DAVID SHTERN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is July 20th, 2016. I am here in -- Mississauga? Is that how you say it? (laughs)

DAVID SHTERN: Right. Yeah, Mississauga.

CW: Ontario, Canada --

DS: Yeah.

CW: -- with David Shtern, and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

DS: Sure.

CW: Great. So, let's jump in. Today we'll mostly be talking about your father. Can you just say his name and when and where he was born?

DS: Yeah. His name was Sholem Shtern. He was born in a small town in Poland called Tishevitz -- or, pronounced in Poland, Tyszowce, which I guess is near 1:00the Czech border. And we used to celebrate his birthday on January 1st, 1907. (laughs) However, it's not very clear to me when his birth date actually was, because he wasn't much interested in his own birthday. And when my grandmother was alive, she used to phone at some point in the fall or the winter and say, "It's your father's birthday today, right?" And he'd say something like, "Oh, really?" And so, after my grandmother passed away there wasn't -- we didn't know, based on the Hebrew calendar, when his birthday was, so we celebrated his birthday on January the 1st, 1907. That's when we settled on his birthday.

CW: And do you have a sense of what Tishevitz was like?

DS: That's an interesting question. I don't have a -- he used to tell me stories 2:00about it. I guess in general, I think -- before the Second World War, there were ten thousand Jews and ten thousand Poles. And after the war there were -- there were no Jews left. There were just the ten thousand Poles. It was a small town. It was next to a bigger center, called Szczebrzeszyn, which, from what I know, was sort of a shopping destination for my grandparents.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW: What do you know about your father's parents and his family?

DS: They were Hasidim. My grandfather belonged to a Hasidic group called the Ruzhiner. He was a follower of a rabbi who I believe was based in the Ukraine, 3:00named the [Hustiner?] rebbe. And he was a shoykhet [ritual slaughterer] by trade. He was a religious scholar. I have his book upstairs. And they were very devout. They came to Canada in the 1930s, and he had quite a reputation as a scholar in the Montreal community. So, yeah.

CW: And he remained a khosid [follower of Hasidism] his whole life?

DS: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. In fact, towards the end of his life, when the doctors told him he had diabetes and he was supposed to take it easy, they told him he 4:00had to take it easy, and that maybe he shouldn't get up so early in the morning to go to the synagogue and pray. This kind of really deflated him, and -- my father felt that this was a beginning of a spiral for him. So, yeah. This was their life, really. Yeah.

CW: Did you get to know him?

DS: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. They lived -- my grandparents passed away when I was about six or seven. When they were alive, we would see -- the family would get together, typically once a week after services on Saturday morning, and we'd all have lunch at their house. After he passed away, the family gatherings became less frequent, although we still did get together for holidays. Of course, all the holidays we celebrated together, seders and Hanukkah and those holidays. 5:00Yeah. So, no, I did know him. I have nice (laughs) memories of him. I guess looking back, maybe at his picture, you know, he had a long beard and he wore black clothes and -- you know, when I've looked at his pictures as an adult and thinking to myself, Gee, he could have been really intimidating. But he wasn't. He had a very nice demeanor about him, and he was really nice to the grandchildren, so, yeah. And my grandmother, I guess, was a -- was also observant. She had shaved her head and wore a wig. Saturday meals were all -- everything was cooked in advance. I remember them keeping the oven door open 6:00when we'd come over Tishevitz lunchtime after services, so, yeah.

CW: So, back to Tishevitz. So, you said your father would talk about it. What would he say about it?

DS: Well, he used to tell me stories about growing up there and about his relationship with his friends. I guess there are a bunch of anecdotes about it I could relate. He -- during the First World War, he and his sister Shifra, they -- there wasn't much food around. He would have been, I guess, maybe about seven or eight. He and his sister used to go to the farmers' fields and steal potatoes because they didn't have enough food. They used to crawl under the fences, and 7:00they would steal enough potatoes to bring home to their families so they'd have stuff to eat. He had an older brother who was killed in the First World War. They had evacuated the town at one point, and the brother and his father had gone back to Tishevitz to sort of look at the house or to get something. And a French plane flew over the house and bombed the house. And his brother was killed in the house with a -- a slat from the ceiling fell down and killed him. I think he was maybe eighteen or nineteen when he died. One of the other 8:00incidents that I remember about a lot of conversations about Tishevitz -- I mean, this -- he didn't tell me about this I guess until maybe the mid-'60s, at a time when I -- he used to like to go out with my friends sometimes, when I was at university. And when my friends discovered that he was an old radical, I mean, this was really great stuff for them, right? 'Cause this was the '60s, right? Anyway, he told them that after the First World War, the Russian army, which was coming back from the front, stopped in Tishevitz, and Trotsky addressed the crowd in a town square. (laughs) I never heard this story. Anyway, I said to him afterwards, I said, "Well, what exactly did he say?" And he said, 9:00"The people in the square were mostly the Jews in the town, and he told them there was no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union." Really something, considering (laughs) what transpired afterwards. So, this anecdote made my father very popular with my friends. Often my friends would phone and say, Is your father coming with us for a beer? And I'd say, "Well, okay. He's always up for it. Sure." Now, my brother, my late brother, was a doctor, and he -- he was a pediatrician. He was at Brown. And so, he was invited all over the world to conferences and stuff. And he was invited to give a lecture in Poland in -- oh, was it the late '70s or the early '80s? I don't remember. Anyway, his host said 10:00to him, "Is there something you'd like to do while you're here in Poland?" He said, "I'd like to see the town where my father's from." And so, I mentioned to my father that Leo was going to go to this town in -- to Tishevitz, and he said -- he wasn't very enthusiastic about it. He said, "There's nothing for him to see there. There's no reason for him to go." I said, "Well, but he's curious. He wants to see what it is." So, he said, "Well, you know, that's his choice." So, I talked to my brother when he came back. We talked over the phone about this. They lived in Rhode Island. So, he described the town to me. He said that it was a town of ten thousand people still. He said they had one restaurant, which, 11:00according to the ratings systems in Poland, was a Class C. (laughs) And he said, "If this was Class C." (laughs) He said they occasionally showed movies in this restaurant once a month. But he said -- in the Jewish cemetery, he said all the -- he said part of it's been built over, and what is left of the tombstones have all been desecrated and -- you know. Anyway, I said this to my father, and he said, "Well, that's what I said. I said there wasn't any reason for him to go there." If you get the sense from this anecdote that he was not nostalgic about Europe and about Poland, that's exactly the case. So, yeah.

CW: What sense of his -- I mean, what do you know about his youth there?

DS: Ah. (laughs) Yeah. Well, I gather he was already interested in radical politics even there, and he was already aspiring to be a writer. He left there -- he must have been maybe seventeen or eighteen. There was quite a big incident about him getting out of Poland. There was a ring of smugglers who were engaged in taking people's identity and selling them to other people so that they could 13:00get passports. His brother, his oldest living brother, had had that happen to him, and that's why his last name is Zipper, not Shtern, because somebody had taken his name. So apparently, when he went to take out his passport, he had to show up the day before in Warsaw and -- I think it was in Warsaw. So, this gang found out about it, and he was kidnapped. And I have this story from one of my cousins, who said that they wanted to either keep him out of sight until this other person had used his name to get a passport, or they were gonna turn him over to the police as a way of sort of staying on good terms with the police. 14:00Anyway, my grandmother caught wind of this, and she went to -- these were Jews that had done this. She knew who they were. So, she went to the house where he was being held, and she could see him on the second story of this house. And she called out these guys in the street. She said to them, said, "I know who you are." And she said, "If you go through with this, your name is gonna be mud in the community." She said, "I will spare nothing to make sure that everybody knows what you've done." Anyway, so while she was talking to them, she could see him at the window, and she was talking to them, and then she yelled, "Jump!" to him. And he jumped out the window and ran away. And the next day he went and took out his passport in his own name. So, (laughs) this is one story I know 15:00from his -- one of his adventures from his youth in Poland. Yeah, yeah. But he went to a yeshiva like everybody else. I asked my mother at one time; I said then, "How many grades of school did he finish?" And my mother said, "Well --" 'Cause he -- at one point it dawned on me that he was -- you know, he knew a lot, and he was very interested in everything. And my mother said, "Oh, well, maybe four grades at the yeshiva." And I -- well, interesting. (laughs)

CW: And he went to kheyder [traditional religious class] too?

DS: Yeah. Yeah, the kheyder was in the yeshiva. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

CW: Did he talk about his radicalization, you know, from the Hasidic family, 16:00becoming politicized?

