HARRIET MURAV ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is December 20th, 2016. I am here in San Diego, California at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference with Harriet Murav and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

HARRIET MURAV:Yes.

CW:Great. So, just -- can you start by telling me a bit about your family background?

HM:Well, my father was an immigrant from Poland. My mother was born in this country but her first language was Yiddish. And I grew up in New Jersey.

CW:Where in Europe were they?

HM:My mother's family came from Davyd-Haradok, which is a shtetl [small Eastern European village with a Jewish community] in, now, present-day Belarus. I believe it was always in Belarus. And my father's -- I think it was Sokołów, I'm not exactly sure. But I was never particularly one to trace family history, actually, so -- but he came when he was around twelve or thirteen, so -- and that would have been in the early '20s, which is a little unusual -- to arrive here.

CW:And did you get any sense of what life was like -- that your father's early life was like?

HM:He hated kheyder [traditional religious school] like everyone hates Hebrew school and kheyder. The ice cream was magnificent. His parents owned a bakery. His father studied with Rav Kook, went to Palestine to study. They came down in 2:00the world with a big thud when they arrived in this country. It was a very hard life. They were very, very, very poor. So, I -- A, my parents of the not talking generation. B, even if they were of the talking generation, they were of the type that doesn't talk. So, I didn't learn a lot. But I knew that there was a certain sophistication and a certain ease of life -- that my paternal grandmother didn't work. She had servants, she had a different world. And I believe she had some kind of informal literary salon in her home. And my father was literate in Yiddish, unlike my mother, who learned to read very recently, at my encouragement. So, they spoke Yiddish the normal way, so the children 3:00shouldn't understand. But if they spoke that much Yiddish, we would have understood. So, they didn't speak that much Yiddish.

CW:And were there any stories that came down, other than the literary salon?

HM:My father remembers the -- well, he remembered a little bit of the Polish-Russian War. He remembered hearing someone give the order to fire in Russian. And that's all. That's all he said.

CW:What were the occupations of the family?

HM:Where, here? Or there?

CW:Well, first starting with there.

HM:There. My mother's family was much poorer and her paternal grandfather was a ferryman, which I was very delighted to hear because I love water. (laughs) So, 4:00I was glad to hear that. He was a very simple person and he -- the ferry. Not a ferry with -- a little boat, yeah, back and forth. And her father, in this country, I believe, was like an elevator operator or something very simple. My paternal grandfather was a scholar. He learned. And then, in this country, he was a very bitter person and he was a carpenter. And he was an unhappy person.

CW:And your parents --

HM:My father started out studying English literature and then ended up working for -- at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He had been a Zionist in the '30s. He had gone to Palestine and dug ditches and got arrested by the British and that sort of thing, then came back. And he was a -- he served in World War II, in Northern 5:00Africa and Italy. And then, he just sort of fell into becoming an engineer and worked for the US government. My mother stayed at home until the kids were older, and then she worked as a secretary in a Hebrew school. And she had been a biologist before children.

CW:Oh. And can you describe the home that you grew up in?

HM:In terms of what?

CW:Well, just starting with, did you live in one place? Did you move?

HM:Yeah, pretty much.

CW:So, what did that --

HM:They did -- my parents did the -- from Brooklyn to the Bronx, which is a move up, and then to the suburbs of New Jersey. And there was a lot of -- there were a lot of books in my childhood home. We all read a lot. There was -- my parents 6:00were very sociable. They entertained a lot. There were a lot of political arguments. They were very political and they encouraged political participation about --

CW:What was their politics?

HM:Well, very liberal. Liberal-Left. And I remember -- I mean, I was very radical then and now and I organized -- this is insane! I organized from my high school a bus trip to the Moratorium -- Vietnam War. And I remember my mother and I both at the same second saying, "I need a handkerchief. You need a handkerchief!" Why? Can you guess? Tear gas. What if there's tear gas? So, there was a lot of -- my childhood -- my adolescence was -- can be summed up under, "Stay clean for Gene." So, I always excelled at school but I was very, very radical in politics. And there was a lot of support for that at home. But it was also kind of -- I was a very, I think, kind of isolated child. So, I was very 7:00unhappy at my high school. Is that what you -- this is the -- yeah. And I left early. I went to college before I graduated high school and I still have nightmares that I have to go back and finish high school. Every year I have these nightmares, (laughs) so --

CW:So, what did your house look like?

