ANNA SHTERNSHIS ORAL HISTORY

AGNIESZKA ILWICKA: This is Agnieszka Ilwicka and today's the 20th December, 2016.  I'm here at AJS conference in San Diego with Anna Shternshis and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Anna Shternshis, do I have your permission to record this interview?

ANNA SHTERNSHIS: You for sure do.

AI:  Thank you very much.  I would like to start the interview with some information, brief information about your family background.  Where is your family from?

AS:  So, my parents live in Moscow, and I was born in Moscow in the -- when it was still the Soviet Union.  And my father was born in Ukraine in a city called Poltava.  His parents were from Kamenets-Podolsk, a famous -- or famous in 1:00narrow circles -- town in Ukraine.  And my mother's parents were from a small town in Kamenets-Podolsk region called [Linzkaron?] and -- but my grandmother -- my grandfather, my mother's side, moved to Moscow in 1937.  And so, my mother was born there and my father grew up in Poltava and then he moved to Moscow when he married my mother, and that's where I was born.

AI:  And because of your father's origin, you became interested in Kamenets-Podolsk in your research?

AS:  Actually, I'm not that interested in Kamenets-Podolsk in my research, but I have to say that I think I became interested in what I do because of my grandparents' background.  All four of my grandparents spoke Yiddish.  All 2:00four -- I did not speak Yiddish to them, because when they were alive, I didn't know Yiddish.  But I am fascinated now by their culture, by their choices, by their life, and my work really addresses life and history of that generation, of my grandparents.

AI:  We will come back later to this topic.  But I would like to know more about home in which you grew up with.  I wonder in what environment -- how Moscow looked like in your youth?  What was your home?

AS:  So, my mother is a doctor, my father's an engineer, and my sister and I would grow up in a two-bedroom apartment in Moscow.  Right now, it's more central but it's still not the center of Moscow.  It's a suburb.  And it looked like, I don't know, the majority of Eastern Europe looks like: the tall 3:00buildings, concrete blocks, everything walking distance.  And I was born in 1974, so I was -- I grew up in the '80s.  And when I started high school, 1989, I remember very well.  It was the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the Communist Party.  Or maybe it was Nineteeth Party Congress.  I don't know, one of those things.  And we were asked by our teachers to listen to this because they said, "Well, this is the end of the era."  And I remember that, 1989, and it was.  And there was always a sense of living through historical times.  And I got very interested in thinking about living for history, collapse of the Soviet Union, and we're witnessing it.  And there was something very exciting about 4:00this.  I remember that time as very exciting.  All these new things come up, very interesting.  Everything that my parents, my grandparents kind of -- all the values that they taught us and all the values that the government taught us, suddenly they were questioned.  And it was very, very exciting.

AI:  And did you -- would you say that you grew up in a Jewish home?

AS:  Both of my parents are Jewish and my grandparents, of course, and I mentioned that they all spoke Yiddish.  Having said that, I wouldn't say that I grew up in a Jewish home, because it doesn't -- it means something different.  So, my family did not celebrate Jewish holidays, did not, obviously, observe a lot of kashrut [kosherness].  And come to think of it now that I know so much more about Soviet Jewish life and history of the '80s, we were less Jewish than some other people.  So, we were not involved in any underground circles.  We 5:00were not involved in refusenik movement.  We were not involved with some Jewish revival things.  We grew up in a Soviet family.  Having said that, my grandmother did Yom Kippur by herself, so we knew that this was going on.  We would go to their house in May for dinner, all of us, and we never thought what this dinner was.  And only later, I sort of understood that the dishes that they served at that May Day dinner were very close to what now I cook for Passover, so -- and I start thinking back about how my grandmother was cooking, what she was choosing to serve.  And it kind of makes sense to me now that they were actually trying to do some sort of a Passover celebration.  But, of course, we were never told that this was that, yeah.  So, to answer your question -- did I grew up in a Jewish home? -- I always knew I was a Jew.  I never thought this was something to talk about or something to be proud of, and 6:00I didn't know, really, what it meant, either, until I started college, which was much later.

AI:  And please tell me, what does it mean, knowing the Jewish identity -- and maybe you would feel different in this whole Soviet environment or not?  Because in Poland, it's this whole exciting -- kind of various ways feeling of belonging to the Jewish culture.  And I try to make a reference between this and '70s and '80s in Soviet Union.

AS:  Right.  So, you know what?  I think it probably made a difference.  I'm not remote enough (laughs) yet to kind of start the reflecting on that.  I also don't remember a lot of things.  I think in twenty years, I'll remember a lot more about my childhood.  But I do know that being Jewish was -- I was aware of that.  And there were little things you'd do.  So, for example, every school had a class journal.  And a class journal had an information about each 7:00student.  So, the last name, the first name, the names of parents, and nationality.  It was always there.  So, I remember -- and this journal is the -- it's a public thing.  It's a way to check attendance.  So, I remember looking at that thing, attendance, and seeing there is "yevrey [Russian: Jew]" across my name and another girl's name.  And I was thinking, A-ha, she's Jewish, too.  And that was a thing that was in my mind.  Then, back in grade two, I was sitting next to some boy at the desk and he said, "Oh, żydowka [Polish: derogatory term for Jew]" or something like this.  You know, whatever.  And I came home, I was very upset about this.  And my mother took me to the store and bought me electronic watch.  It was -- and, I have to say, I loved that watch (laughs) and it was very exciting.  But I never forgot why I got it.  So, (laughs) it was like little things like that.  And if I start 8:00thinking about this, I will maybe come up with more things, maybe with books or maybe with that, but I can't associate all that immediately with Jewish history.  Oh, I remember the history class.  You would study some European history, and maybe it was in grade six or seven there was a lot of excitement because one of the textbooks which talked about European history of medieval Europe had the word "Jew" in it.  And I remember talking to that other girl who was also Jewish, and we were discussing if we were asked to talk about that chapter, should we say Jew or should we just list all other groups that were listed in that book?  (laughs) And neither of us were asked, so it's okay.  But it's little things like this, they pop up.