DS: I guess a little bit. He talks about it in "Shrayber vos ikh hob gekent [Writers I've known]," too. He talks about how, when he arrived in Montreal, you know, he went to the UJPO Centre, and he felt comfortable there. But I think he'd already started to become radicalized in Poland. I did ask him a bunch of times about what his father thought about all of this. And he said that his father was fine with it. He said his father had told him that he, his father, was living his life differently than his own father, and that Sholem would live 17:00his life differently than his parents and that Sholem should expect that his children would live differently than he did. But as far as his politics were concerned as well, he -- I have the impression from my father that his father was -- that he was a very tolerant guy, that he was really in the tradition of being interested in social justice and being on the side of people who were poor and oppressed. I mean, they were dirt-poor in the shtetl [small Eastern European village with a Jewish community], but -- and my father said that his father often read his columns in the newspaper, and often, after lunch, he would sort 18:00of say, "Sholem, I read your piece in the "Freiheit," in the "Vochenblatt" or whatever it was, and he said, "It was good. I liked it." I guess at some point, it dawned on me there must have been some problem with my grandfather being -- my grandparents being so devout and my father being a political radical. But it didn't -- they meshed. It wasn't an issue for them.

CW: Do you know anything about the previous generations? You mentioned your father's grandfather being different than his father. Do you know anything about that?

DS: No, I -- unfortunately, I don't. I don't. Interestingly, years ago, I had -- 19:00out of the blue I had an email from a man in Israel who's originally an American who -- they live in Israel, and he's related to us on my grandmother's side. And I talked to one of my cou-- his uncle, he said, is my grandmother's brother. They're Zimmermans. And I remember my grandmother had a relative in Montreal who we'd see occasionally for family things. Not often, but occasionally. But my cousin didn't know, really know, these people. He thought maybe they came to America. Maybe they were farmers in New Jersey, he wasn't sure. So, no -- I 20:00guess the short answer's no. I don't really know much about them beforehand. This distant relative in Israel did send me an extract of birth records or marriage records from Poland, and the family name there is spelled S-Z. (laughs) Which I guess is how you'd spell it in Polish documents, yeah. Yeah.

CW: How many siblings did your father have, and can you tell me about them?

DS: Sure. There were -- altogether there were six siblings. The oldest one died in the First World War. That's Issachar. And then, there were three brothers and two sisters. And they all came to Canada. They all managed to leave. My father 21:00came here, I guess, in 1926, but by the mid-1930s they were all here.

CW: They came sort of one at a time?

DS: They sponsored each other, yeah. Yeah. My father was brought here by his brother. So, the oldest surviving brother was Yankel Zipper, who was the principal of the Peretz School in Montreal and also a noted writer. And so, Yankel sponsored my father, and then in turn everybody sponsored everybody else. So, there was Yankel, who's the oldest, and Yankel was a member of the Po'ale 22:00Tsiyon, so he was also, you know, on the progressive side, (laughs) although not quite as far -- as far to the left as my father. And then, the second one in line was his brother Yekhiel. Yekhiel was very religious, much like his grandfather, although I think he, on many instances, tried to outdo them by showing how devout he was. (laughs) My father used to tell a story that his father told him, that Yekhiel used to sometimes -- you know, Montreal being where it is, it got dark on Fridays pretty early during the winter. So, Yekhiel would sometimes phone his parents and say, "It's getting dark early. It's time to light the candles." And my grandfather would say to him, "Listen, Yekhiel, I know very well what time it is, what time I'm supposed to light the candles. (laughs) Thanks for calling." But Yekhiel was very, very religious, although he 23:00didn't start out that way, apparently.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

DS: But when he came to Canada he was apparently a hot revolutionary. But he -- I don't think this period lasted very long. I think he went back to the religious traditions that he knew. Interestingly, both he and Yankel lived other places in Canada for a time. I think Yankel taught school in Winnipeg at one point. Yeah, I know he did. He taught school in Winnipeg at one point, I believe in the 1920s. And Yekhiel I believe was in Calgary at one point, teaching in a Jewish school there. So, that was Yekhiel.

CW: And he also wrote?

DS: Pardon?

CW: He also wrote?

DS: Yes. There's one book that he wrote, yeah, that I believe he published in 24:00the late 1940s. He was also apparently involved in the teachers' seminar in Montreal. And I've met people here who said they had him as a teacher, and they said he was a great teacher. He had a very gentle demeanor. But he -- I have to say, he was -- from what I gather, he was very much a revolutionary, and then he was very religious. But I have nice memories of him. And so, those were the two oldest. Then there was my father's sister, his oldest sister, Shifra, Shifra 25:00Krishtalka. They were also on the left politically. They were also members of the UJPO. Her husband Sholem was a very active member of the UJPO. Shifra was a --

CW: Can you just explain what that is, the UJPO?

DS: Oh, the UJPO, the United Jewish People's Order. They were affiliated with -- they were supporters of the Soviet Union, I guess through the '20s and '30s and '40s and you know, later on, probably not so much. (laughs) And Shifra was a kindergarten teacher. She taught at the Peretz School. She was also very active in promoting the teaching of Yiddish among other teachers. She did a workbook for teachers teaching children in the early grades, full of illustrations. And 26:00she worked on this for a long time, very late in her life. And it's out in three volumes. It's Cerlox bound, and it's full of illustrations and exercises and stuff. Anyway, she was a (laughs) marvelous woman. She could be very feisty and opinionated. I think she considered herself a feminist. And when my father passed away, she would call me quite often just to say hello and stuff. And when I would go to Montreal, I would visit her, and I was always happy to be in her company. And I would talk to her in Yiddish, 'cause this was the only person left I could speak to in Yiddish. Anyway, she was just great. And to this day, 27:00of the people in my family that I'm close to, it's her oldest son, Aaron, that I talk to and that I try to see when we go to Montreal. He tries to come and visit us here in Toronto.

CW: Is he the writer, or is --

DS: Yes, he is. Yes, he is. And we have his book upstairs. I can bring it down here and add it to the pile. It was published when he was thirteen, with a foreword by my father. (laughs) It's a bit incestuous, but it was the only book in Yiddish he wrote. Thirteen years old, and he wrote this book. There's a great picture around somewhere of he and my father together on a street corner in Montreal. I guess this is shortly before his book came out, or maybe after it 28:00came out. They're standing on the street corner, and Aaron's maybe fourteen in this picture. And he's towering over my father. (laughs) My father has his newspapers sticking out of the jackets of his suit pockets, rolled-up newspapers sticking out of the jackets, and he has his arm around Aaron. (laughs) Anyway, it's a very nice picture. It's one of my favorite pictures. So, that's Shifra. And, you know, I would descr-- and so -- and then his younger sister was Henne. She was one of the two siblings in the family to go to university. She was a nurse, a graduate nurse. She served in the Canadian Armed Forces here in Canada during the Second World War. Also very accomplished. I mean, considering she came to Canada not speaking any English and being able to go to university and graduated with a nursing degree. I mean, to me this seems like a tremendous 29:00obstacle to overcome. So, that was Henne. And then, the youngest sibling was Yisroel, who's also a writer, and wrote under a pseudonym Ish Yair. And he also went to university. So, reflecting back on it, I mean, tremendous achievement for the family, having come here with no money and sending two younger kids to university. I mean, you know, it's kind of -- in retrospect, kind of mind-boggling. Anyway, he was a professor of mathematics at McGill. He eventually left there to concentrate on writing full time. And so, he was 30:00published in a lot of small magazines, in English and in Yiddish. But he was kind of reclusive, you know? Years ago, somebody got in touch with me to ask me about a man who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto whose name was Yisroel Shtern. And he asked me if this was my uncle, and I said no, it wasn't my uncle. Apparently, this man had written some Yiddish folksongs. He was -- and he was a researcher who lived in Holland. So, I talked to my cousin Aaron about it, and he said no -- he confirmed for me he's not our relative. He's just someone with the same name. But I mentioned this to my daughter, and her speculation about this was 31:00that maybe he adopted the name "Ish Yair" because he knew the existence of this other man with the same name. So, I don't know. I don't know. It's possible. Possible.

So, that was the family. They all lived fairly close to each other in Montreal. Yekhiel and Yisroel lived a couple of blocks from them. At one time, when they first came to Canada, my grandparents lived with Shifra and Sholem. So, they were in close proximity with each other, saw each other all the time. When my grandparents passed away, the ties were really lessened. I mean, people started 32:00to go more and more their own ways, you know?

CW: I just want to ask you to describe what he looked like.

DS: My father?

CW: Yeah.

DS: (laughs) He was -- he was short. Shorter than my mother. My mother felt that he -- maybe his lack of size was because he was malnourished as a youngster. He didn't have enough to eat. I guess he had a round face, he had a very friendly face. He -- I'll talk about this a bit later, but he was very engaging and very personable. So, yeah, that's about -- that's his picture there. When he has lots 33:00of hair, he looks very artistic here. You know, like a young jazz musician or someone who's very -- a bohemian, right?

CW: What would you say was his most prominent feature?

DS: Physically?

CW: Yeah.

DS: Oh. Oh, I don't know. He had a very -- to me he had a very -- you're making me think about this (laughs) -- he had a very open manner to him. You know, he had a very pleasant face, to me, anyway. So, and he was short, so I towered over him at a very early age. My brother and I -- my late brother and I -- sometimes when we'd go out with him and be looking for clothes for him, people would walk 34:00up to my brother and say, Well, what size does your son take? (laughs) Because he was much shorter than we were. My brother was also as tall as I am. So, yeah.