HM:It was a very typical -- we lived in a small town. It was a bedroom community from New York. It was a triplex or -- I don't even know if that's what you call it. I have a -- older brother and a younger sister. My sister and I shared a room. It was originally a beach community. So, there were three beaches and one little lake. So, there was -- it was full of New York people in the summer and then, in the winter, it was the local people. The community was fifty percent Jewish. The schools closed for the Jewish holidays. But it was very rural. There 8:00were no sidewalks, there were no stores. It's fifteen minutes away from Morristown, which is now a kind of booming Jewish center, but it was not then.

CW:And did you celebrate the yontoyvim [holidays]?

HM:Yeah. Yeah, we did all the holidays, although my parents were rigidly anti-clerical. They were of that -- so, they rebelled against their parents by stopping keeping kosher. And I think I rebelled against them by starting to keep kosher, which I have now stopped. But that's the way that went and we -- the Hebrew school was run by a guy who was Orthodox, even though it was Conservative. So, I went to Hebrew school three times a week. We celebrated the holidays. And one of the -- there was this famous Hanukkah party where my father read a story out loud in Yiddish and our neighbor read it aloud in English and another neighbor who was a violinist played the violin and I made some kind of 9:00decorations. And so, it was the -- it was a Jewish house, very obviously.

CW:So, recurring Hanukkah party or this was --

HM:No, this was the one special Hanukkah party that made a big impression on me, yeah.

CW:Was that your favorite holiday growing up?

HM:No. Pesach was definitely the favorite holiday.

CW:And what was your seder like?

HM:Well, it was like -- when my grandfather was alive, it was a war between zeyde [grandfather] and the kids because the girls, my sister and I, learned all these wonderful cool tunes for all these -- and we wanted it to go on. And my grandfather was like -- (nonsense words) as quickly as possible. He didn't see the charm in the recitation. So, that was -- (laughs)

CW:So, when you were growing up, sort of looking back, what was your feeling about your Jewishness, about --

HM:Ah, feeling about Jewishness. I think the thing that -- I was very 10:00comfortable with Jewishness. I never stopped doing Jewish things all -- well, I have a daughter who, in -- when she was in middle school said, "Well, if you're Jewish, you do Jewish things." And so, I always did Jewish things. (laughs) So, I was very comfortable with that. But it also -- I think it was also a kind of intellectual discovery. And I don't mean to sound fancy, but it was, Oh, the textbook says this about the Crusades. Oh, Hebrew school said this other thing about the Crusades. So, it was like, Oh, things are maybe different than what they are -- how they are being taught. And so, I think that was the greatest contribution that Hebrew school made for me, and being Jewish, was that there was one point of view and then there was this other point of view. And also, the social justice thing was very powerful, very attractive, very powerful. And that 11:00was important.

CW:So, how did that play out for you?

HM:Oh, I went to all kinds of demonstrations and all -- I participated in all kinds of Left movements, social protest movements, and I demonstrated on behalf of Soviet Jews. And then, when I graduated college and I had a master's degree, too, and I couldn't find a job, I went to work as a volunteer for social justice with Sister Gabriel in Chicago. And while I was demonstrating for the Black Panthers, a guy came up to me and said, "Are you Jewish?" And he said it in Yiddish, which I understood. That much I understood. He said, "What are you doing out here demonstrating for the Black Panthers? Do you know that there's Soviet Jews in these countries who -- in this country who are famous doctors and physicists who are driving taxis and are impoverished? You should help them!" 12:00So, I did. I started working for Jewish Family Service in 1977, '78 in Chicago and I was a resettlement counselor. And first, they didn't want to hire me and I called them three times. "No, you have no training, no." And then, they called me. "We need you." I said, "But I have no tr--" -- "We'll train you." And so, there were four of us. We were called the Russians and we each had around a hundred families. So, this was 1978. This was a peak wave of immigra-- I knew nothing. The textbook Russian that I knew called a pen a "plume." People came in with mental illnesses, pregnancies, family -- huge family problems. Everyone was an engineer but no one really had any transferrable skills. So, it was real resettlement, old-fashioned social work. You get people a house, an apartment. You get their kids in school, you get them to the doctor, you get them on 13:00welfare, SSI. And I did that for a year. So, that was wild and wacky.