AI:  Right.  (laughs) And while you were growing up, I mean, in between your teenagehood and twenties and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, I wonder who 9:00are your mentors?  People who influence you?

AS:  Who are my mentors?  So, I think my mentors were my parents and still are in very many ways.  I always was encouraged by my parents to do what I wanted to do, to pursue the passion.  When I was in grade nine, I went to -- I could go to high school.  Like, it was a new thing, so you could choose a high school and you could choose a specialized high school.  Nobody thinks twice about this now, but in the Soviet Union, didn't exist.  So, I was deciding between biology and history, and I tried both and I got into both.  And I chose history, and my parents never told me, Oh, do something more practical, something like this.  They just wanted me to follow what I wanted to do.  And I loved that history 10:00class.  It was very interesting.  I went to that school 1990, 1991.  Everything was happening during this time.  Was also very poor time.  There was a lot of shortages of food and I remember walking to school, going to -- there was a sign on a pole which said, "I will exchange two kilos of rice for two kilos of buckwheat."  And I remember taking that sign down, putting it in my purse, and thinking it will be very interesting later.  So, there's always a self-awareness that we're living in this time, so -- and when I went to that school, history school, I had a very amazing experience.  It was a very highly selective program.  We had university professors teaching history.  And I was exposed to all these new, archival things that were just coming out, like Stalin stuff and all that.  And I remember being excited about learning all the time.  And I think back and I think -- I was just so happy to learn.  And I 11:00remember -- people now talk about high school's just such a difficult time and it's a very American thing to talk about: Oh, I suffered so much in high school.  Everyone goes for high school, such a -- and I remember high school as the happiest time.  I remember flirting with some boys and the flirt was all about, "Did you read that book?"  And, "Did you not read the book?"  Let's keep reading and reading and reading.  And now, I've been thinking about this, this is so nerdy, but (laughter) somehow it was a very, very wonderful experience.  So, after I went to it, I started the university and completely by accident, I chose -- so, I went to the museum studies program and completely by accident, I went to kolkhoz.  At that time, all students were required to go to pick potatoes in a collective farm.  And it was August and I was talking to 12:00someone to -- she was talking to a young man named Grisha Mirkin.  I'll tell you in a second why it's important.  And he said to me, "You know that they're starting the Jewish things."  "A Jewish thing, really?"  And he says, "Yeah, yeah, and all the professors are American and you can go and study that at our university."  So, I had no idea.  And later -- and so, I ask somebody and they said, "Well, yeah, but you know, you're in museum studies, you have to switch to archival studies to be able to do that."  So, I found a student who wanted to switch and we just switched.  (laughter) And so -- which is so weird.  So, that woman with whom I switched, her name is Masha -- Maria Makeeva.  She became a very high-profile journalist for Russian RAIN TV station.  She's an anchor.  She's there all the time.  Very exciting to -- very exciting work.  And Grisha Mirkin has became Tzevy Mirkin and he is now the consulate general, I 13:00think, of Israel in Latvia, stationed in Latvia.  We're still in touch.  But I was thinking that little piece of information changed so much in my life because that program, Project Judaica, which was housed at this Russian State University of Humanities [sic] was a really wonderful place, which gave me all this excitement of learning, just like my high school did.  And we had amazing professors.  They were recruited by David Fishman, who was then a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.  And he just created this program of Jewish studies and we -- that's where we learned Yiddish, that's where we learned Hebrew, that's where we learned Jewish history.  And so many people who I see at AGS today were my teachers: Steve Zipperstein, who we just saw at this panel earlier, he was my teacher of modern Jewish history.  Zvi Gitelman was 14:00teaching Soviet Jewish history, so did Mordechai Altshuler.  And Yiddish professors -- well, David Roskies, and Pesach Fiszman of blessed memory, and Sheva Zucker, and Dov-Ber Kerler.  So, now I understand what kind of caliber professors we've had at this institution.  David Myers.  Have all these who's who in Jewish studies -- they came to Moscow because they were very curious what it's like, and they got so much exotic from that experience because sometimes there was no heat, wearing coats (laughs) in a classroom.  So, they just -- I'm sure it was something for them to remember.  But for us, it was a wonderful exposure to this very fascinating world of Jewish studies, and that's how I got interested in doing what I am doing.

AI:  I already envy you for --

AS:  Yeah, (laughter) (UNCLEAR).

AI:  -- for this Moscow past.  But please explain to me.  So, it was an idea created both by America and Russia in collaboration?

AS:  So, yeah.  So, when they -- in 1990, they made an agreement between Jewish Theological Seminary and the Russian State University of Humanities [sic] that they will start this new program called Project Judaica that -- they will recruit undergraduate students and teach them Jewish studies.  Why?  Because all these Soviet archives were now being opened, and there were all these documents in Yiddish and Hebrew, and they needed to train specialists who could read those documents.  So, that's why they want to do archival institute.  The rector of the university was, at that time, Yury Afanasyev, a very progressive liberal who was very interested in doing cutting-edge education.  And that's 16:00how it happened.  And then, of course, the first year when it all happened was 1991.  And '91 was the coup in Russia.  Gorbachev is gone, Yeltsin on a tank or wherever he was, and everyone was worried.  But the program went on.  (laughs) The program went on and it really thrived in -- during this time, yeah.

