saw anything. Many, many years later, when I learned about the Folksbiene, I invited my sister to come with me. I said, "Let's go see a show there. These are in Yiddish." And so, she came. She lives near New Haven and she came to New York and we went to see the show. And when we walked in, they offered us headphones. And we said, "No, we really don't need them." And they looked at us like, "You're so young. How come you don't need translation?" (laughs) That was the first Yiddish play.

CW:From what you said, you were speaking Yiddish your whole childhood with your parents.

EP:I spoke Yiddish before I spoke English. My understanding, 'cause of course I don't really remember this, is that when my older sister went to school, to public school, and started bringing back words is when I started to speak some English. But yeah, we all -- that was it. My grandfather, who, as I said, lived with us, never learned English. He didn't have to, because I've described the community. The people who would call on the telephone mostly would speak Yiddish. And at the point at which people would start to call for my sister -- not me, I was still too young at the time -- he knew how to say, "Linda no home." (laughs) And that was it, and that was all he needed to say. But everybody else, he could have a conversation with. So, I think he learned how to write his name in English, but that was kind of as far as he got.

CW:Yeah.

EP:Yeah.

CW:So, I want to jump ahead to the theater --

EP:Sure, sure.

CW:-- company. So, you started telling me about this, but when did you first -- when did the idea occur to you to start a theater company? Well, actually, before you do that, can you just --

EP:Okay.

CW:-- tell me what it is? What the project was, the --

EP:It's called New Worlds Theatre Project. And the entire mission of this company is to introduce the world, the Jewish and the non-Jewish world, to plays that were written in Yiddish before World War II, early twentieth century, that -- well, a lot of it is the material that I gained access to. So, it wasn't that 16:00I was looking for anything in particular. But I was not interested -- for example, I read a whole volume of Pinski plays and would get excited at the beginning, and then they just kind of peter out at the end. And I thought, No, this is not a good play. But then, I found one and I -- we did it just recently, actually. Worked on it for a couple of years. I think, to me, Yiddish gets a bad rap. Yiddish culture gets a bad rap. I went to speak with someone about a job once, many years ago. And on my resume, I wrote, where you put languages, I listed Yiddish among them. And he looked up at me and he said, "Yiddish? Is that 17:00a real language?" Okay? So, this is offensive. This is obviously very offensive. And so, I wanted to show people what Yiddish produced. I think that too often, Yiddish culture and the Holocaust are bound up and that's all people think. They forget that these -- as I said earlier, there are different kinds of Jews who spoke Yiddish. Even non-Jewish people spoke Yiddish in those days.

