MARK SLOBIN ORAL HISTORY

HANKUS NETSKY: -- and I'm speaking with Mark Slobin on May 27th, 2016, here at his apartment in New York City. So, can you start by telling us about your family background?

MARK SLOBIN: Sure. I was born in 1943 in Detroit. My father was born in Detroit. His mother was born in New York in 1890, so on that side, I'm third-generation Yankee. My mother was an immigrant. She grew up in Uman, in South Ukraine and escaped. They were refugees in Romania in 1921, got almost the last visas to 1:00America in 1923, because there was a relative who came earlier. And then they got to Detroit. And they met in Hebrew school. They were both avid Hebrew types. I grew up with Yiddish around -- lots of Yiddish in the family. And Russian. They knew Russian poetry -- they would get up and recite -- the older relatives. And, very much a sense of the old country and where they came from. They had what they called the Uman (UNCLEAR) geographical society, where they would sit and talk about the town and people and stuff like that. And I know a lot of people have no clue about their families, where they came from. And for some reason, this family was really interested in that, and kept it up. So it became part of my mythology, too -- all these stories -- and the Yiddish language. As 2:00it happened, when I was ten, my father got a Fulbright, and we lived in Vienna for a year. And they threw me into a classroom, and I learned native German. So, when I came back -- I was still only eleven -- all the Yiddish fell into place. It made sense to me in a kind of way that it hadn't before. And I was still at home another six years. So, I really felt very European, and the experience of having lived in Europe in the immediate postwar period really intensified the whole sense of cultural orientation. And they sang a lot. They sang in the car, they sang around the piano. Gilbert and Sullivan, Russian romantsn [Russian: romances], Yiddish and Hebrew songs. My father's repertoire was vast. He sang "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," because his mother had sent him to a Y camp, 3:00not quite thinking through what a Y camp was. So he could sing Yiddish vaudeville, American vaudeville, German songs, Russian, and Yiddish. And he enjoyed singing. So yeah, it was a really culturally deep place to be brought up.

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HN: Tell us about your Jewish background.

MS: That was my Jewish background. My parents taught Hebrew school -- both of them -- Sunday school. It was a side job. They didn't push Hebrew on me, and so I never really learned it. They did push Yiddish. They actually sat down and had us learn to read and write Yiddish. So I was able to write letters to my grandmother in Yiddish, and read the stuff. But Hebrew was the one thing I could avoid. You know, there was an obligation, so I always just avoided it. I mean, I 4:00had a bar mitzvah. My father taught me. He really knew all that stuff. He also knew -- you know, Gemara and God knows what. But he never practiced it. And we didn't go to shul. I would pick up my grandmother after services -- Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. We did every holiday at home. We had big family seders. It was all serious -- you know, matzo all week, all these kinds of things. But it was not an observant home. Because we lived in the neighborhood, which was an enclave -- it was a shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community]. And that was what Judaism was, was living with people. It was, like, life is with people. So you behaved that way. The little guy who came to the door -- the egg man -- you know, you would talk Yiddish to him. You went to shop on Twelfth Street, now Rosa Parks Boulevard. People would talk Yiddish. They'd 5:00give you a cookie in the bakery. Barrels of pickles on the floor. And it was so culture-bound, your life, that it -- what did that mean in terms of a Jewish background? It was a very particular experience for my generation which, of course, people don't have anymore.

HN: Now, at some point, you started playing the violin.

MS: Yes, at four years old. Right. So classical music was kind of a religion. Going to the concert was like going to services -- you had to go to concerts. And the investment in classical music of this community was really deep, but so was it in Boston and Cincinnati. I've looked into their newspapers doing my research. And so it was in Berlin and Vienna and Kiev. The Jews bought into classical music as part of modernity, as part of being upwardly mobile 6:00culturally, having cultural capital -- of identifying with the establishment that protected them in the Austrian Empire, in Germany -- if one can remember that period -- as opposed to the street hooligans and the anti-Semitic crowds. Detroit was not different. Detroit was the most anti-Semitic city in America. Henry Ford was spewing hatred in the 1920s and paying for the publication of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Father Coughlin, the radio priest, listened to by millions of people across America, was rabidly anti-Semitic, and nobody stopped him. And so forth. You had the Michigan Legion, which was kind of a local Klan. So the Jews -- it's not surprising -- and you can read this in the sociology -- that they lived in an enclave, because they felt more comfortable being kind of huddled together in a certain kind of way. And classical music was 7:00one of the ways that they performed civic identity and cultural identity. So they supported classical music in every possible way. The Music Study Club starts with a bunch of Jewish ladies in the 1920s, directly on the model of the Tuesday Musicale, which had been started by non-Jewish ladies in the 1880s. And that meant that they patronized child prodigies, many of whom became important American musicians, concertmasters, soloists, coming through Detroit. So it was a producer of really serious concert artists -- Ruth Meckler Laredo, Seymour Lipkin -- I mean, starting in the earlier generations and going on through. A lot of these kids were using the public schools, which were very supportive of classical music, but there was an entire parallel Jewish structure of support 8:00systems. So, I was in the Junior Music Study Club. We would get together and play music. That was one of my major social circles. So, they had taken me to recitals probably at the age of three, because by four, I said, "I want to play the violin," 'cause I had already seen this. And they said, Well, maybe it's a little young. There was no Suzuki. Okay, so how did you learn violin at four? It happened that one of their really good friends, who was a high school teacher like my father, was a high school music teacher named Bernard Silverstein. His son, Joseph Silverstein -- Joey -- became the longtime concertmaster of the Boston Symphony and went off to Curtis at the age of thirteen or something. And so, Ben knew something about violin teaching. And so, Ben said, "Oh, I'll try it with the boy." And he found me a quarter-size fiddle. And it worked. I was in the All City Orchestra by the time I was six or seven -- the junior division -- 9:00and went right into the classical music pathway, which was all there. You know, you just got onto this path -- you just merged right onto it. It was there.

HN: So you also, I believe, had a brother who played the piano, right?

MS: Right. My brother was almost four years older. Yes. He was the pianist. So that was another reason I was a violinist -- then we could play music together and we could play "Happy Birthday" at every party, and we could play "The Anniversary Waltz" at anniversaries together. And it was expected that we would play.

HN: So this all led you to music school?