CW:And you had studied Russian before --

HM:I'd studied Russian in college. I didn't study Yiddish or Hebrew but I'd studied Russian. So, Russia came to me, and (laughs) was incredible, yeah, yeah.

CW:What were the languages other than English that you heard growing up?

HM:Just Yiddish. But I studied Russian starting in high school, so I was -- and I studied French, as well, and -- but those were the only two. English and Yiddish were the only languages. But also, it was like a whole -- it was a different orientation. A story I like to tell is that I was a little girl, maybe eleven or twelve, I don't know. Somebody rang the doorbell, it's our friend, a family friend. "Is Jack home?" "Jack? What Jack? There's no Jack living here." 14:00"Oh, oh, sorry, sorry. Is Jake home? Is Jake home?" "Jake? Who's Jake? Jake?" "Oh, Jacob." "Oh!" My father. 'Cause my mother always called my father "Yankel." So, I didn't know Jack, I didn't know Jake, I hardly knew Jacob. I knew Yankel. So, when someone rang the bell and asked for Jack, I thought, What's happened? What's wrong? Who lives here named Jack? So, that was -- so, it permeated. They didn't speak Yiddish but it permeated into, I don't know, the atmosphere.

CW:Are there any particular stories from that year or working with the resettlement that stick out to you or that were impactful for you?

HM:It was a lot of misery. And around -- out of the ninety families, I'd say there was one or two that had -- could master the transition and wanted to enjoy 15:00themselves. And this was a couple that said, "Do we have your permission to just travel for a while?" I'm like, "Yeah! It's a free country! Go! Travel! Do what you want!" And that was the only family that said, "A-ha! We're here. We don't have to fight the bureaucracy. We don't have to fight" -- they didn't have children and they didn't have elderly -- usually, a family had a young child and an elderly parent. So, the parents were caught in the middle of trying to make mom or -- happy and the child would end up being the translator. It's very, very, very hard. And it was a big growing up for me. I was very young and I had no idea what was going on and what these people's lives were like and --

CW:So, what did you do next?

HM:I went to graduate school in comparative literature and escaped the world of resettlement counseling and stuff and resettlement issues. And enjoyed myself very much, so -- and I didn't study Yiddish then, either. I did -- at that point, I was doing Greek and Russian. And then, I dropped the Greek and just embraced Russian. And that's what I did next.

CW:And so, how did Yiddish [UNCLEAR]?

HM:How did that happen? (laughter) Well, I mean, I'd always been aware of Yiddish. I had read Yiddish literature in translation. I knew they there was stuff there that I might want to encounter. And I did it by accident on purpose, in a way. I wrote -- and my third book was on this Jewish criminal. The first Hebrew critic, Avraham Uri Kovner, who embezzled money, went to jail, started 17:00writing letters to Dostoevsky, "Why are you such an anti-Semite?" And there were two books about him. One was in Russian and one was in Yiddish, by Max Weinreich. I don't know why Max Weinreich, in 1955, decided to write a book about this fairly despicable person, but he did. So, I had to read it. Therefore, I had to learn Yiddish. So, I got the Weinreich out and I got beyond lesson nine and went through the whole thing and then went to the great Vilnius summer program and my Yiddish improved and I kept reading and reading and reading. And then I just kept -- and I started to be less tormented and actually, Oh, I read a whole sentence! And I didn't have to decode. And I knew the Hebrew alphabet and I knew a fair amount of prayer book Hebrew. So, that wasn't such an obstacle. And I -- it worked for me. Some languages work for you, 18:00some languages don't work for you. So, it worked for me. And then, I went to the Tel Aviv program more recently, in 2006, and I taught -- there's nothing like teaching. I taught first-year Yiddish and just kept reading, reading, reading, reading. And that's how it -- so, I'm not really officially empowered to do any of this, but -- so, it's been great.