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There's a serious side. People think of Yiddish theater and I think the first thing they think of is the silly comedies. I mean, yes, people are becoming interested in, I guess, Jewish theater, whatever that is, written by a Jew or about Jews. But the silly plays that people are doing now about Jewish people, I 18:00think, are -- to me, they're offensive. I tell this to friends and they think I'm overreacting. But I just find it offensive. I don't think people take Yiddish seriously. When you encounter places where -- for example, I went to a theater to see a play that was created based on or inspired by Yiddish literature. And the part of -- it was three separate shows, actually. And you wouldn't at all guess that they came anywhere from Yiddish. They were interesting. But one of them, part of the show was that we -- each of the 19:00members of the audience got a little booklet which supposedly had Yiddish writing in it. So, I open this up and it's not. I mean, it was Yiddish orthography, but it was not Yiddish. And again, I get offended, because I think to myself, All right, well, they figure nobody can read this anyway, so what's the difference? Well, I can read it and I know the difference. And don't offend me by doing something like this. And then, there was something else I saw at one point. Some people are sensitive to this. I went to see "Red." Did you ever see that on Broadway? Michael Grandage directed that. And in it -- it's an artist, a 20:00Jewish artist. Who was it? Was it Jackson Pollock? I can't remember who it was. That's because I'm old and my memory's very bad. But he had the character say Kaddish at one point. And I think I went to a dress rehearsal. Yeah, I was invited to a dress rehearsal of -- and that's why I was able to do this. So, the actor, who was Alfred Molina, a really good actor, says Kaddish, but he does it in modern Hebrew, the modern Hebrew accent. And I know the history of this. I can't re-- whoever this was, I knew the history and knew he was from Eastern Europe, or his family was from Eastern Europe. He wouldn't have said it that way. So, I left a note for Grandage and said, "Just wanted you to know that he 21:00would be pronouncing it this way, not that way, these words." And I think he changed it. I didn't go back and see it, but he wrote me a note thanking me. So, some people care, but other people would just dismiss it and say, So what? Nobody's going to notice the difference. They're not going to -- they won't know. And that kind of not caring, it's there a lot. It's in translations, it's lazy translations. Inaccurate translations. If you don't know what something means, you just make it up. Now, (laughs) I'm very particular about my translations. I go over them and over them and over them, because, of course, 22:00each time you do that, you get a better translation. It's that -- first you go from the Yiddish to the English, and then you work on the English to make it sound like English and not Yinglish. But by that time, you have to go back and look at the Yiddish again to see whether -- how far you have been removed. In fact, we -- the few years that we did play readings at the Book Center, I think maybe two of those years, or maybe it was only one, we did what we call an open rehearsal. So, people who were visiting the Book Center would come and sit down, and they would see the director turn to me. I would have my script, which had Yiddish on this side and English on this side, okay? It wasn't exact 23:00page-to-page, but that way I could find things much more easily. And the director would say to me, "Can we change that word?" And I'd look back and see what the Yiddish was, not -- you can't just do that in terms of English. You have to know what it originally was to know the -- how broad you can get or how narrow you have to be. And people were fascinated by this, that we really -- I forced the directors to take it seriously (laughs) because I take it very, very seriously. So, why did I start the company? I started the company when I was doing readings in Yiddish of plays for the Folksbiene, because I'm trained as an actor. Wouldn't it be great if we did plays in English so that people really 24:00understand the material that they're seeing and hearing, as opposed to listening to Yiddish, maybe they catch a word here and there, and -- but they don't really get the play because they don't understand enough Yiddish. And I thought this would be a really good thing to do with classic plays. I asked someone who, at that time, was working at the Folksbiene. He had actually -- Mark Altman is his name. I don't know where he is these days, but he was working at the Folksbiene. And he organized this series of Yiddish play readings of serious Yiddish plays. We had a system where he would sit on one of the (laughs) couches and read, 'cause his reading of Yiddish was very fluent. I never learned how to read Yiddish. I taught myself over these eleven years, twelve years, but -- so, he 25:00would read it, I'd sit with my laptop and hear it and type in the English. And it's interesting, because when I go back to some of those plays and compare the Yiddish to the English, a lot was -- he just kind of left out stuff. It wasn't that it wasn't translated correctly. It was that things just weren't there. And, yeah, it was kind of too bad. So, before I did the play, I made sure to put stuff back in. Now, of course, you can't keep everything. In some of these old plays in any language, there are monologues that go on for pages that nobody today is going to want to sit through, unless it's Forest Whitaker doing "Hughie" on Broadway, which was brilliant, just talking for an hour or more than 26:00an hour. So, you need sometimes to cut those short and you need to make sure that you are not including scenes that drag the play. You want it to keep moving dramatically, because my interest in this is not the Yiddish, it's the literature part of Yiddish literature. And I want people to appreciate what these amazingly talented playwrights like Peretz Hirschbein were writing and the beauty of it. And I like to think that my translations are as literal as possible without sounding like they're literal translations, but -- because the 27:00language they use is so beautiful.

CW:Can you give an example of a play that you've done?

