YAEL CHAVER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is December 19th, 2016. I am here in San Diego at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference with Yael Chaver, and 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?

YAEL CHAVER: Yes, you do.

CW:Thank you. So, first of all, can you tell me a bit about your family background -- where your family came from, first?

YC:My family is basically European. My mother's family is from northern Poland, southern Lithuania, around Białystok. They moved around quite a bit before the 1:00First World War and went through the First World War as refugees, made it to the United States in 1926. The immigration laws had been passed; my grandfather was a rabbi, so he got in in the quota of religious people. My mother and her siblings had been members of the socialist Zionist youth organization, Hashomer Hatzair, so my mother immigrated from New York to Palestine in 1934. My father's family was also originally from the same area -- around Białystok -- Stawiski. I'm forgetting the name of that larger town. My father's grandparents immigrated to the Holy Land -- to erets yisroel -- in the 1880s, and my grandfather and 2:00father were born in the Old City of Jerusalem, der alter yishuv [the old Jewish settlement], and grew up speaking Yiddish. But since a lot of it was before the First World War, they grew up -- my father, and especially my grandfather -- grew up speaking a mixture of Yiddish, Arabic, Turkish. And then, they lived in Jerusalem. My father's family immigrated to the United States after the First World War. Economic conditions in Palestine were really bad after the British -- after the Turkish left, so they immigrated to the United States in 1921. My father then became a Zionist through some process that I never thought to ask him about, and immigrated to Palestine in 1934 -- and was one of the founders of 3:00the town of Ra'anana, north of Tel Aviv, which is now a very sort of high-quality town but then was very agricultural -- orange groves and so on. I was born in Palestine in 1938. When the Second World War broke out, my parents, both of whom were American citizens -- and I was registered as an American citizen at birth -- decided to go back to the United States for the duration, as they say. Especially my mother, who had had some terrible experiences during the First War. But it was always their intention to go back to Palestine, and in 1947, we went back to Palestine with my sister, who was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1942. So, I lived in Palestine for the first two-and-a-half years of my life, in mostly Brooklyn and Hartford for seven years, and then in 4:00Palestine for decades until I decided, with my own family, to move to the United States in the early '90s. At home, my parents -- since they were fluent in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English -- spoke a mixture of all languages. They never had this thing about Yiddish being a secret language. And my grandparents eventually came to Palestine -- Israel -- as well. So, the conversation sort of varied freely, depending on the topic and the mood, between all three languages.

CW:So, do you know much about what your family's life was like in Poland before 5:00the Palestine period -- your mother's --

YC:My mother's life -- she didn't like to talk about it. She lived in Poland in various small towns around Białystok. The last place from which they immigrated to the United States was Białystok. She left when she was sixteen -- never finished high school. She always claimed not to know Polish, although I find it difficult to understand. She told stories of anti-Semitism. There was one story about how she was walking home from school -- she went to the Jewish -- or the Hebrew -- Tarbut network of schools. And she was walking home one evening with her books, and a Polish policeman stopped her and threw all her books to the ground. And so, when it became sort of the thing in Israel for families to take 6:00trips -- family trips, extended generations, to search for roots, my mother always said that she would never set foot in Poland again. And I'm afraid I inherited a lot of that attitude. My father's family, on the other hand -- in the Old City of Jerusalem, they were on pretty good terms with the local Arabs. My father told stories of the peddlers, the shopkeepers, and so on. The Jews did not own property -- or very few Jews owned property in the Old City -- so the landlords were Arabs. But things were on a pretty even keel.

CW:So, what is the first home that you remember from your childhood? Where?

YC:Oh. In Hartford, Connecticut, when I was five years old. I do not remember anything of Palestine from before we left. I've heard so many stories that I almost seem to remember them -- that there was this long ship journey around Africa from Port Said in 1941. It was a ten-week trip. I got mumps along the way; the ship's doctor was a drunk -- and this is all from my mother. He wanted my mother and me to leave the ship somewhere in Africa; she flatly refused. And so, that must have been a horrific experience. And then, when we came to the United States, we lived -- my father came a year later, and my mother and I lived with her parents in Brooklyn, which is where I really learned to speak Yiddish. And then, when my father came a year later -- he always had hopes that 8:00the war would end soon, but it wasn't going to end. So, then we moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where we had family members -- in-laws. So, I basically remember that first house in Hartford, Connecticut from when I was about five years old.

CW:And can you describe it a little bit -- the house?

YC:Well, we were renting from a cousin of my father's. I mean, the family networks were really so important. It's like my daughter-in-law today says -- my daughter-in-law's not Jewish -- and I say, "Well, we're going somewhere, and actually, I have a cousin there," and she says, "You guys" -- meaning my husband and I -- "You guys have cousins everywhere." (laughs) Which is pretty true. So, we rented -- I think it was the ground floor of a house that was owned by a 9:00cousin of my father's. And I guess it was a pretty standard '40s place -- not fancy. One of my father's brothers was a very successful businessman, and he owned a big house with a lawn and a little swimming pool. And I guess my mother was always envious of her brother-in-law -- whom she loved dearly, but that was like an alternative, you know, American vision of what life could be like.