AI:  Wow.

AS:  Yeah.

AI:  Wow.  And your first exposure on Yiddish was where and when?

AS:  Was at that program, yes, in the classroom.  So, my first Yiddish teacher was Pesach Fiszman, who is, I think, the most brilliant Yiddish teacher that ever lived.  And he got us all excited about Yiddish.  And we started with Yiddish.  We learned Hebrew later.  But it was the Yiddish for two full years and by the end of the second year, we've had David Roskies who came and gave a course on modern Yiddish literature in Yiddish.  And we were ready, and we 17:00could do it, and that was -- so, Pesach was doing that and then Yitskhok Niborski was teaching us, as well, and then Dov-Ber Kerler, who is now at University of Indiana, and Sheva Zucker, who is the author of so many books and -- in the Yiddish teaching, and who is really the pioneer of this modern approach as to teaching Yiddish.  So, all these people really made Yiddish so interesting that all of us, even those who were not -- they didn't come to this program to study Yiddish -- we all agreed that there's nothing more fun than Yiddish.  And I still think that.

AI:  Oh, of course!  (laughs)

AS:  Yeah!  (laughter) Right, right.

AI:  We both agree that there is nothing more fun to do than --

AS:  Oh, for sure, for sure.

AI:  -- than Yiddish.  (laughs) How long took your studies there?

AS:  So, I studied until '96 and then my other teacher and mentor, who I admire 18:00very much, Mikhail Krutikov, who was then a graduate student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, I think.  And then, he got a job at Oxford.  He and a number -- he and Gennady Estraikh, my other amazing teacher -- and we became all colleagues now, but they were all my teachers.  And they had -- they started this project called Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies, which was in Oxford but it was not Oxford University.  And they raised money to invite five people to go study for a year in Yiddish.  So, they invited me to come and I was so excited.  So, I went for a year.  That's where I work -- or studied with -- and we had a group of five people: Vicky Ash, Avishai Fisch, Tova Halperin, and 19:00-- oh, and Haim Sokol, who now became quite an accomplished artist.  Lives in Russia.  And myself.  So, we lived in the same apartment.  (laughs) We only spoke Yiddish to one -- well, I spoke Russian to them, because many of them spoke Russian, too.  But all these studies were all in Yiddish.  That's when we read all the canon of Yiddish literature in Yiddish.  And it was very intensive, and they gave us diplomas of -- certified Yiddish teachers.  And I was like, What am I going to do with that?  (laughs) What will I do?  So, I stayed -- I applied for the grad school at the Oxford University, where I wrote my dissertation on Soviet Yiddish culture.  And then, I got a postdoc at University of Pennsylvania and got a job next, a year after 2001 at University of Toronto teaching Yiddish.  So, (laughs) somehow that diploma -- and 20:00actually, it played the most important role in my life.  I thought I just thought I was doing it for a year to do something interesting.  But actually, it became the very core training that I had, yeah.

AI:  And excellent basis for just what you did later.

AS:  Oh, for sure.  For sure.  It was -- it really gave me command of Yiddish that I needed to do the research, to speak, to teach it, and to eventually build a program in Yiddish Studies at the University of Toronto of which I am very proud.

AI:  And you should because you have a good reason to be.  How did you start your adventure with oral history?

AS:  Yeah, so that's actually an interesting story because -- if I might say so myself.  So, when I was in grad school, I got a small grant from YIVO to go 21:00work in their archive.  And I was going to go, and I came to New York and -- to work in the archive.  I get there and the director of the archive, Lisa [Eisen?], she says to me, "Actually, the archive is closed.  It's renovations.  There's nothing for you to do."  So, I said, Okay, I'm in New York, (laughs) what am I going to do?  So, I decided that I would go to Brighton Beach and I would go and interview some people about their life in the Soviet Union, because I wanted to do research in the archive, but archive was closed, so whatever.  And that's what I did, and that's how I started to do oral history, just because the archive was closed.  So, I spent six months in New York.  I didn't know what I was doing.  Really, I didn't know it at all.  So, I asked some friends, "Do you know any old Jews (laughs) who are from 22:00Russia?"  So, I went to interview them in Yiddish, and through friends or whatever, I found some people.  And then, they would send me to other -- their neighbors, to their friends.  I would often go on the streets of Brighton Beach and just sit with them and say, "Can I come and interview you?"  And that's how I got involved in oral history.  And then, later, I told YIVO about this project and I said, "I'm getting a lot of interesting stuff.  They all speak Yiddish and I'm recording all this beautiful Soviet Yiddish, so maybe it should be the YIVO project."  And they said, Okay.  So, then I announced the -- I made an announcement in Russian newspapers that I was doing it, and I gave them my cell number, which was a big novelty at the time.  And I had to buy this cell phone from -- prepaid and it was very expensive.  And it had a voicemail, which was small, because I couldn't afford a bigger one.  So, anyway, so my 23:00voicemail was filled with requests for interviews.  It just really overwhelmed me.  And it was 1999.  It was before anybody was interested in Russian Jews.  And I interviewed almost two hundred people in New York, and then I came back in August and I interviewed more.  And I was also working together with Zvi Gitelman, who was working on a -- interviewing Soviet Jewish veterans.  So, I said to him, "I am interviewing a lot of veterans and they're giving me stories which I think you will enjoy."  So, he helped me to find funding for that, as well.  So, somehow, I got all into the oral history.  And when the archive was open, I already had very different questions which this archive could not answer for me.  So, as a result, I -- instead of going to YIVO archive, I went to Moscow and started working at the -- Lenin's library -- or now it's called 24:00Russian National Library, which has a huge Yiddish collection of published materials.  And I wanted to know, What are the references that people were telling me?  So, that's how I got involved with oral history.  Later, it grew into a bigger project.  I worked with Zvi Gitelman.  We got an amazing grant from material claims conference against Germany on documented Jewish life before the war.  And I went to Germany, interviewed over a hundred people there, then I went to Russia, interviewed more people there.  And then, I lived in Canada.  So, at some point, I interviewed people in Canada, as well.  So, all together, it came to almost five hundred interviews from Jews born in the Soviet Union before 1928.  Over kind of experiential learning, I understood that those who were born later really didn't remember anything about the time that I was interested in.  So, that was my cut-off age.  But overall, other than that, no 25:00more cut-off.  So, I was interested to talk to men and women and Yiddish speakers from small towns, from big towns.  So, it was very, very wide, this sample.  And as a result, I collected all these materials and when I wrote my first book, "Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Culture in the Soviet Union," I ended up using only ten percent of what I collected.  And then, I thought, Oh, my God, it's such a shame because I have so much.  So, I wrote another book, which was now based on all these oral histories.  And I still used, I don't know, thirty percent of the material because it's just so much data and so many sources that got collected that way.