MS: Yeah. Well, I never went to -- I mean, yeah, there wasn't an actual music 10:00school in Detroit I went to, but I went to Cass Tech, which was the great magnet school of Detroit, which produced -- all of these musicians went to Cass Tech. I mean, we're talking the Kavafian sisters, we're talking Rita Sloan, my friend, who's a pianist, who is a great piano pedagogue at the Aspen Festival. The list is unbelievably long of the -- Robert and [Darryl Burns?], my buddies, who were -- their mother was from Kentucky -- a French horn player -- they were both -- you know, and the Philadelphia and the Boston career (UNCLEAR) -- the list is endless. And we all studied with [Mr. Bystritsky?], who was a Russian Jewish guy -- [Misha?] Bystritsky. And Bystritsky, who had the European training, inculcated a Europeanness at every turn. As we went to our orchestra rehearsals every day, he told us the stories about classical music in old Europe. So, we 11:00understood this in some kind of deep way -- the heritage of all of this. And Cass Tech had music programs that were already famous in the 1920s -- one of the nationally known, renowned music curricula in America. And so, you went through that whether you were in jazz -- I mean, we're talking Ronald Carter in the orchestra -- Ron Carter, we're talking Paul Chambers -- this place was a nursery for a vast number of musicians in the '30s, '40s, and '50s that went into the jazz worlds, into the classical world. And so, the Jews were kind of folded into this structure -- of an ongoing structure that was there -- through this kind of charismatic guy. The jubilee they held after Bystritsky died was like -- the guest list was just phenomenal of who sat down and played. And they played -- 12:00like, they didn't just play cute pieces; they played Shostakovich quartet movements and Hindemith and things, because that's the stuff they learned. And there was a phalanx of teachers. And the Jewish Center had its own parallel orchestra run by Julius Chajes, a Viennese composer who had emigrated to Palestine, came to America, and was hired to run a completely autonomous school of music within the Jewish Community Center of Detroit with choruses, ballet, and other things. And he created a music scene using the Detroit Symphony, which was mostly Jewish players -- and Jewish Music Months of the Detroit Symphony -- playing works of Chajes accidentally. And he had a wife named Marguerite, who was a singer. And they were this dynamic duo. They raised money, they appeared everywhere, they're in the society page, they're touring Europe, they're doing 13:00this, they're doing that. So the music establishment was extremely well rooted in -- not just in the Jewish community, but as a player in the Detroit cultural scene.

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MS: I took violin lessons, but I didn't do much with it. Then I went to college, I went to Michigan. The first two years, I did no music. I did Asian Studies. I got fascinated by that, and wanted to be an Orientalist. In the third year, through a series of accidents, I was asked to come and study with this woman at Manhattan School of Music, and I decided to take the opportunity, get out of Detroit, grow up, live in New York. So, I went to the Manhattan School for two years, from age nineteen to twenty-one. And that's my only music school experience -- which I quickly grew to totally hate, because I couldn't stand 14:00conservatory life -- the anti-intellectualism, the competitiveness, the lack of interest in anything other than playing faster or better and flashier. I was -- Can I go back to a university, please? So I went back to the university, discovered there was ethnomusicology -- and that combined my Orientalism interests and my music interests, and became an ethnomusicologist.

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HN: Why Afghanistan?

MS: All right. So I was in graduate school -- I was just starting -- and in the 1960s, if you were a graduate student, you had to find a territory of your own to write about, do your dissertation and make your place in the field. We knew very little about most of the music of the world at that time. There were almost no recordings of anything, outside of folkways. And one of the places that nobody knew anything about was Afghanistan. There was nothing to read about and, like, three LP albums -- that was it. And so, I studied Persian and decided to 15:00go off and plant the flag for science in Afghanistan. And I was just married for a year -- went off with my wife Greta. And, it was quite a wonderful adventure. It was a nice country then. Very receptive to foreigners, very interested in being open to the world. It was a lucky moment, which didn't last very long. So, that's how I got to Afghanistan.

HN: The music itself must have been something you had heard, though, if you were --

MS: No.

HN: Oh, so it was -- so the interest in --

MS: No, I had to find out what instruments they played.

HN: So the interest in Orientalism was not a musical interest, it was simply Orientalism. Or was it in music?

MS: Yeah, I was interested in area studies, and then I found out, Oh, there's all these different musics of the world you can learn about. Isn't that fascinating? On the basis of handfuls of records and nothing much else to go on. 16:00So, it was something you were supposed to develop -- be one of the people who developed -- rather than something you, you know, inherited, so to speak, as a field of studies. I was the second generation of American ethnomusicologists. People who were ten, fifteen years older than me started it as an academic discipline in the '50s. So, I inherited this idea of questing and researching and finding out.

HN: And what did you love about the music? Or did you love the music?

MS: I did love the music. I ended up really liking Central Asian music and being fascinated by it -- and the folk music in Afghanistan. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.

HN: Was that from the point of view of just, it sounded nice? Or you listened to the -- you figured out systems that go with it and rhythms, or -- what aspects of it appealed to you?

MS: Well, you had to do everything. I mean, you had to understand -- you know, I had -- first, I thought my job was to survey, so I surveyed. So, I went from 17:00place to place and I'd find out, What do they play here? Where can I find people to do this? What is the kind of mapping of this territory? I don't know why. I just took that as my job, since nobody knew anything. So, I picked up -- you know, able to play a couple tunes on this and that instrument. I didn't study deeply. I thought I would keep coming back here for the next thirty years, and I'll do all that later, right? And right now, I just want to find out what the lay of the land is. So, that's what I did a lot of. I worked in the north. I had gotten interested in Central Asia accidentally -- and this is not really relevant, but -- through Soviet publications that I could read 'cause I knew Russian. And you couldn't do field work in the Soviet Union, clearly, but you could in Afghanistan. So I had a kind of bias towards Central Asia.

HN: And you published a book in 1976 on the music of northern Afghanistan, which, I assume, was probably your dissertation?

MS: Right.

HN: And then, what happens musically?