CW:Any important teachers along the way? Or mentors?

HM:I had the best teachers in Yiddish language. And I had -- in Tel Aviv, I had Roskies, and I had Novershtern, and I also had Niborski, the father and the son, who were fantastic. And I was in way over my head but it -- they were fine. It was okay. And in Vilnius, I had Dovid Katz, who sort of terrified me. "Kurts un 19:00klor [Short and clear]!" And when he said that to you a few times, you didn't -- you couldn't say anything kurts un klor. You couldn't even say your name, so -- and there was this other guy who -- we had the book in front of -- he didn't really -- he wanted to talk about what America was like. So, I had these amazing arguments with this guy in Yiddish, which -- so, I forgot that I didn't know Yiddish and I could argue with him and stuff and it was really fun. So, I had fantastic teachers who were patient, who wanted to help, who wanted to understand my -- 'cause when I opened my mouth, first comes out Russian and then comes out high school French, and then comes out Yiddish. So, these were people who clearly wanted to teach and didn't care and wanted to help and loved what they were doing and were magnificent at it. And so, they were all wonderful.

CW:And what was it like for you to be in Vilna?

HM:(laughs) It was fun. I mean, I was old enough to be everyone's mother. But 20:00there were a few people kind of my age. But I was still working on this book on Kovner and so the -- in the old town is the former yeshiva where he studied -- was right there. There were archives to look at. And so, I felt like an inverse -- yeah, I spoke Russian on the street and Yiddish in the house. I was just like a Jew from the Russian Empire. And it was a very intense experience and we had to write constantly and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.

CW:And so, what was the feeling or what was it like when you finally could read more than a sentence and got into this literature?

HM:It's fantastic. It's the best feeling in the world when you read and you're 21:00in another language and you're in another world and you notice things and you feel like, Oh, I've always wanted to read this. I knew this was possible and I always wanted to read this. It's wonderful. I mean, and it's still -- you know the literary term defamiliarization? That that's what literature is all about, making something ordinary unrecognizable. So, I have that. (laughs) It happens anyway, and so I can hear sounds and I feel that I can play with the materiality of the language, which is very exciting. And what I really love is young -- stories about young people hating one another, falling in love, feeling desire, feeling ambitious, being bored. It's just normal life, but it's in Yiddish. And 22:00it's not this -- can I confess?

CW:Sure.

HM:I'm not really a Sholem Aleichem fan. And it's because it's so stylized. And it is about -- it's all about revolution and violence and sexuality and desire and parental control and all the same stuff, but it's done up in such a package that makes it feel like Yiddish, it's Yiddish. Whereas other authors that you read, it's translucent. It's not stylized. Of course, it's super stylized, but it creates a different impression for me. And so, that's what -- I feel like, Oh, I knew it was there and here it is.

CW:So, who -- what writers --

HM:Well, of course Bergelson, who's maddeningly difficult and in order to avoid being verbose leaves out so many words that you don't know whether you're coming 23:00or going by the end of a sentence. But also, Moyshe Altman, from Bessarabia, who is incredibly limpid and interesting and European-oriented, cosmopolitan. Kipnis, I really like Itsik Kipnis and my next translation project, I hope, will be "Khadoshim un teg [Months and days]." And he has another very dark novel of leaving the shtetl behind that's long and difficult and dark. I don't know if -- I don't know. But "Khadoshim un teg" is next. And then, there's women writers, women poets that I've encountered. I've sort of said hello and kept walking because I was pursuing other things. But I think I want to go back to some of them. And I can't even -- I was reading "Literarishe Bleter" for something else, and there's this picture of this young woman with huge hair, just like (makes 24:00explosive noise) and she looks angry and passionate and I want to find out who that is and read her work, so --

CW:At what point did you decide that translation was going to be part of your work?

