MICHA BRYM ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is March 24th, 2016. I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center with Micha Brym 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?

MICHA BRYM: Yes.

CW:Great. So, I'd like to start, if we can, in your grandparents' generation. What do you know about your grandparents?

MB:I never knew any of my grandparents because they all died in concentration camp in Poland. And when they died, I was not yet born. (laughs) I actually had maybe -- I don't know whether they died in '42 or '43, but I was born at -- 1:00October '42. So, I never knew them.

CW:Are you aware of their professions or any --

MB:Yeah.

CW:-- facts about them?

MB:And mostly through the interview with my mother I know their profession, yes.

CW:So, can you tell me?

MB:Well, actually I knew the profession essentially on the -- my grandparents on my mother's side. And she talks a lot about them on the tape in Yiddish. But my grandfather, actually, his -- my mother's grandfather was a tailor. My mother's father was a prominent citizen in a small village in Poland called Wyszogrod. He was part of the Jewish community there, and he was multiple things at different 2:00time of his life, among which -- which was very rare in this village in Poland. He became mayor, or the mayor of the Jewish section of the village, and was a respected man. And when, for example, there was a robbery in the bank, they asked him to take charge of straightening out things (laughs) at the bank. He was also an aid to the local judge on civil matters locally, and he was very highly respected in the village.

CW:Do you know his name?

MB:His name was -- is Abbe Mayer. No, sorry. His name is Lybish Gemakh. And his wife's name is Altekhaye. And apparently, in the tape that my mother recorded, she mentions that the name was due to the fact that when she was born, it was predicted that she would have a long life. That's why her name, her surname was Altekhaye. So, these are the parents of my mother. Now, the grandparents, and particularly the grandmother of my mother, was a very important character in my 4:00mother's life. She was an orphan who had a complicated life because she was partially adopted by family.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

But she was a very interesting character with a lot of impact on the wisdom that she conveyed to my mother. She was a very generous person, and there are stories in Yiddish on the tape about her behavior that (laughs) are very well told by my mother. So, this is for the grandparents. On the parents' side, of my mother -- her father, who was assistant or mayor of that community -- in order to survive, 5:00'cause a lot of people were relatively poor, he was two things. One, he became representative of the Singer Sewing Machine locally and, as such, both my mother and some of her sister, became trainers for people who bought the machines to help them learn how to use them. He was also, at one point in time -- hold a rental outfit for bicycles. So, people who wanted to rent bicycles went to that place. The house of the parents of my mother was a fairly open house. There were 6:00six kids and my grandfather owned land locally. And at the time, in Poland, was very difficult for Jews to go to study. And he ended up -- there was what's called "numerus clausus." And he ended up selling his land to be able to send some of his kids to study in France. So, two of the six kids went to study in France. One, which was called Marcus, ended up in engineering school in Toulouse. And the other one, my aunt, my mother's sister, Rosette Ruschka, ended up -- started studying, I think, medicine, but couldn't really afford the length 7:00of the study and became a nurse. The other child out of the six that was able to do studies -- at first in Poland and then in Russia -- was Yakob, Jacob. And he became a lawyer, and apparently a very brilliant, young lawyer, but ended up dead in Russia during the war.

CW:Can you explain for people who may not know what the numerus clausus was?

MB:It was a -- I don't know whether it was a law, but a practice that made absolutely unaccessible superior studies for Jews except for -- tiny, tiny, 8:00minimum. And I guess the -- if I am correct, the significance of numerus clausus, or the meaning, is limited number of access to Jews. And it handicapped seriously the Jews who were quite a bit geared towards intellectual activity to be able to study.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:So, France offered a way out of -- around that.

MB:Yes, yes. And, of course, the cost was substantial, and therefore they needed to sell the little piece of land that they had to be able to afford that. And unluckily for him, the -- Marcus, who became an engineer in France, ended up 9:00being taken as a hostage by the German and killed close to Paris.

CW:So, your mother's family, were they religious?

MB:They were a mixed family. Some of the kids were more left-wing than others. Her father was an important person in the village and was sort of religious and had a particular seat in the synagogue. Was a very old synagogue in the village. And that seat was sort of (laughs) reserved for him, but -- and they were more traditional Jews than religious Jews. Some of the kids were very left-wing. My 10:00father was communist, and -- but a number of them were Zionist of different factions of Zionism. (laughs)

CW:Right. So, what about your father's parents?MB:My father's parents were from another village that was close to Wyszogrod but even smaller, it was called Bodzanów. And I think his father was a tailor, but he had studied accounting and became an accountant. But they had even less means than my mother's side, and very few were able to do some study, except the generation after. Those that survived the war emigrated mostly to Canada, and that's how one of my cousin-- 11:00is now a professor at University of Toronto. His father, I think, was a tailor. And he also, luckily for himself -- three of the seven or eight kids of his family went to Russia, and everyone that survived the war -- all the people that went to Russia, to the Soviet Union.

CW:Do you have a picture of what these places looked like, what life was like before the war?

