EDNA NAHSHON ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is December 18th, 2016. I am here in San Diego, California with Edna Nahshon and I am -- we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

EDNA NAHSHON: Yes, my pleasure.

CW:Thank you. Well, first of all, could you tell me a little bit about your family background, where your parents came from?

EN:Well, both my parents were born and bred in Vienna. My mother came with her family to Israel -- I was born in Israel -- when she was a very young student. And she was an only daughter. Her parents would not let her go alone. So, they 1:00all joined -- and that was basically a Zionist aliyah. My father was a young attorney in Vienna, and when the Anschluss occurred, he escaped to Prague, where his sister lived, and with a good friend boarded the first boat he could find on the Danube. And it was an illegal immigrant boat to Palestine. So, the motivations were very, very different and there was also quite a difference in -- time-wise between their arrival. He arrived in '39 and she arrived in a -- very early '30s, totally unrelated to anti-Semitism or anything like that. So, with my grandparents, when I was a little girl, I -- they spoke German. They could never really master Hebrew, and I grew up with German and Hebrew. But when 2:00I was about six or so, my parents separated. They were divorced. And a few years later, my mother remarried and my stepfather, whose name was Dovid Aidelman, as I mentioned to you earlier, was a Yiddish writer, professional. He worked for "Letste Nayes" and also wrote a couple books. And I grew up very much within that milieu of Yiddishists. My mother didn't really speak Yiddish. She understood it, but she was not a Yiddishist at all. But all the people he worked with, all the people that were somehow socially connected or work-wise connected, were survivors and were Yiddish speakers. So, if there was a medical question, he would call up Dr. Dvorzhetsky, if you know the name, who also wrote 3:00about the medical experiments of Mengele and so forth. I remember I was at home one day, I was alone, sick with the flu or something and was looking for something to read, and there was his book. And I didn't even know what I was getting myself into. I started reading it in Hebrew and I started crying and crying, crying. I didn't even know such things existed. But in essence, people with numbers on their arms and people who had been to -- through all kind of experiences were part of the natural landscape for me. And I remember I asked Dovid, once -- he had a large -- what do you call it?

CW:Scar?

EN:Yeah, so, large scar on his thigh. "What is this?" And he said, "Oh, it's from a bullet." Yeah, matter of fact. He was not in a camp. He fled to Russia.

CW:And where was he from?

EN:He was originally from Lublin, and he wrote a book called "Geven a mol a yidish lublin [There was once a Jewish Lublin]." And then moved to Warsaw and worked at "Haynt." And his friends, also Hebrew newspapermen, were people he knew from there.

CW:Do you know how he got -- he started writing?

EN:No, no. Must have had the talent and -- no, and I also don't know very much about his family. I know that he had a twin sister who did not survive. He had a much older brother. He was, I think, the youngest of a whole brood of children. The oldest brother lived in Israel. Made aliyah in the 1920s. But they were barely connected because when the older brother left Poland for Palestine, Chaim, the -- little Dovid was a little kid. So, he remembered something, but 5:00not much. And when Dovid arrived in Israel, he stayed for a couple of weeks with his brother. Didn't work out and he came to Tel Aviv and started working there and that's how it all started, yeah. So, details I really don't know.

CW:Did you hear stories about Vienna?

EN:A lot, yes, yeah. Vienna stories came from my mother, mostly, and from my grandparents, sure. A lot.

CW:So --

EN:I was a little disappointed (laughs) when we got there. Heard so many stories about the Prater, the Prater, the Prater. (laughter)

CW:So, do -- what is your sense of what your grandparents' life was like there bef--

EN:Austria and Vienna at the time were not in good shape. Don't forget that in 6:00the 1920s, even before the crash, things were not good at all. I think it may have contributed something to the idea of immigration. I know that my mother, as a young student -- now, this -- a little family secret -- had a very intensive romance with a medical student who came from America and studied medicine in Vienna. And then, the crash in the United States happened and his brother, who was a developer of some sort and who supported the younger brother in his studies, could no longer send him money. And so, things became difficult and my grandparents' business was not doing so great. And somehow, out of this whole mess, my mom, who was nineteen at the time, said, "I'm going to Israel." She was part of a Zionist student organization. And her parents said, No, you're not 7:00going alone. If you're going -- she was born after two boys died in -- one at birth, the other one a few months later, so she was this precious -- If you're going, we're going. And they sold everything. They took a cruise on the Mediterranean. I still have the cards from the different -- and at Haifa, they just got off the boat and never returned. Stayed off the boat, and I still remember my grandmother telling me stories. She said, "You cannot believe it. I got to Haifa, just -- what have I done? What is this? It's horrible, it's just so filthy. The Arabs came with these tiny little boats to get us off the larger boat and I said to myself, Am I mad? What have I done?" And I would say to 'em, "Yeah, but that's how your life was saved!" She said, "True, but at the time I didn't know it." So -- and they moved to Tel Aviv. They brought some money with 8:00them and started a life there.

CW:And what had their business been in Vienna?

EN:Something that had to do with clothing or -- I don't know exactly. Something -- that order.