HM: I mean, for a long time, I thought, it's getting very hard to talk to people about authors I love because they've never heard of them. And then they get mad at you. Well, why don't I know this person? If this person is like Kafka and Babel and Joyce and Woolf all rolled into one package, why don't I know? Must not be. And it's because you can't read them. They're inaccessible. And so, "Mides-hadin," which we're translating as "Judgement," is one of these treyf [not kosher] novels. It's bad Bergelson. He gave in to Soviets. Bad. And it's really not. So, there's a bit of an -- I'm having a bit of an argument here, and 25:00I did this with Sasha Senderovich. And so, it was fun. And also, I learned that I really like translating, 'cause you don't have to figure out what to do next. You just have to figure it out. But you don't have to figure out the structure, 'cause the author did that for you. So, it's a totally different world of thought and research than scholarly writing, in which you're kind of less responsible, in a way, which is tremendously fun and you get to do weird word searches and you get to look for weird things, like, "What is that? What is that thing that is a crane well? What is a crane well? I don't know what a crane" -- and then, you get to look at all these images. And then, I finally saw a crane, a well crane this summer when I was traveling, when I was -- I went on a field trip out -- not a field -- an organized trip. It was a Sholem Aleichem 26:00conference. From Kiev, we went to Pereiaslav. There's a weird and wonderful outdoor museum and I saw a well crane. "Oh! That's a well" -- no wonder he says it makes an eerie, uncanny noise, 'cause this huge crane operates the well. It's not a bucket. So, what is the tongue on a telephone? If you look hard enough, you see a little -- you can -- old-fashioned phones from the 1930s, the little -- there's a little plate that vibrates or something, and Bergelson calls it a tongue. Oh! Fun stuff. Not words but things. That's tremendous fun.

CW:How do you go about translating something like that?

HM:You read and read and read the text and then you come up with a lousy English translation, and then you wait a while and you come back and you -- No, that was wrong, that's wrong, no, that's not right. No, you missed that. And then, one 27:00day, it kind of hits you, what the style should be in English. You suddenly -- you know it should be kind of staccato, elliptical, fairly obscene. I think "Mides-hadin" is fairly obscene, and kind of rough and tumble in places but also very elegant. And it somehow -- you know what moves the author's making and you can sort of imitate the move. But it sort of takes a very long time and I don't know how else to -- I mean, I don't know how else to describe it. But it's very enjoyable. You feel very close to the writer.

CW:What did you learn from -- have you or are you learning from Bergelson?

HM:In terms of --

CW:Just that you didn't know before, that his -- reading his work allows you to --

HM:About him? I mean, he was a very private person. He did not like 28:00autobiographical disclosure. I think he loved the Yiddish language and Yiddish literature more than he loved any one person in his life. And he thought that it had come alive in a new way in him. And he knew it. I mean, he must -- he knew, I think, how good he was. He knew it and he wanted to bring his stuff to the world. He wanted to be translated and he wrote in a way that made him difficult and yet accessible. And he kept on defending himself that he was writing Jewish texts, which is very funny 'cause he was writing in Yiddish about the shtetl and yet he had to say, "It is, too, Jewish," almost in those words, about "Nokh alemen [The end of everything, lit. "after everyone"]." "It is, too, Jewish," 29:00like having one of those silly arguments. And I learned, also, something that another theorist said in general. You read letters from World War I era? He's not making huge historical pronouncements. He's planning. He's planning to revive Yiddish literature when the war is over. He's planning new journalistic enterprises. He's got money. He wants to use this money. He's not sitting there lamenting, although there was plenty to lament. He's planning his next move. Interesting. He did his work. And he said, "I'm sitting here and ikh tu mayn zakh." He does his -- "I'm doing my thing." And he has a lot of hopes for the future. And you think about that when you work on a writer like Bergelson -- I 30:00mean, didn't you know what was coming? Couldn't you tell? Yes and no. And then, I think about our time and I think, Are we also not paying attention in some -- I always think about that. Are we not paying attention in some crucial way? Are we self-deluded? Though I hate that narrative of he would -- they were all deluded. They weren't deluded. They knew. They had to know.

