EUGENE DRIKER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney. I am here in Detroit, Michigan with Eugene Driker. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. And today is June 28th, 2016. Eugene, do I have your permission to record?

EUGENE DRIKER:You do.

CW:Thank you. So, I'd like to start first with your family background. Where does your family come from?

ED:Both of my parents were born in what is now Ukraine. My father was from a relative good-sized city called Zhytomyr. Some people call it Zhitomir, which is about fifty miles west of Kiev. My mother was from a shtetl [small Eastern 1:00European town with a Jewish community], a dorf [village] about fifty miles south of Kiev called Toporiv. And --

CW:When did they come here?

ED:They each came, separately, in 1922. My mother was a seventeen-year-old orphan. My father was, by then, twenty-two. But he lied to get into the country, said he was seventeen. There was a whiff of the immigrant gates closing, and somebody told him to say he was younger than he really was.

CW:And do you have a sense of what their early lives were like in --

ED:I do. Each of them recorded a lot of oral histories, which we've incorporated in a piece of kinetic sculpture in our living room. And so, we have a lot of first-hand accounts. My mother also laboriously hand-wrote her history of her Old World experiences, which we published on her eightieth birthday. So, we have 2:00a lot of first-hand accounts. And I understand in many families, the immigrants did not talk about their former lives. In our family, both my parents enjoyed talking about their lives in Ukraine.

CW:So, what's your sense of, starting with Zhytomyr, what Jewish life was like there and what your father's life was like?

ED:I think when my dad lived there, Zhytomyr had about a hundred thousand people, and I think about forty percent of them were Jews. I believe Zhytomyr was one of two cities in the Pale of Settlement where Hebrew and Yiddish books were allowed to be published. Warsaw and Zhytomyr were the two centers of Jewish publishing. When I grew up, although we pronounce our name Driker, many of my parents' friends would call them the "Drickers." And I didn't appreciate at the 3:00time that drikr is the Hebrew and Yiddish word for printer. So, perhaps somewhere in our family antecedents there was a printer. I never asked my father that question, but I suspect maybe that's the case, given that last name.

CW:Do you know what the occupation, the parnose [livelihood] of the family was?

ED:I don't. Well, that's not quite true. My father's father, Leyb, was a carpenter, what was called a rough carpenter, not a finish carpenter. And when he came to Detroit in 1913 alone, the Ford Motor Company -- Henry Ford had announced the five-dollar day. So, Leyb Driker came here in 1913 as a rough carpenter to build auto bodies at the Ford Highland Park factory, which is just a couple of miles from where we are right now, on Woodward Avenue. He was a 4:00body-builder, and the plan was that he would make enough money to bring the family over. But the World War I and the Russian Revolution intervened. So, he was here from 1913 to 1922 alone, and it was not until 1922 that Leyb's wife, Ida, my grandmother, and his two children, my father, Charles, and my aunt, Ruth, they finally joined him here eight or nine years after he had gone.

CW:Was the family religious? Observant?

ED:They were certainly observant, and so my father grew up in an observant home with all the traditions. And he went to kheyder [traditional religious school] and he was knowledgeable in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian.

CW:And had he gone to gymnasium?

ED:Yes. He graduated gymnasium in Zhytomyr. So, when he came to this country as a twenty-two-year-old, he had a high school education, but nothing after high school.

CW:Are there any favorite stories that -- from him of the Zhytomyr of his early life that give a sense of what his life was like then?

ED:It was a full day of gymnasium, and then kheyder after school, and then close-knit family. His grandparents were nearby, in a farm. And so, he understood something of both city life and rural life. And I think it was pretty much a traditional East European background at that time, school and work. I 6:00don't recall him ever talking about having a job there.

CW:Going to your mother's side -- so, where does your mother's family come from?

ED:She comes from a very small shtetl, which we actually visited in the Yiddish Book Center LiteraTour ten years ago this summer. We visited Zhytomyr, and we also visited my mother's shtetl called Toporiv. If you read "Everything Is Illuminated," Jonathan Foer's book, the feeling of discovering Toporiv was like the hero of that book going back and finding his roots in this very remote little village that I couldn't find on the internet. But our guide said, "We'll find it," and we stumbled on it and it was quite magical to be there. Probably hadn't changed much from the day my mother left it.

CW:So, what did it look like?

ED:We pulled into that town about ten o'clock in the morning and there were no paved roads. It was all dirt roads, and a lot of animals kind of milling around in the roads and a small market area with women in babushkas sitting there, selling their wares in very modest amounts. And the tour guide jumped out of the car and started engaging some woman in conversation. And she immediately jumped back in the car with us and took us to her home. Her husband was a high school history teacher. And we spent the morning with them in their home. And they spoke no English, we spoke no Ukrainian, but the guide was an intermediary. And it was quite revealing. In my mother's autobiography that she had hand-written over many years, she had vivid recollections of life in Toporiv, including going 8:00down into a root cellar behind the home where they lived. And sure enough, this home we went to had a root cellar, and the woman went down and brought up a jar of pickles about this big and a jar of raspberry jam about that big. And we were eating pickles and raspberry jam at ten-thirty in the morning and, of course, had to have the obligatory shot of vodka. We were forewarned, if people offer you something, it's polite to accept it. So, I was drinking vodka and eating pickles early in the morning. These people couldn't have been nicer to us. They took us to the high school, and my mother's recollection, vivid recollection, was that her father had worked in the local sugar refinery. Beet sugar is -- sugar beets was a big crop in that part of Ukraine. And he worked in a sugar refinery that was owned by a -- absentee landlord, a Jew who, I think, lived in 9:00Kiev. And we were taken to the site where the sugar factory once stood. It was there no longer. But there was a little historical museum in the high school, a small room that showed pictures of the sugar factory where my grandfather had worked. He had gotten pneumonia, gotten ill working in the sugar factory and died. The Jewish proprietor paid some money to my mother as worker's compensation and -- not to my mother, to my grandmother. And she was persuaded to give that money to another member of the family to come to the United States in search of her husband who had fled. And so, my grandmother was left penniless 10:00while this woman used the money to come to the United States. So, that was the family lore. And then, my grandmother died. And so, my mother was left as an orphan at age -- about fourteen. Went to live with an aunt in the same shtetl. And then, pogroms occurred and convinced them that there was no future for them there. And she left for America in about 1916. Got trapped in Bucharest, Romania for a year. Stayed there alone. Slept in bed with a fat woman that she recalls vividly, who smelled. And made it here in 1922 as a seventeen-year-old orphan. And she had a sister and brother who were here.