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

EN:Well, that depends up to what age because, obviously, as a young child -- we lived on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, which was commonly referred to as Ben Yehuda straße because all the German-speaking Jews tended to concentrate around there. And there was -- and my grandparents lived right nearby, and there was this Café Opera that I still remember at the corner of Trumpeldor and Ben Yehuda with heavy, heavy greenish curtains. I remember them to this day. And 9:00nobody went to anybody's home. They always met in the café. And all the illustrated German newspapers were hanging there. And I would go there with my grandparents, a lot. And when I was bored, I would sit with these German magazines and look at the fashion. I'd say, "I'll buy my mom this, I'll buy my mom that." So, that was when I was little. And then, we moved and my parents got separated. And this was a bit of a -- changed things. And my grandparents became older and eventually my grandmother became very ill. She had cancer, so she died and a couple of years later, my grandfather, to whom I was very close, passed away. And then, somehow, this whole Yiddish world was part -- became part and 10:00parcel. So, there was always a certain tension here, because it wasn't fully Yiddish and it wasn't fully German. And then, there was Israel, of course, there. But culturally, the -- to some degree, I mean, the tension between German and Yiddish was felt. For instance, Dovid would say "moyl" for mouth and my mother hated that word because she said, in German, it's the mouth of an animal, not of a human being. So, little things of this nature. And the background, also, was very different. I remember the first time they went to Europe together and she said to me, "He had a hard time going into a church." He wasn't religious, but the idea of the church was -- so, he went to one, they went to the Vatican, but she said to me, "In order to see art in Europe, you have to go 11:00into a church, and he was very uncomfortable with that and refused to go." So, there were these little things there. Also, my mother's Jewish background, in terms of learning, was very weak. But she knew her Catholicism and she had a very solid background in European art and music. She played the piano and et cetera, et cetera. He was very grounded in Jewish material, but less so, other than the Polish -- I always heard about Mickiewicz and all that business. But in the grand scheme of things, no, he did not have a really good European education. So, these little tensions came up. And they also came up when they went -- a couple of times later in life, they went to Austria. Bad Gastein, my 12:00mother liked that. And the locals thought that she was a German. She was also very blonde and blue-eyed. So, they thought she was a German woman or an Austrian woman who married a Jew. Because he was Jewish, there was no question about it. You could tell right away. And she was very shaken once when they stayed -- some pension -- and I think he may have gone to the bathroom or something. She sat alone and the waiter came over to her and said, "How could you marry him?" Assuming that she was one of them. And yeah, so these things did come up. And so, this frisson, if you want to call it -- I wouldn't call it fights or anything, but it was there. It was in the air.

CW:So, just linguistically, growing up, where did you speak which language or 13:00hear which language?

EN:I spoke mostly Hebrew. I belonged to a generation that did not appreciate speaking Yiddish or any other foreign language out there on the street. But I understood everything. It was around me. And it's not just a question of language. It's a question of the culture. It was obvious that I go see Dzigan and Schumacher, who were extremely popular at the time. Whenever there was a major Yiddish performance, we always had tickets for it and I was always taken along. I remember the Sisters Barry performing and I looked at them as if they came from another planet. They were in these shiny sequined red dresses. Who in Israel dressed like that? No one! But I saw all these things. So, it was not 14:00just Yiddish as a language. It was this whole culture that I was constantly exposed to, and creative people, to a large extent, because this was the milieu.

CW:So, just to go a little further into that, I mean, how was Yiddish placed in Israel as you were growing up? I mean --

EN:I cannot tell you, because I grew up in a city and it -- pretty much at the center of the city -- and half the people who surrounded us were survivors, where Yiddish in most cases was their native language. I also, as I told you, grew up personally in a household where the people I knew, the people came over, were Yiddish speakers and Yiddish writers. I remember Itzhak Luden, who I think 15:00is the last one alive, coming over quite often to consult with my mother about his romantic affairs. So, it was there. It was part of life. Or Moshe Bernstein, the artist, and so on and so forth. I hear from friends, who were more or less of my generation, who grew up in other places, in other homes, and when -- had no awareness of it at all, never heard a word of Yiddish in their life. So, I don't really know how to describe it, how to -- I know how I grew up and many people I knew. But I have to emphasize two things: A, the Yiddish, but B, also that it was a very creative circle. It was not a shopkeeper who spoke Yiddish. These were all people who wrote and traveled and knew and read and were also 16:00connected with people in the Hebrew world who came from there who knew Yiddish, as well. So, for instance, Moyshe Ron. Moshe Ron sounds very Hebrew. But Moyshe Ron, as he was known at home, who was the head of the journalist association or the union, was a friend from Poland. So, he did not write in Yiddish, but of course he knew Yiddish and he understood it. Yiddish was the subtext for almost everything, even if it were not in Yiddish.

CW:People think about that period as being -- I mean, and they're -- a time when Yiddish was suppressed. But, of course, there was also the fact that people spoke it. So, did you see that play out around you in terms of the language that people were choosing to create work in?

EN:The people I knew functioned -- I mean, many of the people I knew functioned 17:00in Yiddish. So, it was a given as far as I was concerned. There was nothing -- with the bureaucratic wars that -- around it. Perhaps, but at the same time, it was a language of home for a lot of people. It was well known, for instance, that Levi Eshkol, when he was prime minister, half the discussions that took place -- maybe not half, but there was a lot of Yiddish interjected. So, Yiddish, in terms of officialdom, was one thing. In terms of real life, it was all over. People approached you in Yiddish and asked for directions. Especially if you were an older person, not a kid. And especially in Tel Aviv, probably more so. Of course, if you went to a kibbutz or you went to a moshav where there 18:00were no survivors, then no, then you did not have it. I have a good friend, both her parents were born -- just a little younger than me, not that much -- both her parents were born in Israel. And she told me, said she grew up, she never heard a -- in Netanya, she never heard a word of Yiddish. She didn't even know it existed, in fact. That was not my case.

CW:Looking back to those years growing up in this svive [environment], what was your -- did you have any feelings about Yiddish versus Hebrew or German, the languages you were around?

EN:Well, my primary language was Hebrew. This is what I had at school, that's what I wrote in, that's what I -- that was the language of the land. I cannot separate the language from the people who spoke it. It's not a learned language 19:00in this respect. I also do not always like the fact that some of the scholars tried to sort of elevate Yiddish into an aristocratic or nearly aristocratic language. I remember very simple Jews, and not always very well-mannered, who spoke Yiddish and that was their language. And I cannot separate them from the language. I saw the different people who spoke the language, who created in the language. And sometimes, I feel almost as if there's a false -- how would I say it -- lens put over it, trying to elevate it, trying to give it grandeur. It was a folksy language with enough curses to (laughs) suffice and to -- I remember 20:00people who -- women who pulled hair. Who would do it today? Not the people I knew intimately, but it was done. Or they would just go like this. They would touch you -- there was a lot of touching and pushing. And it was not a particularly delicate, aristocratic culture, though some of the peo-- dafke [precisely] the people I knew were more -- much better mannered and well-spoken and all that. But yes, it was all around you.

CW:Do you have memories of Dovid writing?