MB:Yes. Actually, the pictures that I have of Bodzanów, which is even the smaller -- are relatively recent pictures, but they show wooden houses, very primitive (laughs) in terms of the look even now. There is less pictures of 12:00Wyszogrod, and -- except some of the synagogue, which was very, very old synagogue, and relatively famous. Actually, recently, the village decided to build a museum of its history, among which -- there's a Jewish section of the museum and I have never been. I've never been to Wyszogrod at all, because I was born in Russia and we came to France after the war. Well, no, we came to Poland first and then to France.

CW:Right. I don't want to, as you say, repeat what your mother says. But do you have a sense of what daily life was like for them growing up?

MB:Yes. Actually, daily life was pretty hard. The vast majority -- they were 13:00about -- over three thousand Jews in this village, and the vast majority of them were barely surviving, meaning that some -- the one that were doing okay were the people that had commerce, either in dealing with dry goods or a café or a type of environment that allowed them to make a little bit of money. But there are stories that are fairly tragic -- about the attempt to survive, particularly for women, because men were supposed to be taught a trade. Women were more likely -- be taught to be good wives, (laughs) produce kids, and do the cooking, 14:00do the homework. And my mother's family was an exception, because they wanted even most of the girls to study. My mother did not go much higher than elementary school. But it was more related to the fact that she wanted to help with the need of the family life. That was -- the traditional trades that the Jews had were either -- how do you call that? They had -- a little bit like in the story of Sholem Aleichem, they had chariots with either horses or -- and 15:00they would go from town or village to village to sell stuff and trade and things like that. Other -- the more well-to-do sometimes had a little mill, flower mill or something that could enable them to provide a service and get compensation for the service that they provided. Some had little restaurants. But these were the more well-to-do. The vast majority were not (laughs) and surviving barely by engaging themselves in trade or working for people in the village. But hard. Hard life. One of -- the wealthiest Jew in that village was actually the family 16:00of that cousin of my mother. His mother and father owned a large piece of land that they farmed. And that enabled them to employ local people. And the paradox is among those local people, there were a lot of German people. People of German origin that were living in Poland and were working as farmworkers in land that pertained to Jews. So, that was -- interesting thing. And there was, in that family, a tragic story because his father died of what was very common in these villages -- either typhus or cholera. Cholera?

CW:Cholera.

MB:Cholera. I think. And he was basically without father since the age of five. And his mother took charge of the farm and managed it until the war without major problem. And he was relatively privileged because of the income of the farm. But this was an exception. And my grandfather, my mother's father, because of his civil duties, either as mayor or in the bank or representative of the Singer Machine, made enough money to live relatively comfortably but not with much money. And some of the people in the family were a lot poorer, even. That's 18:00it about the family. The elder part of the family -- my mother was, I think, third in the six -- order of the birth. But the people that were able to study were either the men, two men, and one woman that was one of the youngest in the family, Ruschka, the sister of my mother, who actually was the reason why we came to France, because after the war, when we came from Russia to Poland, my mother and father separated. My father, who had been with the Red Army during the war -- because when they went to Russia, my mother started working in a 19:00collective farm called a sovkhoz [Russian: state-owned farm in the Soviet Union] -- yes, not a kolkhoz [Russian: collective farm in the Soviet Union], a sovkhoz -- and survived because of that during the war. But my father, who was left-wing, a communist, ended up in the Red Army and did the Berlin campaign. And on his way back from Berlin met another woman. (laughs) He fell in love. And my mother and him split when she met him in Poland. And since no one else was left alive in Poland, luckily, she found that she has one sister living in Paris, and they establish communication. And that's how we went to France when I 20:00was three-and-a-half or four years old.

CW:What do you know about how your parents ended up getting to Russia?

MB:Well, it was an interesting situation, because when the war erupted, Poland actually was one of the few countries that really tried to fight the German. And some of my uncles were in the Polish army fighting the German. It was a brief war. It was blitzkrieg, as the German called it, and very cruel. And the people from the village had left the village to go to the big city, to Warsaw, which was about seventy kilometers from that little village. And when the war was, 21:00quote, over, meaning the German had occupied all of Poland, the Jews that had gone to Warsaw from the village came back to the village and some of them felt, it was over, it's okay. And it was clear for some of the other, particularly those that were left-wing, that their lives were (laughs) in great jeopardy. So, some of them, particularly those that were left-wing-minded decided to leave Poland, and went to the Soviet Union. And with mixed result in the case of my father. They didn't go together to -- because he went from Warsaw and she went from the village. And she had at the time one child, my sister, who was born 22:00exactly -- or about one year before the war erupted. So, with a one-year child, she went by foot (laughs) and other means to Russia, and was lucky enough to be able to get to Russia. And they ended up meeting in Russia. And she lived some tough times, also, at that time, because she passed through railway stations on the way through -- inside Russia and that was a time where the German were bombing heavily. And she got, actually, a very serious wound during one of those bombings. But was a tough lady, survived and continued. Actually, the paradox is 23:00the Jews that decided that they needed to flee could not go west, because that was Germany and impossible for Jews to go. So, they went east and east was Russia. And actually, among them, the majority survived. Very hard condition, but they survived. Not all. But those that stayed, only one member of that village that survived and stayed in Poland. And that was because she was -- it's a woman. She was a little child at the time and was given temporarily to a peasant Polish family. And she was blonde and thought that she was a Catholic 24:00herself, and was educated as a Catholic to discover later on that (laughs) she was a Jew. So, that was also a very interesting story in that village.