CW:And the sister and brother were in Detroit, or --

ED:In Detroit. He worked for the auto industry and the sister had come after him. But the brother was the husband after whom the relative had inveigled that money from my grandmother so she could get here and find her husband. And so, it was a complicated story.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Your mother's family was also observant?

ED:They were, yeah. Both of them came from observant families. They met in night school, learning English. And they were wed in 1924.

CW:Curious, did either of them talk about any folklore, sort of folk medicine or folk traditions that they remembered from (UNCLEAR)?

ED:My mother had vivid recollection of folk cures and practiced them her whole 12:00life. I mean, she was -- although she never had a day of formal education in her life, she was a very educated woman. And she taught herself a lot. She read a lot and was a cultured and intelligent woman. But there was nothing like a clove of garlic to kill a cold, or a guggle-muggle to --

CW:Can you explain what that is?

ED:A guggle-muggle? It's a raw egg dropped into a glass, broken, and the egg is in the glass, to which you add tea and a shot of whiskey and some honey. And that cured everything from tuberculosis to a sore throat and everything in between. So, we were forced as youngsters to down a guggle-muggle. And after a couple of those, you never complained that you had a sore throat again.

CW:Her stories of her childhood, what was her association with this -- with Toporiv?

ED:It was a sad association. She lost both parents there, and my mother had every right to be an embittered woman. And she was the most optimistic person I've ever met in my life. She came here orphaned, penniless, but she had just an upbeat philosophy of life. And her mantra was, "Every day is a wonderful day." So, while she had kind of a -- when she talked about Toporiv, there was kind of a Glocca Morra quality to her description, to -- it was obviously a difficult life. They eked out a living, there was a lot of violence from the -- Petliura, 14:00Symon Petliura was the leader of a -- Ukrainian nationalist gang that often set upon the Jewish towns and shtetlekh [small towns] and that -- the Petliuras came to Toporiv and killed the uncle that my mother was living with. And that was the last straw and the aunt took the family, including my mother, and fled. They had a very difficult time getting out. And, as I said, my mother got trapped in Bucharest for a year. She didn't have her, quote, papers. They described things in descriptive but powerful terms. Her papers weren't in order. So, while the rest of the group went on to the United States, she remained in Bucharest as a teenager until HIAS produced the papers.

CW:Can you describe what Detroit was like when you were growing up?

ED:I can't describe what the whole city was like because I grew up in a very distinctly Jewish ghetto. And I use the ghetto in a positive -- we weren't locked up at night, but this was a strongly Jewish neighborhood of largely Jewish families and institutions. Several dozen synagogues, Jewish stores, the kosher meat market, the kosher bakery, the grocery stores -- all of the small merchants, the clothing stores and so on, were all owned by Jews. So, this was a densely packed Jewish neighborhood. And I went to school, Detroit public 16:00schools, grade schools that were, I would say, seventy-five percent Jewish. And so, that was my universe. I had some non-Jewish friends, schoolmates who weren't Jewish, but they were in the distinct minority. And that was the flavor of the community. My father had owned a series of very small hand laundries throughout Detroit and he finally got out of the laundry business. And (laughs) in a fit of middle-age exuberance, bought a candy store. And so, my mother and I, she in her fifties and I in my high school years, wound up working in a candy store seven days a week. And that was how I spent my high school years, working at the candy 17:00store. But it was in the heart, right in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood.

CW:What are the streets, the main streets of that area?

ED:There is, in the back yard of the home where you're filming this now, is a street sign that says "Dexter and Davison" on it, okay? That was the heart of the Jewish neighborhood. There was a food market called the Dexter-Davison Market which was the Whole Foods of 1950, okay? It's where everybody went to get all their delicacies. And that was the main intersection of the Jewish neighborhood, Dexter and Davison.

CW:So, can you describe the candy store? What did it look like?

ED:I sure can. It was a small corner store with a counter that had about ten or 18:00twelve stools, two booths in the back, and the front counter had a cigar case in it. And behind it were racks for cigarettes. Cigarettes and cigars were a big part of the business, and pipe tobacco. And then, behind the ice cream counter on the shelf were a couple of Hamilton Beach mixers where you mix the milkshakes. And there were some pewter ice cream sundae holders that you tipped upside-down and -- a paper Lily cup got stuck to it, and you went this way and you scraped out the ice cream and put them in. And there were jars of -- large 19:00receptacles for loose nuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, little pieces of licorice. There were three or four varieties of penny candy, and with scoops, and you'd take a little paper bag and you'd -- there was a scale and you'd weight out two ounces of pumpkin seeds or two ounces of different kinds of nuts. And then, there were school supplies in the back and a small assortment of games. There was a magazine rack and newspapers, including a very good variety of Yiddish newspapers: the "Forverts," the "Tog," the "Morgen-zhurnal," the "Tsukunft," the "Freiheit." We covered all political -- all courts and all causes were -- the whole political spectrum there, from the conservative to the communist. You could pick up everything in that newspaper rack. And my dad 20:00thought he was running General Motors. So, he would sit at the corner stool and take a cigar out of the cigar rack, and while my mother and I were running around dishing out ice cream and trying to handle the crowd, my dad would be sitting there reading the "Forverts" and smoking a cigar. He thought he was the president and CEO of the candy store.

CW:Who were the people who came to visit?

ED:At the --

CW:At the store, yeah.