EN:Yeah, he had very nice handwriting and I -- he wrote by hand, longhand, and I remember they had these special papers that came from the newspaper that were kind of longish, but it was fairly cheap paper. His handwriting was gorgeous, 21:00but was somehow different from the way I learned to form these letters. They were formed -- he was taught differently. The one thing I remember saying to him once was the spelling of his last name. Okay, Dovid is Dovid, spelled the same way. But what do you do with Aidelman? So, in Hebrew, it would be alef-yud-daled-lamed-mem-nun. But written in Yiddish, there would be two yuds and there would be an alef after the mem. And somehow, that struck me as very strange, that the name on a checkbook is not exactly written the same way as the name on a newspaper story. But so, there was this -- somehow double identity, if 22:00I can say that. But not of a different name. Of the same name. Pronounced the same way, so, yeah, yeah.

CW:Were there particular times he would write that you remember? Times of day or habits?

EN:Normally at his desk, and he would sit and write. I don't think there were any particular habits. He loved going to the court, write stories from the rabbinical court, from just the court. Writing was a kind of natural thing. I didn't have a place that had a separate study or anything like that, no.

CW:And can you explain a little bit about what he wrote?

EN:He loved human interest stories. So, I know he wrote a lot about, as I said, 23:00rabbinical court because they were all kind of he and she stories there, and about the courts. Then he wrote about various things. The books that he wrote, one was about, as I mentioned to you earlier, "Geven a mol a yidish lublin" that were stories from Lublin. And another one, which was not published at the end -- he died before it was fully finished, was "Stories from Tel Aviv," various stories. And everything was supplemented by imagination, which sometimes was a little bit of a problem in real life, because something would happen and then he would tell you about it. And he would start embellishing it and after a few times, you no longer knew exactly the full truth from (laughs) the story. So, a 24:00nasty neighbor, at the fifth rendition of the story, already had a revolver in his hand, which he never did. So, yeah. But very creative, yeah.

CW:Can you just describe what he looked like?

EN:What Dovid looked like? He was short, thin, had a long nose. He was originally a redhead. By the time I met him, he was not so redhead. And look, the scars of the war were there. I think that all these people were scarred. Not just physically, I'm not talking about that. But he was not an easy person to deal with. He could be very moody. I learned sometimes to tiptoe and not disturb and developed a very high sense of smell of mood changes. It's easy to talk 25:00nowadays about Holocaust survivors as kind of cultural heroes, but the truth of the matter is, many of them were people with problems. And I'm not talking about problems that made them not functional, but psychological problems that are connected with loss, with experiences that they went through, all kinds of things that were not shared with you as a child. I'm not even sure they were shared with my mother, fully. I don't know, but they were not exactly normal people, most of them, so -- but that is the way -- and many of them did not like to talk about it. I didn't have the feeling with him that he avoided it, but in 26:00my husband's family, I once sat with the mother of his brother-in-law, who was a teenager when the war broke out. She and her sister were hidden by a Polish farmer in some ditch and saved this way. And I was sitting with her, her granddaughter, who was, at the time, more or less the same age as her grandmother had been when the war broke out -- was sitting with us. And she began to tell me the story. And I see her granddaughter sits like this with open eyes and listens to every word. And I said, "Paula, you never told them the story?" And she said, "No, not really." I just said, "Why?" And she said, "They didn't ask." What kind of an answer is that? But -- and thinking of this woman who's no longer alive, Paula -- Paula was very much the opposite of the Yiddish 27:00speakers I knew because she had no education. She was a teenager during the war and worked in a supermarket. She didn't -- so, the kind of conversations that I heard at home were not her bread and butter at all. Just the fact that she spoke Yiddish and these people spoke Yiddish is not -- it creates a link and there is a shared experience of the war. But these are different segments of society. So, I'm sure that if you spoke with her son, he would tell you a story that's very different from mine.

CW:So, in this Yiddish world, were there particular characters that stand out in your memories?

EN:Well, some I'm not going to tell because it would be very gossipy. (laughter)

CW:It's okay. (laughter)

EN:Nah, not nice. Women and all kind of stories like that. But, well, what do I remember? I remember Dovid coming home one day when Sholem Asch came to Israel and said, "M'zogt az er hot zikh geshmadt [They say he's converted]!" And with Sholem Asch, there were all kind of -- it's not true, but there were all kinds of stories about him. So, these were the discussions at home. What else? I remember Moshe Bernstein, the artist, who was tiny and there was a -- kind of Yiddish Toulouse-Lautrec -- with very long, black curls all the way down, the -- a kind of Yiddish hippie. Who else do I remember? I remember a neighbor who wanted to be a writer and was pestering Dovid with her poems. She always came 29:00over and (laughs) he told me to say he's not home because he couldn't deal with that anymore. Other than that, I remember the people who -- I remember Tsanin and I remember the people who wrote for the paper, most of them.

CW:Did you ever visit the offices or the press?

EN:No, no, no, no. But I've been to Tsanin's house, very beautiful house. He was a smart guy. He knew how to take good care of his own business, too. Oh, what do I remember? That two -- my mother and another woman somehow whispering, "Er iz geven a bundist [He was a Bundist]," and I had no idea what it meant. But from the sound of it, I understood it was something bad. "Shh -- geven a bundist." Oh, okay. Yeah.

CW:And I know you mentioned earlier you went to see Yiddish theater. What do you remember from those productions?

EN:What do I remember? I remember mostly Dzigan and Schumacher, because that we went religiously to. Serious theater, I remember still -- but I was a kid, then, when Maurice Schwartz came. And Maurice Schwartz died in Israel. He had a heart attack, 1960. But I'm not sure if I saw it or not. I'm not sure at all. But we went out a lot because the -- he always got tickets for everything. Not just Yiddish, everything. I remember the -- my parents were amazed: I refused to go to a Marlene Dietrich concert. Don't ask me why. I have no idea. But these were hard-to-get tickets. Oh, and the Barry Sisters, I do remember, yeah, so.

CW:What was a Dzigan and Schumacher show like?

EN:Oh, these were skits, very -- they were immensely popular. Everybody went to 31:00-- by everybody, I don't mean people who did not understand a word of Yiddish, but they were very, very popular and there was a lot of political satire of Israeli current events. So, it wasn't a play-play. It was satirical and very, very, very popular.