CW:So, what are your earliest memories?

MB:Well, the earliest memories were from Russia. And in Russia, we lived in a small izba, a wooden type house. Small, tiny. One-and-a-half rooms, something like that. And my mother was forced to share it with a Russian woman, and she had one and then two kids there. And my earliest memory was that my mother needed to work in the fields during the day, and my sister was the one to keep 25:00me in the house, and she was four-and-a-half years older than I was, so -- and she was sort of impatient to stay in that place and wanted to leave the house, go to the fields. So, (laughs) one day, I -- and I don't know to which extent it's real memory or constructed memory -- that she actually went out the window, the window was just almost level with the floor, and went to the field and I was left alone in the house. And I have the image of looking through that window to see where she was. But I don't know what is image and imagination there. Another 26:00image -- but that's probably because my sister told me that we had -- she had stolen an arbuz, which is a -- what is it called? A watermelon.

CW:Watermelon?

MB:Yes, a watermelon. And it's very big and heavy, so she couldn't carry it. So, she rolled it on the ground to bring it to the izba and was finally able to bring it. But in her way of telling me the story, I have the impression that I saw it. I don't know. I don't think it's true, but it's imagination. Other than that, I don't have any more memory from Russia because even though -- it was a very tough period, because I was born in October 1942 during the battle of Stalingrad in the Stalingrad Oblast, which is the region of Stalingrad. But we 27:00were more than a hundred kilometers from Stalingrad itself. But in the middle of the battle, not very pleasant place to be. And after the war, some of my memory -- are clearer. And when we went to Poland, we couldn't go to the village of my mother's youth, because there were no more Jews there and Jews were not welcome there. Actually, when my uncle, the cousin of my mother, went from Russia to Poland, back, he was told that he would risk his life if he went back to Wyszogrod. But he decided to go anyway and was able not to be too much in 28:00trouble there. But he was a young man, strong, and was not afraid. But there was only one or two Jews that were left in the village out of close to four thousand. So, we went back to Poland but we went to the part, I think, that was recovered from Germany by the Russian army. And we were guest in a house that I remember images of, where the women owning the house was a German woman whose 29:00two son have fought in the German army. And they were sort of obliged to play host to Jews, which was a little bit strange. And in that village, I went -- this was my first contact with elementary -- well, pre-elementary school. And I still have images of this school because winter were fairly cold and we were doing luge -- what is the name?

CW:Sledding?

MB:Slide?

CW:Sled? Sledding?

MB:Sled. That was one of my memories there.

CW:And it was a mixed school? Just a public school?MB:This was a mixed school, yes. But it was -- after the war, it was Poland. Poland was essentially controlled by communists and there were no question anymore of having segregated schools.

CW:And then you were there just for one year before --

MB:For one year. And enough to learn a little bit of Polish, which I forgot now. And then we went to France. And in France, my mother had two children by that time, had no profession that she could earn easily money on. She had been a teacher of embroidery made with Singer machines. And she didn't know French, so ended up doing piecemeal work. She borrowed money to buy a machine, did some piecemeal work, but didn't have enough money to really have us with her. So, we 31:00were housed in a children's home for children that had either lost their parents during the war or were partially displaced and semi-orphan. And that, paradoxically -- I was four, five years old -- was a period of my life that I remember (laughs) absolutely fondly because I had a great time there. It was with groups. It had teachers, or volunteer teachers that were young, beautiful, really concerned with the kids.

CW:This was in Nice?

MB:In France. In Nice, yes. And one of the -- incredible element is that the -- monitrice, the woman that took care of us, whose name was Greta, was German and was from a left-wing family in Germany. The man that was her partner and then her husband, was a Jew that had escaped from concentration camp. And I remember her as magical. And one of the thing that happened is later on, I learned that 33:00she had lived some serious trauma during the war. She was still extremely young and had been probably forced to go to the Hitler-Jugend [German: Hitler Youth] at the time. And to a certain extent, her meeting that Jew and becoming his partner was trying to compensate for -- and tragically ended up committing suicide. However, recently, I discovered that she had kids. And I met with one of her son who she gave my name to. (crying) It's very emotional for me. So, I 34:00have another Micha, named after me, in Paris.

CW:Wow.

MB:But I found it tragic that that woman committed suicide.

CW:Was that recently?

MB:Oh, that was not recently. She was --

CW:No, I mean, you met recently or you knew about this?