ED:At the store, it was driven by neighborhood foot traffic. Again, nobody drove to the candy store, right? The candy store was on the first floor of about an eight-story apartment building. There were -- Detroit is a city largely of single homes and two-family homes. It's not like New York or Chicago. But in that area of Dexter, there were some apartment buildings. And there were a 21:00couple -- one on top of the candy store, one across the street from it. So, there was a lot of foot traffic and people went shopping. You went grocery shopping every day or every two days. You went to the grocery store and the meat market, the bakery and the fish market. So, on the way home, you'd stop in for -- you'd pick up a newspaper, you'd pick up something to nosh, you'd get an ice cream cone. So, it was part of the daily process. And then, at night, especially in the warm months, you'd get young people. Kids coming home from school would stop in. At night, you'd get the after-dinner -- people who were taking a shpatsir [stroll] and they were -- the passeggiare, that's how they say it in Italian, the stroll after dinner. And they'd be walking in and get an ice cream soda for fifteen cents.

CW:On that street there, what were the smells, the colors of that (UNCLEAR)?

ED:They were powerful. Underneath -- there was a deli two doors down from us, Lieberman's Delicatessen. [BREAK IN RECORDING] So, two doors down from the candy store was a very popular deli, Lieberman's Delicatessen. You'd get a big corned beef sandwich, stacked this high for thirty-five cents, with a pickle. And boy, I'd love to eat at Lieberman's. That was really at the top of the food chain, as we say. And then, there was a Chinese restaurant across the street. There were butcher shops and bakery shops. So, there was a confluence of sights and smells that was memorable. One never forgets that.

CW:And the languages that you heard on the street, what were they?

ED:The young people spoke English. Their parents spoke Yiddish. Occasionally, occasionally, you'd hear some Russian, but not very often. It was maybe English and Yiddish.

CW:So, your home, what did your home look like that you grew up in?

ED:I was born in 1937. Until 1944, I lived in what was called a two-flat, okay, a two-story home where the landlord lived on the downstairs and our family lived upstairs. In 1944, my father had accumulated enough wealth to buy a single home near Dexter and Davison for seven thousand dollars. That was their first home. 24:00But it was a single home, and it had four bedrooms on the second floor. It had a bath-and-a-half, a full bathroom upstairs and a half-bath on the first floor. It had a living room and a dining room and a small den. It had a backyard but no garage. The garage had burned down. So, this was high living indeed when we moved into that single home. It had a basement and we really felt that as -- we had arrived. And there were quite a few people living in the house: my father and mother, my older brother and sister, me. My sister got married and her husband moved into the house with us because he was completing law school at Wayne State on the G.I. Bill. And then, we had a bachelor uncle who came to dinner in 1939 and stayed for fourteen years, (laughs) so -- remember the movie 25:00"The Man Who Came to Dinner"? So, little uncle Joe came to dinner. So, we had quite a crowd and tried to use -- the bathroom was -- you had to make a reservation to use the second-floor bathroom. It was a chore, but it -- I slept with this uncle until my sister and her husband finally moved out, after he graduated law school. He continued living with us forever, but my parents finally said, "Es iz shoyn tsayt," it's time to move on, right? So, they moved out and I got my own room when I was probably sixteen.

CW:And what was fraytik tsu nakht [Friday night] like in --

ED:My parents became very much involved in Yiddish cultural life. But they were 26:00not -- they shed any interest in formal ritual observance. So, Friday night, we went to the Sholem Aleichem Institute where they were founding members. This was a Yiddish cultural organization which had branches in New York and other major cities. And in contrast to the grand buildings where my friends attended synagogue, this was a little frame house on a little modest street. I was always kind of a little ashamed to show them when they said, Well, where do you belong? This was kind of a small Cape Cod house in a nondescript street and -- but for my parents, that was their life. And then, Friday night, there would be an oneg Shabbat after dinner that -- it was -- you'd go there after dinner, and there'd be a program and there'd be Yiddish singing and a lecture or readings or poetry. 27:00And it was a communal -- they never called it a service. If you ever called it a service, you'd get your hand slapped. It was an assembly. It was an interesting choice of words, an assembly, and that was to contrast it with religious services. It was not to be God-oriented. It was to be culturally-oriented. And then, Saturday nights, the end of Shabbos, there would be a proletariat dinner, as my mother would describe it. The dearest friends, all immigrants, would go to one another's houses. There'd be a rotation. So, they come to our house one week and go to somebody else's. And I sat there as a kid, watching these people. My godfather played the mandolin beautifully and they sang Yiddish songs and they 28:00read poetry. I mean, can you imagine, this day and age, could we get together, any of us, with our friends and read poetry to each other on a Saturday night or just sing? When I think back how these people entertained themselves and the richness of it and the pleasure they derived from it. And the cuisine was herring and black bread and a lot of -- a dish of schmaltz and some cloves of garlic and a lot of onions. Nobody caught cold at one of those dinners, right? Everybody was immune from everything. But it was a rich, self-created world of entertainment.

CW:Who were your parents' closest friends in that group? Who do you remember, particularly?

ED:Morris and Sarah Friedman, whose daughter you're going to be speaking with later today, Betty Sorkin, great Yiddishist. And then, I remember many of the people not so much by their surnames but by their occupation. The egg man, the fish man, it's -- that's how their identities were burned -- there was Winoman, who was the purveyor of fish. There was Harry and Gladys Komener, he was the egg man, they -- and that's how people were identified at that time. And the Frantzplaus and the Shanes and the Cantors and the -- Herman Cantor was a house painter. So, nobody was making other than a subsistence living. People weren't poor. I mean, they fed themselves, they clothed themselves. But they were all -- 30:00they weren't living off of dividend checks. They were all working very hard to make a living.

CW:Did your parents talk about politics?