MS: Well, even while I was doing that, because I was the first person to publish anything about any of this, I was asked to do all the main research things -- "The Grove's Dictionary," God knows what. I had to do all these articles and put out all this stuff, and as the only person. And I got exhausted from that. I'm junior faculty, and I'm really tired. And I also got exhausted trying to understand Afghans. And doing this -- you know, working with really alien cultures. I wanted to take a break. And I said to myself, What would it be like to work on something you actually know about? Which nobody was doing in ethnomusicology in 1973. And anthropology was just barely an idea. I don't know why that occurred to me. And I said, Well, what do I know? And I said, Well, I know Yiddish culture, kinda. So why don't I go see what they do with that? And, you know, it'll be interesting, and then I can just check it out. So I picked 19:00the right moment to do that, because that was exactly the moment of the huge influx of very smart younger scholars, and then graduate students, into Yiddish Studies in the '70s, housed at YIVO, which I had never heard of. And I was invited there by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who said, "Come over here, let's talk." And I was just blown away by YIVO and the resources and the people and what you could do with this. And everybody said, Nobody's working on the music. Please, please do stuff on the music so we can have this project. But it was all those people you know -- I mean, with Deborah Dash Moore and it was -- Jeff Shandler is even later. Who was there? Jenna Joselit. The first crowd of academics who were -- Paula Hyman -- people who were coming into this -- usually, as a second field, like me -- except for Barbara, who actually did a dissertation on Yiddish stuff. Everybody else was acquiring it.

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HN: What Yiddish music did you want to work on?

MS: Well, I felt I should learn about the folk music, so I read what you could. And I dug into those materials. Barbara was doing the YIVO Yiddish Folksong Project at that point, so she was collecting the tapes of these older singers -- Lifshe Vidman and Mariam Nirenberg and Mr. Milstein and all these people -- so I got to listen to the real thing as it was being collected. A vast project that remains, to this day, untapped and untouched, for reasons I will never understand. It's the best single project done -- most comprehensive project ever done, in terms of the contextualization of the songs. Ruth Rubin wasn't interested in context, Ben Stonehill wasn't interested in context; this project was. They had a protokol -- they had a questionnaire -- where they, for every song, asked, Who would sing this song? How did you learn it? What were the circumstances and the context of this? For a couple thousand songs, with about a 21:00dozen absolutely wonderful singers. And that just has sat there for the last forty years. It's not even clear where the tapes are. I think Barbara has bad cassette versions of this somewhere. And nobody has tapped it. It would be very hard to do it, because the recordings are crummy, and you would have to really know Yiddish and some Russian and, you know, code switching, because it goes by really fast. You have to really listen. And so, it would take some people that really knew what they were doing listening to it, who now exist.

HN: What was your role in this?

MS: I had no role in it. I just listened to it. And I really admired it. And I got some samples, some copies, bootleg copies, which I seem to have lost -- of some of the material, which absolutely -- like, This is fascinating. Just the anecdotes about the contextualization. And I use these when I lecture, 'cause there are a couple of them -- my favorite being the question of the talented 22:00singer -- the individual in a sea of communal performance. So there was these two parallel stories. There's one from a man who said, "Well, when would you sing this?" "Well, you know, when you make matzah, you have to do it in a very short period of time, ritually." Right? It has to be done -- what is it, seventeen minutes? Whatever it is. "And so we would all gather to do it together, because why should we -- you know, so we do it collectively. And they would say, Look, to pass the time, you're such a good singer, why don't you sing? So I would sing, and they would roll my matzah." So then you get a story from a woman, and she says, "Well, before the holiday, we all had to prepare our chickens. And we would do it together. We would all gather, prepare, pluck our chickens, do our chickens together, and they'd say, You're such a good singer. Why don't you sing to pass the time, and we'll do your chicken." Okay? Now, that's invaluable information that I don't know any other sources for. Right?

HN: Absolutely.

MS: In Yiddish collect-- (UNCLEAR) research. So that's there somewhere, and I 23:00wish somebody would work on it. But I've been saying this for thirty years. So, anyway -- so I got fascinated by the whole milieu. I got dragged into it farther than I thought. And, of course, Afghanistan disappeared anyway off the map of history for the next thirty-five years, and is still not there -- which is another matter. But, I just got drawn in. So, I discovered there was a guy named Beregovskii, and he had done really interesting work that nobody knew about -- if you didn't read Russian or Yiddish, nobody in America knew anything about this guy, so I thought, I should put his work out. I have this weird filial piety streak, so I do these things for people who came before me, ancestors. I did this with Belyayev in Russian -- I put out his work on Central Asian music, translating from Russian, even before this. And then Beregovskii, and then the Ruth Rubin project, eventually. 'Cause I think it's important to pay tribute to people whose work may be not available, so that -- you know. So the Beregovskii 24:00book became a kind of a bible for the klezmer revival. So, I was right -- people needed this.

HN: What was different about Beregovskii from the people who had collected Jewish music before?

MS: Beregovskii really needs to be compared to Béla Bartók as a major collector in Central-East Europe. And when you look at it that way, you see how interesting Beregovskii was. 'Cause Bartók collected these thousands of folk songs from all these different groups, and his only interest was to get the formal structure, so he could use it in composition and memorialize their musical language. As kind of compositional colleagues -- he felt them as being kind of compositional colleagues. He analyzes the song structure and the melodic structure. He has no interest in instrumental music, by the way. And he has not interest in who the singers were -- he had no relationships with them, he was a different class than they were. So his interest was a formal, analytical 25:00interest. Beregovskii, on the other hand, really wanted to know who these people were, and really tried to understand how Yiddish musicology was connected to the surrounding peoples -- what we call "co-territorial culture." That was very distinctive, and not largely done by the Polish folklorist types, either, I mean, the people collecting the songs. Now, they're building on Ansky and his endless ankete [questionnaire] -- you know, which was a whole book of nothing but the questionnaire that he never actually lived out, but which he designed. And that was important for Beregovskii to understand that. But he was also influenced by Klement Kvitka, a great Ukrainian folklorist-ethnomusicologist. And Kvitka had this approach to contextualization of song. So, it's an interesting moment, when there's beyond formalist interest, kind of, in folk song -- as a kind of more living, breathing entity -- which Beregovskii took part in. Of course, he couldn't really work it out, because the tide of history 26:00was against him. He was swimming upstream, shall we say, in the Stalinist era. But you get glimpses of that. And those flashes of insight -- that's what really got me interested in Beregovskii.

HN: And somehow, the Beregovskii book comes out at the same time as "Tenement Songs."

MS: Yeah.

HN: So tell us about "Tenement Songs."