MB:Oh, only two years ago, in my seventies. (laughs) And he's younger than I am, because she had that child after the time. But that was -- my memories of that period, then I have some photographs of that, is a very happy set of youth. That was very unusual, because people, when -- I have a lot of friends in France that 35:00are psychoanalysts. And imagine that I had terrible time away from my mother with the background that I had. And when I tell them I had a great time there, they cannot believe it.

CW:And your sister was there, as well?

MB:She was also there, as well. But at times, we were separated because we were in different homes. So, I was in Nice and she was in Aix-les-Bains which is another town in France. And an interesting anecdote on that is, we were in different places and a film director decided to make a movie about the attempt of Jews to emigrate to the United States in illegal manner on boats. And people 36:00were coming to these houses, to these children's home to take photograph of kids that they would take as extras in the movie. And they chose me and they choose my sister from different places and we ended up being in that movie. And this was done by a sort of a fairly left-wing film director called Louis Daquin and the film title was "Maître après Dieu," meaning "Master after God." And it was -- the title came from the fact that on a boat, a captain is the master after God. And it's the story -- is told as a bunch of Jewish refugees all trying to 37:00escape Europe and end up on that boat, which is a freight boat, tough stuff. But the captain is portrayed first as a rough guy, doesn't -- he wants to do business. He doesn't care about Jews, no Jews, whatever. (laughs) And as he discovers the fate of those Jews and those kids, becomes more and more involved with the process and really tries to save them. And it's a time in which United States did not accept refugees from Europe, and particularly the Jews. And in the story, the boat is forced to go back. And the captain decides to destroy his 38:00boat so that US is forced to accept them. So, that's the story.

CW:Wow. In which language did you speak with your mother?

MB:In Yiddish. And that was partially because when we left Russia -- I was three-and-a-half years old, so I spoke Russian. But then, in Poland, people wanted me to -- particularly in going with other kids -- spoke Polish. And for my mother, it was easier to maintain Yiddish as a communication means for both me and my sister. And my sister was four-and-a-half years older than I was. She was born in '38 and -- was born in '42. And she spoke Yiddish even -- much better than I did. But Yiddish was a pleasant language for me, and good 39:00communication means with my mother.

CW:So, when you came back to Paris, what was life like at that time in Paris?

MB:Paris after the war -- well, we lived in a very blue-collar neighborhood, actually, in an area that used to be a hot area in revolutionary time in France, both in the 1789 period of the revolution but, as well, the subsequent revolution in 1830, in 1848. And we lived in a tiny one-room apartment that had a corner where there was a little bit water access and sort of a kitchen corner. 40:00And it was so small that my sister and I and my mother could not stay in that one room. So, they asked her sister, who had the bigger apartment, to host me. So, I lived a number of years in the apartment of my aunt, Rosette Ruschka, who was the sister of my mother. The life in Paris was -- we were -- our status, because we were coming not as legal immigrant, was as refugees and that was called at the time in French "apatride," which means without country. And for many years, the French government and its bureaucracy did not want to give us French nationality. So, we were forced regularly to go to the préfecture de 41:00police [French: police precinct] to check paper for anything: to get the right to work, for the -- my mother, et cetera, et cetera. It was a bureaucratic nightmare. However, made lots of friends, enjoyed Paris, and was in elementary school that was very close to that one-room apartment my mother had. And that school, we were forty-two kids. I started school late, actually, in France. Was almost eight years old when I started school. And out -- we were forty-two kids in that class. Out of the forty-two kids, only three went to high school. The 42:00rest went to either professional school or -- so, it was fairly poor neighborhood. And very few Jews at the time there. So, I was the only Jew in my class. And paradoxically, since there were very few Jews, I never felt anti-Semitism there (laughs) because people didn't take me for a Jew. They didn't even know I was a Jew. The only thing they knew is I had a little bit -- I looked more -- a little bit like Asiatic. I have a little bit darker skin and my eyes were a little bit -- so, they -- some of them took me for Chinese. (laughs) And that was it.

CW:And did you go to synagogue when you were in that period?

MB:No, I was not religious. Well, my mother believed in God but it's more a 43:00belief that is, I would say, because of destiny. She believed in God because she survived these periods that were incredibly difficult. But when I became of age of making my bar mitzvah, she ask me to do my bar mitzvah. At the time, I didn't believe in God and I didn't want to do my bar mitzvah. But she insisted and I said, "Okay, this is my last concession." (laughs) So, I did my bar mitzvah, but we had moved by that time to the section in Paris which is called Le Marais, which is the real Jewish -- the old Jewish section of Paris. And I did my bar mitzvah with a very interesting rabbi, who had been timonier dans la marine, 44:00what -- meaning he had been the rabbi for the French navy and therefore he -- for the Jews that were in the navy, he served the purpose of rabbi. But he liked the title that he had there, and had all of his kids raised up in sailor's uniform (laughs) and it was really funny. But he was a very interesting man. He knew that I was not religious and told me that I had still to learn a little bit of Hebrew. And if he was willing to get me to do my bar mitzvah -- but I had to give in to some of his requirements. And he was an interesting guy.