CW:And what was the atmosphere in your home? What felt Jewish about your home growing up?

YC:Everything. For one thing, my parents spoke Hebrew with me and taught me to read and write in Hebrew. We celebrated the holidays. I don't recall anything 10:00that was not Jewish. I do recall that when it came time for me to go to school -- to go to first grade -- my parents were, of course, very proud of the fact that I could read and write in Hebrew, and so the principal of the school wanted to see whether this was true. So, he sat me down with a Hebrew Bible -- which I guess my parents brought -- and there I was, at six years old, reading from the Hebrew Bible. Of course, he didn't understand a word -- this was a public school -- but he sort of could not comprehend it, and so he figured the stories were true. And so, I started school at second grade (laughs) -- which may have been a mistake, but there it is. But everything -- we had very close connections with family. And my parents were fervent Zionists, so everything was geared towards Palestine.

CW:Were you part of a youth movement?

YC:No. I was too young for that. I was later, in Palestine -- in Israel. Yeah.

CW:And did you have a favorite yontev [holiday] as a kid growing up?

YC:I think it was probably Pesach, because I got to be with my cousins. And we'd go under the table and drive my grandmother crazy, and she'd always try to put us down for a nap before the seder, and of course that never worked -- we'd be jumping around on the bed. So, I think that was it.

CW:And can you say a little more about the languages at home -- Yiddish and Hebrew -- and how much -- and how they were mixed?

YC:So, the quote-unquote "official language" was Hebrew, since my parents were 12:00firmly decided to go back to Palestine as soon as possible, and they wanted me to be able to go straight into a Hebrew-speaking school. And I think we mainly did speak Hebrew at home in my presence. My parents, among themselves, shifted between Hebrew and Yiddish very freely. Of course, family stories involved a lot of Yiddish, and telling family stories was the preferred entertainment around the table. And I spoke Yiddish outside the home. I remember being on a bus one day with my mother, and she was speaking Hebrew to me, and I was terribly embarrassed -- I would not speak Hebrew in public. Because, you know, of course, when you're seven, eight, nine years old, all you want to do is just fit in. But 13:00at home, the languages just still were mixed.

CW:So, speaking Yiddish in public rather than English? Or --

YC:I never actually spoke Yiddish, except with my grandparents, but it was part of my everyday life. I didn't speak Yiddish with my parents. (laughs) They wanted to speak Hebrew -- only Hebrew at home -- rak ivrit [Hebrew: only Hebrew]. So, I spoke very little Yiddish as a child. But I was sort of surrounded by Yiddish, I guess, language and culture to a certain degree.

CW:Are there any famous or infamous family stories from these storytelling sessions that you remember?

YC:Nothing outlandish. Nothing scandalous. They didn't speak of such things around the children. I do remember one story my mother told about when she was, 14:00I guess, maybe ten or eleven years old. She spent the summer with one of her uncles -- with one of her paternal uncles -- in the town of Stawiski, which is north or northeast of Białystok. And that uncle had many children. He had been married twice, so there were many, many cousins there. And they taught her to ride a bicycle -- which sort of seemed very natural at the time, but now that I think of it, for a Jewish girl from an observant Orthodox family to be riding a bicycle as a preteen was really sort of unusual, and it's stuck in my mind.

CW:And what was the observance in the home growing up?

YC:It was kosher. It was a kosher home. My parents were not observant in any 15:00ritual fashion, but most of my parents' -- well, my grandparents were all Orthodox. My maternal grandfather was a rabbi; my paternal grandfather was a melamed [Jewish teacher in a traditional school] in Brooklyn. And my parents married in a very secular environment in Palestine in 1935. But they immediately decided to keep a kosher home, because they wanted family members to feel comfortable -- particularly the parents. And my mother's oldest brother was one of the founders of Bnei Brak. When that family immigrated from Poland to the United States, he decided he was not going to do to di treyfene medine [the non-kosher land], and emigrated to Palestine, and became one of the movers and shakers of Bnei Brak. So, my parents wanted him to be among others. He, however, 16:00was so observant that my mother's kashres was never enough for him. So, that made family visits a little awkward.

CW:So, what were --

YC:But hold on --

CW:Oh, go ahead.

YC:Let me just say that we did go to shul on holidays, although my father would later take his hoe and start working in the backyard. So, it was a combination which, I think, was not that unusual in Palestine at the time, for Zionists to be sort of both traditional in some ways -- in many ways -- and to carry on the Zionist socialist tradition of working the land and so on -- in the same day, on Shabbos -- on Shabbat.

CW:Looking back to your childhood self, what was your feeling about Palestine, Israel -- how did you feel about this plan of moving back there?