MS: Right. So, "Tenement Songs." When I was sitting there at YIVO -- and they very kindly -- on a sabbatical I had -- they gave me a whole office, and let me just use any materials. And this was on the fourth floor, the famous fourth floor, which had the seminar room. And when I walked in, Chana Mlotek said to me, "Now, you'll notice around the whole perimeter of this room is the Perlmutter Collection, which was just donated here. It's about 103 boxes. We don't know what's in it. So in your spare time, could you inventory that and tell us what's there?" So, it was kind of this project that you could do. So I 27:00was opening these boxes every day. It was full of fascinating stuff. So I did a little thing on that. So, that got me into theater music -- mostly, it was theater music. So I got very interested in the theater music. And then there was the sheet music. The stuff produced on the Lower East Side by these publishers, and principally, Hebrew Publishing, but also all these other little publishers that flourished in the great days of the immigration -- of the great wave of immigration. And that stack of four or five hundred folios -- I don't know, it just spoke to me in some way. 'Cause it was American. And I'm an American. And I just -- well, you know, 'cause you have this interest in American Jewish materials. I don't have to tell you, of all people, why it's interesting to look at American Jewish materials compared to, say, folk materials from Ukraine. There's an intrinsic complexity about the encounter with American culture and the productivity -- the incredible productivity and creativity of the Jewish 28:00musicians --

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MS: -- all these musicians who were either coming here as immigrants or growing up here on the Lower East Side. And I got fascinated by -- there were people who were not Irving Berlin. There were these people who didn't leave the community, who stayed and faithfully served that community. I found them really interesting figures -- Rumshinsky, but also Friedsell and Gilrod and all these guys. And I got fascinated by what I ended up doing in "Tenement Songs," which is the iconography -- the sheet music covers drew me in, because they're fascinating documents. So, I got drawn into iconography studies, which was just coming in in American folklore with the work of Archie Green and Norm Cohen and people who were analyzing hillbilly record jacket covers and other things like that. So, 29:00there was a methodology for this that was coming out of American folk studies in this period where it was understood that folk and popular are all the same system -- that things go in and out of oral tradition, they're recorded, they're published, they go back into folk tradition, then they're collected again, then they're put in schoolbooks. That whole way that the new American music system works was clearly paralleled in this subcultural system, within a Jewish world. So it gave me a possibility of doing a parallel analysis, using methodology that was getting really interesting, actually, in the 1970s, for doing that work. So I took to that, I just gravitated to that. And the book is basically about the sheet music, but I had to start with the history of European music and the immigration using figures like Rumshinsky, who wrote a splendid memoir of his 30:00transition from Russia and then Poland to England to America, and how he established the modern tradition of stage music in New York. And then I looked at all the Yiddish theater texts themselves: the plays, the potboilers, the melodrama, what they called "shund [theater deemed to be of inferior quality]" or "trash" -- which, to me, was hardly trash, but was really major cultural expression of a transitional generation. So that's what "Tenement Songs" came out of.

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HN: And all this time, you're already teaching at Wesleyan. (UNCLEAR) --

MS: So what happened was for me to -- yeah, I came to Wesleyan as an Orientalist and an Afghan music specialist, but this was an incredibly welcoming music department that valued diversity, rather than narrow specialization. And I can't believe that I did that now. As junior faculty, before tenure -- to come and completely give up the field you were hired for and say, I'm going to do something wildly experimental here and we'll see what happens? You don't do 31:00that. I would never let a grad student do it. Nobody would do it now. But this department said, That's cool. They had that funny -- that kind of interesting music? Great! What are you doing with it? So I said, Look, if I'm going to understand music as part of popular culture of the Jews, that popular culture was only invented in the 1870s and came directly to America with the immigrants themselves who were creating it. It's not like an ancient tradition. There's nothing ancient about this, it's modernity. So they're bringing this right off the boat -- ideas from Romania and Odessa -- and they're setting up this system. And it's being expressed largely through theatrical stuff. So, I had to understand those dramas and how they worked -- and how they incorporated music and why. So I said, the only way I can understand popular theater is to stage it -- to see how it works. So I was very drawn to a play called "David's Violin" -- "Dovids fidele" -- the subtitle of which is, "Or, the Magic Power of Music." So 32:00I said, This was irresistible. How could there be a whole play that's about the magic power of music? I've got to do this one. So, I looked for scripts -- of which there were some in the Perlmutter Collection, but also other scripts at YIVO. And these scripts -- one is from Cleveland, one is from Cape Town, and they're all "Dovids fidele." And they don't have the same cast of characters, they don't have the same musical numbers. And I said, I get it -- this was an improvised tradition. They patched stuff together, and they decided on the spot -- whoever the music director was -- what would be in the show and how to arrange it. And if you look at the sets of parts -- which exist in large numbers at YIVO -- the sets of parts are crazy, they're patchwork. There's no score. And so, the music director would put it together from sets of parts. And these were all -- they would be signed out, because they circulated. And they're being signed out in Vilna and in Vienna and in these places. And you saw -- like, who 33:00was signing them out? Some military regimental band in Krakow, you know? And there are actual envelopes of them being shipped from America to Europe and back. So, I understood, this is where the pulse of the music really was. And so, I had decided to stage it. And so, we staged this four-act melodrama in 1976 in Middletown, Connecticut. And the reason it worked was, what are the conditions for popular theater? You have to have a community that recognizes the actors, okay? That lives with them, that knows them and recognizes them. And this is true for -- if you ever go see "Les Enfants du Paradis," the great French film -- one of the greatest French films -- it takes place in the nineteenth century in Paris, and they take the character from the street, they put him on stage. 34:00And people know the actors, and they're following their lives in the backstage drama. That's what popular theater is about. So, Yiddish popular theater is in no way different than Parisian or Romanian popular drama -- or, for that matter, forms in Java and in India. Which all have the same formula, which is that you need community support and recognition -- a community that is living with its own -- it's not like a bunch of touring artists. It's not Broadway. Then, you have to have a combination of a good dramatic storyline of some kind, comedy, and music. And Shakespeare runs this way as well. Shakespeare is popular theater -- you have the songs, you have the knockabout clowns, you have the tragedy and the high characters. That's what popular theater is about. So, I kind of wanted to enact that -- which I was able to do on a small campus by having not just students but faculty who agreed to act -- faculty from different departments who 35:00agreed to act and be ridiculous on stage. And to make a simple version, which was violin, clarinet, and piano -- pickup forces, and an English translation to do it in, 'cause people understood the language of popular theater; there's no point in putting it out in Yiddish. So I created an English translation with my friend, the poet, Tony Connor. And, we produced a performing edition. And it only ran for three performances. But I did two more shows after that in, I think, '79 and '80 -- of other materials, once I had gotten this thing going. So, I did some shows there -- to enact the idea of popular theater and see how it works.