AI:  And please tell briefly something about your second book, which is about to come and which -- I'm loving this book very much.

AS:  Oh, thank you.  Yes.

AI:  And please make sure to say the full title of this book.

AS:  Of course, of course.  So, the book is called, "When Sonia Met Boris: Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin."  And it talks about this generation of Soviet Jews, the first Soviet-educated generation.  And it deals with two aspects of their lives: how they create their families and what their family life is like.  And the other one is: what are their careers?  How they choose to work; how they choose to do what they do.  And then, those two parts are divided in the chapters.  I look into stories of courtships, I look into stories of weddings, I look into stories of raising children.  And all that, of course, is happening when we see Great Terror, 1937, World War II going on.  I don't focus as much on Holocaust, because people who I interviewed usually 27:00survived the war in Central Asia.  But I talk about that experience a lot, as well.  And, of course, then comes the -- after the -- aftermath or the black years of persecution of the Soviet Jews, so were -- definitely discrimination.  So, I have all the stories about that and then about work.  And because my sample was so big, I ended up -- interviewing -- so, for example, eighty engineers born in 1924 or whatever, or sixty doctors of that generation.  So, somehow, even dividing them by professions turned out to be of tremendous interest because you could compare -- see, what were all these doctors doing during the Doctors' plot of 1953?  Or what were all these engineers doing in 1951 when they started cleansing the government institutions?  What they were doing?  Because we don't know -- so little about this.  We know so much about the government programs and we know so much about the elites of the Soviet 28:00society and those who left the diaries and what -- and became public personas.  But we know so little about everyday people like us.  How did they handle all that?  So, that's what the book was about, and it's coming out next month.

AI:  Kol hakavod [Hebrew: Well done].

AS:  Thank you, thank you.

AI:  I'm very, very excited and I strongly recommend to everyone who's watching this interview to make sure to see this book.

AS:  Thank you!  And I paid you to say that.  (laughter)

AI:  By stating it here on the tape and sharing --

AS:  And that's right.

AI:  -- with me your story, thank you.  (laughter) Anna, I would like to know more about your personal approach to Yiddish, because you came into the Yiddish room with these amazing people.  And do you remember your first lesson?  Do you remember your first feelings when they were introducing you into Yiddish world?

AS:  I definitely don't remember my feelings, but I do remember -- I don't 29:00remember the first lessons but I do remember that when week of two, when we kind of learned the alphabet.  And I remember being at home and saying a sentence in Yiddish to my mother.  And she says, "Oh, my God, you already speak Yiddish."  My mother speaks Yiddish and so does my father.  But, of course, we never spoke -- they never spoke in my family.  And then, my father said -- and my father is not a very kind of emotional person who -- he never says a lot of kind of things that you -- (laughs) that reach you out on the emotional level.  But then, he said, kind of in a very quiet, reserved way, he said, "I think my mother would have been very excited to know what you're doing."  And I remember that, and it was just two weeks into that class.  And that, somehow, really resonated with 30:00me.  So, I remember that feeling of doing something important.  And I keep thinking about my parents being -- they're very supportive in that way.  Because saying in Russia, "I'm studying Yiddish," I mean, the country's collapsing, (laughs) people are trading rice for buckwheat, and I'm sitting there studying Yiddish, and my parents are proud.  And it's really -- that's something that I would say I remember of that time very well.

AI:  Anna, did you ever write poetry or prose, like fiction?

AS:  No, not poetry, not prose, no.

AI:  But you are historical actor, and you are the person to whom people are willing to share their stories.

AS:  Oh, for sure.  I am fascinated by stories, and my latest project -- my 31:00work on this Yiddish music of the Holocaust.  That pushed me out of the traditional kind of academic article writing, book writing thing.  Pushed me onto the stage.  I worked with a musician, Psoy Korolenko, who sings the songs that we found in the archive.  But I speak -- I'm still an academic.  And to challenge that a little and to make it more interesting, I sing one song, too, just to give people an idea of how they sounded in the field.  But to me, that was really pushing myself out there.  Performing is not lecturing.  It's not the same thing, so -- but that's as creative as it got in my life.  So, no prose writing, no poetry writing, either.