CW:Why should people read Bergelson?

HM:Why should people read Bergelson? I mean, why should you read any great author? Because you will be exhilarated, you'll be in tears. You'll be furious. You'll be confused. You'll have one of those fantastic adventures in reading. But you have to read very, very slowly. You can't read for what happens next, 31:00'cause as we know -- like, Chekhov, almost nothing happens, except in certain work. I don't -- why would you read any great author? I mean, I have a polemic, but I don't think that there's a reason to have an argument. I don't think -- that's not the reason. I mean, things cry out in Bergelson. Plates, dishes, trees, branches, leaves. Things cry out in pain. People are petty and resentful and somehow objects next to them understand better than they what's happening to them and it's fairly amazing, I think.

CW:I'm curious if -- what the impact, if any, of working on -- with Yiddish had 32:00on you and your own sense of identity, of Jewishness?

HM:I mean, I feel that I've always had a fairly strong sense of Jewish identity. I don't -- well, sometimes I say, "All right, we're going" -- people will say, Oh, there's this great TV series or this novel you should read. I'm, like, I've had enough. I've got war and Holocaust and pogrom. I'm, like, I have to lighten up a little, so -- I mean, in a kind of -- as a jokey answer. I don't think it's really changed much, since it kind of fulfills something that was kind of already there. And I want Yiddish to be like some other European language. Well, 33:00you're reading a great modernist work by Virginia Woolf, well, why shouldn't you read "The End of Everything" right next to it? It's a great language that can play with registers in a fantastic way. Other languages can, too. Well, if you're interested in that phenomenon, then why not include Yiddish? I mean, I guess that would be -- but that's not about my identity. The interesting thing -- the interesting reaction I've had, which really kind of infuriates me is -- so, I started out as a Dostoevsky scholar and wrote a couple of books purely about Russian language in literature. And if I see someone at a -- "Oh, well, you -- oh, maybe you should come give a talk." I've had this experience several times. "Oh, you're out here? Oh, would you like to come give a talk at the Russian East European Center?" And I say, "Sure, I'm working on this great 34:00author, Bergelson." "Oh, no, that's Jewish." He was born in the Russian Empire and he was executed by Stalin and he spoke at the First Congress of the Writers' Union and it's not Russian enough for you? So, that really bothers me. Like, come on. Multilingual, multiconfessional, multicultural, multidisciplinary, and yet you're putting up a wall. So, I'd like to see that wall go away.

CW:What do you think is there, from the Russian studies perspective, the opinion of Yiddish in general?

HM:Depends who you are. But I've seen big changes. I mean, maybe fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, people I know who were originally -- who are Russians -- I mean, they're Jews, 'cause they don't call themselves Russians. But Yiddish is low class, low prestige, which is the Soviet inheritance, that Yiddish is low 35:00prestige. But I think that it's coming back. And a scholar I know who writes about montage, he has a huge book in Russian about montage as a style in literature. And he includes Kulbak as a verbal montage artist. So, there you go. That's what I would like to see happen and that's what is happening. And I just taught a course this semester in which we read Bergelson and Woolf and Benjamin and Henri Bergson and Viktor Shklovsky. And all the students, they wrote papers about temporality and the -- durée and Benjamin and Bergelson. And so, it all -- it worked. They did it. So, that made me happy.

CW:What kind of students are you having come in to study Yiddish with you?

HM:All kinds. Mostly not Jewish. Some Jewish. I had a student who was from the communications department who's working on radical media. And so, it occurred to him that he's working on radical media in the '30s in -- US, he kind of needed to read Yiddish newspapers. So, that was fun. I had another student who -- I don't know why he wanted to study Yiddish, even, and he started giving papers in Yiddish 101 on Itzik Fefer, little presentations, and now he's getting a PhD at Stanford in Slavic studies. I don't know what's motivating, but I have a student who is interested in national identity, nationalism, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian. Also not Jewish. I mean, most of the students are not Jewish and I 37:00don't know -- I haven't asked them what brings them in. I think Yiddish has a certain kind of coolth now that it never had before and we could diagnose the reasons for that, but -- so, I'm very excited by these students. Who knew?

