VIVIAN FELSEN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is July 21st, 2016. I am here in Toronto, North York -- where are we exactly?

VIVIAN FELSEN:Well, you're in Toronto.

CW:In Toron-- (laughs)

VF:That is true. (laughs)

CW:Yeah. With Vivian Felsen. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

VF:Yes.

CW:Great. Well, I'd like to start just with what you know about your family background.

VF:Okay. My father was born in Poland and he came to Toronto in 1930 at the age of twelve on one of the last boats that they allowed bringing Jewish immigrants 1:00from Poland. I was going to say refugees -- in a way they were. From Poland. After that, the policy of the Canadian government was not to allow any more Jewish immigration except under very special circumstances. So, he came to Toronto and he was -- he came with his parents and his -- and two of his siblings. One had come earlier. So, his whole immediate family was here in Toronto. And he, being the youngest and only twelve, actually went to school. And then, while working at -- his aunt had a little delicatessen here, and it was she who brought several family members here. So, he always said that his life, the life of their family was saved by the aunt here in Toronto, and the 2:00Suchudniówer rebbe who told my grandfather, who was -- very pious Jew -- that he could go to America, it was okay, despite the fact that he was afraid that his children would become goyim and eat treyf [not kosher]. So, they came. And so, my father -- I don't know how much you want to know about my father, but I'll continue. He was expected to become a rabbi. My grandfather also had smicha [Hebrew: rabbinical ordination]. And he went to a technical school to learn a trade so that he could be a rabbi, because in those days, rabbis did have trades. And he studied aircraft mechanics. And then, the war broke out and he decided that he was going to enlist. And his father was very much against it, 3:00but he did and he had skills that were necessary in the Air Force. And he ended up, at the end of the war, as a flight lieutenant, an officer. And then, the Air Force helped him to attend university. They gave him some small subsidy. In the meantime, during the war, he met my mother in Montreal at a dance for Jewish servicemen at the Canadian Jewish Congress, where my mother was working at the time. Now, my mother was born in Montreal. Her parents came -- well, my grandfather in 1910, my grandmother a little bit earlier, he -- from Belarus, and which, at that time, was part of the Russian Empire. And my grandmother from Lithuania. And they came by themselves. They had some relatives. They came by 4:00themselves as teenagers, and he became a Yiddish writer. He was a graduate -- now, I don't know if he graduated but he attended the Lida Yeshiva, which was famous yeshiva because his teacher, the head of the yeshiva, was Rabbi Jacob Reines, who was one of the founders of the Mizrachi movement. He was a religious Zionist and one of the few rabbis in Eastern Europe to support Herzl. So, he went to that yeshiva and there, he received a good education. Rabbi Reines wrote books on education and bringing modern methodology to the study of religious texts and introducing secular subjects. So, my grandfather studied Russian and mathematics, and so on. And when he came to Montreal at the age of sixteen, he had an education and he started writing, which other writers did, and he wrote 5:00about this era. He became a journalist for the "Keneder Adler," the paper, but he also wrote two history books. One was about that early era, and the second was about the First World War, the interwar period, and the Second World War here in Canada, the --

CW:And can you just say his name?

VF:His name was Yud Medresh, or Medres, as he called himself. He is now known as Israel Medres. Now, he had two first names. He was Yud Yud Medres, actually. His first name was Yisroel and the second was Yoyne, Jonah. So, he was known as Yoyne on -- by his cousins in Montreal, and he was known as Joe or Uncle Joe by my grandmother's relatives. And she called him Joe, so -- but when his book, his 6:00first book was translated into French and the translator, who's become -- very important person in my life now -- didn't look for relatives or children or anything like that. He translated the book into French and called my grandfather Israel Medresh. But he added an H to the M-E-D-R-E-S because it's very difficult to pronounce in French. It became "Medre" or something like that. So, that became his name until I translated that book into English and dropped the H again, because that was never the way it was spelled. Anyway, so that's his name now: Israel Medres. He's known as Israel Medres, M-E-D-R-E-S. Anyway, so, my 7:00mother grew up in Montreal. And I used to hear about her childhood, because it always seemed to me like it was a wonderful childhood, even though it was through the Depression and times were hard. And I used to hear about that a lot, that, "You're so lucky, because we grew up in the Depression." She lived in a Jewish environment and she went to the Peretz Shule and she was very much influenced by her teacher, who was Yaacov Zipper. And she ended up becoming a Yiddish teacher in Montreal. And also, when she was in high school, it was a very exciting time. She went to Baron Byng High School, where the students went on strike to protest against the -- they were raising tuition. They had to pay 8:00tuition in those days. Not everybody could go to high school. And they went on strike, and the Communist Party came and organized them all. And most of -- my impression was that most of the students became com-- joined the CPSO. And it was a wonderful thing, because there, they got lectures in philosophy and economics and Marxism and so on, and literature. And it was exciting to participate in these things. And I think at that time, too, the Communist Party was the only one to protest against Hitler, because for everybody else, it seemed that the Soviet Union was the big enemy that one had to worry about. 9:00Anyway, so she was part of that. And I think that she must have left the party at -- 1939, with the Soviet-Hitler pact. But I never had a chance to ask her about that, because my mother died at sixty-three. She became sick at the age of sixty-one, she died at sixty-three, and I was in my early thirties. But what I did -- but what did -- the impression that I had as a child was that it was a very exciting time and that this was exciting. And also, to go at the age of sixteen -- she was sent to New York. She stayed with a relative somewhere, and I don't know who the relative was. And she went to what I've been told now was called the "hekhere kursn [advanced courses]." I knew that it was a teacher seminary run by the communists, and that there she had the most wonderful teachers. And one of the names I know, because it was mentioned, was [Rafoyl 10:00Mueller?], the historian. And she traveled all around Manhattan to different places in New York, practice teaching, and then she came back to Montreal and taught at the Winchevsky School, which was the school run by the Labour League, which then became the United Jewish People's Order, so -- and my grandfather wasn't happy, I don't think, that, I think, three of his children got involved with the party, although my oldest uncle was expelled in 1937 for questioning the show trials, and that's another story. And that was a real trauma (laughs) for my mother and for everybody else. But anyway, he had already been expelled from high school for being a communist and then he was expelled from the party, so --

CW:So, do you know much about your father's and your grandfather's life in Europe?

VF:The Poland part?

CW:Yeah.

VF:Okay, so that was another thing. So, the Poland -- the life in Poland definitely didn't have this romantic appeal of the (laughs) one in Montreal. And certainly, he didn't talk about it in the same way. Yes, I did hear about his life in Poland. They lived in a little one-room -- well, in a room, and I have visited the -- he came from a village called Słupia Nowa in the Kielce province in the Świętokrzyski area, which was in Małopolska, that part of Poland. And it was a little village and his father, his parents were very devout. And his 12:00father just sat and studied. He was a Torah scholar and my grandmother ran a little "shenk," as they called it, a little store where she also sold liquor and other things, which was the front of their -- they lived in a building with many entrances, right on the main square of the village. And there, when that window which was a door, I guess, looked out onto the main square. And she sold things to the peasants that would come into the town. And my father told me, also, that -- and I've written a little bit about this, too, that one thing that was really difficult for him to see was that his grandmother went every morning and -- to carry back two pails of water from the river on a yoke, like an animal. And none of the men helped with this job. Even in winter, she had to go down to the river 13:00and bring water back, 'cause that was their only source of water. I once asked him about a toilet, because I had befriended a woman from Poland who told me the first time she ever saw a commode was when she went to Vilna in the seminary to study and she stayed in the house of one of her teachers. And that was the first time that she saw a commode. Otherwise, they had an outhouse. So, I asked my dad, "Did you have an outhouse?" He said, "No." Asked, so, "What did you do?" He said, "We went to the field." (laughs) So, that's what he told me. Also, rats were a big problem, these big rats that were as big as their cats that they kept, and that the -- there were four children in the family. My grandmother had given birth to eight children, four of whom survived early childhood. And her grandmother had given birth to sixteen, and eight had survived early childhood. 14:00So, in between these four children, there had been others. So, that's really basically what I know about my father's childhood in Poland. His father was very strict, and he went to the Polish school, where he was apparently called things like "pig's ear." When I was in Poland, I asked some Polish people, "Is that a typical epithet for" -- and they weren't familiar with that one. But anyway, that's -- I just know it in English -- and that children were made to sit at the back of the room. So, it wasn't a pleasant experience, and he really didn't like using Polish at all. And when some cousins arrived after the war who had survived Auschwitz and so on and were among a group of people of -- close friend 15:00survivors. But my parents became very close to them. He couldn't understand why they spoke Polish among their friends. It really bothered him. And I guess, in those nine years between 1930 and 1939, there were big changes taking place in Poland, and young people became very Polonized. So, that was very different from my father's upbringing.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:How did you find out about all this information about your father's background?