CW:So, why did you move to the Jewish neighborhood?

MB:That's also circumstantial. It's because my mother's sister bought an apartment that was on Rue Ferdinand-Duval in Paris, which is -- cross with Rue des Rosiers, which is the typical Jewish street in Paris. Actually, Rue Ferdinand-Duval used to be named, in the nineteenth century, la rue aux Juifs, the street of the Jews. And my aunt had moved in -- I think in 1952 or '53 into a very large old apartment for very cheap money at the time, but that was large enough to have no problem having me live there. So, I lived there for a number 46:00of years. And that was a time that I went to high school. And it was great.

CW:As you were growing up, what did it mean to you to be Jewish?

MB:Ah. That became more and more important as I grew up, not because of my bar mitzvah but because I felt that the history of my family really was strongly impacted by the fact that they were Jews. And I was sort of left-wing and the maison de l'enfant, the children's home, were managed by, I think, a communist organization who, after the war, wanted to help the Jews that were still alive. 47:00And even after that, I went to camp for several years, to another organization called Commission Centrale de l'Enfance with the same type of objective, meaning, raising kid with left-wing environment. And I remember us watching Russian movies (laughs) as entertainment. And being left-wing was a perfectly natural phenomenon there and that was the spirit, that -- but all of the kids, both in the children's home and in the camp, were Jews. But they were Jews from -- not religious environment but left-wing environment. And it mirrored, more or 48:00less, what had been, in Poland, even before the war -- where Jews were often, even in the same family, split between ultra-left-wing kids and Zionist kids and religious kids. So, that mix existed.

CW:Was the feeling -- I mean, did the communism or left-wing -- was that synonymous with anti-religious? I mean, were --

MB:Yes, yes. Not in a matter of propaganda but for them, the story of the bravery of the Russian army and the Russian Revolution was far more important than any religious affiliation. And it was fine with me.

CW:So, when, if you look back on your childhood, I guess in your youth, when did you feel Jewish? In what situations?MB:Well, in camp, for example, even though they were not Jewish culture oriented, we were still singing -- even in the revolutionary songs, they were Jewish songs, some of them. And there was nothing that was anti-Jewish in the camps. On the contrary, I think the part of history that people would refer to were the roles of Jews in the Russian Revolution. 50:00(laughs) But it came later, as I became very interested in the Jewish culture, that some literature, some story about the village, for example, but that's -- I was already an adult. When I was in my mid-twenties, I started being interested in the story that my mother wanted to tell me about her youth and her village. And, of course, I had been exposed to some of the little piece of Jewish literature, like Sholem Aleichem, but not in Yiddish. In French, at the time.CW:Through school or home or --

MB:Hm?

CW:Through school or home? How did you encounter --

MB:It was home, essentially. In school, as I told you, it was neighborhood which, at the time, had very few Jews. And it's after leaving the left-wing organization, I became interested in a Zionist left-wing organization actually called Hashomer Hatzair, which, by the fact, you probably know, (laughs) Bernie Sanders was associated with at one point in time in his life. (laughs) Anyway, I stayed with that organization for two or three years and made a lot of friends there. Went to work in a kibbutz for a summer and enjoyed it. And at that time, 52:00which was in the late '50s, I met, for the second time, my father, who had immigrated -- he had stayed in Poland after the war. Out of being communist, it was normal for him to stay in Poland. Being a Jew, he started having problems, even in a communist country. And actually, when the Gomułka government got in power in the mid '50s, it ended up being almost intolerable. And he decided with his new wife and child to emigrate to Israel. And when I came to Israel, he wanted to meet me and came to the kibbutz to invite me to his home. And that's 53:00when we had our second encounter after a brief encounter in Poland.

CW:What was that like?

MB:The encounter with my father? It was interesting because I had mixed feeling about him, having abandoned a wife and two children. So, he tried to break the ice during the time I was at his home. And I had come with three other people from the kibbutz, young people, my group. And he tried to break the ice, was very nice, had dinner and whatever, and then proposed to me to play a game of chess, which -- at the time, I was extremely interested in chess. And I remember 54:00one thing very strongly: I wanted badly to beat him at chess, and I did. But I never knew whether he let me beat him or whether I was good enough to beat him. So, that's what I remember from that period. And we had a little incident on the way back from his place, because we tried to do -- it was a Friday evening and in that section, as at the time most of Israel, there were no more public transportation at that time. So, we tried to do hitchhiking. And we got a lift on a jeep of people that looked fairly nice that were Arab Palestinian. And they 55:00invited us for dinner at their place and we went there. It was in the village, mostly an Arab village, in Israel. And I remember -- incident in which, because of police patrol there, they suddenly said to close the iron curtain of their store, to not being bothered by the police. So, they did it and at that time, some of the kids that were with me became concerned that this may be becoming a dangerous situation, because we didn't know who they were, what their motivation were. But it ended up being very nice people. And when we told them that we were in a kibbutz that was relatively far from there, they ended up driving us back 56:00through the kibbutz. But it was a period of doubt for some of us.