AI:  Do you want to share with us this song?  I heard you already in Berkeley, so I know that it's worth --

AS:  Oh, no.  (laughter) Well, maybe later.  But that song needs a lot of context for -- to be interesting.  But maybe.

AI:  Sure.  So, maybe we will give this song the context, because you were 32:00interested in the pre-war life, but the talk -- what I heard was about Holocaust and was about very difficult matter.  And I understand that it's -- of course, in history, it's not possible to escape from Holocaust.  How come you became one of the people who stepped into the Holocaust --

AS:  Oh, because I didn't want to do it at all.  That was not what I wanted to do.  And my research was always about, I want to write about life.  My whole thing is, I am writing about life, because we know so much about death, that's what I thought.  And I don't want to write about death.  I want to write about life.  So, my first book ended in 1939.  But what's interesting, when I was doing oral history, people didn't want to talk about life.  They wanted to talk about the war.  In fact, as an unexperienced oral historian, I would come and I 33:00would let them talk about what they wanted to talk -- at least I had an instinct to do that.  But then, I was actually waiting till they finished with this war, so I can ask what was interesting to me.  (laughs) And no, and then later, when I was reading these transcripts, I was thinking, Oh, my God, they really wanted to talk to me about the war.  And they really wanted to talk to me about 1948.  And they really wanted to talk to me about this persecution, discrimination.  And thank God, I didn't interrupt them so I got all the information.  But I was so not interested in that at the time, and they really couldn't tell me much about what I wanted to know.  So, gradually, I decided that I need to follow that and I need to talk about important things.  And then, a kind of -- serendipitous things that happened was that through a very 34:00complex and complicated non-linear way, I found the access to these materials in Kiev, which was the archive of the Jewish -- the Cabinet for Jewish Proletarian Culture in Kiev.  And Moisei Beregovskii, the ethnomusicologist who worked with the head of the ethnomusicology section of that cabinet and his team, were collecting Yiddish songs and folk stories from Soviet Jews in Ukraine from 1941 up until 1947.  And they collected a tremendous archive.  And they were arrested in 1948 and -- they were arrested a little bit later, but the archive was -- the cabinet was closed 1948, and all this archive was seized.  And for a very long time, historians believed that it was gone.  And when I came across it with the help of librarians and archivists of this manuscript department of 35:00Kiev National Library, I started reading it and I thought, Oh, my God, that's another Ringelblum.  Because that's the story that I was getting: Yiddish songs about [petshora?], Yiddish songs about ghetto in Tul'chyn, songs about serving in the Red Army, songs of Jewish refugees surviving the war in Kazakhstan, all in Yiddish, all -- or that song that I sang, a song about women drafted from Chuvashiya region to serve in the Red Army.  And these songs did not -- were not known.  They're very different from the other Holocaust music that we have.  And some of the authors of the songs -- and then, I started reading these annotations.  And they often were not even collected by Beregovskii, but they were mailed by the authors in envelopes to Beregovskii.  And he would get 36:00those annotations, written by a twenty-three-year-old man on his death march to Tul'chyn Ghetto or from Tul'chyn Ghetto.  And he writes it, sends that song, and that's how they get it.  And when I'm reading those annotations, I'm reading those stories, that is -- this is a life-changing material.  And the problem with that material is that it's really not accessible.  It's written in very poor handwriting Yiddish.  The paper's deteriorating.  And yet, people are writing those songs the last minutes before their death.  And it's important for them to do that and to send it.  Or they're writing the songs after they witness things they don't have -- they could not imagine would be 37:00happening, like the acts of --

AI:  (UNCLEAR)

AS:  -- the extreme violence or shootings and all this.  And as early as August 1941, they start writing these songs.  And it's interesting to think about why don't they write the prose?  "Germans came, started killing."  Why did they write this poetry?  Why did they write songs?  And that's actually the paper I was talking about at AGS this year.  And I think it's because the songs had the language they needed to describe it, because there are so many songs of violence, the pogrom songs that existed in this -- that existed in Yiddish before that, the Khmel'nyts'kyy massacre and pogroms in Kishinev and that pogrom and that pogrom and there's so many of them.  So, those new songs, they really relied on the language of these old ones in order to describe what 38:00was going on.  So, the song is a witness.  So, anyway, so there's this huge archive talking about all these experiences of Jews, talking -- a lot of humorous songs.  Tons of joking songs.  Songs that say things like, "When Hitler will come to -- when we get Hitler, we will hang him on the tree and then on the left side we will hang Ribbentrop.  On the right side we'll have Rozenberg."  And there's a whole big thing.  Or, so there's a song called "Sholakh-mones [Purim gifts]."  It's to Hitler, a Purim gifts for Hitler, and it's really kind of -- talks about, "You're not my first enemy.  I've already had enemies like this.  Antiochus, Torquemada, Krushevan wanted to kill me but they didn't succeed."  So, Antiochus we know from Hanukkah, Torquemada is the 39:00Spa-- Inquisitor, Krushevan, the author of "Protocols of Elders of Zion."  So, it was a lot of history in those songs, as well.  But a lot of, a lot of humor.  And they're laughing at Hitler, they're laughing at the Germans, and there's something very powerful in that, as well.  So, that idea of laughing -- laughter as a weapon is very interesting to me.  And so, all these songs, they just jumped on me, and now it's my material because it's really, really -- I think it's life-changing, that document, this collection, and you can't really access it without Yiddish, without Soviet Jewish history, without -- and also, to bring it back to oral history, in my almost five hundred interviews, I specifically asked people about Yiddish songs.  I would record anything they would sing for me in Yiddish.  And they did, and they wanted, and they remembered.  But not a single one was able to remember any Yiddish songs -- 40:00sang during World War II.  I asked them about this, and they say, Nobody was singing in Yiddish during World War II.  They themselves couldn't even talk about the war in Yiddish.  They would go up until 1939 in Yiddish.  They could finish that story.  The war comes, they switch to Russian.  So, history and memory here are telling very different stories.  Those songs did not survive into the memory.  But they survived in the archive.  So, I'm very invested in this project and that's why I went onstage and sang that song, yeah.