VF:Okay, I think just earlier you mentioned that it isn't always -- maybe it's less common for someone to know that much about their background. One thing I can tell you is that -- well, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here. I was going to say that when I started translating my grandfather's books, the one in 16:00Montreal, and I wanted to know biographical information about him, my mother had died already. My three uncles knew nothing, not even the name of the place he had come from. They did not know their grandmother's first name. We knew the grandfather's because my -- in the Jewish tradition, you call yourself the son of, and in the -- I suppose on his stone, it says Ben Mordechai, and his -- he had a pseudonym, which was Ben Mordechai. So, we knew that. They didn't know. And all that information I got from reading obituaries in the "Keneder Adler." And also, Melech Ravitch has a chapter about my grandfather. There are things in the lexicon. But my uncles knew none of it and had not been interested. So, I am 17:00aware that in that generation, there were many people that didn't know, and I know that my husband, who's the son of immigrant parents, also knew very little and he didn't ask until much later. So, my father had three siblings here, and they would get together and talk about it. I lived with my paternal grandparents, the ones from Poland, until the age of seven. We lived in the same house. Small house. And every Sunday, all the aunts and uncles would come, and people would talk and I would hear stories about Poland. So, we did hear about it. And so, that's how I know a little bit, yeah. And I really should record 18:00what my cousins have to say because I'm always learning new things, too, from them. So, that's how I know about him. The other side, my grandmother from Lithuania talked about the fact that she was from Courland. She was very proud of being from Courland because Courland, she said, was -- the non-Jews there were many Germans who were very dignified and well-dressed and apparently had lace collars. I mean, she talked about that. She was very proud of being from Courland. She also used to go swimming and she was -- she could swim. They had a river there where she used to go swimming. And she also was able to bring her mother and her three younger siblings to Montreal. She went to work in a factory and brought them over. So, I guess she didn't have that trauma either of losing them in the First World War or the Second World War, which I think for my 19:00grandfather, her husband, was a terrible trauma. And not only that, we -- I do have a letter of refusal from the Canadian government, in 1926, refusing him the permission to bring one of his brothers to Canada who was just a young man and healthy and everything else. So, he was unable to save any of them. So, yeah, he didn't talk about it. But when my cousins, my two cousins were born in Montreal, he did ask that they be named after two of his brothers. So, I know two names and that's it. So, that's --

CW:I want to ask a little bit more about your grandfather Medres --

VF:Okay.

CW:-- actually. Could you say a little bit more about the books that he wrote?

VF:Yeah. So, he wrote -- his first book is called "Montreal of Yesterday," "Montreal fun nekhtn," and it was published in 1947. He wrote it during the Depression. And as he says, I think, in his introduction -- and there's a forward by Yud Yud Segal. He wrote this series of articles about the lives of the early immigrants, before 1914, and which -- he was one of them. And in a way, it was looking back on happier times and he says this in his introduction, or maybe, "Before the world knew what a world war was, before they knew what a 21:00concentration camp was, what a gas chamber was," so -- and it was a time of hope. There were all these ideologies that people believed in, and they really thought that the world would become a better place. There was a lot of hope in the future. And so, he started writing this during the Depression. And he really was one of the earliest social -- it was one of the -- maybe the earliest social histories of Jews in North America. The chapter headings are amazingly similar to Irving Howe's "World of Our Fathers." He talks about the Jewish neighborhood. He talks about what kind of work people had. He talks about courtship and marriage. He has a chapter on movies, what movies people saw, the Yiddish theater, the vaudeville theater, the phenomenon of boarders, how people either 22:00lived as boarders, came as single people and lived as boarders or took in boarders, and the fact that a lot of books and the plays and the Yiddish theater were all based on this theme of boarders. And it's a wonderful book. And my grandfather also had a great sense of humor. It's very understated, very subtle, but he poked fun at everybody but in a -- not in a sarcastic way. In that chapter on boarders, he said that a wife falling in love with a boarder or husband falling in love with a boarder was very common in the Yiddish theater. But it also happened occasionally in real life. And in that situation, people would read very carefully the "Forverts," even here in Canada, because they had the "Galerye fun farshvundene mener," "The Gallery of Missing Husbands." And 23:00they published their pictures in the newspaper, of these men who had run away from their families. (laughs) And if they were discovered, they'd be arrested and sent back, so -- because he does talk about instances of that in Montreal. You would report it to the Baron de Hirsch Society, which was like their Jewish family and child service. And there was somebody in charge, he gives his name, who was specially in charge of this. And he would alert the police and they'd arrest this errant husband and send him back. So, he has these wonderful little details about life: what a wedding was like, what they would serve. Ginger ale and peanuts and things like that. It's a wonderful book. Clothing, the hats. And then, there are some serious chapters. In 1913, I think I'm getting the date 24:00right, the same year as the Beilis case in Russia where Mendel Beilis was accused of killing a Christian boy for his blood, et cetera. There was a blood libel trial in Quebec City. Well, it wasn't actually a blood libel trial, but it was a trial in which the Talmud was on trial, and this whole idea of the blood libel came out in the very same year that these same kinds of calumnies were being spread about the Jews. And there was a very important decision rendered at that time by a judge, a French-Canadian judge in Quebec City about how could -- these medieval stories shouldn't be repeated in our day and age. How can this be happening in Canada? Anyway, so, it's a fascinating book. And so, it was 25:00published in 1947, after the war. And do you want to know more about the book, or more -- do you want to know how it became known, when -- because that's an interesting --

CW:Well, yeah, I want to talk about the translation a little later.

VF:Okay.

CW:But if you want to keep telling me about that part --

VF:About the book itself?

CW:No, about the -- after its publication.

VF:I don't know about that except many, many people had the book, because I actually went -- was at the Yiddish Book Center several years ago, and I bought all the copies that were there (laughs) because -- and they're all signed by my grandfather -- because I wanted to have them for my children and my sisters and their children. But anyway, so I don't know about its reception. I can only tell you that my grandfather had several of both books. His second book was called 26:00"Tsvishn tsvey velt milkhomes [Between two world wars]," this really deals with World War I and World War II and the time in between. There were a lot of them in his house, and my mother got them when he died. And I have some of them. And nobody talked about them. And I never heard about them, except I do know that when my mother was sick, just before she died, she did sort of start to translate the first few pages of "Montreal of Yesterday." And I have those notes. But my uncles didn't take the book seriously at all. And anything to do with Yiddish was not -- they were not into Yiddish at all. And I think my grandfather encouraged them to become Canadianized and just participate in the 27:00present day. So, that book was really rediscovered by -- I think I have to credit Zachary Baker, who was -- have you interviewed him? Okay, so Zachary Baker was the librarian in Montreal at the time, and they had a conference in Montreal -- long time ago. I'll have to check the exact date -- about Jewish Montreal. And he gave a paper about my grandfather. And I'll show you the book later. And I think it was from Zachary that Pierre Anctil, who's a -- now a professor and anthropologist. But he studies the Jews of Montreal and Quebec. 28:00And he decided to translate that book into French. It was his first book he ever translated. And that's what -- I was mentioning that to you earlier. Nobody in the family knew that this was happening. I found out about it through somebody in Jerusalem, in the Jewish studies department there, that got a notice that these are the books on Jewish studies that were published in Canada. And one of them was "Le Montréal juif d'autrefois [Jewish Montreal of yesteryear]." And he wrote me an email and said, "Your grandfather's book has been translated into French." He was from the other side of the family, actually. And so, I phoned my uncle in Montreal and I told him and he went out and bought a few copies in the bookstores. And he contacted Pierre, and my uncle sent me a copy and I read my grandfather's book first in French. And I couldn't put it down. And I thought, 29:00Wow, this is an amazing book. And I now -- I'm a translator, which I was at the time. I've been working on my Yiddish. I'm going to translate this because the rest of the family couldn't read it in French or English, except this one uncle. So, that's what got me into translating Yiddish. And since then, I've translated a lot. But that really got me into translating Yiddish.