EP:Well, the example that I ordinarily think of about this is from a play that Peretz Hirschbein wrote called "Dämmerung," which means twilight in German. I think the other title was "Tsvishn tog un nakht," "Between Day and Night, Or --" "Oder dämmerung" -- that's, I think, the whole title. And in it, there are two brothers, one of whom, when he was an infant, grew wings and flew out of his bassinet. Well, years later, he comes back, the brother. And they're talking 28:00about why would he come back. And he's a very interesting kind of figure. These are all very supernatural -- a lot of these plays have supernatural things about them. And he says, "I was yearning for my home like a flower yearns towards the sun," or something like that. Reaching up. And it was the idea of reaching -- I could probably find it if you really want to see it, but the idea of reaching toward the sun, "The flower reaching toward the sun like I needed to be home, I needed to come home again." I mean, it turns out he has come to save his niece because he thinks she's on the wrong path, and anyway. But that, I just -- I 29:00didn't have to cha-- I mean, the words, it was a literal translation of what Hirschbein wrote. And wherever that's possible, that's what I do, because that's what they wrote. In the beginning, when I started doing this, I felt such an oblig-- I mean, it was a neurotic obligation to be faithful that I just couldn't even change an "a" to an "an." (laughs) I just -- but then, I realized that if I'm doing this -- if it's about the literature, then you do sometimes have to make little changes so that it sounds, in English, just like the playwright intended it to sound in Yiddish, and that -- so, that's where I come from, wanting them -- wanting English-speaking audiences to hear this the way 30:00Yiddish-speaking audiences would have heard it or heard it. Hirschbein wrote a play that I'm just about finished with. I've been working on it for a long time. It's called "A kholem fun der tsayt," "A Dream of That Time." But I'm thinking of calling it "Life is but A Dream." And he wrote "Dancers." He wrote it in 1919. He wrote a bunch of dancers. I don't know if he says how many there are, but Martha Graham-style dance, where they go off -- he'll say they go off in a chain, they come back in pairs, and he's giving you all the choreography for these dancers. Not only do you have that -- 1919, Yiddish. You have a form that 31:00goes from being a child to an old woman and an old woman to a child, and a character who has no limbs. He's just kind of inching his way on his torso around and screaming about -- and how the world has been so horrible. Yeah. People just would not believe -- the first few times I did plays -- actually, I would say, probably, the first play was really shocking to people because they didn't expect that. They expected somebody to come out singing and dancing and saying silly things. They did not expect this dark piece of literature. And that was part of the point. We wanted to say, "Look, you don't know what Yiddish literature is. Here it is. This is it, too." And one man, actually -- I still 32:00remember this from eleven years ago. He came out, he looked at me, and he said, "You shouldn't have done that play." Or, "You shouldn't have shown that play." That's what he said. "You shouldn't have shown that play." Why? I mean, somebody wrote it, it's -- we did it a few years ago again at HERE Art Center. And it was reviewed in "The New York Times," and by a reviewer who really got Hirschbein. And it was -- he said, "It's hard to watch, but it's hard to look away." I think that's the play he said that about. It must have been, yeah. Yeah.

CW:And what do you want people to learn through the plays? What can you access through them? What's your intention?

EP:I want them to know that Yiddish culture produced a literature, a dramatic 33:00literature -- I mean, all kinds of literatures. People know about the poetry. Whether they're very familiar with it, I don't know, but they don't -- nobody's ever heard of Peretz Hirschbein, for God's sake. And it's beautiful literature, their plays -- there's Hirschbein, there's Sholem Asch, there's this -- Brenner. The one we most recently did is by Dovid Pinski. These address issues that are universal. Love, or -- I mean, there is a common thread, I think, among all of the Yiddish plays that I've ever read, and that is there's this outsider. What does it mean to be an outsider? In very different ways you see that represented, 34:00but it's there. And I just want people to respect Yiddish. I want them to respect the language, to respect the culture, and to understand that it was a very rich culture, that there's not -- just the way today, we have all kinds of people in all levels of sophistication, they -- people were like that back then, too. And "Fiddler" may be a great show, but that's not how everybody lived, how all the Jews lived before the war. It just isn't. They didn't talk like that, they didn't look like that, and I just think the richness of Jewish people and Yiddish culture needs to be appreciated. And that's what I think seeing these 35:00plays does. It opens people's eyes that these were real people. And just like reading the journals from the ghettos, these are real people, day-to-day, looking for a way to get through the day when their wife was just taken away with their child and -- I mean, that's closer to the Holocaust, but what -- but it's still a day -- no, what is it? Quotidien [French, quotidian] thing. And there's this, I don't know, there's this gestalt of what Yiddish and Jewish people and their language and culture are that people always revert to without seeing the multifaceted nature, the richness, the intelligence of these plays. I 36:00mean, people think Yiddish is a joke. Most people, if you ask them do they know any Yiddish, they'll say, Oh, I know a few bad words and I know dirty jokes in Yiddish. And that's it. They think that that's what Yiddish is.