CW: And how did he dress? You mentioned that before. (laughter)

DS: Gee. In a very eclectic -- (laughs) he didn't really care for how he looked very much. Suits -- a good suit was one you had a nap in. He inevitably had a rolled-up newspaper in the pockets of his suits. He'd be often wearing two pairs of socks. My mother, in warm weather, would be urging him when he was outside 35:00writing to get into his shorts, and he wouldn't -- wasn't interested in it. He was too busy, focused on his writing. No, he wasn't -- he was not a fashion plate. He didn't care for it in the slightest. Yeah. So, your questions are interesting.

CW: So, can you describe the home that you grew up in?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

DS: So, we lived in the central part of Montreal. My memories of it were it was a mixed neighborhood, Jewish immigrants and then Francophones and later on other immigrants.

CW: What neighborhood?

DS: Sorry?

CW: What neighborhood was it?

DS: This is now called the Plateau neighborhood. We didn't have such a rarified term for it. We lived in one of those multi-unit dwellings which had an outside 36:00staircase. And in the winter, the staircase was so treacherous, because the ice would just form over the steps. My mother would go out with an axe and break up the ice. And the unit we lived in was -- I remember it had a stove in the kitchen where we burned something in it. The living room and one of the bedrooms sort of ran into each other. It was a pretty modest house. The atmosphere in the 37:00house -- well, for one thing, my older brother was quite a bit older than I was, so -- quite a bit older than me. So, he was thirteen years older. So, by the time I was kind of about ready to go to school, he was already off at university. He was away at university for a year, and then he came back to the house. And then later on, he went to medical school. So, I guess I'm saying he wasn't around all that much. He did a lot of looking out for me. I was the little brother, much younger. And, of course, he (laughs) knew his way around the world, which my parents did not, right? Being immigrants and all. My parents were very much in tune with each other. They had a -- I would say they had a 38:00marvelous relationship. They struggled financially. There wasn't much money. But they weren't at all materialistic. I think they were content as long as they could -- as long as the world was moving towards being a better place, and they could talk about literature and about improving things in the world. That was a big focus of their lives. So, later on when I was about twelve, we moved out of that part of town. We moved to an area that was also part of Montreal but further north, called Parc-Extension. It was a semi-detached house, but it had a 39:00yard. It was also, I guess, smallish, but it was a big step up for us. I have to say, my father had help financially in acquiring the house. One of his friends had owned the house, and his wife couldn't navigate the stairs very well anymore, and he was eager to move out of the house. And he became their landlord. But he subsidized their acquisition of the house -- he and others subsidized their acquisition of the house. Anyway, they were very happy in this house. They had a yard. My father used to like to write out in the yard during the day in the summertime. And he used to like to go for walks with me. We used to talk, and we'd often go and have a hamburger in the shopping center, or we'd 40:00go and buy bread. There was a joke in our house about, How many people does it take to buy a loaf of bread? Well, my father wanted to have a conversation, so we went, and we'd buy a loaf of French bread. My father was very interested in bread, incidentally -- any kind of bread. French bread, black bread -- he was very fond of bread. Probably because he didn't have enough of it when he was growing up. Again, they -- my parents had -- later on, when he stopped being the principal of the Winchevsky School, and he most-- and his income came from private lessons, he had a routine that he followed. He'd get up quite early. He'd write all morning, maybe till about two o'clock or so. And then, because 41:00the Jewish community had spread out, he would take public transportation to the newly emerging suburbs. And often, he spent about an hour getting to his private lessons, an hour and a half, so he'd come home about -- usually he'd leave about 2:00. He'd come home about 9:30, 9:30 in the evening. My mother would feed him dinner. And this was kind of his -- on the weekends he was -- you know, because the kids weren't in school, he had more lessons. And so, that was his routine for many, many years. When he wrote, he was -- I felt he was very disciplined. He would sit there for hours. I'd often say to him, "Well, you know, what did 42:00you write today?" He'd show me, and he'd say -- he said, "I've erased more than I've written." He had a word for it, like grafomanye. It's like "graffiti," right? And my mother was kind of his taskmaster. She would say to him, "Well, okay, what did you write today? How much did you write today? Read me what you've written." (laughs) And so, it was -- you know, she would keep him on track to -- I mean, he needed to express himself. He wanted to write every day, but if he needed a check, someone to remind him that this was what he was supposed to be doing, that was her. So, yeah.

CW: And so, where would he write?

DS: (laughs) He had very strange places to write. In fact, there's a picture of him in a book about Montreal. He's hunched over a stool, a chair, and he's -- the chair comes up to about his chest here, and he's just writing away. He wasn't very well organized. His papers were often a mess. In fact, (laughs) one source of contention in the house was that he would be looking for stuff, and he'd say to my mother, "Well, what did you do with my papers? What did you do with my important papers?" And I can say this in Yiddish, "Tshepet nisht mayne vikhtike papirn." You know. "Don't move my papers." The papers were -- the papers were all over the place. And I remember after we moved away in the '70s, 44:00my wife said to me, "Why don't we buy him a filing cabinet?" "That sounds like an excellent idea! Let's buy him a filing cabinet." So, we went out and bought him a filing cabinet, a pretty simple affair. You know, three drawers and stuff. Brought it home. He seemed very appreciative, (laughs) but he didn't use it. I mean, he could have even just opened the drawers and just shoved it in there, not bothered with file folders or anything. But he didn't use it. And he kept insisting on leaving his papers all over the house and telling my mother not to touch his important papers. So, that was his -- that was his approach to it. But he was very disciplined. But the other thing I must say, his attitude about writing was he felt he just couldn't -- he didn't feel you could just do 45:00writing. He said he thought it was important for a writer to be among people, not to lock himself up all day and just write. He said being with people was -- gave you -- well, it was important as a person. But also in terms of writing, gave you ideas, gave you inspiration. So, that was, I think, a very important approach of his to how he did his work. He felt he needed to go among people. In fact, he felt he needed to go among people every day, to have conversations with people, to see people. And he had a very wide circle of friends. People were phoning the house all the time. He had a regular group of pals who he would drop in on. In fact, one of the people in my Yiddish book group, it turned out she 46:00was my kindergarten teacher in the shule [secular Yiddish school] where he was principal. I didn't realize this until she produced a picture of me and her, and I'm about five years old, and I'm looking quite stunned. But she said my father used to drop in regularly on her husband. And he'd have conversations about the state of the world, and she said her husband always looked forward to seeing him. And he had friends. He had rabbis and other writers who he knew. There was a friend of his who was a shopkeeper where the shule was, who used to drop in to see -- he used to like to go over there and talk to him about how things stood in the world. He was very sociable. Yeah.

CW: Did people come to the house?

DS: Yeah. Yeah. We had people come to the house. He (laughs) also didn't mind talking to strangers, which -- often much to my chagrin. I mean, he liked to know people's stories. So, if you ran into him on the street or on a bus, he overheard a conversation, he'd strike up a conversation. We'd be going, Oh, Dad, come on. You're embarrassing me here. You don't just do this. You know, bank tellers became his best friends. "Tell me all about yourself." Anyhow. That's what he was like.

CW: So, what was Jewish about your home growing up?

DS: Well, we spoke Yiddish in the house, spoke Yiddish in the house. It was a language of conversation in our house. We had Yiddish books. In addition to the newspapers he wrote for, he read the Yiddish newspapers daily.

CW: Which ones would he read?

DS: Pardon?

CW: Which newspapers would he read?

DS: Well, the newspapers he wrote for were the "Vochenblatt" here in Toronto, the "Morgen Freiheit" in New York. But then he would also read the "Keneder Adler," which was the -- I guess the Po'ale Tsiyon newspaper, who he used to often derisively refer to as the "foygl," you know, the bird. (laughs) He'd read the "Forward," from New York. He especially liked Sholem Aleichem's son-in-law, 49:00Goldberg, the columnist. And he liked his stuff. He used to read him all the time. He read very widely in a lot of Yiddish journals. The other writers would send him books all the time. But their whole life was built around Yiddish. When we got a television set in the '50s, things changed a bit, right, because we actually had another language that you could hear in the house. In fact, one of the things that he worried about was when it was time for me to go to school -- so the Winchevsky School was a day school at the time, but it was half in English, half in Yiddish. He was worried that my English wasn't good enough for 50:00me to go to school. And so, the year before I was supposed to go into school, he made sure that I would be in the school sort of at the end of the previous school year, like in May and June, just so that I could be around English. He needn't have worried. (laughs) And, I mean, shortly thereafter, as soon as I'd learned English, they would have conversations in Yiddish, they would speak to me in Yiddish, and then there came a time when they would speak to me in Yiddish, I would answer them in English. Right? It was my way of being part of the crowd here, showing them that I was different than my immigrant parents, right? So. (laughs)

CW: So, you mentioned there were also a lot of books in the home.