CW:Were there stories about what your grandfather was like as a person?

VF:Well, I knew him.

CW:Yeah.

VF:He died when I was eighteen.

CW:Okay.

VF:So, I did know my grandfather. That was one of the notes I had written. Now I don't know where --

CW:They're right underneath you.

VF:Oh, okay, thank you.

CW:So, what was your --

VF:I think I don't need my notes, but I saw my grandparents a couple of times a 30:00year. I lived with them when I was very young. I was born in Montreal. It was after the war and my mother was in Montreal. My father was in Toronto living with his parents and writing exams, 'cause he had gone back to school. And I don't know when we finally moved to Toronto. I went to kindergarten for a while in Montreal. But I think that we had moved before then. Anyway, I knew my grandfather, and we would visit at least once a year to Montreal, and my grandparents would come and stay with my mother in Toronto. And my grandfather, he was wonderful. They were wonderful grandparents. My grandfather, what really sticks out in my mind was that he was interested in everything I was learning in 31:00school. When I was in high school and I was studying German, he loved to read German poetry with me. He was interested in the French books that I was reading. And he was wonderful to talk to and take walks with. And I remember as a little girl going with him to the newspaper -- to the "Keneder Adler" building and -- where the linotype machines were, and he would take the letters and put my name together and make little stamps for me. And he was always sitting at his desk and writing in the house. His desk was in a corner of their living room. And he had these pads of different colors, yellow and green and pink and blue, and -- that he used to write on, I guess, to keep things organized, because he was, at one time, the labor editor. He was the news editor, he was the court reporter, 32:00he did humorous pieces under a pseudonym, felyetonen [feuilletons], which meant -- they were actually pieces of public interest but written in a humorous way. And those, I think, were the -- they're the only thing that have remained in the family. And I have them. There are scrapbooks where he kept every single one of his feuilletons. So, I still have those. But, yeah, it was -- he was a wonderful grandfather. And we used to correspond in Yiddish. My mother had taught me Yiddish when I was very young, and so I could write to my grandparents, and -- even though he knew how to write in English, too, but -- and I had a whole collection of his letters, up until the time he died. And he died quite suddenly, at the age of seventy. And when my mother was ill, she asked me for 33:00those letters and I gave them to her. And I don't know what happened to them after that. They sort of -- they disappeared. So, I don't have them. I have some of the early letters, when I was really little. I still have those.

CW:What did he look like?

VF:I have a lot of pictures. It's hard for me to say. I thought he was tall. (laughs) I don't know that he was that tall. He was bald. He had a very kindly face. He just was very grandfatherly, yeah.

CW:Can you describe the home that you grew up in?

VF:That I grew up in? Okay, so the home that I grew up in -- it's a good question. Well, first of all, we lived with my grandparents. And then, when I 34:00was seven years old, my parents were able to buy a house of their own. My aunt helped them. And we moved away from my grandparents' house, which was downtown, in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood, into a suburb, which -- near where my father worked, which was at the de Havilland airport. And there were a lot of Jewish children, and the school had a lot of Jewish children. And I think that one of the highlights of my childhood was that I was very close to a cousin of mine who was the same age. And my younger sister, who's about two-and-a-half years younger than me also had her -- my cousin's sister was the same age as my younger sister, and we would often sleep over at each other's houses. I think the family was -- my father's family played a very important role. Now, my 35:00father was busy building his career. He got his PhD when I was four, in physics. And his specialty was aerophysics, and he became an aerospace scientist. And so, his work was important and we knew that. And my mother, unfortunately, was having a difficult time because she started losing her hearing, I think, during her twenties. And it became progressively worse. And she couldn't -- then she was stuck here in Toronto without the friends that she grew up with. And she explained later and she -- actually, I have this on tape, because one of my sister's friends did a tarot reading with her, where she actually got her to 36:00talk a lot about her life. And this was really when she knew she had cancer and she was really not well. And she said that she was isolated here not only 'cause she left Montreal, but that she had left the Party and that the people that she would have normally been -- had gravitated to would have been the members of the SPO and the Communist Party. And she had made a break with them. And my father at that time was already working on classified stuff. He was involved in the space program in the United States, too, and he needed a security clearance from our government, as well. And so, I know that there were people that she didn't see because of their continuing involvement. It was the Cold War. So, I think 37:00that was a big thing, too, that she was without her friends here and without her milieu and she couldn't teach because of her hearing. And it wasn't until, I think, after I'd finished high school that the hearing aids improved and that she became active again. And she became very active in Yiddish and in Yiddish teaching and in founding the Yiddish courses at U of T and teaching -- she was the first teacher of the Yiddish program at U of T. So, what was the house like? So, you can imagine that (laughs) it was -- what can I say? There were problems because -- we also didn't belong anywhere. We didn't belong to a synagogue. And I didn't even know that people belonged to synagogues because we were -- I was 38:00raised in a very secular environment, and -- except for my grandparents, who -- I thought only elderly people were -- went to synagogue. Men, in particular, 'cause my grandmother didn't go. My grandfather did, and he wore a long black coat and he had a long beard. And I thought, Well, that was just older people from Poland, because my other grandfather was not. And he didn't go to synagogue. But they also didn't belong to any particular group. So, when I started going to shule to -- I was sent to the Farband Shule, where they were supposed to have Yiddish. Now, that was run by the Labor Zionists. And my grandfather in Montreal was a member of the Labor Zionists, as were many of the writers and activists in Montreal. They were members of the Linke Po'ale Tsiyon, the Yiddishist Zionists. So, I went to the Farband, where my mother actually 39:00knew the Yiddish teacher. She was the daughter of someone that my parents knew and that my grandfather knew. But the teachers were not very good. They were not very inspiring, the children were very badly behaved, and I really got very little out of it. And I went for three years, and I don't think I got anything out of that experience. My sister, then, they sent to the Peretz Shule, which was the Arbeter Ring, the Bundists. And so, she went there and when I was in high school, I decided that I would like to go there because a friend of mine was going. And I went to the mitlshul [high school] for one year and it was really different. I had a wonderful teacher. It was all interesting. It was all about Jewish history and it was really wonderful. But we were not part of the Bund, either. And I never went to any of the summer camps that were run by these 40:00various organizations. I did go to a camp but it was not a Jewish camp, particularly. But that's another story. Anyway, (laughs) so I never really felt that I belonged, really -- and especially not to the Yiddish world, because my Yiddish -- when I got to the mitlshul, I realized that a lot of these students really spoke Yiddish beautifully. And their parents were survivors and I understood that, too. But still, their Yiddish was wonderful and I didn't have that.

CW:So, what were the languages in your home?