CW:Do you have any thoughts about the reasons?

HM:I actually don't. I haven't had that conversation yet. And I just -- I don't know. But I tell them, "You can do whatever you want because there's untried territory here. You can do this work from any angle that interests you, that you like, because chances are no one has gone near this text, or people have gone near this text but they've never talked about it in relation to this other 38:00text." So, it's fun, for them and for me. It's very exciting.

CW:From your perspective, what is the role of an academic in cultural transmission?

HM:You mean to the broader society? I don't think we have that much of a role in this country. And I think that many people would say that if there's going to be Yiddish, a revival of Yiddish, it's going to come out of the Second Enlightenment -- like the khsidish [Hasidic] community, people who depart from that community or stay in it and start writing and translating, that's going to be the next -- in their own Yiddish, which is actually distinct from the Yiddish that you -- YIVO Yiddish and so forth, that that's going to be the revival. I 39:00think the academy is pretty -- it is pretty kind of cut off from the rest of the world and all I want to do is sort of insert Yiddish here and there in the academy in different places. I don't think there's going to be a -- I mean, it depends where you are. In Toronto, in New York, in Los Angeles, maybe there's -- there are events, public comes in, maybe, if someone just ends up being there by accident, some young person and -- but I don't think I, as an academic, have much impact on the world beyond the academy.

CW:Are there any trends you've noticed since getting involved with this material?

HM:I think it's going more in the direction of Yiddish as a European language like other European languages. And we can do more and more and more and just 40:00insert it as we like. And we can talk about modernity and modernism, we can talk about diaspora and migration, all the things that we talk about. So, that's very satisfying. That's enough. That's satisfying.

CW:Well, is there any part of this story that you wanted to fill in that maybe I haven't asked you about?

HM:Fill in that you haven't asked me about. I think there is a narrative that I think needs to be adjusted and the narrative is the "death of": the death of Yiddish or the death of Yiddish speakers, the death of Yiddish literature, the absence of Jewish culture in here or there or other places. And I think when we 41:00get out of "is too," "is not" kind of argument, we can see little -- we can see the beginnings of -- not even the be-- evidence of vibrancy, interest, passion. And I don't want to make pronouncements, but I think Yiddish will be an object of scholarly study, college teaching, and so forth for a very long time to come. And it's a very interesting shift. It's happened very, very recently. And I think it's a very positive thing. When I was in college, I couldn't imagine that this would be happening, for example, some -- I was in college in the '70s. So, it's a huge shift.

CW:And what is your hope for the future of Yiddish?

HM:(laughs) I hope more and more people learn it, work with it. I don't expect -- I mean, there are some families I know that only speak Yiddish in the home. I mean, fantastic, but I don't know how many of those families there will be. But as long as there are people who want to learn languages other than English, and if they're interested in Eastern Europe or interested in Jewish culture, they're interested in literature -- that Yiddish can be an available choice for them. And we're having a crisis in the humanities anyway, and foreign language is especially the kind -- the ones that I hang out with, the Slavic ones -- will there still be Russian taught at university, let alone Polish? Now Yiddish? But I'm hoping that more and more German departments, like departments in Germany, 43:00will say, "Of course we have Yiddish. We have German, we have Swedish, we have Danish. Yeah, and we have Yiddish." But that's very utopian. (laughs)

CW:I always like to end by asking if you have an eytse [piece of advice], if you have any advice for someone interested in Yiddish and this field from your own experience?

HM:It isn't that hard a language. Not that I, by a long shot, feel myself to be -- master it. But in comparison to other European languages, it's a pretty simple grammar. It's easier than German. It's way easier than Russian or Polish. And as long as you stick that Hebrew alphabet on your refrigerator and just look at it all the time, you'll get used to it if you don't already have it. And 44:00that'll be the hardest thing. And that's it, that's -- it's a small language.

CW:Great. Well, thank you so much.

HM:Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]