CW:Why do you think that is?

EP:Why do I think that is? I think that image is perpetuated by a lot of people who write books that are doing just that and plays that are doing just that. I don't think -- I mean, I'm going to sound harsh, but there are not very many people out there that really care. The translation doesn't have to be exactly right, it just needs to give you the gist. Well, no. If you're translating 37:00literature, then you want to give a flavor of the literature as literature. It has to be as exact as you can possibly make it. There's no excuse for being lazy with that material. And I don't see that. I'm probably the most pessimistic person about this just because of -- when I see these people who assume nobody's going to understand, and so they can say whatever they want and write whatever they want, it just -- that really makes me burn. (laughs) Yeah, for me and for my ancestors. I mean, yes, they were real people, and don't condescend to them this way.

CW:So, what has been the reaction to these plays?

EP:Well, as I said, over the years, people began to see that these were plays 38:00like any other plays. It's not as though a Yiddish play is one thing, just like a French play is not one thing or a Russian play is not one thing. Okay, the very first show, after the show it was done in this little black box on Seventh Avenue. And the date of a friend of mine came up to me afterward and he said, "How come they didn't have Yiddish accents?" And I said, "Well, when you go see a Molière play in English, do they have French accents?" And he couldn't quite understand that they -- that French and Yiddish were the same, okay? So, people 39:00got over that, but there were always people who wanted them to identify as the caricature Jew, talking like dis when he doesn't know really how to speak Ingles, that's what they wanted to hear because that's what they thought Yiddish theater was. And I guess even the comedians who were -- what was his name? Jackie Mason. He would kind of do that. So, I said, "These people are speaking a language, their own language, very well. So, if it's in English, they're going to be speaking it well." Think of it as -- you know what I mean. They're -- but then I did a show some years later and the main character, who we -- the director and I told over and over again not to do that, not to make him into an 40:00old Jew, all right? And he just insisted, he just -- there was always a part of that and there was only so many times you can tell someone, Don't do that, because that's what they think. And you -- when we would audition actors, they would come in and say, Do you want an accent? That was for -- No, we don't want an accent. We're doing this in English. Their Yiddish did not have an English accent, and so their English should not have a Yiddish accent. Yeah, I moved away -- in the beginning, I would keep a few Yiddish words or even a whole sentence. I would teach the actors -- I was their dialogue coach and I would teach them how to pronounce these words or, of course, the whole sentence. And some friends of mine said they thought that that took them out of the play. So, 41:00I thought more about it and now I don't do that anymore, 'cause I think that's a good argument. I mean, I don't want people taken out of the play. If this is about the play, I want them to experience the play and not come out of it and say, Oh, this is a translation, and then come back. I want them to experience the drama of the play. Did that -- am I answering your question?

CW:Yeah.

EP:Okay.

CW:Definitely. And how much of the context of the play, being that these are written in the early twentieth century, is -- did you want to bring into your productions?