VF:Well, we spoke English in the house. But I did speak Yiddish with my paternal grandparents. But my grandfather died when I was ten and my grandmother died 41:00when I was eleven or twelve. But there were relatives around. I mean, Yiddish was always around. Yiddish was used when the family got together. And I heard Yiddish in Montreal, too, and I wrote to my grandfather in Yiddish, but we never really spoke it at home, not in the immediate family. But my parents were very heavily into Yiddish. And they did have Yiddish-speaking friends, as I -- yeah.

CW:What was your exposure to the Yiddish cultural world, like the theater or the different institutions? Did you have any contact?

VF:Yeah, no, I did not. Not as a child. Not as a child. And it was a later time, too. I don't even know that the Yiddish theater was still in existence in 42:00Toronto by that time, to tell you the truth. That's one of the things that was very different from Montreal. There was a Jewish library, but it didn't have the same role as the Jewish library in Montreal.

CW:So, did you have any important mentors in terms of your Jewish education growing up?

VF:No, other than my parents, no, I did not. I did not, except Mrs. Reinhart's, and I can't call her a mentor because I just attended for one year in high school. And I think that was already in the tenth or eleventh grade. But no, I didn't.

CW:Looking back, what was your attitude towards Yiddish growing up? Did you have 43:00any particular thoughts about it?

VF:It was positive. I didn't have -- I mean, there was nothing negative about it, but I did feel that I could never become a real Yiddish speaker because I realized that there was a cultural component that I was missing. And I also realized that there was a religious component that I was missing, and that I didn't realize till -- well, I guess, yes, I did, because at the seders that we would have with my grandparents, yes, we learned how to say the fir kashes [the Four Questions at the Passover seder] and we were -- most of my cousins were girls, and we all had to recite the Kiddush and things like that and sing some of the songs. And my father, when he wanted to reprimand us, would quote from the Pirkei Avot [Hebrew: Ethics of the Fathers] and all these wonderful sources that he had access to, which -- we had absolutely none. And he always used to 44:00say to us, "You are so lucky that I have saved you from all those bobe-mayses [fairytales]." I mean, I didn't -- the only thing that I knew about the Bible was what we'd learn -- in our public school, every morning, we'd have readings. I knew the story of Joseph and King David and Goliath and things like that. But I really didn't know the Bible, and certainly not from the Jewish perspective. So, I didn't have that background at all. So, but, yes, the Yiddish was a positive one because I guess that was a source of my identity, my secular identity. I knew that I was Jewish because my family spoke Yiddish. That was our language, this was our culture. And the culture was more ideological, the -- learning about the workers and the sweatshops in New York and the inequalities. 45:00And I remember writing a book report in grade nine on Frank Harris' -- not Frank Harris. Engel [sic]. Frank Harris was another one, but Engel -- Friedrich Engel, the condition of the working classes in Great Britain during the time of the Industrial Revolution. I mean, those books were in the house and I read them. And so, socialism was a big part of it, the ideology. So, yes, that was the -- Yiddish was somehow connected with all these things and it was a source of identity and a source of pride, too, I think. And sort of distinguished -- 'cause I knew that my mother and my parents and their friends, when they got together, would be talking about politics and things like that, whereas other -- 46:00I knew other people's parents who didn't read books and weren't into those things. So, I guess it was positive. It was very positive, yes, but also feeling that it couldn't be mine because I didn't have that. So, I studied German and then I studied Russian in university. I was sort of approaching it from -- (laughs) in a very roundabout way. There was no Jewish studies when I got to university. But I took history and I took languages. I always loved languages. So, I took Russian and, of course, my impression of the Soviet Union had been extremely positive growing up, extremely. And my parents had visited there a couple of times. My father had gone there to lecture and came back, very positive. And it wasn't until I went into graduate school in history and there 47:00was a visiting professor, Professor Ben-Sasson, and he said to me -- and I told him about my grandfather and he said, "Why are you doing Russian history? You're living here in Toronto. Why don't you use your grandfather's articles from the newspaper and do a thesis on the acculturation of the Canadian Jews?" Little did I know that the whole book was about that. And I didn't feel competent to do that. I just didn't at that time.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:At what point did you become aware of what was happening during the war in Europe, and how?

VF:Okay. So, I think the Holocaust was, I think, sort of the backdrop to everything. And I was very young when I became aware of it, because we had 48:00cousins of my fathers who came. I don't even know the relationship of this cousin to my father. But he was the only -- or one of the few survivors from -- or the only from that family. And he and his wife had both been in Auschwitz, and had numbers on their arm. And they had a little boy who was my age and -- or, yeah, just maybe -- almost a year younger. And there was me and my cousin that I told you about who was a girl and this little boy. And we were always thrust together. And I was told very young, if he wanted one of my toys, we'll give it to him. Or if he wanted some of my stamps, my stamp collection -- 49:00because, You have a lot and he has nothing and he's -- and his parents were Holocaust survivors. And so, I heard about it very early, I heard stories. I remember hearing about the death march when I was very young. I didn't know it was called the death march, but this little boy, Ralph, his mother -- describing how she only ate snow. And they, my parents, were very, very interested in finding out everything that they could about what had happened. They would listen and listen and listen. They befriended other people who were survivors. They started collecting books, anything that came out about the Holocaust. And the books were in the house and I would sometimes pick them up. And I used to 50:00have dreams about it and that someone would come knocking on the door. And it was really very real to me, to the point that sometimes I would feel, Am I -- is this all my imagination and I'm going to wake up and find myself in Auschwitz? Or can that be? Can it be that my life is so different? 'Cause I was constantly, constantly hearing these things. And we learned about it a little bit in our Jewish school. And I remember my sister once telling me that she had to really distance herself from the Jewish community at one point. Not that we were so much a part of it, but that she felt that, for her, being Jewish was just the 51:00Holocaust and she couldn't -- she didn't want to do it anymore. When she was quite young, she was chosen to light these memorial candles at a Holocaust memorial in a big synagogue. And we all went and she was up there on the stage. But later, she told me that it was really hard for her. And so, it was a part of it, a part of our lives. And the truth is that one of the things that discouraged me from really delving into Jewish history, and even history in general, was that I was always bumping up against this Holocaust. You couldn't avoid it. And it was -- but I did try -- I didn't read many books about the Holocaust, and I didn't want to know about it. And it wasn't until a couple of 52:00years ago that I actually went to Poland. I've always -- I wanted to go, and I couldn't bring myself to go to Poland. My father had gone back, in 1960. And he was invited to speak there and he had a former student there who took him back to his little village, which we heard about. But I couldn't bring myself to go. And particularly, I could not face seeing a concentration camp. But I was able -- but it was okay to go to Russia. Not Germany. (laughs) But wherever I went, being in France, I used to -- in Paris, I could always imagine a motorcycle with the Gestapo on it coming around the corner. I mean, I was aware, constantly, about these things. And it was what made me very different from my non-Jewish friends or colleagues, was that -- this knowledge of the Holocaust. And so, yes, 53:00it was always a part. And Yiddish definitely leads there. And so, what happened -- but translating my grandfather's books was still not the Holocaust. But after I became involved with Yiddish -- and when Chava Rosenfarb moved to Toronto, she asked me if I would translate a book about -- a Holocaust memoir that she had based her "Tree of Life" on, this memoir, where she'd gotten all her facts from and one of the characters. The author was one of the characters in -- "The Tree of Life" was based on him. And that was really the first time that I really, really confronted this sort of very directly and was actually inside the Lodz 54:00Ghetto. And I also -- the other thing is that I did read her book, even though it was really hard. But I felt, if she could spend twelve years or however long it took her to write it that the least I can do is to read it, 'cause how many people actually read this book? So, I did read it. And then, I started to read more and more, and a lot of what I translate now has to do with the Holocaust. And I feel it's important, so --

CW:So, going back a little bit, how did you get involved in Yiddish in a more formal way?