AI:  So, please!

AS:  So, that song tells the story of young women from Chuvashiya.  They go -- so, there -- they walk and then there is a voice from this -- himl, from the 41:00sky, which says, "Where are you going?"  And they say, We're going to defeat fascists and we're going to fight for Stalin.  And they say, Really?  Maybe you should rest.  They said, No, until Stalin is dead, we can't rest.  And what's unusual about that song is that they -- it had -- came with a tune.  Very few of them came with tunes.  Most of them just handwritten and were written -- or typed up without the tune.  And also, it was written and it's the Chuvashiya folk music.  So, I was working with Psoy Korolenko, but also with other musicians on that project.  And one of them, Sergei Erdenko, who's a very prominent, very kind of amazing Roma musician, I said to him, "So, look at the tune, tell me what you think about this."  And he says, "Well, that reminds me of flamenco."  So, I was thinking, Okay, okay, so Chuvashiya girls -- 42:00Chuvashiya's the region, Volga region that had no Jews.  So, Chuvashiya girls are singing an antifascist song to flamenco tune in Yiddish.  So, to me, that's a whole kind of -- whole complex -- so, it was like only in the Soviet Union, only during the war.  And yet, that's another very important part of that song, that it is a fight for -- it's Jews and non-Jews are fighting together against an evil which doesn't require -- which doesn't have any grey side.  It's clear what the evil is.  And so, that's that song.  So, let's see if I can sing it without embarrassing the authors who collected -- and it was recorded by [Hersh Kleiner?] in Chuvashiya and Cheboksary in 1942.  (singing) "Mikh fregn di 43:00shtern, 'Zog verter!  Ver epes marshirt shpet banakht?'  An entfer, 'Tshuvashker tekhter greytn zikh geyn in shlakht.  Zet nor vi fest zeyer trit, vi es klingt undzer zig inem gang, vi artik zi iz dayner lid, vi freydiks iz dos gezang.'  Vunken zikh unter di shtern, 'Mir hobn azoyns nit gezen.  Vos zingen zey?  Lomir oyshern, in mut un in shlakht arayngeyn.'  Un es hern di shtern in himl, 'Mir hobn a shvue gegebn, nit ruen nit khapn keyn dreml nit shoynen afile dos lebn.  Mir muzn di soyne farvistn vos hobn gehoybn di hant.  A toyt far di viste fashistn, far stalin, di krug, farn land!'  Di lid hot zikh nor vos 44:00geendikt a shtern hot zikh opgerusn vi glush funem himl geshikt di tshavashsker tekhter bagrisn. [We speak to the stars, 'Tell us!  Who is that marching in the night?'  They answer, 'The daughters of Chuvashiya are preparing for battle.  Look, how sure their steps, our victory echoes in their movements, how appropriate, how joyful their song.'  They remark to each other under the stars, 'We have never seen something like this.  What are they singing?  Let's listen to them as they go courageously into battle.'  And the stars in the sky hear them, 'We gave an oath to not rest, not sleep, nor even care for our lives.  We must lay waste to our enemies who raised their hands against us.  Death to the damn fascists, to Stalin, to the war, to the country!'  The song had just ended when a star shot across the sky like a greeting from heaven to the daughters of Chuvashiya.]"  So, yeah.  So, (laughs) that's the song that I learned.  Well, actually, I learned all of them because I had to teach musicians how to sing them with Yiddish and with tunes and all that.  But that's the song that I sing sometimes when we do this lecture.

AI:  What is your feeling -- as historian, now I understand that when we step into this dark room of Holocaust, we are still human, but then we have to kind of hide our own feelings to be able to even read this material and --

AS:  Right.

AI:  -- and for our -- I mean, just to protect ourselves as an -- academics.  And how you deal with this?  Because the material what -- right now you're 45:00attaching --

AS:  Right.

AI:  -- is just -- it's so depressing, so difficult, and so horrible that how -- what is your strategy to overcome this?