CW:And where would they perform?

EN:Oh, all over. [Hebrew institution - 00:31:37] was a very popular venue. They very often also brought in, for added whatever, a Yemenite or a Sephardic singer. That was the kind of -- and then, there was a falling out between the two, so much so that years later, when I went to the -- what did they call -- 32:00theater museum, so to speak, in Tel Aviv, which was really housed in an apartment. [Yehuda Gabbai?], who had organized it all and treated it then as if it was his own private property took me around and said, "Well, here are Dzigan's papers and in the other room are Schumacher's papers." And I say, "Why are they separated?" "Oh," he said, "that was the condition, that they would not be in the same room." And, yeah, and I remember Dovid going to the funeral -- I think it was -- who died first? I think it was Schumacher, and they blamed the other -- one blamed the other one for his early death, whatever. The relationship had gone very sour. But for years, they were like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who also has a falling out at some point, yeah.

CW:And just briefly, what was your Jewish education?

EN:Jewish education was what every kid in Israel had. I went to public school and that was it. Now, Dovid had his own customs when it came to Judaism. So, certain things he kept, other things he did not keep, don't ask me why. Clearly, the High Holidays were important and he would go to synagogue and all that. In terms of food, I think he ate everything. He had his own things. Some of the things, some of the customs were also not exactly religious. I remember when -- my mother died fairly young and when people came to the house, I remember one woman came whom I didn't know. And she asked him if she could have something. 34:00And he took her to my mother's cheap jewelry box and said, "Take whatever you want." And she took something. And to me, it looked very bizarre. And when she left, I said, "What is this?" "Oh," he said, "this is a custom. You let somebody take something that belonged to the deceased as a memento, as a memory." I had never seen it before and never seen it since. But I mentioned it to a few people and they told me, Yeah, that is true. So, customs and religion were all kind of mixed together. After my mother died, he went to shul every day for a year, I think. After that, he stopped. But it was of his own choosing. It wasn't systemic in any way. It's not that he followed this or followed that. It's what 35:00felt good to him, what felt right to him.

CW:And what was your own relationship to the religion growing up? The religious practices?

EN:Again, it was not so conscious. We didn't think so much about it. I mean, it was obvious that during Passover you didn't eat bread. But you also couldn't get bread. It was very hard to get bread. The same goes for meat that wasn't kosher. So, certain things are decided for you. You didn't even have to think very much about them. I was comfortable with it. But I cannot say that I gave it a great deal of thought, because there wasn't an alternative environment. It was what it was and most people I knew lived like this. And people who go to Tel Aviv today 36:00don't realize that things were different in the -- let's say in the '50s and '60s. For instance, every Friday afternoon, there would be a -- some sort of a vehicle passing through the city streets announcing that Shabbos is coming. And they made quite a ruckus with that. On Shabbat, you really couldn't buy anything. You needed a little milk because somebody came over and you had to go to a neighbor and ask for it. There were a couple of restaurants open for tourists and that was it. It was a lot more observant in the traditional way than people imagine nowadays when you go there and everything's open all the time. And I don't think (laughs) that car with the siren is passing through city streets anymore. I doubt it. But then, on our street, there was one family that 37:00was really ultra-ultra-Orthodox, with the girls wearing heavy socks. And I looked at them as if they were strange birds, because we were running around in shorts. But they were still part of the human landscape. It's not that we -- you know who was the first person I stared at as a kid? There was an African woman who came to study who lived on our street. And I had never seen an African before. I've never seen a black person before. So, to me, it was curious and I remember walking after and saying, "She wearing stockings or not?" Somebody from another planet. But these religious guys? They were part of the landscape and that was it. They were not your friends. You didn't go to their house, didn't come to your house, didn't go to your school, but --

CW:How'd you get interested in theater?

EN:Well, I was always interested. I always liked it and it -- when I went to university, you had to choose two subjects at the time, from the beginning. It's very different from the system here. And I chose literature and theater. And that was it. Got hooked on that.

CW:And did you have particular mentors in terms of your studies?

EN:Where, you mean as an undergraduate? There were various --

CW:Both, I guess.

EN:-- yeah, and a lot of friends, some of them I'm still in touch with. One of them ended up being a Yiddish actor. That's Rafi Goldwasser, who is in France. Very, very talented. We went to school together in Tel Aviv. Others, some 39:00drifted away, some stayed within the profession. It wasn't terribly hard. It wasn't as hard as it is, let's say, in New York to break into the theater. If you wanted to and you were persistent, you did. You could. It was not an impossible dream. I was always more interested in the more academic side of it, and I got a very, very solid training in Israel. So much so that when I came here and continued my studies, first at Columbia, I was a little bored because Columbia was a -- that was already grad school -- was basically a rehash, to a large extent, of things I knew. On a higher level, but it wasn't new. The new stuff was going on at NYU and --