VF:Okay. So, while my mother was very, very actively involved in Yiddish, I was not. I never went to her classes and I had very young children. And I had my own 55:00life and my own career and I -- well, I don't know, I probably should mention this here. Okay, so I did not go on to do my PhD that I was supposed to do. I decided to do something very practical, and I went to law school. And I started practicing law in a way that would give me time with my family. So, the easiest thing was to join this very small group that basically gave me the work that -- it was a couple in practice together. And she was on maternity leave when I started. And he basically had me do all the things he didn't like to do, which was civil litigation and mostly family law. So, I ended up doing this family law, which was awful. But at the same time, because I knew French and I had 56:00articled for the Ontario government, I started translating legal documents from French into English for our Ministry of the Attorney General here in Ontario, because every -- we are officially bilingual. All our laws are in both languages. Court cases have to - the transcripts have to be in both languages, the judgments and so on, so -- and speeches of ministers, whatever -- everything is in both languages, websites. But mostly, the translations go from English to French. So, I had my own little niche of French into English and it was freelance. So, I could do it -- and eventually, I said, I'm just going to do this, and I've always wanted to draw and paint and I always did draw and paint. And I said, I'm really going to get into my art seriously, which I did. And I 57:00was doing these legal translations and it was fine. And I just was really -- I took courses in the things in art that I thought I needed. And I was just going along doing this and raising my kids, and Sylvia Lustgarten ended up in the same -- coming to the same open studio where I used to go to paint from the model. These things are done from live models, by the way. So, Sylvia was the director of the Yiddish Committee at the time. And she was always talking about Yiddish and Yiddish and Yiddish. And I'd say, "Sylvia, I am concentrating on my PhD. I can't think about this right now." And she was so excited about all these things that she was doing and I was really not. And then, what happened was that 58:00eventually, she persuaded me to attend the first conference, the Yiddish Women's Voices that Frieda Forman had organized. And I didn't know Frieda at the time. And so, she persuaded me to come and I said, Okay. And I had a studio, actually, near the OISE at the time. So, I attended the whole thing and I was just blown away. Here were all these women and young women and -- who were interested in Yiddish. There were two factions at that conference. I don't know if Frieda told you much about it, but there were -- the religious part, the women that were interested in reforming the liturgy and the synagogue and stuff like that, which I knew nothing about. It didn't interest me at all. And then, the Yiddish part 59:00of it, which were all the social activists. And it was really very exciting, 'cause of the women that came to speak and the women that were there from all over the place and especially the Yiddish literature. And finally, after a few years of Sylvia trying to persuade me to join her Yiddish -- the reading group where they were reading these Yiddish writers -- and that eventually became the "Found Treasures" -- I finally, after that conference, I started to go. And it was amazing. And at that time, my father was very sick and he -- I used to bring him whole excerpts from writers like Dora Shulner, which was so exciting, about her escapades during the revolution. And he loved it. (laughs) He loved reading it. And it was so wonderful for me to -- every time I would visit him, I'd bring 60:00him a new episode in this book that we were reading. And so, that was great. And then, when he died, my husband had already started taking Yiddish classes. After my mother died, he decided to take Yiddish classes. He had grown up with immigrant parents, but he just totally tuned them out. And he wanted to pick up his Yiddish. So, Sylvia had started -- she was responsible for them introducing Yiddish as a credit course for the final year of high school. And he enrolled in these Yiddish classes, and he really enjoyed them. And when my father died -- and I didn't want to be alone in the house at night when he went out to -- I just didn't want to be alone. And I started going with him to the Yiddish class, which was wonderful because I sort of got back the grammar and all these things. 61:00And we had a wonderful teacher here, Elle Moidel. Now, are you -- have you interviewed her? Have you heard about her? You have? Okay. And her family, her brother.

CW:You can tell me more about her.

VF:Yeah.

CW:Yeah.

VF:Anyway, so she was wonderful as a teacher, just absolutely wonderful. And so, my Yiddish started to improve. And then, in 1997, was suddenly when my grandfather's book came out. And then, I said, Okay, well, I know my Yiddish is good now, I've been reading it, I've been working with this "Found Treasures" group. But by then, the work on the book had already started. So, I was not one of the ones who actually translated something for the book. But I got to know these wonderful women from that group. They were amazing women, and one of them 62:00in particular helped me a lot when I first started translating Yiddish. So, I did that. I was involved with that, and then Sylvia said to me, "You know, there's going to be this Yiddish program in Vilna and you really should go." And I sort of dismissed it, and she -- but that started to catch my imagination because my grandmother had come from Lithuania. And I said, Well, wouldn't it be wonderful. I'll go to Lithuania, I'll see where my grandmother was born. I'll be able to sketch all these places in Lithuania. It'll be just great. And I eventually decided to go at the last minute, and I went and that was wonderful, as -- I don't have to tell you about that.

CW:Yeah, but can you tell me about it? (laughter) What was your first impression?

VF:Lithuania, for me, there were so many things that were familiar. Well, first of all, the food in the cafeteria, that was the first thing -- that morning 63:00after all the jet lag and everything. Elle, actually, had been to Lithuania, and she had arranged for this man that she -- had been a guide for her there who -- and she helped me. I arranged for him to pick me up at the airport and he found an apartment that I shared with somebody else. And so, he brought us to the university the first day just to show us where it was. And we went into the cafeteria. And they had blintzes and they had -- I forgot, yeah, what else, but everything was familiar that they had. And it -- just the whole atmosphere, there was a familiarity, maybe from the reading that I had done and the Yiddish stories that I had translated. It all felt very familiar. And the classes were amazing. And I had met Dovid Katz before. That's another story. And he was 64:00outstanding. And Dov-Ber Kerler was the other teacher. And Miriam Koral was there with poetry. And it was just really, really wonderful. And I became very, very close to two of the women there. One of them was Judita Rozina. Do you remember her? She worked at the museum. And she and I discovered that her father had come from the same town in Belarus, Lekhavitsh, her father and my grandfather. And they were more or less contemporaries. And her father had come to Brooklyn early on and -- with his family. And then, as a communist, had gone to Birobidzhan as an idealist and was shot there. She didn't know he was shot 65:00until just before I came. With glasnost and everything -- that she found out the details. And so, she was looking for her roots and I found the Yizkor book for her and sent her a copy. And so, we were in touch for a long time. I understand she's not well now and we -- this is the first year that we have not been in touch. She's had a hard life. The other person was Fania Brantsovsky. And Fania's very close, close, close friends live here in Toronto. And they were the ones that gave me her phone number. And from the first day that I went to see her, we spent every Saturday together and we would just walk around and she 66:00would show me things. And she was amazing, and we kept in touch for a long, long time. Also, in the past couple of years, not so much. But I'm in touch with her friends here. One of them is Norman Shneidman, who wrote -- has written books about Vilna. Do you know about him?

CW:I know his name.

VF:Okay, 'cause I can show you some of those books. And the Kramers. Alex and Anna Kramer, who grew up with Fania. And Nonya Schneidman actually was -- he was left an orphan after the war and he lived with Fania and her husband after the war. So, he was in the partisans, too. So, yes, so I've maintained real -- and I was back in Vilna again briefly in 2005, and I saw her and I saw Judita. And so, 67:00that's my connection with Lithuania. And there were some other people that I was in touch with after Lithuania.

CW:So, you had been translating before going to Vilna?

VF:My grandfather's book, yeah.

CW:Before that?

VF:Before that. It was already, I think, at the publishing stage when I was at -- there, yeah.

CW:So, I wanted to ask a little bit about your process for translating Yiddish to English. How does that go?