DS: Yeah.

CW: So, can you just, I guess, describe what the set-up was a little more in detail. Where were the books?

DS: Oh, gosh. There were books in the living room. We had books upstairs and in one of the spare bedrooms. And there were always -- when we moved to the house in Parc-Extension -- this would have been in the late '50s, so his first novel in verse came out in 1960. So then, there were always copies of books in our house, right? And so, one of the things he did, which I understand was fairly common among Yiddish writers, was he would send books to people. He would mail out books to people. He had lists that the newspapers had given him, or the IKUF 52:00in New York had given him, of people who were subscribers, who they knew were -- and so he would mail books out to them -- unsolicited, mind you. And, I mean, the sad thing was that, although quite a few people took these books, we often got letters back saying, "My parents have passed away, and I don't read Yiddish, so I'm returning your book." That was a fairly comm-- so in addition to all the books from all the other writers, his contemporaries, the classics, the works by Peretz and Sholem Aleichem and Mendele, we were surrounded by his books as well, and he was regularly packaging up these books and mailing them off. And also, 53:00when he used to go to his private lessons, he would take his books with him, because he would think that on the bus sometimes he would run into somebody who might be a reader, and it was important to have a book to show him. And once in a while, (laughs) he would come home without a book that he'd taken with him on a bus.

CW: So, he was involved in producing these books as well as selling them later?

DS: Well, the administration of the books was usually handled by a committee of friends of his. Often, his brother-in-law Sholem Krishtalka, Shifra's husband, was kind of the secretary. You know, they raised money for him to put the books out. He got grants from various organizations. But he was very active in 54:00promoting his own work. He was not shy about his own work. I came across a word of his, which I hadn't known, in "Shrayber vos ikh hob gekent," called "reklamevdik," which means, shy, not wanting to put yourself forward. That wasn't him. (laughs) He put himself forward. In retrospect, a good quality, even though at the time I thought, It's maddening, go up and talk to strangers. "Here's my book. Have a book. Are you a reader? You interested in this?" But he wasn't shy about his work and stuff.

CW: For someone who hasn't read him, can you tell me the things, the type of 55:00things that he would write?

DS: Yeah. Sure. So, his first few published books -- that starts in 1929 with that flimsy book called "Noentkayt," "Nearness" -- his first three volumes were volumes of poetry. And they were about nature and about, I guess, maybe traditional family observances. So, that came out in 1929, the first one, and then they were followed up by "Es likhtikt," "It Is Light," and then "Inderfri," which is "In the Morning." And they were poems about -- again, I think there was a lot of -- mostly about nature, images of Montreal, you know, where he lived, as well. I guess the big dividing line in his work -- so the first one came up 56:00in '29, the third volume in 1945. He became principal of the Winchevsky School in 1940s, and that lasted maybe until the shule closed in the late '50s. Maybe we can talk about that a bit later, but it closed in part because of how badly things had gone in the Soviet Union and how the Communists had been so discredited. I mean, people just didn't want to send their kids to a school that had this affiliation. Also, as well, the community became much -- in Montreal -- much more spread out, moved to the suburbs, became wealthier. But that's another matter. So, he went through this long period where he didn't publish any books. 57:00He continued writing. He continued writing for newspapers. He wrote articles and stuff. He did a lot of literary criticism. But he -- after the Holocaust, he felt that he really needed to reorient his work, that what was important now was to document life in Canada, life here for the Jewish immigrants in Canada, not to dwell on Europe or what was in the past. Which is incidentally one thing that really distinguishes him from a lot of the Canadian Yiddish writers. I think he was perhaps the only one of this group to write about -- to have themes that 58:00were set in Canada. I don't think that's true of the American Yiddish writers. I know there were guys who wrote cowboy stories, for example. But among Canadian writers, he's really unique in that respect. And it very much reflected what he felt about Canada. He was a tremendous patriot and took great pride in it. So, in 1960 his first novel in verse appeared. That was "In kanade [In Canada]." And it's basically a saga of an immigrant family coming and living in Canada, a family much like his, a devout family with all the different strains in the family: the socialist, the Marxist, the people who were just trying to get ahead, the -- so that was his first book, in 1960. It was followed up by "In kanade," volume two, in 1963. And then, in 1967 he produced "The White House," 59:00which was the time he spent in the tuberculosis sanitarium in the Laurentian Mountains. And he was sent there shortly after he arrived in Canada, because he was suspected of having tuberculosis. In fact, he didn't have it. He was malnourished. But they kept him there. And so, he chronicles life there, the hopes, the aspirations of basically the -- I would say the panoply of Jewish immigrants in Canada. Bundists, secularists, religious people. There's a communist character in there. It's also the story of the romance between my parents, how they met. My mother was his nurse. And there are lots of stanzas 60:00about my mother's aunt not wanting her to marry him because she had him all lined up with a doctor, right, and she foolishly went off with this poet who made a living selling magazines door-to-door. But the other thing that's unique about it, too, is his descriptions about French-Canadian farmers who lived near the sanitarium. And the interrelationships between the patients at the sanitarium and the farmers. So, that was his book in 1967. It was, I think the first book to be translated into English. And I think it's the best translation of any of them. It was done by this man in Philadelphia, Max Rosenfeld. And it 61:00was translated into Hebrew. So, that was "The White House." I was trying to think of something else I wanted to say about it, but maybe it'll occur to me in a minute. Interestingly, the sanitarium was really quite interested in the publication of the book. When the book was translated, they held a reception for him in the sanitarium at Mount Sinai. So, at the TB sanitarium -- so that was his -- and I think --

CW: And there's this new book also about [UNCLEAR] --

DS: Yeah, so that led to this new book, which is about three sanitarium poets: Leivick, Haim Leivick; and Yeshua, I guess, is how you pronounce his name -- who 62:00were at a TB sanitarium in Denver. And so, this Professor Gilman has put the three of them together in a volume. I think he's done a very nice job of talking about my father and his work, and his life. So that's "The White House." And then the last novel was two novellas. Oh yeah, one of the things I wanted to say about "The White House" is you can see his tone about his radicalism is -- in some ways, it's consistent with his other works in his depiction of the characters. In other ways, there's a bit of a subtle shift here. Or maybe a subtle shift. Maybe I don't have the specifics down too well. But in all of his 63:00works, it's interesting that often the most sympathetic characters are religious people. They often have very progressive ideas; they're often on the side of the oppressed. And this is a reflection, I think, of his affection for his father and the way his father lived his life, even though his life was very different. He didn't go to synagogue regularly. But he had great respect for these traditions. The other thing that -- in "The White House" is that in terms of sympathetic characters, he has a communist who's a character who he doesn't portray in a very good light. He talks about him having blotchy skin -- red, 64:00blotchy skin -- and he fills him full of slogans, about what's gonna happen when the workers' state arrives, what's gonna happen to the bourgeoisie and the lackey Jewish press, you know. It reflects his view about what had gone on and Stalin's atrocities and stuff. So, I found that kind of interesting in "The White House." And the reason it's fresh in my memory here is because we just read it in my Yiddish group, and so I particularly remember the character of the communist there. So, the attractive people in there are the pious Jews, the religious Jews. The manager of the sanitarium, who's a Bundist, comes across as a very warm, sympathetic character. You know, he doesn't abandon his idealism, 65:00his own idealism. I mean, he talks about -- both he and my mother talk about social justice and about the need for there to be equality and economic stability for poor people and stuff. But there is a -- he's portraying stuff in a way that reflects changes in his attitude. And as I said, one of the things that makes this book different is his depiction of French-Canadian farmers. So, the last novel in verse that came was actually two novellas called "The Family in Canada" and "The Household of Professor Sydney Goldstein." And the content here is really quite different. He's not talking so much about the different 66:00political currents on the Jewish street anymore, but what he's talking about is new generations of Jews in Canada. He's talking about assimilation, about hanging on to culture and heritage, about intermarriage -- I had met my wife at that point, so (laughs) I guess he had some firsthand -- so these are two relatively short novellas that are in one volume, "Household of Professor Sydney Goldstein" -- and Sydney Goldstein is a Zionist. And he meets a woman university who's not Jewish. They talk about their family life and their kids eventually finding some value in their Jewish roots and stuff. So, he ends on an optimistic note here. So, that was his last novel, his last novel in verse. And if I didn't 67:00mention it, they're all novels in verse, which in some minds of some people have led them to make comparison with Edgar Lee Masters, the Spoon River Anthology. The fact that his -- "The White House" is set in a sanitarium, that's the Thomas Mann comparison. So, his last work is his literary memoirs and his portraits of other Yiddish writers, "Shrayber vos ikh hob gekent]," which came out in 1983. He has portraits there of Mani Leib, of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern. He talks a lot 68:00about people coming to Montreal to visit him. This is one of the things that -- to visit Montreal -- this is one of the things that attracted the French academic Pierre Anctil to his work, is that he says that how he presented these portraits as a backdrop of Montreal and writing about the city itself -- he said in a way which not only the Yiddish writers didn't do, but the Francophone writers didn't do either. And he said, again, this is one of the unique things about it. And he has a lot of interesting stuff in there about other writers. 69:00There's a very interesting chapter on the time when Sholem Asch came to Montreal as part of the effort to raise money for the Soviet Union for the Second World War, and a big rally that was held in Montreal, in which thousands of people were there. And there were people from the Soviet Union there. Itsik Fefer was there. The artist [Maholis?] was there. My father met all these people. He spent a couple of days with Sholem Asch. There's pictures of him and Sholem Asch together. There's some, I would say, some very intriguing things about it, because he says to Itsik Fefer in the hallway there in the hotel -- he asks him about a couple of people who he knew. He said, "Well, I haven't heard from them in a long time. Where have they gone?" And he said Fefer says, "Oh, well, a 70:00mistake was made. Oh, this person's well, I saw him last week." But he said Fefer acts very nervously, you know. And my father just relates the scene. He doesn't talk about the aftermath of this. It's just the scene. The chapter's very interesting also about Asch's personality, about how flamboyant he was. But in this book, there's also a -- what I think, a very powerful portrait of the Russian-Yiddish critic, literary critic, Leyb Kvitko. And to me, it's among the most powerful pieces of work in the book. He talks about how Kvitko thought he was living in a utopia, that he had all these -- there were Yiddish schools, and he had all these Yiddish books. And then, he was nabbed by Stalin's secret 71:00police and shot. And my father describes this as the second great tragedy to befall the Jewish people in the twentieth century. And it's -- when I read it, I thought it was a very powerful piece. And it contains a no-excuses condemnation of Stalin. He's not making any allowances for him in the slightest, at all. He said Kvitko was an idealist who thought he'd gone to paradise. So, there's that. There's lots of other interesting pieces in there about how he got started as a writer, what his inspirations were. As I said, there are portraits of Mani-Leyb Halpern [sic] and also some of the Montreal writers. There's a chapter on Segal. 72:00Yeah. So, that was his last -- that was his last effort.