CW:Out of curiosity, what language did you speak with your father when you met?

MB:With my father? In Yiddish. Because by that time, I did not know any more Polish or Russian, and the only language we could really communicate with was in Yiddish. By that time, my Yiddish was no longer as good as it had been, but was good enough to communicate.

CW:With your mother, did you always speak Yiddish with her? Did you switch languages?

MB:No. No. After a number of years in France, we spoke in a mix of French. And when there was a problem, a little bit of Yiddish. But it was mostly French.

CW:So, you said as you got older your Jewish identity changed a little bit? Can you --

MB:Oh, yeah, it became important. And important -- when people were to ask me what that meant for me to be a Jew, one of my position was to say, "Look, if tomorrow another ultra-right-wing government came to power and anti-Semitism re-flourished, whether I believe in God or not, I would be a Jew. So, I am a Jew and I have no problem recognizing it. On the contrary, I became interested in the culture. For me, being a Jew was more a question of culture and historical heritage. And that was great. I was very proud of being part of that tiny 58:00minority of population that had contributed so much to a lot of areas.

CW:So, I want to ask about the interviews you did with your mother. How did this come about?

MB:Well, I had had a very multinational exposure, and at the time, in France, military service was mandatory. And it so happened that after many years of being without country in terms of status of immigrant, the French government decided that I deserved to become a French citizen. (laughs) So happened that they decided that when I was eighteen years old, and that is the time where they 59:00start registering people for military duties. (laughs) So, the whole family became French at the time. And that was a time of the Algerian War, where France had up to five hundred thousand soldiers in Algeria. I did not want to go to Algeria. It was an independence war, and I was more sympathetic to the Algerian than to the French and -- but I was studying and I had deferral of my military service. And while I was studying at -- was deferred from military duties, the Algerian War ended. And I still did not want to go to the regular military 60:00service, because I was in an engineering school that was sort of -- fairly prestigious and they wanted us to become officer. So, we had to go through a special military training to become officer. And I then ask -- I volunteered to go to a special kind of service in France called Coopération Technique, which means technical corporation. The closest things in the US is maybe the Peace Corps. And I ended up being sent to Venezuela, where I taught physic in a university there. And that's where my Spanish come from. (laughs) And in coming back to France, I had problem because I develop polio. But after I came out of 61:00the hospital -- was five months in the hospital -- I decided that life was fairly hectic and problematic and that I had not known very much about -- I had never been in the village of my mother and her family. I was interested in it. And I knew that she was a good storyteller. So, I asked her if she would be willing to talk. And she was absolutely eager, (laughs) and we had a number of session in which she -- at my aunt's place, because was more comfortable -- sit down on a couch, like you, with a thing and we taped first on the reel-to-reel 62:00machine, then transferred it and used a cassette recorder. But fairly primitive, so the recording quality is probably fairly mixed, but good enough. So, we had a number of sit-down session where she was telling stories. So, the total is probably about three hours. And it has periods where she talks about her grandmother who is a very important element in her life. Life in the village, her family, and thereafter other episodes in her life and the village life. And I enjoyed that. And that's why I kept those tape preciously. (laughs) And about ten years ago or more, maybe fifteen years ago -- since they were old cassettes, 63:00I decided to have it transferred to better quality thing, and I used a professional sound engineer who transferred it to numeric cassette. Not video, but numeric audio cassette, but in a format that I don't know how to transfer to anything else. (laughs) So, I was lucky to be able to transfer the analog cassette into the computer on numeric sound files. That was it.

CW:So, what was the impact, if any, on your relationship, this -- doing these interviews?

MB:Well, I kept -- very emotional about the content of these interviews. And the interesting things there is the -- as I said, my mother was a very good storyteller. And some of her story were so fantastic that I was wondering, is it reality, is it folklore, is it imagined? So, I decided to check it out a little bit and I decided to try to interview my -- her sister, my aunt, about the same events. And I found out two things in that attempt. One was that a number of the events that my mother was referring to did actually occur, maybe not with some 65:00of the embellishment that she had, but it did occur. So, that was reality. But I also find out that my aunt was -- had gone to college and was more -- spoke French very fluently -- was a completely flat storyteller. In other words, very little interest in the way she was telling the same stories. And that was an interesting discovery, and that told me that there was something in the stories of my mother that was special.

CW:Can you describe how her style -- what made her stories so compelling?

MB:Well, it made me think in some of the literature of Isaac Bashevis Singer, 66:00where you have a mixture of magic and reality in the story, in the short stories. And I found that, with time, very interesting. And that mix of magic and reality is something that I think you find quite a bit in the Jewish culture, particularly in the Yiddish writing.

CW:Over time, what have these interviews come to mean for you, for your family?