YC:As a child, I didn't see much point in it, which is one reason -- I guess the main reason -- that I hung on to my English. I kept reading English. And we had -- there were visitors -- cousins and uncles who would visit Israel fairly often in the early '50s, so I had chances -- I had the chance to speak English. I read English -- I just read everything voraciously. I did not read Yiddish, interestingly. But it was kind of a point of pride for me and for my own personality to preserve that American part of me. And English in the '40s when 18:00we came back -- the British Mandate was still in force, and the British were viewed as enemies -- the authorities -- and learning English was a kind of treason. You were betraying the Zionist cause if you learned -- if you liked English. So, I had to sort of keep my English under wraps for -- because again, you want to fit in, and so on. And I sort of took for granted that there should be -- that the State of Israel was a good thing. And I went along with the Zionist view.

CW:Was there similarly any feeling about Yiddish as you were growing up?

YC:Yiddish was considered -- among Zionists -- the language of the past, the 19:00language of diaspora, especially when survivors started arriving in Israel. They were not welcomed very cordially, and Yiddish was emblematic of that. But Yiddish, for me, was one of the languages of home. So, I had no problem with Yiddish, because my entire family spoke Yiddish, my grandparents knew Hebrew but were not comfortable in Hebrew. So, I did not share that -- you know, ostracizing Yiddish -- at all.

CW:Was there talk -- were you aware of what was going on in Europe as you were growing up -- the war?

YC:Not very much. Fortunately, my immediate family -- my grandparents, some of 20:00their siblings, most of their siblings -- well, my father's parents were all -- and their siblings were all in Palestine. My mother's siblings had all immigrated to the United States, and many of her uncles and aunts -- most of them -- I think there was only maybe one or two families that were left in Europe. So, there wasn't this very immediate, you know, painful awareness of what was happening. So, I was very lucky in that respect. Later, when I married, my husband's mother was the only one of her siblings to -- she and a sister were the only ones of her family to have made it out of Europe. And so, she would -- my husband's stories were that she would listen religiously to a radio program 21:00that was on every day in Israel searching for survivors -- searching for relatives. But I think I was more interested in the war from a general point of view. I followed the headlines; I followed the progression of the armies on the map, and so on. I and one of my cousins were very interested in all of the -- you know, the Soviet generals with their very exotic names and so on -- and place names. But I was very lucky not to have been exposed to that terrible experience -- at second hand. It was only much later.

CW:You mentioned earlier that you grew up exposed to Yiddish culture through your grandparents and parents. Are there examples of that? Music, literature --

YC:Not literature. Music -- certainly, my parents loved to sing. And a lot of the singing -- this was on Friday nights -- so it would start with the zmires [Shabbos hymns sung at the table] and then move into other types of songs. And some of the Zionist songs they sang were in Yiddish. Which I took for granted at the time, but when I was doing my research on Yiddish and Palestine, I found a songbook that my father had compiled -- that there were some -- about sixty songs -- words -- no music. He couldn't read notes, but he was very musical and he had a lovely singing voice, as did my mother. They were both members of choruses in Ra'anana. But they sang Yiddish songs as well, and in his songbook, 23:00I found a good proportion of Zionist Yiddish songs, which is one of the things that set me on my path in my research.

CW:Could you give an --

YC:Oh, and my father loved khazones [Jewish liturgical music]. So, we had records. And there was a program on Israel radio -- it must have been Saturday, which is indicative of the kind of secular connection to Yiddish -- because, of course, an Orthodox Jew would never open -- turn on the radio on Shabbos. But there was a program Shabbos afternoon and then Shabbos in the evening -- an hour, maybe -- I can't remember the exact timespan -- of khazones, which was still, you know, close enough to the secular settlers in Israel.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Could you give an example of one of these songs -- the Yiddish Zionist songs?

YC:No, I'm sorry. I'm blanking on that.

CW:That's fine.

YC:If you had asked me ahead of time --

CW:That's fine (laughs) --

YC:-- (laughs) I could have gone through the songbook.

CW:You still have a songbook?

YC:I do. I do. I mention it in my book. Actually, a few years ago -- my mother passed away in 2004, and at that point, I decided to write a family history. Because at that time, I already had seven grandchildren, and I figured if I didn't write it down, all of that history would be lost: the history that I received orally from my parents about my grandparents, about the uncles, about their grandparents, and so on. So, I wrote all of that down. And so, my father's songbook -- I think the table of contents is reproduced in that family history 25:00-- which I wrote in English, because my entire family lives here. But I can't remember any example offhand.

CW:So, I have to ask -- what was your first impression of Palestine when you went back there?

YC:Hot. Sandy. Ants all over the place. The street we lived on was not paved, so I had to walk -- we walked to school and so on over the sand. But there was a lot going on, and my parents were very involved in what was happening. In late 1947 -- I remember the U.N. declaration in November of that year and all of the 26:00enormous excitement, coupled with the hostilities that immediately broke out. My father had been a member of Haganah before, so he was sort of the civil defense -- part of the civil defense right after the hostilities broke out. And then, I got completely caught up in the socialist Zionist youth group that I was in and --

CW:Was that also Hashomer?