CW:With whom did you study in Israel, at --

EN:Oh, I don't think the names would -- the Yiddish theater was not part of the 40:00story. So, I don't think the names would mean very much to you nowadays. There was Professor [Moshe Reza?]. We had various topics: the classics, Aristophanes. Really had a good, good grounding in theater. And so, I switched after a year and a half from Columbia to NYU. Those were the heydays of the avant-garde. So, I switched to NYU and that was really exciting. That was opening new doors in my head, every other day. And those were the days of Richard Foreman and Richard Schechner, little after his big hit -- I was not here at the time -- "Dionysus in 69" -- but still, very avant-garde approach to theater. And Broadway seemed 41:00very dull in comparison, not all that interesting. Popular culture became a big thing, popular theater, performance, performance theory. And there was one course that I took at -- American theater that led me to the Yiddish theater. And that was the one course I didn't really like very much. I had to write a paper and I had no idea what to write on. And we would always stop at Strand on the way from NYU, look at books, and I found -- now, I'm going to badmouth someone, but -- I found Lifson's book, "Yiddish Theater in America" and I started reading it for obvious reasons. And it was such a farblondzhet [mixed up] book. Not -- somehow things didn't follow, and he jumped from this to that 42:00and it somehow it didn't quite make sense. And I found there was one chapter on the Artef Theatre, which was a communist quasi-professional theater. And I was fascinated with it because it was the most avant-garde and because their director had come from Habimah. I knew the story of Habimah quite well. And I read it, I read the chapter again and again and somehow, nothing -- it's kleypt zikh nisht -- nothing made sense there. And I sensed it was -- so, I wrote a short paper on it, and eventually it became the topic of my dissertation. And I felt that because of my background in Israel, there were things in its history that were easier for me to understand. The whole system, the importance of 43:00ideology, the political nature of it, it just made sense. I knew where it was coming from and I did not realize at the time that I was taking myself into a somewhat difficult zone because American Jews were still very uncomfortable with the history of Communism, of Jewish communism in America. And later, in later years, was just -- people would say, Why did you choose to write about them? Now, since I worked with a non-Jewish professor, all of this didn't come up. And the theater of the Left was a big thing to write on in that period. But Jews were very uncomfortable with it. And I interviewed quite a lot of people who -- those who were still alive. They were also playing games with me. One started 44:00giving me the spiel, "Everything is political." Yes, it's true that everything is political, but that diminishes the meaning of the word. I sat with another one who was another actor who was the closest one, I would say, to a star, let's say, they had -- with an old-fashioned tape recorder. And he started crying over his lost youth and the movement and the disappointment. And he cried so hard that I didn't have the heart to stretch my arm and just turn off the recorder, it was such an intense moment. So, it kept running and running and running and he was sobbing, until he got himself together. So, these are very, very emotional scenes. Many of the actors of the Artef were not professionals, and it 45:00was hard to get a straight answer out of them because they didn't have the vocabulary. They didn't know how to describe it. The exception, of course, were those who -- the few who stayed in the profession were the younger ones. So, David Opatoshu -- I came all the way to the West Coast. I was hosted very nicely by a couple, by -- I think she's still around -- Sybille Binder and her second husband. Her first husband had been an Artef actor and the second one was a -- second group of the Artef, with the younger folks. And she got me in touch -- she was much younger than the first husband. I think when they married, she was twenty and he was forty, which made quite a difference. And she arranged for me to meet the different Artefniks in LA. And they've all -- one of them, I 46:00remember, [Shayke Strauss?]. I just ran into somebody who told me -- was a member of his family -- came to meet me with a huge mogn-dovid [star of David] here. And he came became a staunch Zionist, and tried to explain to me the allure back then of communism. Another one, whom I should not mention -- was not an actor, was a writer involved with the Artef, sounded like an old Stalinist. It was unbelievable talking with him in the -- when would it be? Let's say in the late '70s. And it was like talking in the 1950s. Very different responses. They were all old people by then, but -- and a fact they gave me, and I've learned all the pitfalls of oral history, very often incorrect. And it would 47:00take me at times days to find out and realize that I was right and they were wrong in mentioning a place or a date. But you got the ambience of it, you got the smell of it, the taste of it, the real people who made up the theater. And the one whom I met years later, unfortunately, was Jules Dassin, who was also the -- really, a very close friend of David Opatoshu. The two of them made it into the big company. And he loved the Artef and he loved Benno Schneider, the director, who had studied with Vakhtangov, was a Habimah member and worked with them. And I met, also, Nina Schneider, the daughter of Benno Schneider. Benno Schneider, unfortunately, had died by then. So, yes, so I had still the taste of 48:00the people, even though they were older -- but of the real people who created the theater and of their dreams. Some shattered dreams, but yeah.

CW:Were there other people that were working on Yiddish theater at the time that you were?

EN:At the time? Well, there was Nama. Nama, of course, and Nama was very helpful and supportive. She had just come out with her book. And I spent my days at YIVO. I mean, when I -- before I really decided it would be the topic I'm writing on, I went to YIVO supposedly to buy a dictionary. And it was still on Eighty-Sixth Street and Fifth, where the Neue Galerie is now. And I came in and my experience was very different from most people's. I was welcomed with such 49:00open arms. "Meydele! Kim aher! Fun vanen shtimpsti? [Young lady! Come here! Where are you from?]" Immediately, they told me where my family came from. I said Vienna. "Oh, no, no, no. You're not really from" -- they knew everything (laughs) about me. Right away, I had to drink coffee and take some this and that and I felt as if I came home. So, I know that they were snotty to some people. But they couldn't be nicer to me. So, I was put in the archive and basically, I was given a free hand to do whatever I want and I just sat there and went over stuff. And so, there was Nama. Who else was there at the time? What's her name? She wrote on GOSET -- Faina Burko, I think, was more or less done with her dissert-- I didn't know her all that well then, but I think through Nama I met her. That was pretty much it. There was a guy who taught at Hunter, whose name I 50:00don't remember offhand, who wrote the first dissertation on Yiddish theater. And I knew someone who knew him. To make a long story short, I asked him, "Why didn't you continue with that?" And he said that when he started dealing with it, writing on it, the Yiddish actors thought very highly of themselves and were very nasty to him. So, he just moved on and that was it. But it was always a limited group of people. It was never an awful lot. But I didn't realize how charged this whole political thing would be, 'cause I really went into it as an innocent. And I'll tell you more than that: years later, Jules Dassin came to America to -- there was a special screening of "Rififi," which was the film he 51:00won his Cannes -- the Cannes festival prize. And I was a little bit in touch with the "Forward" then. What's his name, the -- was very kind of right-wing editor at the time? And I wrote to the -- I sent him an email and I said, "You know Jules Dassin is coming to New York and I know I'll spend some time with him. And he's always very eager to talk about the Yiddish theater and non-Jewish audiences are not so interested. And I think it would be nice" -- I got an email, I finally deleted it a few years ago -- that was like a vish in punim [slap in the face]. (laughs) "Given the historic fight of the 'Forward' against communism," da-ba-da-ba-ba-ba-ba. But definitely a no. I've read it again ad again. I thought, Maybe I'm misunderstanding what I'm reading. Well, I did not misunderstand. So, that was -- when everybody else was writing about theater of 52:00the Left and the workers' theatre and revolutionary theater, Jews were not comfortable with it yet. Now, I think, they finally are, but took a long time.

CW:Could you just describe what the YIVO building looked like when it was at --

EN:The old one?