MB:Well, I decided quite some time ago that we should keep it as a record in the family. And I send a copy of the numerical file to my sister and she has started 67:00translating them in French. And I also send them to a cousin who is the son of the brother of my mother -- that was executed as a hostage by the German. And he lives now in San Diego and has put those things as with -- he was interested in genealogy, so he put a genealogical tree of the family online and appended some of these recordings to the story of my mother. And as I said, I was surprised to 68:00learn that eight years later, Chantal Akerman made a movie of my mother telling some of the same stories, but in French. (laughs)

CW:Yeah. So, over your lifetime, what has been the role of Yiddish in your life?

MB:Yiddish has been occasionally very convenient. And when I mean convenient, I mean, for example, we went to winter sport with a Zionist organization, Hashomer Hatzair to Switzerland. And it was in the German section of Switzerland. And we were given, as an assignment, by the folks there, to do an inquiry about the history of the village that we were in. And, of course, I didn't know German, 69:00and we went to see the mayor of that little village and he started communicating to me in German and I answered in Yiddish and we were able to get ourselves understood. So, that was really fun. Another time, and this is a more negative part of Yiddish, when I was in Israel, in that kibbutz, and we were traveling, I had learned very rudimentary -- some words in Hebrew, mostly pragmatic, to ask directions or something like that. And on the street, we meet with two elderly men. And with my broken Hebrew, I ask them how to go somewhere. And to my surprise, the people look at me a little bit suspiciously and answer in Yiddish. 70:00And I asked in Hebrew. I was a little bit shocked, but I answered in Yiddish. And when they heard me speak in Yiddish, their face changed and they were suddenly incredibly friendly, (laughs) whereas they had been sort of distant before. I looked like a shvarts, meaning I looked like a Sepharad and they were obviously Ashkenaz and they didn't -- were not that interested in communicating with me. So, the Yiddish here was a discrimination tool. (laughs)

CW:Interesting. Did you have any other encounters with Yiddish in Israel in that time? It's sort of a period where --

MB:Well, in Israel, for example, a woman in the village, a very young woman that 71:00was partially orphaned that my mother had taken under her protection to teach her some trade -- ended up being very -- marrying a very religious Jew and they immigrated to Israel. And when I went to Israel, I was interested in seeking out whether she was still alive and who they were. And I was able to go to the small village where she was, where her husband was the post carrier, and we had a wonderful evening, of course, speaking in Yiddish. And she told me some of the stories about that -- her experience with my mother. So, that was great. So, I found that Yiddish was sort of like a -- international language. I'd used it in 72:00Israel, I'd used it in France, I'd used it in the United States.

CW:So, what does the language mean to you now?

MB:Yiddish? I think I'm glad that institution like these have flourished. And I was a little bit resentful in the fact that, in Israel, there is a mixed feeling about Yiddish, that there's almost a duty, because Israel has adopted Hebrew as their national language, to sort of set aside Yiddish as an old language that's dying. I think Yiddish has a folklore and a culture that's so rich that should 73:00be preserved. Actually, what that made me think of: when I lived in Venezuela, I was teaching in a university, in Spanish, but I was teaching physics. Much easier teach than literature for me, because the terms, the scientific terms are more common, close to English or French than in literature. And I went for one long period of university vacation to -- deep in the forest in Venezuela, to live for a while with Indians. And there, I had one of the most striking experience in my life, which was living with people that had their own language, 74:00had their own culture, had a self-sufficient way of life in which they were living in symbiosis with the forest. And it seemed so wonderful. Why did it seem wonderful? Because majority of the Indians that were living in Venezuela had been acculturé -- I don't know what --

CW:Acculturated?

MB:Acculturated? Meaning they had lost --

CW:Assimilated, maybe?

MB:They were not quite assimilated, but had lost their identity. Were living in mostly priest-sponsored camp where they were forced to wear Western clothes that -- looked like beggars in those clothes, whereas the Indians that I lived with 75:00there, with an anthropologist and a doctor, European type -- no, the doctor was Peruvian. The anthropologist was French. They were living a completely authentical, rich, healthy life and I was wondering, Were they going to be strong enough to preserve that lifestyle in spite of the contact and the almost forced assimilation that they were exposed to? And I was flabbergasted that they were able to live still with that rich culture. And that made me think of Yiddish and the future of preservation of that language because, alas, the last 76:00time I looked for the tribe of Indians that I was exposed to, they are now practically all gone, completely accultured. The priest that tried to convert them to Catholicism forced them to believe that their prior life is what caused Christ to die, things that are so -- not only cruel but wrong, and I consider that criminal. And yet, these Indians now are probably disappearing completely.

CW:So, can you say more about how that relates to Yiddish for you?