ED:All the time. They were very politically-oriented and this group talked about politics all the time. These people all became American citizens and citizenship was a civic religion for them. Voting was absolutely of the highest order. And my parents voted for -- in every election till they died. So, it pains me greatly when I see young people kind of indifferent. These people crawled across Europe to get to this country and treasured the right to vote and were very politically sophisticated and read everything. In addition to Yiddish 31:00periodicals, we got the English newspapers and -- which they read voraciously. They were big readers, and we had a lot of newspapers. And my love of newspapers came from watching my parents read them all the time.

CW:So, did they get the "Forverts" -- did they read the other Yiddish papers, too?

ED:They read the "Tog" and the "Forverts" and -- certainly when we had the candy store. And they had -- when my dad had free access to everything, they read everything. I think, at home, I think we got the "Morgen-zhurnal" and the "Tsukunft." I don't think we ever got the "Freiheit." That was a little extreme. But I think that was the universe. And they read a lot of Yiddish books. We had a very large collection of Yiddish literature, and much of it I've sent down to 32:00the Book Center, but some of it I've kept because of -- it just speaks to me. I like to just look at the books.

CW:So, what was it like for you? What was your involvement and position in these events and this world?

ED:My sister was twelve years older than me and my brother nine years. So, when they were born, they were living on top of the laundries that my father had. I mean, they were very much part of the first chapter of the immigrant experience. By the time I came along, my parents had been in this country a dozen years or so. Little bit more, fifteen years. So, they were a little bit more established and a little more financially secure. And so, the life that my older siblings experienced was somewhat different than mine. I was a fascinated observer to all 33:00of this. I just loved watching and participating. I never shied away from work, and so the Sholem Aleichem Institute would have picnics. Belle Isle is an island in the Detroit River, a beautiful island park. And the Sholem Aleichem would have a fundraising picnic there in the summer. And so, I would be the gofer, running and carrying the pop bottles and the ice and helping cook the hot dogs and hamburgers. And they'd pay me maybe five dollars for a day's work. And then, during the year, during the fall and winter, they would have "restaurant days," they would call them. Again, fundraisers, and they'd have them at the Workmen's Circle on Linwood, right across from Central High School. And I would work at those and I loved it. I just loved being a part of the commotion. There was just 34:00a lot going on. It was energized. There was a feeling of things happening.

CW:And alts iz geven af yidish [everything was in Yiddish]?

ED:Alts iz geven af yidish, yep, yes. These people all dealt with the outside world all day long in the business world and so on. So, they obviously knew English. My dad was very good at languages and spoke a perfect, unaccented English, very quickly, and wrote beautifully and turned out to be a far better speller than me, which, to my great embarrassment -- I digress by saying that when Israel was founded in 1948, I wrote a paper about this for school. So, I 35:00was eleven years old at the time, and I laboriously typed the paper and I brought it down to show it to my father, so proud of this. And he took one look at it and flung it back to me. He said, "You spelled Israel wrong." And I thought to myself, How can this immigrant -- I'm an Amer-- what do you mean that -- I had spelled it throughout the paper I-S-R-E-A-L, okay? And this was a revealing moment in my life, that I was an American, he was an immigrant, and he caught the spelling mistake in two seconds. And I never forgot that lesson, believe me. So, to get back to your question, yes, they all spoke Yiddish when they were amongst themselves. But they dealt with the outside world and spoke 36:00just fine English.

CW:And with you -- what was the communication in the home?

ED:My mother spoke more Yiddish to me, almost until her death, than my dad did. He was more used to speaking, in the house, in English. But in one-on-one conversations with my mother who, again, spoke beautiful English -- but there was just something -- I think there was a message there about, Let's preserve this language. And one way to do it is to speak it, right?

CW:Did they ever explicitly say that to you?

ED:Never, and I wish they had. They were not people who placed many demands, any demands on their kids. They led by example rather than by edict. And I wish they would have explained more the importance of preserving the language and the 37:00culture. I absorbed it instinctively, but I never had a full discussion with them about the importance of it. And when we bought the candy store and I had to drop out of what was then the Workmen's Circle mitlshul [high school], my daily immersion in Yiddish ended. So, at about age sixteen or seventeen, where I had spent all of that time in my life exposed to Yiddish learning almost daily, it ended. And I really didn't recapture it until I got involved with the Book Center twenty-five years ago. So, there was a big hiatus. And thank God for the Book Center and for what it brought to my family and me.

CW:I definitely want to talk about that.

ED:Yeah.

CW:I wanted to ask you first about the shule [secular Yiddish school].

ED:Yeah.

CW:So, first of all, was it connected to the institute that you described for -- on Friday?

ED:Yes, it was -- the formal name of the organization was called the Sholem Aleichem Institute. But in the vernacular, my parents would call it the shule, okay, school. You went to the shule. I went there after school three or days a week for Yiddish lessons. No religiosity. There was no attention paid to God or prayer at all. It was all cultural. It was --

CW:Was it anti-religious?

ED:No. They nev-- no, not at all. And in their holiday materials, they have some 39:00prayers in a -- but not prayers from a Yiddish -- from a Hebrew prayer book. They would be prayers from Yiddish poets and singers and so on. And so, the word God wasn't obliterated, but it just wasn't a feature. It was not emphasized. What was emphasized were human qualities, human values, the goldene keyt, the chain of continuity. Israel was a very important focus of the Sholem Aleichem Institute. And Yiddishkayt, in all of its dimensions, from food to song to literature, all of that.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Did you have a favorite yontef [holiday] when you were a kid?

ED:Pesach was and remains the central -- one of the central events of our family.

CW:And there was a third seder?

ED:There was a third seder that -- the Sholem Aleichem had its own Haggadah. Rather primitive. It was -- do you know what a mimeograph machine is? Do you know what that is? You're showing your youth, okay. A mimeograph machine, before Xerox, was a machine with a large drum and you typed a stencil and you put the stencil on the exterior of the drum and ink went inside the drum and you turned. This was a primitive form of reproducing documents. And the Sholem Aleichem Haggadah was made on a mimeograph machine. And it was mainly-ish some Hebrew and some English. That's what I grew up with in our -- the Driker family Haggadah 41:00now is a direct outgrowth of that Sholem Aleichem Haggadah. My father and mother, in their senior years, when they got active in the Yiddish Culture Club at the Jewish Community Center, started a third seder. Let's have a third seder. It became a very big activity with probably two hundred people attending. And my father led the seder using the Sholem Aleichem Haggadah.