CW: When did he start writing?

DS: When did he start writing?

CW: Yeah.

DS: I think he was already writing in Poland. And the first volume of poetry was published in 1929, so he was already writing in the sanitarium when he was -- he was writing in 1926 when he was here. Yeah.

CW: And did you get to know the writers that -- the other writers that he was friends with, as a kid?

DS: A little bit. A little bit. They would phone the house. We have lots of 73:00pictures of him with other writers, with Segal, with Meylech Ravitch. There are lots of family pictures with him and his brother, of course, with Yaakov Zipper, and group pictures of other writers whose names I don't recognize. Other writers would call the house from time to time. He was friends with a refugee -- he was good friends with a refugee named Roge, who wanted to be a writer, who wrote a little bit and managed to get his books published. But I think that -- and I'm not sure I'm really in a good -- can talk about this very definitively, but my 74:00impression is that the writers saw each other, interacted with each other, quite a bit in the '30s and the '40s. You know, the Second World War united a lot of them and papered over their political differences. I mean, they were a particularly noisy, rambunctious lot, (laughs) these writers. And there was a lot going on in Montreal. Regularly there were visitors coming from New York. There were things at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal. It was a very active cultural scene, so I think he saw a lot of people. But I think after the revelations about Stalin, I think a couple things happened. I think he -- I 75:00think the other writers ostracized him. I think some of them never forgave him. I know how shattered he was about this. But I don't think they ever -- his brother Zipper in his memoirs talks about he was invite-- my father was invited to join the PEN Club, the writers' club, maybe sometime in the '80s. Maybe in the '70s or the '80s. And Zipper writes, "It was good to see him there," because he said he'd either been ostracized or ostracized himself for so many years that 76:00it was good to see that he was coming among the other writers and speaking up and contributing and stuff. But, you know, people would phone the house regularly. I mean, I remember Ravitch phoning the house regularly. I'm not sure I'm in a very good position to talk about -- I was very young when all of this transpired. And, again, my parents were immigrants, they were different, they had different -- the people that they spoke to spoke Yiddish to them. (laughs) I mean, and here I was out on the street, speaking English, playing ball, being interested in the sports pages, all those kinds of things. So -- (laughs) but those are just some of my impressions. They may be a bit superficial, and they 77:00may not be entirely accurate. But that's my -- those are my impressions of his relations with the other writers.

CW: Can you say a little bit more about that generational divide and what it was like for you to grow up with a Yiddish writer father?

DS: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. (laughs) Well, I mean, looking back on it, it was a great household. When you consider what my parents came to Canada with and what they persevered to make a life for themselves here in Canada, it was just phenomenal. My father, before he became principal of the school, I think there was a period of time which I think he sort of worked at odd jobs: worked at a fruit store, he sold magazines door-to-door, he worked in a factory for a while. 78:00I don't think he was very good at these things. My mother was a nurse and went to work. I think she worked night shifts a lot. But they provided for us. I mean, they sent two children to university. And as a writer, I mean, he -- both artistically and in terms of some semblance of economic stability, he flourished here in Canada. But (laughs) when I started to go to school, and I'd meet other people's parents in their house, they'd be speaking English to each other, and they had a TV, and they were interested in sports, which my parents were not at all interested in. So, there was a bit of a -- and I don't think unique to our 79:00circumstance. I think for a lot of immigrants, it's -- first-generation immigrants, first-generation Canadians -- it's the same thing. I think it cuts across all cultures. You see your parents as different, as funny, as odd. And they weren't cool and reserved like a lot of other people's parents were, either. They were very emotional and excitable -- stuff. My cousin Aaron once had a very -- we were talking about our respective parents once. He said to me, "You know, other people's parents," he said, "they went on skiing vacations," he said. "Our parents," he said, "they worried about the fate of the world. That was their outlook on stuff." So, you know, for a time, as I said, when they 80:00talked to me in Yiddish, I would answer them in English. I think they realized that it was different for me. And I wasn't always that understanding of them. I thought, Well, they're just old-fashioned. But they -- my father wanted very much that we should be -- despite being in a Yiddish household and speaking Yiddish to each other and having all these Yiddish books, he wanted us to be Canadian, you know? He wanted us to have the same rights and privileges and lifestyle that other Canadians had. He never discouraged me from doing -- from 81:00having a wide circle of friends, from -- and, in fact, when I was just a nerdy teenager and having all kinds of issues that teenagers have, they both were wonderfully supportive. I think about it in retrospect. You know those gloomy teenage years when you're just sort of angst-ridden and all that sort of stuff? I mean, he would regularly say to me, Let's go for a walk. Or my mother would say to him, Go for a walk with him. And he was a very good listener, and he -- yeah, it was a -- I wouldn't -- (laughs) in retrospect, as I said, it was a great experience. Wonderful parents. They didn't care for their own financial 82:00wherewithal. Even after they had some semblance of economic security, they always worried that there was some economic catastrophe around the corner. Even later in life -- you know, when we needed stuff for the house, for example, we went out and bought some pillows for the house. My mother didn't go with us, she wasn't well then. We came home, and my father said, "Well, how much did it cost?" So, my wife told him. He said, "Well, don't tell Sonia. Don't tell her how much this cost. She'd be horrified. Don't tell her." And they wouldn't spend any money on themselves. Elspeth and I would say to them, Well, look, why don't you spend part of the winter going someplace warm? Why don't you go to Florida? 83:00You'll find -- there are other people there who speak Yiddish. I'm sure some of your writing pals are there too. And he wouldn't hear of it. "What would I do there? I'd sit there in the sunshine. No, this is my home here in Montreal. I'm happy being here in my neighborhood with -- this is where I live. There are people from all different backgrounds. I'm happy to be here. I don't want to go there." They never went. Anyway, I -- great upbringing, my --

CW: What did you think about Yiddish as a kid, and how did that change over time?

DS: Ah. Well, you know, again, I guess -- thinking that it was different. It wasn't in the mainstream. And here were my strange parents. They weren't like 84:00other people's parents. (laughs) But I guess in my twenties, I began to take a different view of it. I realized what a tremendous contribution this made to my upbringing. I mean, I think a part of it was going out and meeting other people from different backgrounds, too. Seeing sort of the commonality between people from different parts of the country, people with different upbringings, and how they reacted to their own backgrounds and saying, Oh, wait a second. Yeah, the language is different and a lot of the experiences are different, but a lot of other people have kind of -- we're on similar trajectories here. I mean, this 85:00isn't just so far-fetched. It's unique, it's very unique, but it's not -- it's something to be celebrated rather than say, Oh, that's funny; that's strange. And after I moved away, of course, (laughs) I began to appreciate it more and more. When I moved away, I started to talk to my parents in Yiddish again, on the phone, when I was with them. No more of this you talk to me in Yiddish, I'll talk to you in English. After my folks passed away, I was very pleased to have an opportunity to talk to my aunt Shifra on the phone in Yiddish. I tried to 86:00keep in touch a little bit with Itche Goldberg, who was my father's editor of the magazine he contributed to for four years, "[Kultur?]." I'd phone him occasionally, talk to him in Yiddish. I liked that. I liked that a great deal. My view of it -- my view of it evolved.