MB:Well, they were speaking their own language. It was not Spanish. They had minimal contact with the Criollos, which is the mixed-blood people that were 77:00living not far. And they were extremely proud of their culture and language. The anthropologist that was with us had worked with them and knew their language. So, he had to help us communicate with them, had made us a little lexicon with Spanish and French and their language words. And we lived with that, with something that was almost magical. That was -- the stereotype wants to think of it as prehistoric lifestyle, but these people were incredibly curious. Yes, they were painted and yes, they had feathers in their ears and things like that, but 78:00they were very rich, cultured people. For example, they did not know what stealing meant, because what you own is either what you could -- made of your own hands or what you could trade with someone that made it of his own hand. So, we had stuff that they really needed and liked, like nylon thread and hooks to fish and machete to cut things and things like that. And we had them in our rucksack, in the same hut where they lived and where we lived. But they never touched anything and never stole anything of what we had. But they did propose 79:00us -- item that they had to exchange for stuff that they wanted. And that was interesting in terms of how a culture can be rich enough to ignore some stuff that seemed eternal or natural in other culture. And Yiddish has some specific elements that made it very unique. And that's the linkage that I see.

CW:What do you think is the future for Yiddish?

MB:Oh, there's multiple future. There's the cultural future that is now strong because of institution like these, but there is many of those now in the world, and is rich and fairly well-endowed, can pursue. And there is the other side of 80:00Yiddish that I feel more mixed feeling of, which is the ultra-religious side, some of the Hasidic group, who -- some which have become extremely intolerant of the outside world and try more and more to isolate themselves into communities that are closed. I am not that fond of that trend of Yiddish. For example, in Paris, in the Jewish section where I lived, my aunt's apartment was in a structure that had been, in the sixteenth century, a relais de poste, a place 81:00where post item -- were carried to, and was reserved for coach and horses. And you went into the courtyard of that to change the horses, to get the mail elsewhere. And in that place, had moved in a group of Hasidim who were bearded, pious, and whatever, but who had kids of all ages, and even very small kids. And when I met the kids in the courtyard, the only language they knew was Yiddish. They couldn't speak French and they were born in France. I found that sad. And that's not -- that's a little bit the bad side of trying to preserve things like 82:00that. I think that the Yiddish culture is so rich, and actually that the fact that it was closed is more related to forced closing like ghettos, but that the Jewish culture itself is extremely open to the world and favorable to a lot of things that I found great. So, this is my feeling. It's ambivalent. On the one hand, I think it's a great language that should be preserved and seems that (laughs) it's going to be preserved for long time. But on the other hand, it is used by other people as a means of establishing a barrier between them and the rest of the world.

CW:Well, before we close, are there other stories that you wanted to tell me? (laughter)

MB:If you watch the video of my mother in that other interview in French, (laughs) at the end of the interview, the film director, Chantal Akerman asked my mother, "Do you have other stories to tell," like you do now. And she said, "Well, do I have other stories to tell? It would take hours and hours!" (laughs) So, I wouldn't say it's the same, because I'm not a great storyteller. And she was so much better than I am, and -- but, of course, there is always lots of stories.

CW:Well, I am curious if you have any favorite Yiddish phrases or songs?

MB:Ah, there is one song that is a partisan song that I found extraordinary, and 84:00I don't -- yeah, I think it's from Lithuania or L'vov or that area from the partisans that fought the German during World War II and lived in absolutely terrible condition. But that song was composed, I think, in that time. And I know only the beginning sentence in Yiddish, and they are very strong. It's "Zog nisht kayn mol" (crying) -- I get emotional -- "Az di gayst dem letstn veyg," which means -- you understand what it means? It's -- means never say that you go 85:00to your last walk. That's one of the song that I find very emotional and extremely strong.

CW:Do you know where you learned that?

MB:What?

CW:Do you know where you learned that?

MB:Where?

CW:Where you learned the song?

MB:Oh, I have heard it sung by my mother, by other family members. And I received -- I ordered, actually, a DVD from -- I think it's sponsored by the -- not this organization, but --

CW:The Center for Jewish Film, maybe?

MB:The people that try to pursue Nazi that were left. Wiesenthal Center. And it 86:00was absolutely great. I watched it and it's a strong part of the history of the Jews.

CW:So, why is it so meaningful to you, that line?

MB:Okay, it's so meaningful because a number of anti-Semites and people that are not very sympathetic to either the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust says, They went to death like bunch of sheeps. No resistance, nothing. And this is the strongest counter-story about that, as well as the Warsaw Ghetto and the 87:00uprising there. It's things that not only cannot be ignored but I understand, to a certain extent, why some Jews apparently went to the camps without the thought that they were really risking their lives. Because a number of German Jews, for example, who had been the aristocracy of the Jewish community, who were part of banking families and things like that, when the war erupted, still felt that they were safe. That they could not imagine that such monstrosity could develop out of fascism. And it was a little bit too late when they really became aware 88:00of it. So, that's that part of the story of the Jews. But a number of these Jews didn't want to speak Yiddish. They wanted to be completely assimilated, and that happens with both the Jews in Germany and the Jews in Austria. And they both suffered bad outcomes.

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

MB:You're welcome. (laugher)

CW:Thanks very much for taking the time.

[END OF INTERVIEW]