HN: Wow. And then, you're selected to write the history of the cantorate in 36:00America. How did that come about?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

MS: What happened was this: because of "Tenement Songs," I was approached by Sam Rosenbaum, who was the president and executive director, a long-time director, of the Cantors Assembly. The Cantors Assembly at that point had a membership of about four hundred and fifty. It represented the Conservative cantors, who had, under the guidance of Rosenbaum and other people, established themselves as a clergy profession under American law. Went through the Supreme Court, so they had clergy benefits. And they were feeling very, very strong as a white-collar profession in America. Unlike earlier generations of cantors, who were hired for their voices and left to abandon in their old age, blah, blah, these people were trained in seminaries, they invented seminary programs. I mean, this was a very highly -- white-collar bunch of professionals -- who were a lot like me (laughs) in many ways. And so Rosenbaum approaches me in this very professional way and 37:00says, "I liked 'Tenement Songs.' We need to celebrate our profession, the cantorate. There has been no celebration or history of the American cantorate, ever. So, would you help us write some grants to get some of this going? And we'll pay you as a consultant." So I said, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I could probably do that." So, I wrote a bunch of grant proposals for them. One was for a documentary film. One was for a short film, a long film, a tour of cantors to be backed by National Endowment for the Arts, I forget what else. And then there was the moonshot -- the long-shot idea -- of a major National Endowment for the Humanities research grant to study the American cantorate. I wrote this grant proposal having no idea what I was talking about, because nobody had ever done it. I had no idea how this profession worked. There had never been any history of it. I had never studied it. I thought, Well, this is probably how it would work, and this is probably what you would ask for, and this would be kind of -- 38:00you know, this is a very hypothetical thing. So, I filed all these away and I forgot about it -- you know, got back to work. And six months later or something, the phone rings in my office. And it's like, Hello? I said, "Yes?" This is the National Endowment for Humanities. We have approved your proposal. We're giving you ninety thousand up front and thirty-four thousand matching funds you have to match, for a total of, I think, 143,000 dollars. I said, "Who is this?" (laughter) Like, "What are you talking about?" I had no clue. They gave us the whole thing. And I found out later, maybe through Sam Rosenbaum -- the reason it went through -- Congress has to approve all these things -- was you had in the House -- now, wait, which was it? I think Emanuel Celler -- no, Abner Mikva, maybe. There were two high-powered Jewish congressmen -- oh, a 39:00congressman and a senator -- who looked at this thing and said, This goes through. (laughs) You know, in the Congress. And they got this funding, okay, to do this really obscure thing. And so I called Sam Rosenbaum. I said, "Congratulations! Mazel tov! You got your grant!" He said, "So now you'll do the project?" I said, "What?" You know, this is a three-year project with massive funding. I have other things I'm doing. So, I had to think it over. Did I want to actually run this? There it was. And so basically, I said, This is an incredible research opportunity. Nobody gives ethnomusicologists grants like this. I've never heard of it. You could do things on a scale unknown with a real budget, doing an American music project. I would have to completely invent all of the methodologies, 'cause they didn't exist. I would have to construct a 40:00research team that doesn't exist and run this thing. (laughs) And I'd have to write a book, right? So it didn't take me that long to say, Sure. I'll just go for it. So out of that project, which I did manage to design and execute, came the book "Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate."

HN: Wow. Now, meanwhile, back at the ranch --

MS: (laughs)

HN: -- at some point, you became interested in klezmer music?

MS: Right. Well, being in YIVO in the 1970s, I mean, everybody was there. And I remember -- in fact, I had the program, which I've lost now -- I've thrown out so many of things when I moved to a studio apartment, and all my archives have dissipated and vanished, and I didn't save very much. But you will see at the 41:00beginning of the film that you're in, "A Jumpin' Night in the Garden of Eden" -- you will see Kapelye playing in Museum Mile Festival on Fifth Avenue. And that was outside the door of YIVO. So that was really something, 'cause the Museum Mile was this very stuffy celebration of high art and culture. It happened YIVO was still there on Fifth Avenue, so they put out a klezmer band. So, it was in the air. I mean, Adrienne Cooper was working there. Alicia was a part-time employee at some points. Michael Alpert was coming in. And Sapoznik was working there, too. So, it was kind of a clubhouse -- you know, YIVO -- for the aspiring 42:00-- the burgeoning scene. And I, and Zev Feldman, and -- so what happened was, though, technically, I got engaged through Ethel Raim putting me on as the academic front person for the NEA-funded Dave Tarras tour in 1978. They got an NEA grant, for which we had to have an academic who was an interpreter -- otherwise, you couldn't put folk artists on tour. Those were the rules. And they didn't have anybody, so they turned to me and said, Could you give a little talk before the concerts? So I said, "Sure. Why not?" This was after the Casa Galicia concert that you were at and everybody was at -- the historic, groundbreaking, seminal event at which klezmer went public -- with Zev and Andy and Feigl Yudin and Ethel. And that's when they put in for the -- so they put in the Balkan Arts 43:00Center still -- it was still the Balkan Arts Center, I think -- before it was Ethnic Folk Arts Center, maybe --

HN: The first one was Balkan, yeah.

MS: Yeah. So they put together this tour, and nobody knew where Dave Tarras ought to go on this tour, 'cause nobody -- they had no idea who would listen to this. The whole term was not known. "Klezmer" was not a household word in 1978, exactly. You were just starting -- almost -- your first course -- not quite. And the -- what do you call them? Not Klezmatics. The --

HN: Klezmorim.

MS: -- Klezmorim had just come out with their first album. So it was total pioneer territory. So, they didn't know where to go. But, I toured with that. So, they went to Co-op City, because they figured there were a lot of old Jews there. And it was an amazing event, because -- I have never been in Co-op City 44:00before or since -- they had this huge kind of entertainment hall with a low ceiling that fit, like, fifteen hundred people, all of whom were shorter than me and older than me, and who would come up to Dave and say, (puts on accent) You played our wedding in 1946. And they loved it. So then, we went to a JCC in Jersey, which put it in a little hall. Then, they realized they had to put it in a bigger hall, because people really wanted to hear this. So, it was clear that this was a thing that was happening. So I was there at the moment, as it turned out.