YC:No, no. That was -- you know, everything -- (laughs) there are so many splinters in all of the Jewish ideological movements, and those youth groups were no exception. So, I was a member of a slightly less left-wing group. It was called Hamahanot ha'olim -- I guess "The Ascending Camps," literally. But I did not become that fond of the idea of kibbutz life. So, I was a member of the movement, but decided not to go into the kibbutz trajectory, which some of my 27:00friends did. There was stringent rationing in the first years. We were very lucky in that respect; we had a quarter of an acre right next to our house in Ra'anana, and so we raised tsign [goats] and oyfes [chickens] (laughs) and had many fruit trees and planted potatoes and vegetables. So, we were never short of food, and in fact, we used to give extras to family members who did not have that. And this ultra-religious uncle who lived in Bnei Brak, who did not allow his children to eat at my mother's table -- and she nearly chewed his head off -- but he was happy to go home with fruit and eggs. Yeah, so I was not too 28:00affected by that. There was a war going on, and people I knew were killed -- young men, leaving young widows and babies and so on. So that was a big part of my childhood -- you know, '48, '49, into '50.

CW:And just personally, what was your exposure with and relations with non-Jews in Palestine and then early state Israel?

YC:There were no -- I had no relations with non-Jews. The Arab population was sort of theoretical -- hypothetical. I did not come into any contact with non-Jews.

CW:Can you explain a little bit about your educational trajectory, just briefly, to give some context?

YC:I started public school in the United States, continued in Palestine and Israel. Completed high school, and went to a teachers' college. Served in the army as a teacher in what was then a new settlement, the town of Dimona in the northern Negev, where I taught children of the Moroccan immigrants, and that was my first exposure to Mizrahi -- I guess culture is a very broad term, but I actually -- I was in close touch with many of the people, and we were -- there 30:00was a group of us teachers who were doing our -- this was our army service -- young women -- so we were invited to homes and got to speak -- of course, see the families and have some of that wonderful food and so on. And when I was done with my army service, I actually had started my bachelor's earlier -- in teachers' college, there was a short-lived experiment of collaboration between the teachers' college in Jerusalem -- David Yellin -- and the Hebrew University, where we could take classes at the university and get credit for them. So, I started my bachelor's while I was still in teachers' college. And once I had 31:00finished my army service, I went back to the university, got a job at the university library, and went on with my bachelor's. Dropped out again, and then I got -- I was working at a publishing house called the Israel Program for Scientific Translations in Jerusalem, which, as I understand it, was a setup designed as a kind of US aid to Israel. This was really actually quite interesting -- this was in the '60s. There were quite a few immigrants from Russia -- this was not immigration from Russia, but there were a lot of Jews from Russia who had lived in Shanghai, and these Russian Jews immigrated to 32:00Israel in the early '60s. Many of them were scientists; they knew Russian very well; and so there was this translation institute that was set up that was, I guess, financed by US aid, because they were very interested in translating Russian research works.

CW:Into English?

YC:Into English. I learned a little bit of Russian, but I was an editor, so I learned enough Russian to find my way around the Russian. And my English, which I had kept up all this time, was good enough. My bachelor's was in English literature -- when I started my studies. So, I worked in that institute for 33:00quite a few years -- and had no thought of going back to school. Married, had three children, and all that goes with that. And then, towards the end -- in the '80s, I thought that I should probably finish my bachelor's. I went back to the Hebrew University, and they surprisingly accepted all the credits that I had amassed twenty years earlier. So, I got my bachelor's in English and archaeology, became a tourist guide. And then, in the early '90s, my family and I immigrated to the United States. We were all, I guess, ready for a change. So, 34:00when we came in 1991 -- I had finished my bachelor's -- I applied to UC Berkeley and started my master's and Ph.D. in '93. And initially, it was going to be in Hebrew literature -- the role of archaeology in Hebrew literature, which I still think is extremely fascinating, but at some point -- do you want to hear the whole story? (laughs)

CW:Yeah, I do.

YC:When I was getting ready for my Ph.D. work, I needed an extra research language -- no, I'm sorry, an extra Middle Eastern spoken language. I was certainly going to do work on Hebrew literature, and the department I was in, Near Eastern Studies, offered Arabic, Persian, Turkish -- none of which 35:00interested me in the least, and I did not want to spend any time on that. And then, I was talking to a faculty member -- can I mention names? (laughs)

CW:Yeah.