CW:Who were the writers' names, the Yiddish writers' names that you were familiar with, that you remember from --

ED:My parents loved Peretz, Yud Lamed Peretz, Sholem Aleichem. They read Chaim Grade. My mother loved Kadia Molodowsky's poems. She was her favorite poetess. There were some books by Sholem Asch in the house, but I'm not sure how my parents related to them. I mean, there were books from all the big names: 42:00Sutzkever and others. But I remember distinctly that my parents loved to read Yud Lamed Peretz's materials. And my mother loved to read Kadia Molodowsky.

CW:Do you remember any of the writers who came through Detroit?

ED:I don't, but as I have to show you, I have a book that, in 1950, Chaim Grade was obviously in Detroit and likely stayed at our home. These writers were -- they struggled to make a living, and they would carry a pack of books of their own authorship around the country, I think. And they would go from town to town and try to sell their books. And apparently, Chaim Grade either stayed at our 43:00home or visited with my parents here and I have the book that he endorses to my mother as a friend, to Feygl, my mother's -- her Americanized name was Frances, but everybody called her Feygl. So, "To Feygl Driker, my friend, from Chaim Grade."

CW:Was there theater, do you remember? Yiddish --

ED:Yes.

CW:-- theater?

ED:Yes, there were -- couple of theaters. There was Littman's Yiddish Theatre in Detroit. Quite a famous theater. I don't recall, myself, ever going to it. But I'm sure my parents attended Yiddish theater here in town. This was a very vibrant Jewish community and still is, but in terms of the interests of 44:00immigrants in arts and culture, it was -- it was a thriving Yiddish cultural scene.

CW:So, looking back on that rich life, the early life, Jewish life that you had, what did you learn -- what do you think your parents were trying to pass on to you?

ED:I think through example rather than, I think, kind of didactic effort. It was the importance of maintaining Yiddishkayt in one's life, the importance of cohesiveness in Jewish life, a family of friends, of community. They were both very active in community, and my father, when he had these laundry businesses, 45:00he'd wake up at five in the morning to open that business. And he'd come home hot and disheveled at six o'clock at night. And yet, he'd clean himself off and go off to a landsmanshaft [association of immigrants originally from the same region] meeting. He was very active in the Odessa Progressive Aid Society. Did he come from Odessa? No, he came from Zhytomyr. Odessa was five hundred miles away, right? But I think the Odessa Progressive Aid Society, I think, had more cachet. And so, my parents were involved with the Odessa Progressive Aid Society. And my mother was very, very deeply committed to the Pioneer Women and to Hadassah and to the Sholem Aleichem Women's Division, leyenkrayz, the reading corner. Book groups are all the rage in the current generation. This was the 46:00rage in my parents' generation. They read books and discussed them. And so, they were part of a very rich community. And I think by example, they were saying, This is how you live your life. You're part of a Jewish community, and it's very important. They never said it in those words, ever, they just did it.

CW:How did your Jewish identity change when you left home and -- if at all?

ED:Well, you have to understand that I stayed home through college. I went to college just a few miles away from where I went to public school. I stayed on the same bus line that just went a little further to what's now called Midtown Detroit, and attended Wayne University. So, it was -- as I've often joked, my 47:00father said I could go to any college I wanted to as long as I could get there on a Dexter bus. Our cohort, a few people went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who had a little extra money. But most of us went to Wayne, where the tuition was a hundred dollars a semester. So, I lived at home for my whole college life and for my first year of law school, which was also at Wayne. Then, Elaine and I got married. She had just graduated from Wayne, as a teacher. So, we went off as a young married couple. She was twenty and I was twenty-two, and we set up in an apartment, and I continued with two more years of law school. And she supported us by teaching. Jewish life kind of got shoved into the background. We were so busy being young marrieds and trying to figure out what 48:00that's all about that I don't think we paid much attention. It took a while for that to seep back into our lives. My parents, of course, continued in their very active Jewish circles. The family continued to celebrate Pesach and Hanukkah and we had the seders at my parents' home and so on. But it was kind of interjected into our more secular existence. I got out of law school, we moved to Washington, D.C. as I took a job with the Justice Department. We had very little Jewish content in our lives in Washington. Very little. And it was only, I 49:00think, when our daughter was born -- she was born in Washington, and after three years we moved back to Detroit. When you have a child, you start looking at life differently. And that's when we started to become, the two of us, Elaine and I, more purposefully involved in Jewish life, both in the household and in communal life and so on.

CW:So, what kind of choices did you make? What --

ED:(laughs) Elaine is a product of the largest Conservative synagogue in Detroit, Congregation Shaarey Zedek. That's where she went to religious school. I was a product of the Sholem Aleichem, so this was very much a mixed marriage, right? What'll we do? And we've always been city dwellers. We've never lived outside the city of Detroit. And when we returned to Detroit in 1964, there was 50:00already a fair amount of movement to the northern suburbs of the Jewish community. The institutions were moving out of the city. And then, after the 1967 riots, there was an accelerated departure of the Jewish community to the suburbs. So, there weren't many choices. So, we joined a Reform temple, Temple Emanu-El in Oak Park, which is one of the close-in suburbs. It's a couple miles from where we're living now. And so, we kind of compromised. And it's never really filled my needs. So, we've continued to attend the Sholem Aleichem Institute, which is kind of hanging on by a thread. It has not successfully 51:00transferred its DNA to a new generation. But we still go there for Rosh Hashanah and Kol Nidre and we support it financially, because it's a piece of who we are. And their -- I can't call it a service, remember. It's just an assembly. Their assembly is more meaningful to me than the Reform service at a temple that we've belonged to for fifty years.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:How did you hear about the Yiddish Book Center?