VF:Okay. Well, I'm glad you asked. (laughs) So, my training as a translator was 68:00by doing these legal translations. Now, I had -- in university, I had studied French, and I had studied French stylistics and all about transposing different grammatical structures from one to the other, et cetera, et cetera. And I knew German and I studied Russian and I know some Hebrew. So, the process for translating -- okay, so with these -- the French translations, they had to be very exact in terms of meaning, because if there was a word where the nuance was not right in a judgment or a piece of legislation or something like that, it really was very, very important to get it right. And there was also quality control, so that every now and then, they would do these spot checks and they 69:00would just check. And they would actually report anything, even a little typo, but especially some kind of situation we call "faux amis [French: false friends]" in French where an English word sounds like a French one and is similar but it is not exactly the same, so -- but anyway, so that -- and I had to have negligence -- liability insurance for translating. I had to belong to the provincial translator association, and have insurance in case there were any mistakes. But I loved doing it. I loved translating. To me, it's like doing crossword puzzles. It's just a lot of fun. And so, with the French, I had a lot more resources. I could -- well, now there's a website, actually, that exists called Linguee, I don't know if you're aware of it, L-I-N-G-U-E-E, where you can 70:00-- you look up a phrase. Let's say there -- a pairing of an adjective and a noun that sounds like maybe it's -- there's more to it than just the usual meaning. You can enter it and they will give you every government document, Canadian government document where those two are paired. And then, you have a whole choice of what options you might have depending on the context. You'll also become aware that this is a known phrase in French. And so, it's really helpful. Though when I first started, they didn't have that. But what they did have -- well, I didn't even have the Internet when I first started. But eventually, with -- what I could do was look up a phrase that I was unsure of and put the 71:00government of Canada's -- every website ends gc.ca. So, you'd put gc.ca with your phrase in quotations and you'd get all these options for translating that very phrase that you were interested in. It was wonderful. Yiddish is not like that. First of all, Yiddish, you need many, many dictionaries. You need the Stutchkoff thesaurus. I could not work without it. You absolutely need a German dictionary. Russian is important. I wish my Polish was better. I'm able to read it, but it's not very good. But I have to say that Google Translate, for looking up individual Polish words, is pretty good and they do give you a lot of alternatives, too. So, I have all those things at my disposal for Yiddish, but 72:00it's a lot slower process than the French. But I'm always careful to check -- not to take anything for granted. I think that is the first rule. Just because something sounds like something, it is probably not, (laughs) especially if it doesn't sound quite right. And that was one of the things about Yiddish that -- I had told myself I will never, ever be able to learn Yiddish. This is before I got back into it. With all the prefixes to all these different verbs, I thought it was going to be absolutely impossible to get all these nuances of when you use these prefixes and what that difference means. So, I would say the most 73:00important thing is never, ever to take a Yiddish word for granted and think that you know about it, and to really, really -- unless it's an obvious thing, to really, really look and see what you can come up with, because no one dictionary has a complete meaning. And often, the German is -- even for a common word -- I just had one the other day. Well, yeah, what was it the other day that it -- in German has -- oh, I wish I could remember what it was -- that in German -- actually, the dictionary went on to give a second whole different direction of definitions that actually fit where the Yiddish definitions didn't. Like the word "shtayger" -- I just found out "shtayger" -- which means a way of life or -- right? It also means a melody. And that was in the Niborski dictionary. And I 74:00just thought, Well, I better look this up again and see -- but, yeah, the German dictionary is really, really, really helpful, especially from that era of my grandfather and Yud Yud Segal, which I really -- I'm now translating some of his writing in -- which is in the biography that I'm translating now.

CW:What was the experience for you, sort of, I guess, more personally of translating your grandfather's book?

VF:Oh, it was amazing. (laughs) I felt like Pierre had given me this gift of my grandfather, like I was spending time with my grandfather. It was an amazing experience. I can't describe it. It really and truly was a real gift. It was wonderful.

CW:I guess why, sort of more broadly, what is the role of translation? Why is it important?

VF:Well, I think for Yiddish translation, it's important because we're going to lose so much. Speaking of which, there is another -- well, there are a few more things about Yiddish translation that I wanted to speak about, too -- that we're going to lose so much. And today, the popular conception of Yiddish is that it's 76:00this language that you used when you didn't want people to understand and it's not a literary language and it's funny. You just say one Yiddish word and people start laughing. They don't even know what it means. And most of the words that are used in popular American culture are not translated properly, anyway. So, I think it's important to preserve this culture. There were also such amazing things written in Yiddish. And honestly, if I had a second lifetime, one of the things that I would really want to translate are some of the books written by rabbis in Yiddish who were very scholarly, not just in Jewish subjects, but it -- they were worldly, they were well-read, like Nachman Shemen, who lived in Toronto and has written many books. Those books should be translated. He talks 77:00about -- there are books about musar [morals], I guess you would call it, where he talks about relationships between husbands and wives, between parents and children, attitudes to the non-Jew. But he brings in Freud, and he brings in other sources besides all the usual Judaic sources. Those are going to get lost, and a lot of the people who write these religious books today are reinventing the wheel. They don't have access to these wonderful books. So, it's not just the secular Yiddish writing which we -- as in the Yiddishist world, we're taught, Oh, we have this wonderful culture. Yes, we do. But there's so much more to Yiddish culture and there -- and as Dovid Katz always points out, there are many authors that we don't even know about that we haven't even discovered. Not just the women, but in general. And so, I do think it's important, because 78:00Yiddish has embedded in it the whole history and culture of Ashkenazic Jewry. But one thing I am against, and that is using Yiddish words in an English translation too frequently and unnecessarily. Because translating a Yiddish story by an educated writer, let's say a woman writer, who was well-educated, well-read, and a good writer. To use these Yiddish words brings down the level of the writing. Or to use Yiddish grammatical constructions that makes her dialogue sound less than -- makes the person sound like an immigrant or a 79:00foreigner or a non-native speaker or a less-educated person, I really am very much against that. I think that the author deserves to be given a voice that's commensurate with their ability as a writer. If there's a word that's untranslatable, yes, you have to use it. But if it's a word that somehow, the meaning can be woven into the sentence without trying to give lessons in Yiddish to your readers, and as -- having as few words in a glossary as possible -- and better still, not even a glossary, 'cause to have to flip back and forth is very disruptive. I think the language should be as unobtrusive as possible when you're translating. So, those are (laughs) my two cents about translation. But I think that second one is important.

CW:What was it like, or what has it been like, for you to work with different genres, starting with legal documents in -- from French to English but then going to literature and maybe poetry, short stories.

VF:Right. Well, yes, the legal stuff was much easier. Much. (laughs) Because you were dealing with a certain kind of language. I mean, occasionally, I would have these judgments where there are some very creative judges that make -- had some interesting language and idioms and so on. And, yes, there were instances -- but the literary language is really difficult. Literary Yiddish is so poetic. Well, Sholem Shtern, for example, his writing is so poetic, even when he's describing very mundane situations. It's not easy and it tended to -- it tends to be very 81:00flowery at times. And so, yes, it's very challenging. I have been very lucky to have people that I could consult with and that was an important part of my process, especially in the early years. There was a woman here called Hannah Ehrlich who was wonderful to consult with. Simcha Simchovitch has been very, very helpful to me. There were other people around that I could speak to. There are fewer and fewer of them these days, but I've learned a little bit more, too. But, yes, we've -- that's why there's such urgency to do these translations well. We still have Yiddish speakers around. I think it's very important.

CW:I want to return to this concept you brought up earlier of the "real Yiddish 82:00speaker" and why you feel like you could never be a real Yiddish speaker.

VF:Did I use the word real? Well, the native Yiddish speakers, because, first of all, I was born in Canada. And I think that's the main thing. And I didn't grow up speaking the language. And I think that my generation -- well, at least in my case, I think that there's also -- there was a reverence, also, for that generation because, especially because of the Holocaust, that I felt -- there was, I think, a sense of guilt that was passed down to me from my father, in particular, of not having gone through that, not having lived through that, not 83:00really knowing what real life was all about, and that without that, I'm a real interloper, in a way, that -- I guess that what really made me feel that I could be part of it was when I got this identity as Medres's granddaughter, that it sort of gave me a little entrée into the Yiddish world. I mean, I never had that identity until I started doing this book. And also, I'm much more familiar with Jewish tradition now. I have a son who became religious. And that has enriched my Yiddish tremendously. I didn't even realize in the beginning that 84:00that was going to happen, but it has, because I'm aware of customs and traditions now that I knew nothing about before, so --

CW:What do you think the -- is going to be the impact of losing that generation of European-born Yiddish-speakers on the Yiddish world?