CW:Yeah, its old --

EN:Oh, it -- first of all, it had two doors. I always wondered, How did these old ladies open those two doors? You -- (laughs) they were so heavy. And especially when the day was a little windy or something, I don't know. But they somehow did it. At the entrance was -- and that's how it made its way into the exhibition -- was this cabinet with the small heads from Yoshe Kalb. The first time I saw it, I was stunned. I thought those were shrunken heads. Somebody told 53:00me about Indians and shrunken heads. Couldn't figure out what this horrible thing was. (laughs) And so, that was in the lobby. And someone was sitting there in the lobby. I think someone who's still working at YIVO. She was very young at the time. Most of the people who work there were native Yiddish speakers and old Bundists. There was no mezuzah. Very, very Bundish. But the people were very nice. To me, at least. I know somebody else who went there around the same time and they were not so nice to her. Marek was really a mentor. He would go, "Meydele, zitst du [Young lady, sit here], here, you see the files? Go, take them, bring them." And he trusted me fully. He would let me do something that no one would allow me today -- that was to bring in coffee and sip on coffee while 54:00I was doing my work. So, it was very heymish [familiar]. It felt very good to me. The building was very elegant. But the building also needed the serious renovation. I mean, it was not -- it was an old building that needed an infusion of a lot of money and was not really fit in terms of its internal arrangement to be YIVO. And then, they sold it. And then, they moved to Fifty-Seventh Street, which felt like a storage space. Had no character at all. And that took a while and then, finally, to the Center for Jewish History. But I still like the archive. You'll find -- it's like going to your grandmother's attic. My grandmother never had an attic, but it's the -- (laughs) you'll find all kinds 55:00of things in there. You see a box and it says, "Assorted." Now, go figure out what assorted means. And it still has this feeling if you get into the archive.

CW:Yeah.

EN:The reading room is a different story.

CW:What do you think is the importance of studying Yiddish theater?

EN:Well, Yiddish theater was a -- first of all, had an immensely important place in Jewish life, especially in America. I would say that it may sound a little heretical if I say it, because most Yiddishists choose to look at something called "Yiddishland" and speak about this as one phenomenon. But reality is that I look at things differently. The huge percentage of Yiddish theater activities 56:00took place here in America. And in addition to being a theater in Yiddish, it was also an American theater and it was an immigrant theater, which I don't think is a label that would fit, let's say, Yiddish theater in Poland. It was not an immigrant theater. Here, from the moment you stepped on American soil, a new conversation began with the environment, with the sound, with the experiences, with people you had never seen before. You could see Italians and African Americans and Chinese and so on and so forth. So, this is unique. Even if you were an immigrant yourself and you wrote as if you were still there, it begins to be influenced by it. And one of the areas that are particularly influenced by America, as I found it in my research, is vaudeville. Vaudeville, 57:00first of all, is an American form. It's not a Polish form, it's not a Russian form. And secondly, with the short skits and dances and songs, how easy is it or how not difficult to just take a tune, a popular tune, and add lyrics in Yiddish to it and voila, you have a Yiddish number. So, the give and take when it does not concern serious literary writing is there from day one. It's constantly there. And the yearning and the nostalgia -- and yet, as Hasia Diners [sic] wrote once, they came to stay. It was clear. With all the yearning and "Mayn shteytele belz [My dear town of Belz]," mayn shteytele dus [this] and shteytele that -- yeah, you can dream about geveyn a mol [once upon a time], but you're here. And that's very much part of the immigrant experience, the Jewish 58:00immigrant experience, and there are many similarities with other immigrant cultures that developed in this country. So, taken with somebody like Jacob Gordin, which is really the basis of Yiddish drama -- yeah, but he writes all his plays here, after all, not in Russia. So, as Russified as he may be, he writes them in America. He writes them for actors who perform in America -- to a Jewish audience, yes, but already an audience that has gone through this whole process of gradual acculturation and no longer lives in Russia. Lives in New York. And that is a huge percentage of Yiddish drama. Things were written here. On top of it, this is where the money was and this is where the audience was. 59:00There was no other place that had so many Jews and, relatively, so much money.

CW:And censorship, too, right? Just --

EN:And there was censorship and there were rabbis. The rabbis didn't count very much in the New World. And there was money to be made. And Jews were crazy about theater. The numbers are beyond belief. Even in the early, very early 1900s, where you don't have that many Jews in New York, they sold about a million tickets a year. When you think of those who don't go by nature -- too old, too frail, too young, whatever -- it's a huge percentage. And Jews went to the theater. That was their fun. I mean, there was a culture of going out in general in the city, because what did you have at home? Didn't have video, didn't have 60:00television, didn't have radio. You had nothing. And the apartments were small and oppressive. So, the little extra money you had, you went to the theater. There weren't movies. So, theater played a very important role. And there was an intensity in it that every uptown person who came to look at this phenomena [sic] writes about, that maybe they -- because it did appeal to non-Jews, to uptowners for whom the, as they call it, the ghetto was the new frontier. So, where could they go see Jews? Where could they see this culture? Going into a synagogue is a little problematic. It wasn't done at the time. Or if the mayor wanted to do some political work, he wouldn't go to a synagogue. But the theater was there, the most spectatorial place you can think of. So, the theater 61:00mattered. It was very much part of life. And the songs were very popular. They were sung again and again and again. And then, as soon as Jews had the little extra money, they would buy a piano and they would buy music and play it at home. So, yeah, that -- if you think of it in today's term, you combine television and radio and DVDs and you name it, all the home entertainment that we're so used to -- it all took place in the theater.

CW:Do you personally have a favorite Yiddish play or playwright?

EN:No, not really. I mean, that -- I wouldn't venture into that. But I think a very interesting phenomenon is Paula Vogel's new play because it's the first 62:00time that an American playwright is writing a play that is not just an adaptation, that is about Yiddish and about Yiddish theater. And a playwright of note. Not a kid hidden in some dorm in a college upstate. It's somebody who won the Pulitzer Prize. And I think it shows that it's still -- there's still life in it. Will it be done as Yiddish in Yiddish for masses? Of course not, and nobody is foolish enough to think that. But it still inspires people. It still intrigues people. It still intrigues theater people. And I think we are the link, because they're not going to do the research and they're not going to look at plays that have not been translated. But we're the link and if we open it up and we offer it to them, they're going to use it because these are the roots of 63:00American Jewry, after all. Where would they go? This is it, the beginning, so --

CW:And what is your take on --

EN:My students love these plays, by the way. (laughter) And they're -- some -- I taught a short course at YIVO. Some of the older people are shocked by the content because they think it would be sort of semi -- I don't know, rabbinic or whatever. And there's lust and there's sex and there's murder and then there's all kind of very sensational things in it -- and they don't anticipate that. And it jars them.