ED:I'm not sure how we heard about it originally. I'm a big joiner and so I probably got a piece of mail and said, Gee, this looks interesting, and sent in eighteen dollars or whatever. And we started getting the magazine, the "Pakn treger [Book peddler]," and I was intrigued by it. And then, a little Jewish 52:00guilt serendipitously produced our personal bond with Aaron and Gail and the Book Center. I had made plans -- Elaine and I had made plans to go out to California on a vacation. And at the last minute, she cancelled because of a professional obligation. She was in -- working diligently on a big strategic planning process for the City of Detroit. She was in charge of something called the Race Relations Task Force. And she had to stay here.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

And somehow, shortly after that cancellation, which forced me to go to California alone and she stayed here for work, she happened to flip open the "Pakn treger" and there was an ad for a Yiddish camp at Mount Holyoke College. 53:00And to surprise me and to make amends for the cancelled trip to California, she said, "Let's go to the Yiddish Book Center camp in Mount Holyoke." So, we packed up our bikes and our car and we drove to that great center of Yiddish thinking, Mount Holyoke College. And I remember the day we pulled in there and there was this fancy, beautiful New England school. It was right out of a Hollywood movie. There was a sign for tennis camp this way and equestrian camp this way, and the last sign was for Yiddish camp this way. And we just howled. And I'm sure the women who gave birth to Mount Holyoke College one hundred fifty years ago never thought that there'd be a group of Yiddishists -- and we met Aaron and Gail, and it was love at first sight. And it was twenty-five years ago this summer that we 54:00were there.

CW:So, what was that program like? 'Cause it's not around anymore.

ED:In the morning, there were lectures. Aaron would speak about East European Jewish history, the birth of Yiddishkayt, what the language meant, what the culture meant. There was a professor named Leonard Glick, and I can't remember what university he was attached to -- he spoke.

CW:Hampshire, I think.

ED:Yeah. So, we had a few hours of lectures that were fascinating. Then we'd have lunch and the afternoon was play time. One group had a purim-shpil. We wrote a purim-shpil and performed it. Another group did crafts or some -- or singing or a play. I mean, everybody -- then we broke up into subcommunities. It was somewhat self-selected, based upon one's knowledge of Yiddish. Some people 55:00were good Yiddish speakers, some couldn't speak a word. And then, the evening, we had programs, singalongs and so on. It was a week. We lived in the Mount Holyoke dorms and it was a life-transforming event, especially the lectures in the morning. Aaron, as you know, is a very effective communicator and he distilled a lifetime of my -- kind of the strands of my life, he put it together in a meaningful way for me. It was an a-ha moment for me at the time. Oh, this is what it's about. The things that I had kind of just been presented by my parents and how they lived their lives, he added an intellectual framework to it 56:00that was a transformative moment for me.

CW:Can you say more about that? What did it change for you?

ED:It made me realize that this wasn't just nostalgia. It wasn't just, Oh, let's all sing "Rozhinkes mit mandlen [Raisins with almonds]," and it just wasn't that. There was a -- important, cohesive body of literature and thought and culture that was all swimming out there that I hadn't -- I had been exposed to it, but hadn't realized the importance of it.

CW:What was your first impression of Aaron?

ED:Elaine says it best. We were at, I think, lunch, maybe the first day, perhaps dinner, and the buzz in the room said, Aaron Lanksy's coming, Aaron Lansky's 57:00coming. And based upon his reputation, we thought some six-foot-six guy would walk in and dominate the room, and this little elfin chap comes bouncing in in a baseball cap and gym shoes. And he was just charming, what -- I mean, we just fell in love with him as a person, as a leader, as a fount of knowledge. But there was a warmth and a directness and a genuineness about him. I recently stepped down after serving on the board of governors of a state university for twelve years, and I spent a lot of time with university people, people with academic degrees, and sometimes they can be quite impressed with themselves. Self-absorbed. Aaron is nothing like that, okay? His vision is outward. It's to 58:00embrace people and bring them into a discussion of the field he's interested in, but make them a part of it and feel comfortable talking about it and realizing it, right? It was a very positive experience then, and every moment since.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Where had Yiddish been for you in those years since you left your parents' home?

ED:It was something in the past. It was part of their lives that had a nostalgia component to it. But that was it. It was -- I didn't think a lot about it. I liked the hear of it. I loved when my parents, especially my mother, would speak 59:00to me in Yiddish. It was a reminder of remembrances of things past, right, and -- but I didn't stitch it together with its importance as the vehicle for a culture. That didn't come about until that week at Mount Holyoke College, and then that kind of made me realize that there was something here that needed some attention to. This wasn't just going to survive by nostalgia. Somebody had to pay some attention to it. And so, we decided to pay some attention to it.

CW:So, how did that take form?

ED:We started reading more about the Book Center. My guess is that before that time I would glance through the "Pakn treger" but not pay too much attention to 60:00it. We would talk more with my parents about -- my father by that time had already died, but my mother was still living. She was a great fan of Aaron's. She clipped out every little article from the "Detroit Jewish News" about Aaron and the books on Aaron. We tried to become emissaries for Yiddish and the Book Center in the Detroit area. Not zamlers collecting books but kind of the other way around, talking about the Book Center at gatherings and so on, trying to explain to people what the Book Center was doing. We were reverse zamlers, okay? And at some point, and I can't remember exactly how, Aaron asked me to join the board. And I was committed to a major trial and I was involved -- and I just 61:00couldn't do it. I couldn't take the time to travel to Amherst and (UNCLEAR). So, I expressed my appreciation but I declined. I said, "Call me again in a couple of years," which he did. And I would guess that was probably fifteen years ago. And I went on the board and the rest is kind of history. I found it a very rewarding experience. I've been involved with Jewish communal organizations, social service organizations, and American Jewish Committee, and things of that nature. On a local level, not -- but none of them come close to the punch of the 62:00Yiddish Book Center. You know the expression of somebody punching above their weight? The Yiddish Book Center punches above its weight. It really has had a profound impact on Jewish cultural life in America and elsewhere that's really quite astonishing.