YC:Daniel Boyarin, who in his inimitable way, said, "You know Yiddish. Why don't you make Yiddish your other spoken language?" And I said, "Well, you know, it's not really spoken." So, he pointed me in the direction of a study that was done in the late '30s by Mordecai Kosover, "Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish." Actually, I was at the panel yesterday -- Eve Jochnowitz talked about a study that Kosover carried out about food in Yiddish culture. So, it's the same Kosover who lived in Palestine for many years, and that was -- "Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish" was his dissertation, which was published many years later in English in Israel. So, I got hold of that book and started leafing 36:00through it. And all of a sudden, I could hear my grandfather speaking. Because he gives a lot of examples, and it's -- the language is a mixture of Yiddish, Arabic, Turkish, and English. And so, I became completely fascinated by the idea of Yiddish in Palestine. So, I switched direction -- I was very fortunate in Berkeley to have the most wonderful mentor, Chana Kronfeld, who herself is very deeply interested in Yiddish and profoundly interested in furthering Yiddish. So, I had all this encouragement. I did a Yiddish reading exam, which is what I needed (laughs) as a language requirement. And the Kosover book was proof that it's a spoken language, right? And then, I went on to get my degree from Near 37:00Eastern Studies in Yiddish literature.

CW:So, you mentioned a couple names, but any important mentors that you want to point out in that switch to Yiddish?

YC:Yes, well, I'd love to mention Robert Alter, whose field was not Yiddish, but he was very, very supportive. He was very interested. And I think he probably knows some Yiddish. He was very supportive. What can I say? He and Chana Kronfeld were both -- Robert has retired in the meantime. They were in both Near Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature. So, in his capacity of wearing two 38:00hats and Chana's wonderful mentorship -- those were my most important mentors. They really supported me all along the way.

CW:And what was it like for you personally to start working with Yiddish more intimately at that point in your life?

YC:Well, I suppose in Freudian terms, which are not very popular these days, it was, in a way, a return of the repressed. It was a reconnection with roots. "Roots" is not the right word, but sort of a very long-range kind of roots -- and discovering Yiddish culture, which I only knew from everyday talk and family stories and so on. So, it was very, very fascinating for me personally to 39:00connect -- and I guess in a sense reconnect, although at the time I didn't think of it in those terms, but I guess at a very deep level it was very meaningful.

CW:And did you find you could read Yiddish right away, or is that something you had to work on?

YC:Yes, that was really the greatest surprise. Because I had never really read in Yiddish, except for some letters. I'm pretty good at deciphering handwriting -- that's one of the things I do now as a community service -- I decipher inscriptions on family photos and letters and stuff. But I wasn't -- you know, I said, Okay, I'm going to make Yiddish one of my reading languages, but hold on -- can I actually read Yiddish? So, I got hold of a book, and lo and behold, I could read Yiddish. Of course, I knew Hebrew. I was familiar with the alphabet, I didn't need to make that switch. But it was a complete surprise. Later, I went 40:00on to take some Yiddish courses with Eli Katz. Oh, I should mention Eli, who was a very, very important -- lovely person -- just a very, very heymish [familiar] and encouraging -- he passed away ten years ago -- but he was a wonderful presence in my life. I'm very fortunate to have had these mentors in this field that had nothing to do with anything I had done before. So, yeah -- so I read Yiddish. I was able to read Yiddish -- using a dictionary, but you can use a dictionary in that language exam. I still use a dictionary quite a bit when I'm reading literature -- older literature or for regional phrases. And I use a German dictionary and a Russian dictionary. But yes, it was somewhere. It was latent, and it came out.

CW:And who were the writers that you sort of discovered during this work?

CY:The writers I discovered were writers who are not known at all, and that was part of the fun. The whole idea of a Yiddish culture in Zionist Palestine was something that had not been studied, that had been discounted. It had been officially repressed. Once I started doing research, though, I found a great number of periodicals, several books that were published, and what I found very interesting about these writers -- and they're all mentioned in my book, which came out in 2004 -- and in these journals -- that very often, because their language was Yiddish, they were able to sound a critique of the Zionist enterprise that Hebrew writers did not do for various reasons. Most Hebrew 42:00writers kept the official Zionist line. I can think of some notable exceptions, but most of the Hebrew writers during the '20s, '30s, '40s -- and many of the Yiddish writers were also very fervent Zionists, and many of them were kibbutz members. There was the poet Arie Shamri, who was a kibbutz member -- and others, many others. But -- so I had all this enormous amount of sources, and I found among them quite a few who sounded different notes. I worked mainly on three writers. One was Zalmen Brokhes, who wrote about Palestine before the First World War -- very romantically on one level, but also very conflicted on another 43:00level. Sort of idolizing Arab culture, while at the same time recognizing that he could never really become an Arab. Another writer was Avrom Rives, Rives -- who was a socialist and had been published in Poland -- was an expressionist. Once I realized what they were all -- this was the modernist period, which -- in Yiddish literature, expressionism appeared a bit later than it did -- there's this time lag. Rives was very much an expressionist. And also attuned to Arab life, Arab culture. One of his most interesting stories is about a teenaged Arab boy living in Jaffa who was completely enthralled by Tel Aviv. So, it's very 44:00interesting to see this great Zionist enterprise -- which it was; I'm not knocking it at all -- but seeing it through the eyes of this Arab teenager from Jaffa. The third writer was a poet who had been published in Poland in Polish. This is Rikudah Potash, who immigrated to Palestine in the '30s and continued to write in Yiddish. She was very individualist. She was not a member of the organization -- the Association of Yiddish Journalists and Writers, which was organized in the '20s under the auspices of the British government. Potash was not a member of this group. But -- and she wrote in Yiddish. And what I found 45:00very, very interesting -- she was the librarian of the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem, where her brother was the director of the institute at the time in the '30s. She became very interested in Mesopotamian mythology, ancient Near Eastern sources, and it's really captivating to see these ancient Near Eastern mythologies through the prism of her Yiddish sensibility. Offhand, some very interesting poem cycles talk about Babylonian gods and the hanging gardens of Babylon and the ancient Near Eastern god of Tammuz, who's also an Egyptian god. So, I think the Palestinian experience of these Yiddish writers was really very, 46:00very special -- very unique. And I think I was very fortunate to have discovered that and become so immersed in it and so captivated in it that I was able to complete my work and publish my book and give talks at conferences, other places. I was a guest at the Yiddish Book Center a number of years ago. Yeah.