HN: And then you also were the first one to write about it?

MS: Yeah. Well, Zev claims credit for some article he wrote where he used the term "klezmer music," so I will not argue with that. But, the first article I 45:00did did get a lot of notice in the early '80s, where I kind of explained it as an eclectic movement -- you know, and what its basic ethos or its orientation was, in a way that people hadn't done from a kind of ethnomusicology side. So that put me in a position -- yeah, and I had done the Beregovskii book, so I had immediate access to everybody in this world. So, I went around talking to people a little more formally, and ended up writing that book, "Fiddler on the Move," exploring the klezmer world, which was 2000, I guess.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

HN: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot just to ask about "Fiddler on the Move." That's kind of the first book that puts the revival in a serious context and not only looks at America, but also looks at Europe. It has my single favorite thing ever written about Jewish music, which is your critique of (speaking at the same 46:00time; unclear) --

MS: (laughs) Right, right.

HN: -- which I read out loud, whole paragraphs to my class every year, because it's just --

MS: (laughs) That's very funny.

HN: -- incredible writing. The epiphany moment.

MS: (laughs) Right. No, I deliberately placed that there --

HN: Can you talk about that a little bit?

MS: -- in that book. I deliberately placed that. The writing strategy for that book was the most interesting part to me, in a way. I mean, not the most interesting part, but to me, it was the really serious issue -- was, how to write this thing? The same with "Tenement Songs" and "Chosen Voices." How do you make a book project out of some research you've done? And so, I had agendas -- my own agenda. My agenda was first, to place klezmer -- the first chapter places klezmer music as a heritage music, within the scene of heritage musics in the world. So that this is not just a Jewish story. So, to put it in the wider context, this immediately was an important agenda to me. It's not an in-house, in-group -- you know, like a little thing; it's part of what goes on in the 47:00world today. Then, I wanted to look at it from these different points of view. First of all, from the point of view of the individuals involved -- so there's that chapter on the urge -- as I say, Why are people doing this? This kept intriguing me. Why does anybody do this? What was the urge? So, I analyzed the urge in my various -- three different ways. Then, I wanted to see it as a community product or a place -- a place that had a community home. So, what were those communities in which it found a home? Then, I wanted to talk about the music itself, and find a way to tie the actual sounds of the music to these other planes of analysis -- which is the hardest thing to do in ethnomusicology, is to integrate the music with the cultural, social, historical patterning. So, that was my strategy. But, I wanted to not be an interested party and not give value judgments -- 'cause I listened to a lot of stuff I thought was junk, and 48:00other things I thought was beautiful, but that's not the point. You don't do that. That's not the point. But I wanted one place where my own response to this would be located. So, I picked that one. So, that's why it's there.

HN: You had previously -- in 1993, you had written "Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics" -- or you had compiled essays, anyway. And so, how does that figure into it?

MS: Well, see, what I do with this Jewish culture and this Yiddish (coughs) kind of milieu stuff is to integrate it into everything I do. So, I've written these specialized books, but whatever I happen to be doing, it's one of the examples or one of the case studies. So, when I did this very short introduction to folk music in this Oxford series of tiny little books called "A Very Short Introduction to" this and that, of which there are hundreds -- when I did folk music, I used a Ruth Rubin song in the middle of it. And when I did film music of the world, Yiddish cinema is a case study of a particular kind of cinema. So, I'm always integrating it into things that I do. So, when I wrote this extended essay about how to understand the notion of small musics within large music structures -- larger societies -- I just would turn to some of this material as embodiments or examples. And then, I'd take those methods and put 'em into the specifically Jewish thing that I'm writing about, which in this case was the klezmer movement.

HN: So, you wrote the article in the "YIVO Encyclopedia" on Jewish music, which came out in 2008. Did you see that as a continuation of all this? Or was that another kind of project?

MS: Well, what happened there was, when the "YIVO Encyclopedia" was going, I had 49:00a message from Gershon Hundert, the overall editor, saying, "Well, we thought we'd ask you about what we're going to do with music." And he sent me this breakdown of what they were doing, and I thought it was appalling. So, he said, "Would you come and talk to us in New York?" I did not realize that he -- was a really clever trap. He set a beautiful trap for me.

MS: What were they going to do?

HN: Well, I don't remember even. But I -- so I came to this meeting. I said, Blah-blah-blah and this and that, and he said, "Oh. So will you do it? Will you do the music section of this encyclopedia? 'Cause you clearly, you have a lot of ideas." So then, I realized, Oh, this was such a clever trap. He set me up for this. And then there was no way I could say no -- having said what you're doing doesn't work. So, I became the person in charge of whatever was going to be about music in the encyclopedia. So then, I had to identify authors and I had to identify topics headings, as entries, and identify the authors for them and 50:00create that set of articles. That was quite the project. So then I had to frame it in terms of, What about the study of Yiddish music? I had to write that essay. So -- yeah, it was quite the -- it came out well, I must say. (laughs) I was pleased with the -- everybody kind of rose with -- who had to write the articles, or else I edited the hell out of them -- one or the other. And, it kinda works. When they first released it, the music entries were the ones with the most hits, so I was really pleased with that.

MS: And if you count the two Beregovskii books, the folk song book, and the --

HN: And the klezmer book.

MS: -- klezmer book --

HN: Right.

MS: -- there are then two, three, four, five, six, seven major books on Jewish 51:00music that you wrote, plus the YIVO article -- probably the major thing that's been written on that subject lately. Are there other authors or scholars who you look to as people who you respected and felt were important folks who came before you?