CW:Definitely. What is your take on what's going on in Yiddish in theater these days?

EN:Well, the new policy you see, and I have very mixed feelings about it, is taking very well-known plays like "Waiting for Godot" and doing it in Yiddish. 64:00I'm not sure I see the point of it. But, on the other hand, it sensationalizes it and it brings in people who are curious to see, what would it be like in Yiddish? They did it also with "Death of a Salesman," where I have -- more of a problem with because I think that this whole Jewish thing is forced on the play. I don't think it's a Jewish play. Personally, I don't find it -- of course, there are certain elements from Miller's life, but it's -- I'm not sure I buy into it. Now they're doing again "God of Vengeance" because -- A, because of Paula Vogel and B, because of the lesbian theme, and it becomes a big thing. So, 65:00I don't know. I mean, they're trying to survive, and that the new effort seems to involve translation into Yiddish of non-Yiddish plays. How long will it last? Can it -- I don't know. I don't see a huge future for this, because once you've picked all the good ones, what are you going to do? Sophocles in Yiddish? You could, but -- so, we'll see. It's a very small audience. It's an audience of the faithful and of supporters. Does it have a great future? I doubt it. But who knows? You never know.

CW:So, what do you see as the place of Yiddish in the broader Jewish academic world these days?

EN:Well, I just saw that Avram Novershtern said it, something that I said years 66:00ago, and that is that the future of Yiddish is, to a large extent, in Israel. I said it back then because there was a production at the Habimah of a Goldfaden play. I think it was "The Witch," if I'm not mistaken. And I said to someone, "Where else would you have a theater that puts all its resources and the best actors into a production -- true, in Hebrew, but of a Yiddish play? They wouldn't have it on Broadway. You could have it once, but it's about it." So, I think the old fear of Yiddish -- there was a fear of Yiddish -- is gone. I think there are enough people who are interested in these roots, and these are the roots of at least half the population of Israel, and the willingness to invest 67:00in these things is there. Not really here. I cannot see a kind of state-sponsored program in Yiddish. So, if we're talking about theater, I think Israel is the place where it will be kept. There is a Yiddish theater, there's Yiddishpiel. But beyond it, I think it will be kept in translation and it becomes part of the plays one produces every so often. "Mirele efros" has been done again and again because that's part of our theatrical tradition, of our heritage, and every so often, you'll want to encounter, reencounter it and reread it. And that is who we are.

CW:I wanted to ask, of the very many projects, wonderful projects that you've done, is there something you're particularly proud of in your --

EN:I'm very proud of the exhibition we had. It took forever. There were all kind of difficulties along the way. The museum was going through major renovation and it put us on hold for a year. And then, they didn't raise, really, enough money for the exhibition. But overall, it was done. And I was stunned by the response to it, I really was. I mean, I knew we had a nice thing going and et cetera, et cetera. But it was overwhelming. They didn't give out my email, and yet people 69:00found me. They went to the internet and they looked and searched and found my work email. And there wasn't a day when I didn't get emails from people. Many asked for advice. "My great-grandfather was a --" this and that. "Can you help me find out more about it?" Most of them cannot read Yiddish. Whenever I came to the exhibition, it was packed. The guard told me, "You've got a hit here." Because on paper, when you -- they cannot tell you how many people go into that exhibition because you pay for an entrance fee and there were a couple of other exhibitions at the same time. Even on the last day, after it was extended by two weeks, I went there and I thought, No one's going to be -- I'll just go for a sentimental goodbye. It was the last hours on a Sunday afternoon. There were 70:00still people there. And the nice thing, most of them, of course, were Jewish, but not all. There were different people who came. I once came on a Friday afternoon. A whole group of little kids -- I think most of them were African Americans -- came out of the exhibition with a teacher. And the curator, who -- not the curator. One of the people worked there who took them through the exhibition -- "Oh, you see this lady? She was the one who put it together." So, I stopped and said, "Did you like it?" And they all -- Yeah! And I said, "Well, what did you like best?" And here, it's -- about six years old -- a little confused, and then one girl lifted her hand and said, "The clown." And I thought, What clown did we have? It was the clown costume of Molly Picon. They 71:00saw the film and who do kids identify with? Molly Picon! And then all the kids said, Yeah, yeah, the clown, the clown, the clown, the clown! So, the fact that -- this connection with it -- it did, it made me feel very good. It was nice. The people who knew nothing about it -- really, zero, zilch -- connected with that. And saw how it fit into the whole story of the American theater and the connection, because it's very easy to give this big talk about the impact and the influence. And then you say, "Okay, prove it to me." And people can't. They say, Oh, Paul Muni was Jewish. Okay, so, what? Does it mean that the Yiddish theater influenced the American theater? I thought long and hard about this connection, and I finally got to the conclusion that the connection -- were, to 72:00a large extent, the Catskills and Catskills -- which was a kind of in between. That's the time of Yinglish, as they called it. It's for people whose Yiddish is not good enough to follow a serious play, and a Leivick play, but it's good enough to follow this mishmash of languages and to laugh at what's funny. And that's where you get the comics. So, I found, for instance, it was at NYU, a text that Danny Kaye put together, in Yiddish, "The yidishe [Jewish] Mikado." There was a season where it was very fashionable to have takes of various -- there was a "Red Mikado" a -- this Mikado, that Mikado. But the whole thing is written in Latin letters. And it's very simple Yiddish. And that was exactly the culture that it represented and reflected, a kind of in-between-ness between 73:00Yiddish and English. People could no longer read a novel in Yiddish but understood, from home, everything that was being said, as long as it wasn't extremely literary. And I think, when the Catskills die, that's the end, to a large extent, of this ethnic theater, and Jews just go to Broadway.