CW:So, just on a very practical level, how did you find these books? How did you actually discover that these writers were there?

YC:I can't remember the whole process, but I love delving into catalogues and just leafing -- at the time, the Hebrew University had card catalogues, so I 47:00would just leaf through that. And I just got so interested in the topic that I just went into it -- I can't remember (laughs) the initial phases, but it was just a lot of slogging through catalogues. And talking to people -- I should mention another very important mentor, Avraham Novershtern, in Jerusalem, whom I met many times, who pointed me in the direction of some very interesting and very important authors and put me in contact with very important sources -- and was very supportive, for years, of my topic. He's the director of the Beit Shalom Aleichem in Tel Aviv. He just recently won a prize for his work in the area of Yiddish culture in Israel, which is really -- it would have been unheard 48:00of fifty years ago, forty years ago. So, Avraham has been an indispensable source and a great help to me all these years.

CW:Could you just explain briefly about the repression of Yiddish in early state Israel and how that worked, and how people managed to still write in Yiddish despite that?

YC:Well, I should say that the Yiddish production decreased after -- certainly after the establishment of Israel, I think. There was a whole -- almost thirty collections of Yiddish literature that were published between the '20s and 1949. And for one thing, I think people were really in a state of shock by the war -- 49:00by what happened in the war. The official attitude of Zionism towards Yiddish was that it was, you know, the -- I later found -- realized that this was also a very socialist, a very communist approach. Out with the old; we're constructing a new culture -- a whole new construct of people and culture. And Yiddish, being so identifiable, was one of the first things that had to go in Zionism. There was a very strident campaign against Yiddish in the '30s and '40s on the part of 50:00Hebrew enthusiasts. The most extreme group was organized in what was called the Hebrew Language Battalion -- sorry, the Battalion of the Protectors of Hebrew Language -- G'dud meginei hasafa ha'ivrit. And they were very vociferous. They threw stones at a theater that showed a Yiddish film in Tel Aviv. They were very much against the -- and succeeded -- to prevent the establishment of a Yiddish department in the Hebrew University in the late '20s. And so, this carried over. I guess people really were so enthusiastic about creating a whole new culture, a whole new person -- a new world, in effect. When survivors started coming -- it 51:00was very silly. It was a very complex relationship of Israeli society to the Holocaust survivors. And on the one hand, there was this sense that wasn't shared by everybody but still affected -- I think I would say affected a broad view of, They should have come to Palestine. Never mind that, you know, there were stringent quotas and it was impossible -- and they couldn't have gone to other places. Well, they should have come when they had the chance. It wasn't so simple. It sounds nice. And then the survivors started coming, and they were in such terrible shape. And they spoke Yiddish. So, it was another emblem of their sorry state, and, you know, who wants to be like them? Some of that comes across 52:00in David Grossman's "See Under: Love," which has been beautifully translated into English. The first chapter -- I mean, the whole book is an expression of the Holocaust experience, starting in Israel in the '50s and sort of going back and forth -- it's a very nonlinear -- it's fascinating, one of the great books. Yet entire neighborhoods did speak Yiddish -- survivor neighborhoods -- but they were somehow out of the mainstream of Israeli culture. So, I could understand that at the time. I didn't condone it, but, you know, it -- that's what it was. And as I say, again, fortunately, I did not have any family members -- immediate 53:00family members -- who were survivors. Maybe if I had had first-hand experience with survivors, I would have developed a different attitude, but I just accepted -- you know, this is the way it is.