CW:So, in the last fifteen years, a lot has -- second half, really, of the Book Center's life, what was going on -- what was the organization when you were first involved and how did that start to change during your involvement?

ED:Well, the organization was essentially a book collection effort, right? I mean, that's the story, that's the legend: the dumpsters and the late-night calls and flying off to Cuba or Rhodesia or Uganda or where-- flying around the 63:00world, collecting these books and rescuing them. That's kind of the breathtaking story that Aaron captured in his book that has captivated so many people. At some point in time, the combination of -- on succeeding in that venture, and technology, the ability to put the books online, and the interest in -- of younger people, of your generation, and even those younger than you to figure out who they are, those kind of strands coalesced to bend the arc a little bit for the books on our -- yes, we're still deeply dedicated to collecting books and they come in every day. And I just shipped off a couple of cartons in the 64:00last few weeks that somebody dropped off at this house. But the realization developed about a decade ago that we got to open these books up. It's one thing to collect them, but somebody's got to read them and to read them you've got to translate them or teach people Yiddish or both, right? And so, the Book Center's mission broadened into not only collecting the books but providing access to them, in two languages.

CW:I know you've been involved in the translation efforts and those projects. Why is that a particular interest of yours?

ED:Well, I think, again, providing access to the literature -- I can still pick 65:00my way through the first page of the "Forverts." I still get the Yiddish "Forverts" and I try dutifully to read the first page. But it's imperfect at best. I would have a hard time reading a Yiddish book beyond an elementary level, sadly. I mean, at some time in my life, I could have done it just fine, but I lost it and it's -- for me, it's hard to regain at this stage of my life. But I'm interested in knowing what's in those books. So, Elaine and I have taken some courses with some local professors over the year-- we have a group of a dozen couples who we meet once a month with, professors of Judaic Studies from University of Michigan, other places. And last year, we read Peretz and Sholem Aleichem, and so it's great to read the classics in translation. And I doubt 66:00that anyone in the room could have read them in Yiddish. And it's really revealing. Oh, my goodness, look what's here.

CW:Yeah, why is Yiddish literature still relevant? Why read it?

ED:I suppose for the same reason that my wife and daughter went to Stratford this past weekend and they saw "Macbeth." Why -- that's a five-hundred-year-old play. Why is that relevant and important? And the place was packed. It's because it's a window to a time in history, to how people thought and wrote. And it's interesting. It's fun, right? I mean, I've given "The Railroad Stories," in 67:00translation, to lots of friends who wouldn't know Yiddish from a cauliflower. They couldn't figure out a word of Yiddish. And you give them "The Railroad Stories" to read, and they're just blown away by the humor in them and the great writing, right? Those are as witty and interesting today as they were a hundred years ago when they were written. Well, why should we be deprived -- why shouldn't we have access to that literature, right? Should it remain buried? And I don't think so. But I didn't understand that all until I had the good fortune to stumble on the Book Center. And I probably wouldn't understand it today.

CW:What do you think is the broader association with Yiddish in the American Jewish community today?

ED:Well, I think as I grew up, laying the whole blame for turning away from 68:00Yiddish -- I can't put the whole blame on the fact that I was working at the candy store and therefore I didn't have time for it. It was the past and it was the immigrant past. And we all wanted to be Americans, right? We were interested in baseball and movies and America. It's only later -- when you look back, you say there's a value here that shouldn't be discarded to the dumpster. The rescuing the books from the dumpster is metaphorical, isn't it really? It's not 69:00just taking the books out of the garbage can. It's saving what's in the books. I mean, I'd never really thought about it that way but there's an important cultural rescue effort here of a tangible thing, but perhaps more importantly an intangible thing. And that intangible thing is Yiddishkayt and Yiddish culture. And I think American Jews are sufficiently secure that they can say, Let's find out what's there. I introduced Aaron, couple of months ago -- we were in Florida and we had lunch with Aaron and a very prominent member of the Detroit Jewish community, Bill Berman, who's ninety-eight years old. Introduced these two people, lunch, and listened to them go back and forth. Bill really did not know 70:00much about Yiddish. He didn't grow up in a Yiddish-speaking home. Very involved in Jewish life. Extremely involved and extraordinarily generous in Yiddish education and Jewish education, not Yiddish education. He says, "I'm going to go to the Book Center." And he had occasion to be at Harvard a few weeks ago for something and he has the benefit of a private plane. He had the private plane drive to Amherst and he toured the Book Center a couple weeks ago, and called me the next day, said, "What a fabulous, interesting place." This guy's ninety-eight years old and he finds something -- and he's a very knowledgeable person about Jewish life in all aspects. And this was a revealing moment for him to see the Book Center and get a whiff of what we're doing there. And he was impressed. So, that gives me a lot of comfort that we're on the right path. 71:00Doesn't it say that, that -- it's confirmation that if people are exposed to this, it will resonate with them.

CW:I wanted to ask you a little bit more -- we started by talking about your parents' roots in Eastern Europe. What was the experience for you personally to go back to the physical locations where your parents were from?