CW: At what point did you first read your father's work?

DS: Ah. That's a good question. That's a really good question. Probably in the late '60s, when -- maybe I was already a teenager. Or in my early twenties. I 87:00know I read a translation of "The White House" when it came out. Did I read "The White House" in its original first? I don't remember. Hard to remember. But I made a point of reading it in the original. Especially -- I don't do this anymore. I really should. But on the High Holidays, my way of celebrating it was to take out my father's books and read a bit of it, you know. I felt that was appropriate.

CW: I wanted to ask a little bit more about the novel in verse.

DS: Yeah.

CW: What are the characteristics of the style, the form, of his writing? The style or the form of his verse --

DS: Yeah.

CW: -- how would you describe it, or what stands out from his style of writing?

DS: Ah. Well, it's poetry in a novel form. I mean, again, reflecting on it, how 88:00hard he must have worked to make everything rhyme. He told me that he often would invent words, shape words so that they would rhyme. Interestingly, Rosenfeld, in his translation of "The White House," did his level best to keep the rhythm of his work. He tried to make stuff rhyme in English, sometimes with not such good results. Like, he has one stanza where he rhymed "waltz" with "schmaltz." (laughs) I mean, he was really reach-- but he did a very good job. He really had a poet's sensitivity in translating the work. Yeah, I mean, it's 89:00distinct. And when you read his prose, for example, his prose is -- it's just different than his poetry. His poetry's concise. One of the things that struck me about reading "The White House" was the range of themes that he dealt with as well, like the portrayals of the characters, their political affiliations, their views about events in the world, their aspirations. I think that's one of the things, to me, anyway, that makes "The White House" so interesting -- is that 90:00there's lots of really different strains to it, you know? They're ordinary people who -- a patient has an illness. His family comes to visit him regularly once a week. But the case is hopeless; the person dies. There are other people who are kind of abandoned by their families. And Gilman points this out in the chapters on the other writers, that in many instances the spouses kind of abandon the people who are in the sanitarium, that they took up with other people. They didn't see that their spouse was ever gonna come out of the sanitarium, and they had affairs with others. (gasps) My God, you know, affairs. Imagine. Imagine the scandal here, right? But apparently it was -- and my father writes about this. He also talks about the charity ladies who come to the 91:00institutions, who -- people who are very well-off and who think they're really doing -- they're contributing; they're doing good work. And I guess they were doing good work. After all, they were volunteering. But he says there's a sense of sort of -- there's a class difference. There's a sense of -- maybe a bit of snobbery about what they're doing. And then, of course there are his depictions of French-Canadian farmers and how they live and stuff. So, the rhythm of it, the rhyming, the verses -- which obviously, he worked very hard to have a rhythm, but also the diversity of the themes in the book to me were really -- and then as I said, we read it recently in our book group, which really made an impression on me. So.

CW: Of your father's books, do you have a favorite?

DS: A favorite. (laughs) Maybe "The White House." I would think "The White House." I also like "Shrayber vos ikh hob gekent," because it -- he talks a lot about his own attitudes and stuff. And I like the portraits of the other writers. Incidentally, he has a scene -- I think it's maybe in the chapter on Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, where he spends time in New York, and he goes to the Café Royal. And he describes (laughs) a scene that's -- just where the writers used to hang out on the Lower East Side, I guess a self-service cafeteria -- and he describes the tensions among the writers and the animosities sort of barely 93:00below the surface here. Really quite something. I mean, I knew they existed, but he writes about it. I thought that was kind of interesting.

CW: One of the things that is written about your father is that he was really involved in the translation process?

DS: Yes, he was. Yeah. Yeah.

CW: Can you say a little bit about that?

DS: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, again, that was one of the things that he very actively promoted. Starting with "The White House," which came out in -- it came out in the early '70s. But there was a man in Montreal, a Francophone, who had a publishing house, who was very attracted to his work. I think he was kind of a New-Age-y guy, you know. He wore turtlenecks and a pendant. Anyway, he was very 94:00interested in getting Dad's work translated into both English and French, with which I think there was some uneven results. I think there were different translators. I mean, I think this was a very ambitious undertaking and hard to do. But my father was very interested in it. He knew that the Yiddish audience was shrinking. He was interested in having other people have access to his work. He was very interested in getting this done. Yeah.

CW: One of the things I'm curious is -- do you think he has a readership now?

DS: Hm. I doubt it. I doubt it. I mean, I think -- I think there are academics that are interested in this stuff. And that's great, I'm happy about that. I think of my generation, there are probably a few people around who know about his work and stuff. But of the younger generation, no, I don't think -- I don't think people are interested in Yiddish generally. I did look at the National Yiddish Book site a long time ago, and was surprised at the number of downloads of his work. I thought, Well, this is great. I mean, that's nice. This number's 96:00really -- it's an impressive number, right? That's good. I wonder who these people are, but that's great. So, maybe I'm off base here. It'd be nice.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW: Do you have something more that you want to say about why --

DS: Why one should read him?

CW: -- why people should read him?

DS: Yeah. Well, I think -- maybe I can kind of divide this into two. I think people should read him for the literary qualities. I mean, that's one thing. I think he -- you know, he was an artist. I think, in my view -- I think the caliber of his written work is very high. And there are other critics that have praised him. I mean, Itche Goldberg had a chapter about him in one of his 97:00collections. Sol Liptzin, a noted critic, also had nice things to say about him, and also about the family in general. And the form in which he wrote was very unique and very different. I think the other thing, too, is here -- so it's also -- I think his literary qualities. But I think the other thing as well is that he chronicled a

way of life that doesn't really exist here anymore. People don't live the way my parents lived. The Jewish community doesn't have the same interests that they did. And no one should expect that they would have the same interests that they did. I mean, the community's more prosperous, and that's a great thing. And 98:00although, you know, obviously there's still anti-Semitism around, it's not of the same form that it was when they first immigrated to Canada. But the way of life, the depictions of how immigrants lived, their attitudes, their political divisions, you know, even just the context of Yiddish language, I mean, that's all gone. No one lives that -- or, at least to my experience, unless you've -- well, I should -- I guess Hasidim, who speak to each other in Yiddish, live that way, but they're -- that's not a -- it's not in the same universe, right? So, I think that's the other reason that people should be interested in him, is that 99:00he gives insights. He depicts a way of life that's no longer there. And I think people should know about it. Family occasions I come to when we celebrate holidays -- I think I said (laughs) in the questionnaire, you know, in this room full of forty people -- this is my daughter-in-law's family -- they're wonderful people. They're warm and we have great family occasions. But I think I'm the only Yiddish speaker in the room. And as far as the conversation's concerned, it's a completely different universe than what I grew up in and what my parents 100:00lived when they first came to Canada. So, I guess there's those couple reasons. Just to come back to the literary qualities of his work, I guess maybe in a way just kind of to relate this to his radicalism, one of the things he says in "Shrayber" here -- and I'm sorry if I'm sort of veering off course here a little bit.

CW: That's fine.

DS: This was a thread that maybe I kind of -- I think some people try to pigeonhole him because of his radicalism. And I think that's an important part -- that's an important contribution to what he was. He was an idealist, I think, 101:00rather than an ideologue. He was never a Party member. In the end, he was very unhappy about -- obviously -- about what transpired in the Soviet Union, very disillusioned, very disappointed. But in "Shrayber," one of the things he says is that in terms of how he viewed his own work and writing in general was -- he said, "It's not enough to write in slogans. It's not enough to write in rhetoric." He said, "Just espousing words about the revolution doesn't make you a writer, doesn't make you an artist." And this is how he saw his own approach to his craft. So, I think -- the literary merits to his work and how he viewed 102:00his own work and also the context of that time, which is a time which doesn't exist anymore. I think those are reasons to be interested in what he had to -- what he had to say.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW: Disillusionment, you know, the process that your father went through.

DS: Oh, yeah.

CW: Because he went to Poland in '49, right?