CW:And in that period, as well, Yiddish culture was being produced for and by the survivor community -- is that how it --

YC:Very little. Very little. What was being produced for the survivor community -- and for the masses of new immigrants that came in -- were elementary Hebrew textbooks. The idea was that in order to fit in, you needed to learn Hebrew. Going back to my army days when I was a teacher in Dimona, one of my jobs was to work with parents and teach them Hebrew -- and this was a community of 54:00completely Moroccan immigrants. So, the idea was to absorb them into the Hebrew-speaking community. And so, there was very little Yiddish production. The last Yiddish collection was in 1949. People started producing Holocaust memoirs, but people who read them were other Holocaust survivors. So, that whole Holocaust experience -- it was very scary for Israelis. It was something they did not want to deal with. It was only in the '80s -- and there was an interesting panel yesterday -- only in the '80s -- actually, with David Grossman's book, which was a huge bestseller -- that the whole topic of survivors and the Holocaust sort of rose to the forefront. I should mention, 55:00though, that Yiddish was actually such an important part of Israeli culture, a latent part, that Itzik Manger's "Megile lider [Megillah poems]" were produced in Yiddish in Tel Aviv in the '60s and were hugely successful -- some very, very beautiful music, very apposite music. It was a huge success in the '60s. And I don't -- I was not that interested at the time. I don't recall reactions. But the fact that it was so successful -- I started thinking about this later -- is really proof that there was a connection to Yiddish, even -- I mean, despite the official negation and pejorative attitude towards Yiddish. But the "Megile 56:00lider" were a fantastic success at the time. So, it's a very, very complex relationship. And nowadays, it's sort of trendy to learn Yiddish. I mean, that's a whole other topic.

CW:Well, before we leave your scholarly work, I'm just curious if working on these writers who were writing in Yiddish in pre-state Palestine -- did that change at all your own view of that period or your own understanding of your family history in that time?

YC:It did. It did. Because it brought out the complexity of the process. My scholarly work -- it brought out the complexity of the whole, you know, 57:00immigration, Zionism, jettisoning old -- quote-unquote "old" values. I was fortunate in my family -- but this may have happened in other families, as well, where khazones was listened to, Yiddish songs were sung. And so, this was something that brought out for me how very difficult the process was. Following Benjamin Harshav's wonderful "Language in Time of Revolution," I read Rokhl Katznelson -- Rachel Katznelson's wonderful -- I keep saying "wonderful" because this was all very exciting to me -- her memoir. And she edited a volume of women's stories -- women pioneers, women workers -- "Vos arbeterin dertseyln 58:00[Tales of women workers]." And the stories in that volume -- and then I found other histories in other volumes -- of the terrible difficulty -- the difficulty of leaving your culture and not being able to continue with that culture. Which is something that I didn't really think about growing up -- you know, certainly as a child -- as a teenager, I just went with the flow. And it was not -- I mean, a lot of the families that I knew had immigrated from Europe before the Holocaust, and there was Yiddish in the background. So, yeah, one of my parents' best friends had been a very important Po'ale Tsiyon educator, Baruch Ostrovsky. 59:00And they were very close with my parents in Ra'anana. And I only found out later how important he had been in Yiddish education. But he -- they did speak Yiddish, and there was Yiddish all around. It was only when I did my research and really started thinking about it and applying it to my own family history that I thought, you know, what a wrench it must have been and how difficult it was for many of these -- I would say all of these people. It was especially difficult for people whose families remained in Europe -- you know, once the war broke out. So, thankfully, I was spared that. But it's part of the whole experience.

CW:And nowadays, what do you see as the discussion in the academic community in 60:00Israel about Yiddish? What is the place of Yiddish there?

YC:It's complicated. (laughs) I have to say that Yiddish -- secular Yiddish -- now we have to distinguish very clearly between secular and observant or Haredi Yiddish. I'm always asked, Is Yiddish a dying language? And I say no. It's alive and kicking, and actually becoming more and more -- not popular, but the demographics of the Haredi community are such that the numbers of Yiddish speakers are increasing. But of course, it's not that secular -- that short window of the early twentieth century -- I guess I would say late nineteenth century up to the outbreak of the Second World War, where Yiddish literature was 61:00so forward-looking and so modernist. It wasn't recognized because of the language barrier, but writers like Markish, Bergelson, and Glatstein are up there with the best of European modernism. So, nowadays -- I just mentioned -- it's become sort of trendy. There are Yiddish groups, there are Yiddish classes -- at Beit Shalom Aleichem, there are private groups. But I don't see secular Israelis trying to establish Yiddish schools. Yiddish is taught in some high schools in Israel; it's optional. I don't have the numbers on that. I suspect they're -- well, I don't know the whole cultural -- there are so many cultural issues in Israel these days, so I don't know enough about that (laughs) and 62:00don't want to get into it. But I think among secular Israelis, it's close to their hearts, but it's not something -- unless they're in the academic world -- that they would think of pursuing. In the academic world, funding is a great issue. In Israel, perhaps more than in other places, because the government subsidizes a lot of higher education, and the tone these days is not so encouraging to Ashkenazi culture -- and I'll just leave it at that. (laughs) And in the United States, as well. I mean, there's -- this conference is going on. There are, I think, thousands of people here, but only maybe three or four Yiddish panels. And I don't know how many -- you know, fourteen panels in four 63:00sessions a day, three days -- so an enormous number of panels, but not that many in Yiddish. So, there's a lot of interest, but I think it's going to be academic interest.

CW:And you also teach Yiddish.