HN: Well, as I say, I really appreciated Beregovskii, but in Jewish music studies, there were not a lot of predecessors that one is -- you know, you have to look at Idelsohn and you have to look at these things, but I didn't see them as models in any way, 'cause they come from a completely different scholarly universe or generational approach than mine. So, I respect all that, but -- no, it's the people that I met that had this vast knowledge that I was so impressed with -- Chana Mlotek, who -- everything was in her head. You would just say, 52:00Well, Chana, what about this song? Well, I'll just say, you know, the first time that it came out in 1926, and that edition was -- but on the other hand -- and of course, the three recordings. She didn't have to look any of that up. I was completely blown away by Chana Mlotek. Once I went to Israel and visited Meir Noy, who was phenomenal. But he had it all on index cards in his apartment. And fortunately, it's all there and digitized and preserved. But that man was simply another one -- he was like Chana. He knew it all, and he had talked to everybody. And Dov Noy, his brother. Both an incredible team. So sure, I really respected -- they didn't publish that much. They didn't put out that much out of it. So, that's what you have to do -- is get stuff out there. And now that stuff is available, but -- you know, Meir Noy did a radio program. And that's how he did it, every week. I'll tell you about some Yiddish songs. And I'll tell you 53:00how all your Israeli songs are really Eastern European Jewish songs. (laughs) You know, and things like that. But it was in the form of radio broadcasts. You have walking encyclopedias. You have Michael Alpert, who just isn't gonna publish this stuff. I mean, I have coaxed Michael on a couple of occasions to actually produce writing -- which is really hard, but it was worth it, because his knowledge is vast, and his personal experience and the fieldwork and what he knows is -- this is amazing. But -- so there's somebody I really deeply respect, but there's not much to look at, right? Zev Feldman, on the other hand, actually does write. He is an actual real scholar who puts out books. And his new history of klezmer is a landmark study -- the first volume; there's gonna be another volume, which I was glad to see finally come to fruition. And talking to Zev is always extraordinary. And, of course, there's you and your extraordinary 54:00knowledge. (laughs) And a few other people who actually have really wonderful funds of knowledge that they'll share and tell you about. But a lot of it's informal. Adrienne Cooper never wrote it down -- what she knew about the Yiddish folk song. Which is really too bad. Ethel Raim has never put out what she really knows about the Yiddish folk song, and she's probably the most knowledgeable person alive.

HN: What is special about music in Jewish culture? Do you feel it would be important, for example, for someone who's studying Jewish history and culture to know about music? Is there a reason that they should (speaking at the same time; unclear)?

MS: Funny you should ask. Next week, I'm going to the retreat of the American Academy of Jewish Researchers, which they hold every two years, and they asked me to talk about Jewish Studies. And the relationship of Jewish music and Jewish 55:00Studies is somewhat fraught, because music doesn't fit in the model of Jewish Studies. And Edwin Seroussi -- who is another one whose knowledge is vast, but not necessarily in Yiddish music culture, but whose knowledge is unbounded -- wrote a very acerbic article -- a long, thoughtful essay where he calls Jewish music "The Jew of Jewish Studies." (laughs) Okay? Because it's marginal, it's distrusted in some way. And that's putting it really strongly. And I'll put it to the people at the meeting. But for Jewish Studies, it's about text, right? And the implications of texts and the interpretation of texts -- or, that's called Judaica now. And that is ninety percent of Jewish Studies. And then there's history, which is the history of communities and community lives, okay -- which are mostly reflected in texts, but also in relations to the Catholic 56:00Church or -- you know, and so forth and so on, and messianic movements, and mystical trends and philosophy -- that's what Jewish Studies is about. They don't take music seriously, because to them, it's a kind of epiphenomenon. And that's really, really wrong. People live through their songs. I know this. (laughs) From -- I say -- the YIVO Jewish Folksong Project -- Yiddish Folksong Project. People live through their songs. And it got them through alive. And to say that's sort of an epiphenomenon -- it's a soft science; we do hard science with Jewish Studies. It's kind of the hard science/soft science model that you get with the natural sciences and humanities, compressed down to the respectability of Judaica as a really deep and important field of studies, and expressive culture in general -- which is to say, folklore, customs, cooking -- 57:00everything that's expressive culture being lower in the hierarchy of what you do if you're doing Jewish Studies. And the other problem is that Jewish Studies almost never studies living communities. And, of course, that's where you find music. And, conversely, we don't have history of music, so we don't count, because we don't have written sources that we can go back with and do this kind of textual research that they see as legitimate study. So there's that problematic.

HN: And I wanted to ask, then, from all this study you've done, do you have favorite Jewish music that you feel that the world needs to hear?

MS: That the world needs to hear? Well, always the Yiddish folk song, to me, is like this --

HN: Sung by? A field recording or a singer or any of --

MS: Yeah, just in general, in the revival -- I mean, people do sing songs, but I 58:00don't think the general world knows the Yiddish song. They've come to understand the tradition through what they call klezmer, which is this bunch of stuff that was played only at certain times in the month or the year in these Jewish communities, whereas they sang every day. So to me, the song is, in a sense, paramount, and the instrumental music is a special, colorful branch related to cantorial music and to the Hasidic nigun [melodies] and these other expressive forms of culture. But the actual song poetics, to me, is just underknown or undervalued in a kind of way.

HN: Just to kind of go full circle, then: is there -- Yiddish folk song that you 59:00remember from your family, from a long time ago? Is that something that you heard?

MS: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

HN: Any one in particular?

MS: Well, the funny thing was, they also taught us Russian songs, so it was all indistinguishable. I mean, one of the earliest songs that I learned was a little Russian song that I could sing in Russian.

HN: Go ahead. (laughs)

MS: So that's -- (singing) "Ponaprasno Vanyka hodish, ponaprasno nozkii byosh, nechevo ti ne poluches, ee durakom poidyosh damoy [Russian: Vanka, walk in vain, beat your legs in vain, you won't get anything, and you will go home like a fool]." Which is a very funny song. And I've looked up the history of it, 'cause I've gotten interested in part of the memoir section of the book I'm writing on Detroit. Like, what is the particular history of that song, which is kind of a mock folk song.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