DS: Yeah. Yeah. He went to Poland in '49. Went to Poland in 1960, also. He went to Poland in '49 -- I'm not sure if it was '49 or '48. But doesn't matter. He went to Poland after the war, ostensibly to find out what happened to his family. And if you think about, look, it was three years after the war ended. Didn't they know? But I guess maybe people held out hope that some people had 103:00ended up in the Soviet Union or that they were in displaced persons camps. The communications in that area, from what I understand, weren't great. So, he went to find out what happened to his family. And none of the people who stayed behind in Europe survived, not a one. So -- and my cousin Aaron has told me about -- my grandparents lived with him, and when when my father came back from Europe, that the family had a meeting the next day, and he was asked to give a report, and -- Aaron said he -- Aaron's a couple of years older than I am, and he said -- I wasn't there, but Aaron lived in the house. He said they closed the doors to keep the kids out. And he said people just burst into tears. So, he 104:00went in '48-slash-'49. That was the ostensible purpose of his trip, to -- I mean, he did meet other writers there and stuff. So, in 1960 he went again. This was after Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin. And he was invited by the Polish Writers' Union. And I -- I think the Polish government wanted to show that despite what happened in Russia, that things were okay in Poland. And that was their reason for inviting him. He was invited officially. And so, he went. It was a very hastily arranged trip at the last minute, and he didn't have a passport. So, to get him a passport, in those days -- I'm not sure if you can 105:00still do this, but you could go to the office of your local member of Parliament and sit there for a day, and they would produce a passport for you. Which is what he did. So, he went to Ottawa for the day, and they produced a passport for him. And he (laughs) said afterwards, in reflecting on the trip, he said, "This is just an unbelievable contrast to what life was like in Poland," right? He said, "My member of Parliament knew damn well who I was, that I had these affiliations. And there I was; I was treated like any citizen here who needed a passport in a hurry. They were polite to me, they produced it in a day, they didn't ask any -- I was a constituent." He knew who the MP was. But they 106:00produced a passport for him and they handed it to him. When he went to Poland, he had a very different impression of what life was like there. He said, his overall impression was that he didn't feel people were better off under Communism. Now, keep in mind, this is fifteen years after the Second World War. The country had been devastated. All that's true. And he took that into account. But he didn't feel people were better off, that their standard of living had improved. But he also said that -- he had a minder, somebody who went around with him. And he said people that he met up with, other writers who he met up with, had said to him quietly -- said, You're being watched. I'm being watched. 107:00Let's walk around a corner here, and then maybe we can talk a bit more frankly. Most of the writers who he talked to there -- this was 1960, before Gomulka came to power, and before the purge in -- I think it was 1968, when Gomulka encouraged Jews to leave. Most of the writers who he talked to didn't want to stay on in Poland anymore, didn't -- despite the official line that the Polish government was trying to give. Didn't want to stay on. So, this was yet another main thing about his disillusionment. As the years rolled on, he felt Khrushchev 108:00and Kosygin and Brezhnev were part of the same old gang, that they -- and also their increasingly anti-Israeli stance. He was no fan of the settlements, but on the other hand, he was a hundred percent behind -- a hundred percent in favor of Israel. He just didn't think the settlement policy was very astute. He didn't think it was at all in keeping with Jewish traditions. But we can -- but he was disturbed by that. He was disheartened by that. I mean, in the end he didn't go to the UJPO very much. He stopped going. And one of the reasons he said to me was that there're still too many people here who are doctrinaire, who were sort 109:00of prepared to wipe away the past. He said, "And I don't buy any of it." He said, "There aren't any excuses for what happened here." It is, in his mind, the second great tragedy to befall Jews in the twentieth century.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

DS: I said to him at one point -- we were having a conversation, and he said -- he was talking about some people who he knew that were involved in the Po'ale Tsiyon, and I said to him, "So --" I said, "Voyle yidn." This was one of his phrases that he liked. Amiable Jews, you know, nice people. And I said, "You know, well --" -- I said to him, "Well, these days their views aren't very different than yours." And I said, "Well, why don't you go there and meet people and stuff?" He said, "I don't want to belong anywhere anymore. One experience is 110:00enough." And he -- another thing he says in "Shrayber" is he says that no -- and he makes a -- he was very poignant about this. He says, "No Jewish worker, no Jewish intellectual, should ever allow himself to be captive of an ideology that will subjugate his Jewish heritage to that ideology." He's very clear about that. In fact, he told me once that the leader of the Communist Party in Canada once told him to his face -- he said to him, "Sholem, you're a nationalist." He knew damn well what it meant. So, that was -- at the end of his life he was -- you know, "Democracy," he said, "it stinks, but it's the best system we have." 111:00He was very much in favor of elections. He still remained very much an idealist. He still believed in equality. He believed that government should work to eradicate poverty. He believed in the value of government, of people being together in society. He was against discrimination in all of its forms, against all people. But he did not consider himself a communist, I would say, for the last thirty-five, forty years of his life. No, he didn't at all. He liked 112:00Gorbachev. Said it was long, long overdue. So --

CW: Have you read your father's work -- I mean, having read your father's work throughout your life, do you have a different perspective on his career now than you did when you were growing up, and if so, what is that?

DS: Yeah, and I guess -- (laughs) that's a good question, Christa. That's a good question. Again, it relates to my formative years about being in the household and having parents who were very different. And reading -- also especially with 113:00"Shrayber" and his portraits of other writers, but also his own attitudes, which -- and then I also talked to him a fair bit, even after we'd moved away. We'd go for conversations. And he was -- (laughs) again, he was not reklamevdik, you know? He would -- (laughs) tell you what was on his mind, whether you wanted to know it or not, you know? So, he was very supportive, but he also had his own opinions. I remember he told me shortly before he passed away, "You don't save enough," he said. I said, "Well, come on, Dad, I have a responsible job, I have a family and a mortgage and all of that. Living nowadays is much more expensive 114:00than --" "But you need to save more." So, do I have a different perspective on it? Yeah. I appreciate how hard he worked, how difficult it must have been for him to be a writer in that generation. Looking back on it, he bore it pretty gracefully. I mean, he had his frustrations, but -- running and being a principal of a school was tough for him. I think the circumstances under which the school folded were not very good. I mean, he was left high and dry, basically, when they decided to close the school. What saved him was that people 115:00who had their kids in the school came to him and said, Well, what are we gonna do now? What school should we send our kids to? Some of them sent their kids to other schools. But a lot of people came to him and said, Well, could you tutor our kids privately at home? And he started doing that, and he had a reputation, word of mouth, and people really liked it. I mean, he'd go to their homes and -- so that kind of saved his livelihood. So, (laughs) I went from thinking that people were very different and thinking, Why couldn't they be like other people's parents, right? Why couldn't we go on skiing vacations as my cousin Aaron would suggest? To thinking to myself, Boy, this was really something. This 116:00was really something, to come here, both of my parents, as young people. He was nineteen when he was married. She was twenty-one. To make a life for themselves here. To thrive here. I mean, thrive on their own terms -- not that they became millionaires or anything. They (laughs) obviously didn't. But to become entrenched in Canada, to enjoy it and to experience the freedoms and the great things that Canada had to offer. Yeah, I mean, you get older, you think about these things very differently. So yeah, no, I do look at his -- I do look at him, yeah, very differently than when I was a (laughs) nerdy, angst-ridden teenager.

CW: Would you mind telling me about his death?