YC:I do.

CW:Any patterns in terms of the types of students that come into your classroom?

YC:First of all, the numbers are small -- sometimes extremely small. (laughs) The university is very tolerant (laughs) in giving me the chance to teach. Many come out of family connections. Some of my students wanted to be able to talk to bobe [grandmother] on the phone and told me how excited bobe was when her eynikl 64:00[grandchild] actually conversed with her in Yiddish. Mostly -- I'd say ninety percent -- of Jewish background. Quite a few students of comparative literature. Jewish students who have decided to make Yiddish one of their languages. An interesting twist on this is that Yiddish is in the German Department, which is a historical irony in its own right. And Yiddish -- I found out as I was studying Yiddish for my Ph.D. with Eli Katz and talking to other people -- that Yiddish preserves aspects of Middle High German that have disappeared from current German. So, students of German have come to my classes to learn Yiddish as a window into a bygone part of the German language, which involves a lot of 65:00dedication, because they have to learn a different alphabet, they have to switch over from writing left-to-right to writing right-to-left. And some of them have become so enthralled by Yiddish that they've been incorporating Yiddish into their dissertations. And some of them -- actually, all of them -- well, they're not all non-Jews, but they go on to be GSIs in our Yiddish program.

CW:What's a GSI?

YC:Oh, a TA -- what used to be called a TA. We call it graduate student instructor. Mindl and Jenna were research instructors. So, most of these students from the German Department are not Jews. And so, in a way, this is 66:00their introduction into Jewish culture as a whole -- Ashkenazi Jewish culture, I should say. So yeah, that's the experience. This year -- this past semester -- I had a graduate student in Japanese who became interested in Yiddish just out of sheer interest and took the two language courses to complete a year, and he's taken a Yiddish literature course with me this past semester. Last year, I had a geology major -- a Jewish kid who was very bright and just was interested in Yiddish, so he took the language classes. So, it's a mix. And it's very stimulating and a lot of fun.

CW:Do you have any favorite writer to teach?

YC:Well, I love teaching the classic writers -- although sometimes, it might 67:00prove difficult, so I always end up -- I'm always very optimistic when I get a reader together, but I end up actually teaching -- or we end up reading a lot less (laughs) than is in the reader. So, I like teaching Peretz; I like teaching Sholem Aleichem; I really love teaching the modernists. And I just try to vary. This past semester, I've taught the Yiddish writers in Palestine, some of which were topics of my research and some who were not. So, I'm just, you know, eclectic.

CW:Is there something that you found one can access through Yiddish that might 68:00be difficult to access otherwise?

YC:Yes, of course. That whole -- I keep saying "culture," but, you know, it's a whole world -- that's no longer accessible, that would not, just in the normal -- even in the normal course of events, would not have been accessible. Modernity was doing its thing, and people moved and lost touch with cultures. And this -- it's a common process all over the world. So, as with all literatures, it's a window onto a culture that is not accessible.

CW:And how does Yiddish fit into your broader Jewish identity at this phase of 69:00your life?

YC:It does very much. Whereas I would say previously, because of my long background in Israel, I would say it was mostly Israeli identity. But I now have a Yiddish dimension to my Israeli identity, which has been very enriching, and surprising to me. After those initial surprises when I started doing my research, I really did not imagine that Yiddish would come to be such an important part of my life -- to the point that my children, who grew up in Israel, wanted me to teach Yiddish to their children. But at the time, I opted 70:00to teach them Hebrew, because we do have a lot of family connections in Israel, and at the time, the Israeli connection seemed more significant. And there's only so much you can do with kindergarten kids and so on. But they know that Yiddish is part of my life. And I'm hoping -- or, you know, who knows? At some point, they might want to access that -- through my work, through the family history that I wrote.

CW:Do you consider yourself a Yiddishist?

YC:I think I do. I think I do. Yeah. (laughs)

CW:And what does that mean to you?

YC:Well, in large part, Yiddish culture now is a part of my life. And I'm lucky to have been able to do work and to teach. And I'm active in the Yiddish groups 71:00and activities in the Bay Area. I teach a Yiddish literature group once a week in Berkeley for the community. I have different hats, but Yiddish is definitely one of the major ones.

CW:Well, is there anything -- any other topics you wanted to touch on today that I didn't ask about?

YC:Probably lots, but I think (laughs) I've talked enough.

CW:(laughs) Okay. Well, I'd just like -- to end -- to hear if you have an eytse [piece of advice] for anyone who would be interested in learning Yiddish -- advice for them?

YC:I would say stick with it, because you gain access to such a rich and varied 72:00worldwide culture. I haven't even mentioned the Yiddish production in South America and in Australia. I haven't gone into postwar Yiddish -- that's a whole, huge field, with amazing stuff that's been produced. It's worth the effort, because you have access to an area that is not accessible to very many people. So, you'll be pretty special if you (laughs) become fluent and interested in Yiddish.

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

YC:A hartsikn dank.

[END OF INTERVIEW]