ED:It was very emotional. Again, we had just read "Everything is Illuminated," and I think it was just coincidence. I don't think I read it because we were going back. But that whole book -- and then we saw the movie. It really -- it 72:00resonated with me. And just going back and not being able to find my mother's shtetl on all kinds of internet searches, and then having this guide in Kiev tell me, "We'll find it, don't worry. We'll find it." And we drove on some bumpy country roads and found it. And there's a picture in the other room of Elaine and me standing in front of a sign that says Toporiv. It was magical. It was just magical. But it's also sobering. We saw in this little town, the synagogue. You could see a synagogue that probably had been locked up for seventy years with a chain across the front. You see the mogn-dovid [Star of David]. Now, in fairness, the church in the town had also been locked up. I mean, the Soviets had locked the church and the Nazis had locked the synagogue. It was sobering 73:00when you go through towns and you see where the mezuzahs were on the doorposts, right? You can see the spot where they were yanked off. And in some of the towns, some of the little bigger towns that had little historical museums and you saw the picture of the town square and what it looked like, let's say, in 1937, and you could see Hebrew writing on signs -- and one morning, the Ukrainians woke up and the Jews were gone. Didn't anybody ask, What happened to our neighbors? No, they just took over the stores and the houses and the -- so, it was, in one sense, very exciting to walk the steps where my parents had walked. But it's quite sobering to remember what happened to -- we went into one 74:00courtyard, I can't remember the town, and the guide pointed out to us that the pavers in the courtyard were Jewish cemetery headstones turned upside down. If you lifted up the pavers, it would be the headstones from the cemetery. So, there's a lot of loss embedded in everything you see. When Elaine and I, on our own, went to Babi Yar, I thought, as we walked up to the ravine, I figured there'll be a magnificent monument there. There was a rather small monument, and 75:00it was broken up, and there was graffiti on it and so on. And then, when you peered into the ravine, I don't know what I expected, but I expected to be overcome with emotion. And I looked down, and there were Coke bottles and pizza boxes and so on. There were thirty-five thousand bodies down there, and the Ukrainians have not come to grips with the Jewish question, okay? No place, other than our guide, the personal Ukrainian woman who accompanied us, who was candid about what had happened to the Jews of Ukraine -- a lot of the local guides in the various towns and so on kind of pretended that nothing bad had happened. That was a stunning kind of a revelation. Stunning.

CW:What do you think your parents would have thought about you going back?

ED:I think they would have, on the one hand, thought it was madness to ever go back. And the other hand, felt a certain pride that we were interested enough to go back and see their roots. It would have been mixed feelings, I think.

CW:How does Yiddish play into your Jewish identity on a day-to-day basis now?

ED:I've kind of become a bit of an emissary for the Yiddish Book Center in the 77:00Detroit community. People know that I'm involved with it. And so, when things Yiddish come up, when people either need information -- from time to time, somebody will send me a postcard in Yiddish and, like, Can you get this translated? It'll range from that to arranging for speakers to talk at events where some Yiddish content would be appropriate. And so, I've tried to become a spokesperson for the Yiddish Book Center, and obviously that means becoming a spokesperson for the importance of Yiddish, just like this encounter with Aaron and Bill Berman, this lunch. Here we could have talked about politics or the election or baseball or a lot of things, but it quickly turned to Yiddish. And I 78:00felt this was an appropriate shidekh [arranged marriage] to make, between Lansky and Berman, and they -- Berman expressed an interest in -- here's somebody who's very highly respected in the community. I'm sure he's talking about his experience at the Yiddish Book Center to many people, right? So, I feel there's a -- my first impression of Aaron was that he was the Jewish Pied Piper, okay? And I'd like to, to the extent I can do one one-thousandth of what he's done -- and just help carry the message to a broader audience, I'm privileged to do so. It's fun. It's worthwhile. At this stage of the game, I'd like to concentrate on things that bring me enjoyment, on the one hand, and are consequential on the other hand. And I think Yiddish Book Center fills both of those needs for me.

CW:What do you think is the next phase for the Book Center?

ED:More, yeah. I think there's so much to do. When I attend board meetings, Christa, I come out of there dizzy with ideas. And the board meetings are so jammed with substance. As you know, we added a thirtysomething to our board. This organization can't just survive on people with grey hair sitting around the table. First of all, we don't -- most of us don't understand technology. And as 80:00you know, the Book Center is all about technology, right? And I wish I could begin to understand all of the technological aspects of what we're doing. But I certainly felt strongly a year, year and a half ago that we had to get some people of your generation sitting at the table to tell us what to do, not just hear it from my generation. So, I think there will be a greater emphasis on bringing younger people into the decision-making process. When I first visited the Book Center, everybody was older. Now, when I go there and I see young people passing through the place, gives me great optimism for the future of the organization.

CW:So, what is, sort of to sum it up, what does Yiddish mean to you?

ED:Yiddish is the Rosetta Stone for a culture. And I didn't understand that until late in life. And I didn't understand that until I was exposed to Aaron and the others at the Book Center. And when I talk about Aaron, I don't -- this is not a cult of personality when Aaron's name is a proxy for you and Susan and Josh and all of the people who are making the Book Center work. I don't mean it's one person. I mean it's a well-coordinated team that is together carrying this mission forward. And I think without knowing Yiddish and understanding its 82:00significance, none of this would happen. Elaine and I support a Steiner summer student. Four or five years ago, we had -- the summer student was a young Catholic woman from the University of Paris. Last year, it was a man from the University of Alexandria in Egypt. This summer, we just got a letter from a young woman who's from Germany, okay? I don't know if she's German -- Jewish or not Jewish. I couldn't tell. But boy, doesn't that tell you that there's an importance to this language that transcends Jewish nostalgia, right? People are studying it. I remember the first time Aaron pointed out -- when people ask him or -- Why would non-Jews study Yiddish? I said, "Well, don't Jews study 83:00Japanese?" I mean, it's -- right? And there's a -- it's a language. It's a language with a rich literature and an important culture. And it's a very utilitarian language. I found it very helpful, no matter where you travel, you could usually find somebody, when all else is lost -- and I don't have much facility with language, okay? And so, when I'm in France or Spain or the Caribbean or whatever and I'm at a loss, you can usually find someone -- with whom you can speak Yiddish, right? It's a universal solvent for language barriers.

CW:Do you have a favorite Yiddish saying?

ED:Az m'muz, ken men, right? If you must, you can. I think that that kind of bespeaks what we're all about at the Yiddish Book Center.

CW:Well, a groysn dank. Thank you so much for taking --

ED:Nishto far vos [You're welcome].

CW:-- time.

ED:It's a pleasure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]