DS: Sure. Sure. Well, my mother had a -- I'll jump back a little bit -- my mother had -- was seriously ill for quite a number of years beforehand. And in addition to circulatory problems, she also had dementia. He kept her home for as long as he could. He didn't want her to be institutionalized. But in the end, he made the decision. And they had help in the house. People from the social service agencies would come in regularly. They would arrange his medications. He 118:00had a lot of medications there. He had a heart condition. They would sort out his medications. They would come in once a week, and they'd look at his pillbox and organize how things should -- but in the end, my mother needed too much care. So, at first she went to a nursing home that was nearby, and he could walk there quite easily. But then, later on he -- maybe because they didn't offer a level of care there that she needed when her dementia really started to take hold. She was transferred to the Maimonides Home -- was it the Mai-- yeah, Maimonides Home in Côte Saint-Luc. Which was just a suburb of Montreal, where there was a lot of Jews in that area. But it was a long way from where we lived in Parc-Extension. And he -- for the time she was there, he went to see her 119:00every single day. He didn't drive. He took public transportation there. So, it was an hour -- between an hour, an hour and a half, each way. But he went every single day, and he spent time with her. I mean, this romance continued right up to the end. But in 1988, she passed away. We had talked to him about -- and she passed away [UNCLEAR] -- we had talked to him about moving him to come and live with us. And he was just a dyed-in-the-wool Montrealer. You know, this was his town. But gradually, I think he sort of -- he felt, Yeah, okay, this would be 120:00okay, that he would come and live with us. Anyway. But we needed to make accommodations in our house to do this. In the meantime, he had a bunch of health episodes. He was always very solicitous about his own health, but he had a pacemaker, and he had lots of different medications, including antidepressants and stuff. And the heart medications and the antidepressants interacted, and they were constantly having to adjust his medications. He had a second pacemaker installed -- which my brother said it was miraculous that he managed to last as long as he did. But he did. Anyway, he was hospitalized one final time in the 121:00summer of 1990. And he had an episode where he'd called for an ambulance 'cause he wasn't feeling well, and they'd taken him to a hospital in a Francophone part of town. He didn't speak any French. And it took them a while to sort of straighten out his medications, to get in touch with his regular doctor who was at the Montreal General and stuff. Anyway, they eventually transferred him to the Montreal General. And I went down a few times. And the last time I went down, he was in the geriatric ward, and the guy who was the head of the ward was a young guy who was really very good. It wasn't his -- his own doctor was in the hospital, but -- and who incidentally gave my parents great care. But the guy who ran the ward, geriatric ward, was just -- I felt was just exceptional. 122:00Tremendous amount of sympathy for -- empathy for the people in the ward. So much so, I was surprised to find that there were dogs in the ward when I came in to visit one day. He said, "Yeah." He said, "Look, it makes the older people here feel better. They have the dog from their house, so why not have a dog here in the ward?" (laughs) I thought it was pretty unusual. Anyway, so when he was hospitalized the last day I had gone to visit him. We had made arrangements with a contractor to build an extension on our house. He had given us some plans. And I had said to him, "Well, in the fall they're gonna start the work, and you'll be moved over." We had talked to the head of the ward here, and he had said, "I think this is a very good idea. He needs to be close to his family. And if his 123:00health deteriorates further, well, you know, the Baycrest here would be a good place for him." (sighs) Anyway, he -- the day he died I was there mo-- I had car trouble driving down from Toronto, and I'd had to attend to the car a bit of the time when I was there. And so, I showed up in the middle of the afternoon, and I explained to him; I said, [UNCLEAR]. "So just buy yourself a new car." He said, "What are you doing? Why are you poking around with this car?" He said, "Just go and take the money out of my bank account and just buy yourself a new car." And I said, "Well, Dad, okay. You don't need to do that." Anyway, so I spent a day with him. And my cousin Aaron came to visit him. I hadn't seen him in quite a while and had a long visit with him and his wife. And we talked a lot about 124:00Quebec politics. He was very concerned about separatism in Quebec. He asked me how his friend Parizeau was doing. Parizeau was not his friend, he was the leader of the separatist party in Quebec. Anyway, Aaron and his wife very kindly invited me to come over to their house for dinner. So, I went over there for dinner, and we had a nice dinner. And then, I decided to drop in on him in the hospital on my way back to their house in Montreal. So, I came by in the early evening. And he said he wasn't feeling well, and I said, "Well, okay, why don't you just call the nurse and tell her you're not feeling well?" And I said, "Well, I'll come back and see you tomorrow. Just call and tell them you're not feeling well, and they'll adjust your medication." Anyway, when I got back to 125:00the house -- to their house, my old house, where I used to live -- the phone was ringing, and it was my wife on the phone, saying that she just had a call from the hospital, and he passed away. And so, I -- you know, I got in the car, and I called a cab, got in the car, went back down to the hospital, and -- so dealt with whatever I needed to deal with. Somebody at the hospital asked me if I wanted a priest there, and I said, (laughs) "Wrong side. Thanks for being interested, but wrong side." And then, again, my cousin Aaron helped me get through the next few days. I mean, he went with me -- Elspeth and the kids came 126:00down from Toronto. My cousin Aaron helped me with the funeral arrangements, we went to the funeral home together. Aaron helped me compose the obit that went in the newspaper. There was a big crowd at the funeral. A rabbi gave the eulogy -- a friend of his -- gave the eulogy at the funeral. My father never attended his synagogue, but this rabbi was a good friend of his, one of his pals who he dropped in to see all the time. He also spoke at my mother's funeral. My father had asked him to do that, even though my mother was less interested in organized religion than my father was. But my father felt this was appropriate and my mother would entirely approve, and he's right; she would have. And I was happy 127:00to have the rabbi speak at the funeral, too. So, that was -- he's buried in the UJPO cemetery. One of the things I discovered to my surprise is they didn't have a joint plot. I thought this was in a way kind of typical of my parents not to get a plot side by side. And so, my mother's sort of at the front part of that section of the cemetery, and her tombstone is easy to find when I visit. But he's not! And he's buried back in some rows in the cemetery. And the few times when I've been there in the winter I've spent fifteen or twenty minutes looking around for his tombstone and saying to myself, You know, Sholem, this is just typical of you! People have to find you; people don't know where you are. Just 128:00as a digression, I mean, one of the things about him in everyday life was -- you know, when he'd leave to give his private lessons, he'd often phone home, and he'd say stuff like, You got any mail today? And if you'd say no, he'd hang up on you. You had a question of him, like, What time are you coming home? There's something in the house that needed to be attended to. No! He'd already asked the one -- one question that he'd asked, which was "Was there any mail there today?" Was there anything there for him? If the answer was no, he'd just as often as not just hang up. (laughs) And so, this is typical Sholem. You have to go find him, right -- find him in the cemetery. It's just one of the practicalities in 129:00their lives that they didn't think about. Anyhow.

CW: I was wondering if there would be something you might want to read of his. You know, maybe from the early work or from the "Vayse hoyz [White house]."

DS: Yeah.

CW: I mean, they're long books, but is there a passage that you might want to read for us?

DS: Uh -- um --

CW: Or from "Shrayber," maybe? But maybe to see the verse, you know.

DS: Yeah. You know what, he has -- either in both -- in "The White House" and "In kanade" he has very -- really great introductory passages about Montreal and 130:00the train leaving Montreal.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

DS: A little bit of it in Yiddish, and then most of it in English. 'Cause it really gives his -- you know, as a new immigrant, a flavor of what he's encountered after he's arrived in Canada. This is sort of on the way to the sanatorium. Actually, the opening poem here is, of course, dedicated to my mother.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

DS: So, this is the opening poem in "Dos vayse hoyz." This is Velvl. He's going to the sanatorium. And this is the trip in a train that he's taking to the Laurentians to the sanatorium. So, "In vagon [In the train car]." "[Yiddish - 02:10:58 to 02:12:25]."

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

DS: "Outdoors frosty white, the train races in the hills with its glistening metallic ice. In heavy coat, soft and warm, Velvl, all huddled in his tall, emaciated form, sits by a window, pensive, heartsore, apprehensive. His eyes, a deeply solemn brown, marvel at the mountain with its icy silver crown. Velvl thinks this train on lonely tracks carrying his bag of bones away from bustling city marts will leave him here, somewhere out here, all alone, among the hills of ice and stone. The car is full of speech and smoke, the smell of bagels, 133:00poppy seeds, and buns. Farmer children sit and munch, shouting, teasing, all in fun. In clean and unpatched coats and shoes, each child, from an orange, fragrant, fresh, sips the tiny, bracing juice. Velvl's thoughts go soaring home to his childhood home where hunger gnawed to the tender flesh and bones. Velvl sees himself again in a tailor workshop where they sang of a tomorrow rife with rich and sated tables, and the shtetl hunger clamped along for cities far and fabled. From Canada from his cousin he received this note: 'Dear Velvl, I'm sending papers, money for the train and boat. I'm all alone; the landsmen [immigrants from the same region] never come to visit. All they ever do is eat, and they never fill their hungry teeth. The city's here big and lovely. Sundays you can go to a movie. (laughs) You have a mountain standing in the very middle of town. In summertime, vacationers come from miles around. All year long we eat fresh vegetables and fruits from orchard and from field. One thing, though: the 134:00winters here are very cold, but unlike the shtetel back in Poland, here they don't begrudge the iron stove its bucketful of shiny coal. You won't be the only one coming from the shop at night on aching feet, but I'm sure you'll put some meat upon your skinny bones. There's always plenty to eat here. Warmest greetings, then, from me and from my husband. Elka Greenspan, your favorite cousin.' With a heart filled full of prayers, Velvl rides through foreign lands and busy city thoroughfares. And now he's at the Singer machine, and through the window there -- there in the mountain and the city can be plainly seen. His limbs by weariness are smitten. His heart spills over, countless poems still unwritten." Should I keep going? I mean, this is another -- oh, this is a couple of more pages here. Do you want me to keep going, or --

CW: It's up to you. If it -- I think it gives a sense, but if you want to read 135:00the rest of it, that's also --

DS: Yeah, I mean, it gives a sense of his new life and also his nostalgia for -- at the time, for -- yeah, I think I'll stop here.

CW: Okay.

DS: Yeah. Yeah. One thing: about a year ago, my -- he gives a bit of a portrayal of Montreal, a little bit here. Although I think in the "Mishpokhe [Family]" and "In kanade" there's a poem there at the beginning that I like better. But my cousin Aaron told me there's a museum of history in Montreal, and he said he and his wife went there just to look at the exhibit. And she said on the main floor -- I don't know if it's still there -- there're quotations from three Montreal writers: Hugh McClellan [sic], who's a -- who wrote a book about the explosion 136:00of a munitions ship in Halifax Harbor and one of English Canada's most -- in that area, one of their most respected writers; a French writer; and then a quotation from my father. Which he says -- and it's in French. And it says something about, "This is my home, Montreal." He said, "I worship its halls and its stone buildings." Words to that effect. He said there are a few lines there. And I thought -- I thought (laughs) my father would be just thrilled that he would have this kind of acknowledgment in a city where he spent the bulk of his life. Anyway, I haven't been back to Montreal in a while, but I am planning to 137:00go to the museum and say, Gee, that's great. Thank you. So --

CW: Well, thank you for taking --

DS: Well, no, this is great. Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]