AS:  So, two things about this.  The material, you have to let -- it depends on the person.  I don't find that material that depressing.  I tell you why: because when I read those songs, I think about the strength of human spirit.  I think about people who are creating and who are laughing and who are doing everything that they're doing in the face of such unimaginable things.  And to me, that's very inspiring.  Things they write about, they are horrifying.  I was just recently going through some songs and there is a song, written 1941 from the point of view of children who are being shot.  And they're telling their shooters, "Shis nit in di eygelekh."  Don't shoot into the eyes.  And I 46:00keep thinking about that line and just -- it stays with me, how it makes it so, I don't know, personal and it's so -- it's that -- really, you can't forget lines like that.  And I feel like one of the reasons why we have to go through this material and do all that is not just to honor the lives of people who were able to sing in the face of death, but also to -- really to honor scholars who risked their lives and who were ultimately punished for collecting this material.  Because if you think about Beregovskii and his team, they were arrested.  Elye Spivak, the head of the cabinet, was killed in 1950.  He died during the interrogation. Beregovskii was released from prison.  He did not talk about that expedition, because he knew this would be very dangerous for his 47:00family.  And he died thinking that all that was gone, all his materials.  His granddaughter, I'm in touch with her, she said to me, "We didn't know he did this work."  And I feel like, as scholars, we have duty to our scholarship.  But there's also something to be said for scholars of the previous generation and for this kind of pursuit of knowledge that we have to really honor in order to look into the future.  So, I'm thinking about Moisei Beregovskii and I'm thinking about [Ida Shykovska?] and people -- I don't even know their names.  Or [Ravim Lerner?] or [Hersh Kleiner?] or there's [Golda Ravinska?], all these people that pop up in the archives, who go to the devastated Ukraine and who -- I don't know how they collect those songs from very traumatized people.  And 48:00yet, they collect them, they sort them.  Somehow, they classify them, they transcribe them, they type them up.  So, they do all this work and now all that is gone.  It's been seventy years.  So, I was thinking if I do all this work, I wouldn't want it to be forgotten like that.  So, even though it's hard, I feel like it's really important to work on that material.  And Sam Kassow works on Emanuel Ringelblum.  And think about how much impact that work has, and how much it really changed the way we understand Holocaust in Poland, and how Jews lived and died in Warsaw Ghetto.  But Soviet Jews don't have -- there were no materials until this one that really talked about daily life of Soviet Jews during the war, written by them.  So, in other words, this whole project is about giving voice to people who were never heard.  And everyone wants to do 49:00this, but it's really hard because we don't have materials and now we have the materials.  So, even though it's hard and it's heartbreaking, I feel like it's very rewarding to work on that.  And also, working with a musician in the form of concert, that was really exciting, because I talk about stuff and then we work together -- oh, he does 99.9 percent of work of finding tunes to these songs and then discussing all this.  It's really interesting.  And then, the whole program is him really singing it.  So, I don't know, I think -- I don't find that project depressing.  I find that project actually very exciting.

AI:  Thank you for saying this.  And who knows, maybe that will encourage other people to go to their cultures and --

AS:  For sure.  Well, actually, when we were working with the Roma musicians on that project, Sergei Erdenko, who has this trio, Loyko Trio, it's a 50:00classically trained -- Roma performers from Saint Petersburg and a few other people.  So, Sergei and I were talking about this and he says -- and this project, it's now called "Yiddish Glory."  It's a long story why.  But he said to me, "I wish there were gypsy songs about the war."  And I said to him, "So, are there?"  And he says, "I have no idea."  And Roma was persecuted.  They have very rich history.  But there's only one known song about the Holocaust in Roma in Romani language.  And there's nothing from Soviet gypsies.  So, what he is saying is really important because -- and I said to Sergei -- he comes from a very prominent gypsy performers family.  He's been very -- his great-grandfather was the first Roma professor of Russian conservatory, close 51:00friend of Leo Tolstoy.  His brother and his father, they were all really prominent.  So, I said to him, "Start studying what your family was doing during the war," and all that.  But so, there is a lot of that unknown as well.

AI:  Which is also good information for people who are looking for great subjects for that.

AS:  Oh, for sure, for sure.  (laughter) For sure, for sure.

AI:  You will all be busy as we are.  (laughs)

AS:  Yeah.  Yeah.  Exactly, exactly.

AI:  Anna, I would like to talk more about Yiddish in academia --

AS:  Yeah.

AI:  -- and oral history, because I think that oral history and Yiddish, it's something else than? Yiddish and literature or Yiddish and linguistics.  And I would like to ask you, as one of the pioneering scholars in contemporary academia about Yiddish and oral history and your experience, and also about you being female in this world.