VF:I think the impact has already been. (laughs) I think it's already happened. It's hard to -- well, first of all, we've lost a lot of our sense of history, I think. And it's hard to separate the general trends in the world today from the 85:00trends in the Jewish world. One of the biggest things that I have become aware of in reading Sholem Shtern and Yud Yud Segal and even -- well, I was with my grandfather, too, but even -- much more so now that I'm so deeply involved with the Segal -- it was such an amazing time of idealism, a romantic time when people really were concerned with improving the world. Young people got involved with these very, very -- with these political ideologies, and it was -- and there would be these disputes over whether literature should serve a social 86:00purpose, or can you have art for art's sake? Those were really fundamental debates that people used to (laughs) take so seriously and get so passionate about. In general, the world today is not like that. Literature doesn't have the same place that it did then and just -- things are very, very different. I don't know that it's -- those writers, I guess, are anachronistic in the way poets in general are today in terms of -- what influence do they have on youth culture? Very little, I think, so I -- but for us, that link between the old country and the new is gone, will be gone. That generation that breached both -- right, that 87:00could bridge both worlds, that generation is gone.

CW:And the impact of that, as you see it?

VF:I think it's a lack of knowledge of history, which is a very scary thing. But you look at what's going on in the world today, and you say, nobody knows history. They really don't. It's a very frightening thing. I don't know if you watched the convention last night. (laughs) Anyway, well, what can I say, it's --

CW:Yeah.

VF:-- it's, yeah, it's -- but precisely the impact, I really don't know. The 88:00Jewish community has gone off in a direction which that generation could not have foreseen. And I think my grandfather would see something very positive in that. In fact, in 1964, in his second book, he discusses that. He said, "Already, Yiddish culture is very weak. There are very few Yiddish speakers. Our children aren't speaking it. Our institutions are not what they were. Something else will come and take its place in a very different form." So, he already predicted that in 1964. But I don't think what he could have foreseen, and certainly my father could not have foreseen this in 1994 or -- yeah, he died in 1994 -- that young people would be returning to the synagogue. Not everybody, but there is a return, that there is more interest in the religious aspects of Judaism, that people are fighting over where women can pray. I mean, this would 89:00have -- not that it's women, but just that anyone would even care about wearing taleysim and yarmulkes and being able to take on these mitzvahs of becoming part of a minyan, like who would've wanted that, and -- that this would become -- that Judaism would continue under this form? And not just religious Jews, but in general? I know that my father was very pessimistic about Jews surviving another generation, because he didn't see that there was any real substance there anymore without a language and without a culture. But then again, Hebrew is being taught and I think that we have to accept that Hebrew is the Jewish language. I mean, this is something that some of the Yiddishists have a very hard time with. But without Hebrew, you can't really know Yiddish, either, and I 90:00must say that all these Yiddish writers were fluent in Hebrew, too. And it is the non-Jewish scholars, in my experience, who have no discomfort with going into synagogues and learning the liturgy and knowing that this is going to be important for them if they want to understand Yiddish literature and be able to translate it, whereas in Vilna, the Yiddishists did not go to synagogue. And I was one of them (laughs) who did not go to the synagogue on Saturdays. But [Jerry Frakes?] did and -- so, that's what's -- and the Japanese Yiddishists that I know do, because they realize that it's important. This is an important aspect of Yiddish culture that you find in the literature.

CW:Yeah. Well, I want to look at the books, but before that, I want to ask how has this -- really delving into Yiddish and all of the translation work that you've done, how has that impacted your own identity, your own --

VF:That's a very good question. (laughs) I had a lot of trouble for years and years and years reconciling the fact that I wanted to be an artist. I taught drawing and painting at a college for thirteen years. And I didn't want people to know my other life, because it seemed to detract from my credibility as an 92:00artist. And yet, I could not throw myself completely into the art. Well, I mean, I have -- I've exhibited my work, my work is still being exhibited and -- but I'm not as active as I was. And I guess at this stage, because the -- oh, and I stopped -- so, a couple of years -- a few years ago, I stopped doing the government translations. I was hesitant to do it because it did give my life a certain kind of structure. And once I sent them off, I was finished with them. They had to be done on an urgent basis and then I was done. But when that happened, I started being able to accept these interesting projects in Yiddish that came my way. And I just have taken the attitude to just go with it. If I have this opportunity, just take it and see what happens. So, I have found a way 93:00of sort of coexisting in both worlds. But I don't talk about this much in the art world. I mean, it just feels -- I don't know, although I do have an artist friend now that has been really interested in the poetry -- in Segal's poetry, and I do send her poems now and then because they are wonderful poems. And you asked me about translating. The poetry has been really wonderful to translate. I'm not trying -- I'm not a poet, and I was really hesitant about doing that. Really, really hesitant. Pierre encouraged me to do it, and I'm trying to -- I'm trying my best, but I also admire Segal's simplicity. He was not a flowery poet 94:00and his words are very sparse. And I really am trying to maintain that quality. And it made me so happy when Sylvia approved of a couple of my translations, because she is a wonderful -- she has a wonderful way with words. She's so articulate and she is -- her language is wonderful. So, I was very happy that she was happy with those poems, yeah. So, those poems are something I can share because those poems are very universal. His poetry is wonderful.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

VF: This is the original --

CW:If you could hold it up a bit higher --

VF:-- original edition of "Montreal fun nekhtn [Montreal of yesterday]." It was the author's copy, especially bound for him. And the title page, I will just 95:00show you that, "Montreal fun nekhtn." And then, the English title page, and that was 1947. So, I'll put that one down. And this is the second book, "Tsvishn tsvey velt milkhomes." And the title page -- and you see his name there, I. Medres. That's what he called himself. So, then --

CW:What did you call him? Zeyde [grandfather]?

VF:Zeyde.

CW:Zeyde.

VF:Zeyde, yeah, zeyde.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

VF: This is "Le Montréal juif d'autrefois," "Montreal of Yesteryear." And you can see the name and that's how it's registered in the Library of Canada, Israel Medres, Medresh, he pronounces it. So, in this book, he has photographs. That's 96:00a picture of my grandfather that he had that he found in the archive. And he tried to -- he gave it all these nice touches of having the Yiddish title on every page and having these letters at the ends of the chapters. And he has a wonderful introduction here, a rather lengthy introduction. So, that was that book. So, then my book, which came out shortly after I came back from Vilna, is this. Now, the publisher, Véhicule Press, was one that was recommended to me by Pierre Anctil. He personally took the book to the publisher and the publisher 97:00said, "Yes, I'm going to publish it." I said, "That must be -- that's a sign," because it was so much easier to find a publisher than a gallery for my paintings. Okay. Anyway, he chose this picture that he found. But the rest of the pictures in this book are ones that I chose. And I do have some pictures of the family included in them, but -- see what there is of my grandfather in here. This is the picture of my grandfather when he worked at the "Keneder Adler." And I wrote a long introduction to this book. And I was able to actually use my master's paper for that, (laughs) but when I was studying Russian history. I was surprised at how much Russian history was in this book, too. I had no idea. Then, I said to Pierre, "I am going to translate the second book." Oh, by the 98:00way, Zachary wrote a book, wrote something on here for the book, for the jacket. Okay, so I said to Pierre, "Let's -- I'm going to translate the second book. I think you should, too." Because once I started reading it, I said, "I think that for French Canada, this book is really important." Pierre said, "No, we already know enough about that era." And, in fact, he wrote two books about it, his own books. One is called "Le rendez-vous manqué [The missed connection]," about Jews and French Canadians. And there was a lot of anti-Semitism in that era, and I think he didn't want to get into it. But what I discovered translating my grandfather's book was that he had very positive things to say about the French Canadians. There was a chapter where he discusses how there was a liberal 99:00newspaper in Montreal at the time that used to reprint articles from the "Keneder Adler" about the war and so on or Hitler in their paper. There were French Canadians that stood up against the anti-Semites. And he has some very interesting things. So, I translated that book and that came out as "Between the Wars." And this book, the publisher actually used a photograph I had given to him of my -- these are my parents in Montreal during the war. My father isn't wearing his uniform. I don't know who that was. And this was a picture that aunt gave me of the day that the war ended, and she -- it was in the "Montreal Gazette," and she is somewhere here in the crowd. But she and my mother worked for the Congress, the War Efforts Committee, during the war. Well, here's, 100:00actually -- okay, so this is Pierre's. I'll go to this one. Pierre's cover, he used a picture that I had reproduced in this book. This is my grandfather with his two sons who were overseas and my father. And they were -- my father was in the Air Force and at that time, this uncle was in the Army and he was in the Air Force in Montreal. And when my parents got married, everybody was in uniform. I have pictures of that, too, that I can show you. So, this is --