MS: Well, Ivan, you're such an idiot. You're a fool. You're going out on this trip, and nothing will come of it. You'll come home looking like a fool. That's 60:00the song. You're wearing out your feet for nothing -- the soles within your shoes. It's really cute. And kind of -- why did they teach this to me? I don't know. But there it was, lodged in my mind. And then there was "Hava Nagilah." And then there was -- they would do Gilbert and Sullivan in Yiddish. They would translate stuff into Yiddish for the fun of it -- sit around and do that -- my parents and their friends. There's just, like, a world of songs. But, you know, what do you call the little -- well, or also, in Russian is, you have the child -- I mean, the basic core things I got -- the lullaby they sang to me was in Russian. (singing) "Spii maladenits moy prikrasnii, bayushki-bayu. Tiiho smotrit mesits yasnii, v kolibel tvoyu [Russian: Sleep, my beautiful baby, 61:00bayushki-bayu. The clear moon is quietly looking into your cradle]." Kids were brought up with that regularly. And it's so typically, classically Jewish. Because what is Jewish culture? This is a poem by Lermontov, a great sort of Russian poet. And it actually has many more verses, about how you'll grow up to be a Ukrainian Cossack and you'll go into battle. Now wait a minute, okay? Because the first verse says, you know, The moon is peeping into your cradle and you should go to sleep, lu-lu-lu. And then, somehow, the other verses are never sung -- which happen to be (UNCLEAR) this Ukrainian, you know, nationalist rant, so to speak -- in a way. They just dropped that out. 'Cause what they did was to domesticate stuff. So, they domesticated this, and they turned it into something 62:00they could use. And still doing it, there's no Yiddish version of that song. But it's in the "Goldene kale [Golden bride]," right? It's in this operetta that's now being put on in this Off Broadway way -- in when she's singing about the mother that she lost, her mother sang her lullabies, she sings a lullaby in Yiddish, and she sings this one. So, it was totally ingrained as part of Yiddish culture. So, if you have a childhood of that sort -- of this natural -- what I call inherent eclecticism, it's just built in to the system that you had all of those things. They had "Rozhinkes mit mandlen [Raisins with almonds]," too. So, I heard "Rozhinkes mit mandlen," too -- alongside this. But it was all part of a package. It's not like, Oh, now we will sing the Yiddish song of our forebears. (laughs) It's just -- this is stuff we do, right? And some of it happens to be Yiddish.

HN: Yeah. Okay. Any other questions?

CHRISTA WHITNEY: I was wondering if there are any stories from the cantor project. What was that like for you to be in that observant community?

MS: Yeah. Well, you had a lot of different cantors -- you had Reform, you had Conservative, you had Orthodox -- so I was in the perfect ethnographic position of being an insider-outsider. So, I'm an insider -- I know what they're talking about -- but I'm an outsider, because I don't do that stuff. And that's the perfect position. 'Cause I could sympathize with and ask kind of relevant questions fairly naively, but sometimes really naively, at the same time that I kind of knew what I was working for and what I wanted to find out about their biographies and their life histories, about the repertoire that they sang. So, 64:00it was really -- like, an ideal research situation. I think the anecdote that I like is, the fieldwork anecdote was with Shmuel Vigoda. This was a guy who was in his nineties. And he had written a collection of legends of old cantors of the Old World called "Legendary Voices." And, it's all these stories. I don't know where he got them and which ones are true, but it's fascinating reading. So we're all at Grossinger's in the Catskills -- that's where they had their convention. And I got to see Grossinger's at its height -- the knotty pine utopia where the food was endless. And the cantors were all there, so I'm dragging them out to interview them on the side with two research assistants. So, I approached Vigoda. I say, "Cantor Vigoda, we need to interview you for this project." And he says, "Why should I talk to you? I wrote the book already." This was a problem for fieldwork, because here are my assistants. How 65:00do I handle this methodologically? So I said -- right off, I said, "Exactly. You wrote the book. It's a great book. And who was not in your book? Shmuel Vigoda. We need to have you." "Oh. Let's talk." (laughs) So this was the kind of process by which you had to approach these people in some way to, you know, first get their trust with some knowledge you had, and then you were always saying, Oh, so-and-so told me this; what about that? You know, you build on it as a research project. Yeah, it was just a wonderful experience, 'cause these people were all so interesting in their life histories. So, I put Vigoda into the book, then, as a profile, because he had a great story.

HN: Your list is amazing. And Moshe Taube, I noticed, is there. I mean, these guys are -- yeah, they're very interesting people.

MS: Well, I had the good fortune of having the oldest generation -- Koussevitzky, Vigoda, all of these people that grew up in Europe with oral tradition. Then, the Americans from the -- grew up in the '20s and '30s who studied with some of those people privately but were Americans. And then, the generations that were trained in the seminaries and had an American training, where the old-timers were -- you know, where it was more organized. So, I was able to get the whole stratigraphy, so to speak, of this operation -- you know, like the geological layers of the cantorate. That was just the last moment you could have done that -- in the early 1980s.

HN: Any other --

CW: Can I ask one more?

HN: Of course. (laughs)

MS: Yeah, yeah.

HN: Please. She always has a few more, and they're the best ones. (laughs)

CW: I'm just -- from your perspective, why did the klezmer revival take?

MS: Take in what sense?

HN: Well, why did people --

MS: Why did it catch on?

HN: Catch on, yeah.

MS: With whom? The Jews or the non-Jews?

HN: Anyone.

CW: In general.

MS: Well, it caught on with the Jews because it was a moment of roots and heritage in America. The 1970s was the moment for ethnicity and heritage and roots. The bicentennial and the invention of ethnicity, which nobody ever used the word before, as a post-civil rights and black conflict thing. The Jews helped create the idea of ethnicity very deliberately as a protective element when they got on the outs with the black population. And ethnicity -- how are you gonna express ethnicity? You can be in a synagogue, but it's nice to have some other forms which are more secular forms and which don't require learning sacred languages and going to shul and things like that -- which these 1970s people -- suburbanized people -- were not particularly as engaged in. It's 68:00before the revival of religious stuff and the invention of khevre [informal groups] and minyans and the going back to religious roots. This was an in-between period, of a rather assimilated population who still wanted some identity. And, in that world, a lot of young musicians who had grown up in jazz, folk music, classical music, and rock or whatever -- and bluegrass -- and who were looking for a heritage movement -- to make a heritage -- I mean, here was the music. That was perfect for them, because you could do it in a jazz way, you could do it in a queer way, you could do it in any way you wanted, because the material was just there -- in a very limited, condensed amount of recordings and old-timers who had survived. Various people had family heritage like Hankus Netsky to draw on. So, those people formed a core of activists who were just revitalized in their own funny way by this. And then it becomes what we called 69:00-- Alpert gave it that nice word "revitalization" instead of "revival," which is good. So, they kind of -- this new life was -- so that was an historical moment. It coincided with the invention of world music as a marketing category, and the increased festivalization and distribution of world music recordings and a circuit. So, it coincided with that, so it could simply be plugged in as another channel in this thing. And in Europe, it coincided with a postwar reconciliation, a recognition of Jewish culture that could only have happened by the 1970s, when certain things had shifted. So, the timing was just right there for all these different constituencies and people to recognize this and decide it was useful -- culturally useful for them -- personally and culturally useful.

CW: Okay.

HN: Cool?

CW: Yeah.

MS: All right.

HN: Yeah. Thank you!

MS: Well, that was fun.

[END OF INTERVIEW]