EP:Well, they've all been done differently. Brenner, the recent one, was written 42:00in 1907, I'm pretty sure. And the director updated it to the '50s, which another director did, too, in another play. It was -- can't remember which play, but another one that got updated to the '50s. And in both cases, they said it was because it was a time of repression, both in 1907 and then in the '50s, you had that same kind of -- you're not supposed to talk about sex, for example. And so, they've been done differently. I've learned a lot. I never knew how to produce 43:00anything or -- so, I've learned a lot over these years. In the beginning, I would always argue for doing very abstract things with the costumes and the sets. And I've kind of learned that they do have to be grounded in something for people to be able to relate. We did one a couple of years ago that -- I guess the clothes told you that it was early twentieth century, but -- it was called "On the Other Side of the River," "Af yenem zayt taykh" and -- or "yener," I think, "zayt taykh." (laughs) It was pretty abstract. I've always loved the play. I think it's about a young girl's sexual awakening. And I thought that what the director did -- that was the only female director I've ever had, was 44:00for that play, 'cause she directed a reading and then she really wanted to direct a full production. So, she did that. And who knows how a man might have done it. But she read the play the same way I did. So, that was kind of interesting. In terms of context for the -- so, that's in terms of sets and costumes. The director has a vision of how he wants to tell this story. And so, it's really up to the director. I mean, I provide input and they listen, but not -- the guiding force is the director's vision of the play, even when I wish it weren't because -- (laughs) I mean, in this last play, for example, I argued with the director a lot. I said, "This is about a relationship between a son and his mother." And he said, "No, it's not. It's a love story." I still think I'm 45:00right, (laughs) but it was interesting. You got the mother/son stuff, but you could have gotten more of it if you had thought about it that way. So, yeah, the context for the actors is very important. Someone years ago sent me a play that she said was written by one of her relatives. She couldn't read Yiddish, would I read it and consider translating it and doing it? So, I sat on it for a while. It really is not a good play, which I told her eventually, 'cause we did do a reading that -- I managed to cut away all the philosophical discussion, 'cause that's really what it was, it was a philosophical debate. But I took the story, the human story that was in there and made that the play. But it just really 46:00didn't stand on its own. But that, because they had to understand -- this was in Russia, and what the different philosophy -- how Jews were treated in Russia, I handed my actors out all this literature on anti-Semitism in Russia before the revolution and all this stuff, so that they would understand where this was all coming from. 'Cause to do that play, even the bit that I managed to put together as a sketchy play, I thought it was important that they understood all that. Why does this person want to leave, and why does that person not want to leave?

CW:So, to just return to your original mission of getting -- changing people's --

EP:Perceptions.

CW:-- perception, do you feel you've succeeded?

EP:I feel -- yes, I do. We had people come back year after year and no longer expect what they thought they were going to see that very first -- or the first few times, and instead being excited about, Well, what am I going to see now? This is all -- this literature is so rich. Let's see what this is. And these plays that I've done so far are not for everybody. The last one probably was the most commercial of anything I've ever done. But still, the ending is very dark and, I don't know, if I -- and I didn't do it because it was commercial. I did it because I wanted to do this particular play, and I also wanted to do plays by different playwrights. And so, I was looking at -- I've done four or five 48:00Hirschbein, but I didn't want to keep doing Hirschbein. I had -- so this was Pinski, and I'd done Asch, and Berkowitz, and you try to show people that they're -- people think today -- my impression is that they think that Yiddish play-- there's two Yiddish plays, "The Dybbuk" and "The Golem." Well, no. And there aren't two Yiddish playwrights. There are lots of Yiddish playwrights. And I believe I have opened their eyes to some extent, and that's all I can do.

CW:Great. Well, I wish you the best of luck --

EP:Thank you.

CW:-- as it goes forward, and thanks so much for taking the time.

EP:Well, thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. I hope people keep doing Yiddish plays well, serious Yiddish plays in addition to the fluff, and 49:00show that this culture had everything in it. It wasn't just the fluff.

CW:Great, a sheynem dank [thank you very much].

[END OF INTERVIEW]