CW:So, Pierre eventually was convinced to translate it?

VF:Yes, he started reading it and he was so -- he was very glad that he did, because yes, there is some -- very interesting things here that he hadn't seen before. So, what is this? Oh, this belongs in here. This, I was going to show 101:00you this. Yoshiji Hirose, have you heard of him? He's a Yiddishist. Have you -- no, you don't. Anyway, I met him at Oxford. My son did his PhD at Oxford, his DPhil, and when we visited him, the first thing he did was to take us to the Yiddish institute to meet Dovid Katz. And there was a visiting professor from McGill there and we all went out to a pub. And Yoshiji Hirose was there and we started a correspondence. And I had a chance to be in Japan in 2004. And then, I invited him to come to Canada, which he did, and he gave a lecture. And he wrote about it as the preface to this book, "The Shadows of Modern Yiddish -- of Yiddish on Modern American Writers." So, he writes about my husband and I in 102:00this book. It first appeared -- this is his magazine that he founded, "Shlemiel." It's all about Yiddish. And here, there is the story of his -- the talk that he gave at the Arbeter Ring. He was written up in the "Canadian Jewish News," which is here. And here he is speaking to the audience at the Arbeter Ring. And there's a picture of me and my grandfather's book. And this was a friend of mine at the time that he also interviewed -- and here's a review of Kim Chernin's book, you can see by the title. (laughs) Anyway, so that's "Shlemiel." And I have a few issues -- he usually brings them -- I haven't seen -- he started coming to the IAYC conferences, and that's where we would meet 103:00every couple of years. But there hasn't been one, so I haven't seen him in a while. But we're still in touch. He does often -- when he has to write something in English, he often sends it to me to help him with his English. So, this book you already know about. This is -- I've got it all marked in places. So, I was very familiar with this book because when Pierre was translating it, he would send me his French translations of the Yiddish, 'cause the --

CW:This is Sholem Shtern?

VF:Sholem Shtern. I don't know if David showed this to you or not, but --

CW:Yeah.

VF:-- he dedicated this book to me and my friend who spoke -- he was a Polish Jew, an elderly gentleman who helped me find things that I couldn't find. So, he 104:00says, "To my -- Vivian Felsen and [Abe Shenitser?], mes compagnons dans la traduction du yiddish," my companions in Yiddish translation. So, that was very generous of him. (laughs) But now, I'm using this book. I'm really reading it carefully, because it's cited a lot in the biography of Segal. The original is a little bit different. I guess David explained that. He didn't translate the whole book, only those passages which showed the importance of Montreal to the Yiddish writers. But it's not the entire book. But it's a wonderful book. And these are some of Pierre's books that I wanted to show you. After that, he would send me things so that -- in all these books, he has -- I appear in the 105:00acknowledgements. There's one in particular -- let me get this one. What does he say here? Anyway, he has me in all these acknowledgements. He talks about my help, because I was able to help him. And I learned a lot at the same time. Now it's turning out that all the time -- all the things that I had read and worked on with him finding Yiddish words, I need them anyway for this translation of Segal, because he's incorporated all this in the Segal book, everything that he ever translated. This is Pierre Anctil's wife, Chantal Ringuet, who has become a 106:00Yiddishist. And so, she has some of her translations here. And she also mentions me here in this book, too, because I helped her with her Melech Ravitch poem. This is the book that I'm working on now, which is amazing. And this has been -- you asked me about translating my grandfather's book. This has really brought to life the world of my grandfather, and my grandfather is in some of the pictures in this book, which I can -- I won't be able to find now. This is about another translation of Pierre Anctil's, about the first Yiddish schools in Montreal, with some amazing pictures in there, too. This was a conference at which I met David Shtern. My mother had taught with Sholem Shtern, and Sholem Shtern was one 107:00of the people with whom she lost contact because he remained in the party. And so, David -- I was at this conference in Montreal. I had always heard of Sholem Shtern, I'd never met him. And there is a section on here about my grandfather who's a very -- yeah, in this book, too. So, I came to talk about my grandfather and I met David Shtern and I invited him to our reading group and we've become friends. So, yes, the Yiddish world has been very -- an exciting one, as you've probably found yourself. And this is Pierre's latest book about the Jews of Quebec. And there's something that I wrote about my mother in this book. I put 108:00an ad in here, which -- I can give you a copy of this if you want.

CW:Sure.

VF:I have a -- I think I put -- nope, I've got it upstairs. Anyway, this is one short thing that I've written about my mother. About my father, I've written more. So, I think that's it for the books. I've got a lot of fascinating Yiddish books, however, that we could go on all day (laughter) talking about. And I have all of Simchovitch's books, because he always used to collect money to publish the book, and then we all would get our copy of the book afterwards. And that's how he managed to get the books published.

CW:So, when do you use Yiddish now?

VF:Well, I use it in the leyenkrayzn [reading groups]. I use it to speak to -- well, the phone calls that I make to Lithuania, which have become very few and far between. I use it with a man whose book I translated from French into English in Paris, 'cause sometimes when I'm speaking to him in French, I just fall into Yiddish just because I'm using Yiddish so much more that -- so, we end up speaking Yiddish. So, I do get to use it, but not nearly enough. And I used to use it at the conferences. And my son in California lives near Fishel Kutner. So, I try to visit Fishel when I'm there and speak to their little Yiddish group or with their group, too, when they're there. So, that's fun. But no, I don't 110:00get to use it all that often, except that we read it. We try to meet every two weeks with our group.

CW:So, any last eytses [pieces of advice] you would give to aspiring Yiddish translators?

VF:I would say to follow in the footsteps of Pierre and Yoshiji, who made it a point also to study Hebrew. And I think they both know German. And I don't think they know the Slavic languages, but Polish and Russian really help. And I think 111:00when you're translating, it's important to be reading something that's really well-written. I find that's important. And if it's on a similar subject, then that's even better. And just to extend -- try to extend your vocabulary as much as possible, because it's amazing, with translation, you start seeing how much you fall into the same ways of expressing things. And it's very important to work on the English aspect, that the -- I would say that the target language becomes much more important than the source. But it's very important to make sure that you really, really have understood the words -- and not to just pass 112:00over something if that becomes too difficult and say, Well, I'll leave this out -- that you really -- if you work hard enough, you'll find it. You'll find it. And sometimes, they're very hard to track down. But they're there. (laughs) The Stutchkoff is wonderful. And just by going to the index of Stutchkoff, you find all kinds of things that -- that's what I would say. (laughter)

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

VF:Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]