AS:  So, (laughs) I would never call myself a pioneering scholar in Yiddish academia.  I just want to get it straight.  I stop -- I really learned from my mentors who have done all this work in building Yiddish studies in North America.  And, yeah, in North America, I'm more familiar with that.  And essentially, when I went to a Yiddish classroom, I was trying to do what Pesach Fiszman was doing.  This was my -- (laughs) and remember, he was teaching before all the digital media was available.  He was just writing on the board.  It took me a very long time to depart from this model, because it was just working so well.  But now, human brain is changing, so we have to find different ways to address learners.  So, we have to incorporate more visual and other material, more kind of a -- media-based stuff and the National Yiddish Book Center's been very invested in that project, which I think is great.  So, 53:00my kind of Yiddish career in academia was -- I was thinking about that: why should people care about Yiddish and why should it matter?  And for me, the research questions I was asking -- and the scholarship I wanted to do was impossible without Yiddish.  So, I thought, Okay, so if it is impossible for me, it must be impossible for other scholars in other disciplines.  So, I started thinking of ways of how you can build a program that -- make Yiddish relevant to so many disciplines that do social science, humanities work.  So, that's how I kind of -- I worked at University of Toronto, because Yiddish was at the German department, still is.  And there is a built-in audience for Yiddish there, for sure.  But that's not the only one.  For longest time, Yiddish was not part of Jewish studies, for example, at the University of 54:00Toronto.  Took a lot of very hard work to change that.  The other thing that I was thinking about -- Soviet history and Soviet -- and Polish history really need Yiddish in so many ways.  So, I was working with professors in those disciplines and also with the Center for Russian -- Russian, East European -- was Russian Eurasian studies, and kind of trying -- incorporate Yiddish into their undergraduate and graduate education.  So, a lot of people disagree with me and think of Yiddish as a field that has to develop on its own, and the Yiddish literature deserves very close scrutiny, kind of like what we have for English literature, for German literature, for French literature.  Very kind of in-depth analysis.  And I think it's wonderful.  I don't do that.  That's not what I do.  I study cultural history, and as we said, I study oral history.  And with oral history, it's been interesting.  It's not so easy to incorporate 55:00oral history, believe it or not, into anything that you do.  I incorporated oral history in all the courses that I teach.  I teach grad students on how to do oral history and how to analyze them.  So, that's been very exciting, too.  And so, I really can't complain.  University of Toronto has been wonderful to me, has been wonderfully supportive of Yiddish.  Another thing that was really important at that university is that there's a Jewish community in Toronto, which is very invested into Jewish studies.  It's unusual.  So, university has a lot of resources and a lot of opportunities for Jewish studies to grow and I really benefited from that.  I could give my students scholarships.  I could send them to study Yiddish in Israel or even National Yiddish Book Center.  Some of our students always come and study there.  And so, there's this 56:00opportunity to really build an exciting, exciting thing.  And on being a woman in academia, well, there's a lot to say.  I have four children.  My children are young, so I have a four-year-old, seven-year-old, eleven-year-old, and thirteen years old.  And I'm an associate tenured professor, hopefully become a full professor next year.  So, my career was going very well with the children.  And I credit all that to Canadian system of social support, because we have amazing maternity leave benefits and all that stuff.  So, you really don't have to choose between being a mother and being an academic, which is not often the case in United States.  And I'm very aware of notions like this.  But I really got lucky that I was in the country and at the institution which 57:00really supported women in academia.  There are challenges, for sure, as well, and some of them come from the fact that there are really very few opportunities for women to become -- to get real power in academia.  And I don't talk about nominal power, whatever.  Vice-president or even the chair, there's a -- I'm the director now, the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.  So, I can't complain about that.  But at the same time, the power that women have, even in those positions, is still very different power compared to what men have.  There's a lot of kind of prejudice against women as scholars and as leaders, even if, like at the AGS now, a lot of people were joking about how there are some panels which have men only and they are more prestigious panels, as opposed to panels with women only, which are moved to worse times or have 58:00less attendance and all this.  And that's not just Jewish studies.  It's everywhere.  So, there's a lot of stuff to work on, but I'm optimistic because, you see, I come from a country where women's rights and all this stuff is not what it is in the West, where the word feminism is a dirty word, is an offensive word.  And so, to me, these are kind of -- these are problems, but I also know that these problems will -- they're not as deep as they are in other places.  So -- yeah, it's --

AI:  You have perspective.

AS:  I have perspective.  And it doesn't mean that I don't care about this.  I care very much.  But I also know that for women to really advance in academia, say, in Russia, the sacrifices they have to make are much bigger 59:00compared to what I would have to make in Canada or in the United States.

AI:  We are nearing to the end of our interview.  I would like to ask you if you have any story or anything what you would like to share before we will close the interview?

AS:  So, what is the topic?  What's exactly the -- (laughter) some of my interviewees ask me that, too.  (coughs) Excuse me.  What is the kind of -- the bigger message of that project?

AI:  (laughs) That's up to you.  (laughs) That's up to you, what will be the bigger message of the project.  And it all depends on every person who sits --

AS:  Oh, I see, I see.

AI:  -- on this chair.  And, speaking of, what advice do you have to students of Yiddish?

AS:  Well, that's actually quite easy.  Study Yiddish.  Study Yiddish well.  There is -- take advantage of amazing resources of National Yiddish Book Center.  I'm saying it not because you're interviewing me, but because I'm saying it to everyone who asks my advice, and because -- especially we find with the audio books, it's really helpful to learn Yiddish like this.  And think of Yiddish as a key that will open so many fascinating projects for you.  We have a graduate program in the University of Toronto -- of European studies.  And I always come every year and I pitch them Yiddish and I tell them, "No matter what you do, if you want to study refugees, if you want to study international relations, if you want to study European culture, if you want to study 61:00economics, if you want to study anything, you take Yiddish, you'll get the perspective you won't get anywhere else.  Plus, every job interview will want to know why you actually did that, so you're more likely to get an interview.  So, I say no matter what you do, take Yiddish, because you never know.  Nobody ever regretted studying a foreign language, and Yiddish is a very multidimensional key into so many things.  And we can talk about women culture, like you asked me about women.  But there's this whole -- now, there's explosion of interest to -- women poetry or women's culture and women in society and doing all that stuff.  So, Yiddish is the key to all that.  And I have a student who's now a graduate student in physics who's really excited about Yiddish.  Studied Yiddish with me for two years now.  He and a few other 62:00students run a yidish-vinkl [Yiddish group] in Toronto where they only speak Yiddish.  So, he's now reading Einstein's relativity theory in Yiddish, which he downloaded from your website.  He's very excited about this.  So, even physics can benefit from Yiddish.  So, I think that doing Yiddish will give the meaning to one's life that might be missing if it doesn't happen.  So, why miss out on that, you know?

AI:  That's so true, that's so true.  A sheynem dank [Thank you very much] and --

AS:  Nito farvos [You're welcome].  S'iz geven a fargenign [It was a pleasure].

[END OF INTERVIEW]