CW:And where do you see the Yiddish now?

EN:I think the interest is still there. And I'm going back to the Vogel thing as an example. It's there. It's doing "The Dybbuk" again. People know about it. People are interested. I think the major task now is to translate as much as possible. There was a production of "Di goldene kale [The golden bride]," the 74:00musical. That was a very popular operetta at the time. Of course, you cannot live now on a diet of "Goldene kale"-like productions. But a lot of people came. They were curious and they enjoyed it and it was fun. So, these revivals, these conversations with it -- or Tony Kushner rewrites "The Dybbuk," it was not a particularly successful undertaking. But still, he felt compelled to deal with it. There were all kind of other plays that were addressed. Now, "God of Vengeance" became (laughs) the big thing. Again, largely because of the topic. You'll always find something. But these things need to be available.

CW:What advice would you have to a young student or scholar who wanted to get into Yiddish theater?

EN:You mean, in terms of scholarship?

CW:Yeah.

EN:Well, one thing I -- first of all, I would warn them (laughs) that the chance of getting a job is minimal and that the humanities in general are in trouble in this country and perhaps worldwide. But if they insisted, I think they should learn, also, about theater. It's sometimes a problem with the Yiddishists who know this one thing, but they cannot situate it in terms of the wider culture. And you cannot do Yiddish theater in America without knowing your American theater. You cannot do it, I think, in Poland without knowing Polish theater. And the same goes as far as Russia is concerned. So, it's a double job. It's knowing the context, it's knowing the other language, the non-Jewish language, and also knowing theater. After all, the Yiddish actors who went into it did not 76:00get up and say, I want to be a Yiddish actor. They said, I want to be an actor, and this was the culture in which they operated. So, it's a big job. It involves an awful lot. It's not rabbinic studies, where you also need to have the context. But here, it's completely secular and you have to know what you're dealing with.

CW:Yeah. Well, is there anything else that you wanted to discuss or --

EN:Well, I'm also very glad that the exhibition -- that the museum decided to produce a catalog, because exhibitions come and go after a while, as sad as it is. It breaks your heart when they take it apart. But that is the nature of the beast. But I very much hope that the book retains some of it. And I also hope 77:00that at some point, I'd be able to -- what's the right word? To sort of curricularize [sic] it, to use it almost as a textbook or as a basic book for this material. And I think it can be done. And the images are there. I think the writing is clear enough. It's not excessively academic. And I'm very proud of the book. I'm glad of the way it came out. In hindsight, you forget all the difficulties and problems and copyright issues and this and that. Of course, they come up. I'm happy with the book. I'm glad it came out.

CW:And I did want to ask about what -- was there any particular significance of doing this exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York?

EN:No, it just happened this way. And I commented to people, every so often 78:00someone would say, "Yeah, I have to go to the Jewish Museum to see your show." I said, "It's not at the Jewish Museum." And the Jewish Museum would not do that show. Not that I offered it to them, but in -- after the fact, I met someone who's high up there and she said, "Look, I'll be honest with you, the Jewish Museum would not have done it." And I said, "But it's an ethnic museum!" "Don't use that word. You'll get them very upset." So, the fact that it is the City of New York -- yes, it ended up being a very good thing because -- gave it a kind of shtempl [stamp] that it's of New York. Yes, it's Jewish. Yes, it's Yiddish. It's also New York. It's part of New York culture, it's part of New York history. And it also brought to the exhibition lots of people who otherwise 79:00would not have gone. I'm not sure they would have gone to the museum downtown, to the heritage museum to see it. They brought in schoolchildren, they -- it's a somewhat different clientele and on top of it, you had, of course, Jews who came to see it. So, it ended up well. It was a good story. And it's one of the few cases where they extended an exhibition. That's quite unusual.

CW:Wow.

EN:So, yeah, I'm glad, I'm proud of it.

CW:Well, yasher-koyekh [well done]. (laughs)

EN:I'm glad it happened. Took forever, mind you. Forever, but -- and the concept at first was kind of blurry, part -- in terms of the museum, but -- and the nice thing about the museum is that their chief curator has a PhD in American Studies, and he's very insistent on academic integrity. Things had to be proven. 80:00You couldn't just come up with all kind of grand statement-- about Jews being ethical and that's why they influenced the American theater and nonsense like that. So, yeah.

CW:Great.

EN:Yeah, I miss that exhibit a little bit. Became like family. But maybe there'll be something else. Who knows? And the other thing that I wanted to add to the American aspect of the material, because it became increasingly clear to me: the Yiddish theater started on the Bowery, and the Bowery -- that's before the -- Second Avenue and the like. And the Bowery was an area where you rubbed shoulders with other ethnic groups. And one of the most interesting -- relationship that really no one has dealt with is the one between the German theater and the Yiddish theater. The German theater was a very major phenomenon in New York until the end of World War I. That's when things did not -- started 81:00to decline rapidly. And somehow, no one asked themselves, Okay, there's Thomashefsky, who's a teenager, comes to New York, as enterprising as he or his father are. But within a few months, they rent a space, they put on a show. How did they do it? What -- it's not so simple. It's a whole new country, a whole new -- and you realize that what happens is the connection with the German theater, with German Jews who were heavily involved in the German theater in New York. And this begins to come up again and again and again: actors who started on the German stage and switched to the Yiddish theater, because they're Jewish, but some are not. One of the great stars of the Yiddish theater was not Jewish. Was a German woman who was a star of the German stage. And after World War I, 82:00when it was no longer fashionable to be German -- and she looks for a job. She learns Yiddish and she performs in Yiddish. So, this interconnectedness between Yiddish and German, facilitated by the similarity in language and the Jewishness of people and many of the people involved makes -- once you think of it, it's so obvious, it's so clear. But no one has pointed it out. And that's an important part of the story of this theater.

CW:Sounds like a book. (laughs)

EN:I don't know if there's enough for a book, but certainly (laughter) for an article, yeah. All right.

CW:Great, well --

EN:So --

CW:-- I just want to thank you so much --

EN:-- you're very welcome.

CW:-- for taking this time. Was fascinating to talk to you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]