Keywords:America; Dan Forman; Islam; Islamophobia; July 4th; Kent State shooting; Muslim; patriotism; Shloyme Simon; Solomon Simon; Tsarist Russia; United States
Keywords:Brooklyn, New York; family; grandfather; grandson; Great Neck, New York; Jewish holidays; love; Miami Beach, Florida; Shloyme Simon; Solomon Simon
Keywords:1910s; American Army; dentist; GI Bill; Hebrew school teacher; housepainter; laundry presser; New Jersey; New York; Shloyme Simon; Solomon Simon; U.S. Army; US Army; wagon driver
Keywords:anti-communist; anti-religion; communism; Jewish community; Karl Marx; secularism; Shloyme Simon; social justice; socialism; Solomon Simon; The Essence of Judaism; The Jews Among the Nations; Tokh-Yiddishkayt; Yiddish culture; Yiddish language; Yiddish literature; Yidn tsvishn felker
Keywords:children's literature; Di Helden fun Khelm; Dos Kluge Shnayderl; Hakhomim, Akshonim un Naronim; Robert's Adventures; Roberts Ventures; Shloyme Simon; Solomon Simon; The Clever Little Tailor; The Wandering Beggar; The Wise Men of Helm; translation; Wise Men, Fools, and Stubborn Mules; Yiddish literature
Keywords:Amolike Yidn; anti-communism; communism; communist Russia; immigration; Israel; Jews of Long Ago; migration; money; Russia; Shloyme Simon; Solmon Simon; United States
Keywords:1890s; Americanization; assimilation; cultural transmission; Holocaust; Israel; Jewish culture; Russia; Shloyme Simon; Solomon Simon; World War 2; World War II; WW2; WWII; Yiddish education
CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is January 26th, 2017. I
am here in Ithaca, New York with David Forman. We are going to record aninterview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. DoI have your permission to record?
DAVID FORMAN: Yes, you do.
CW: Thank you. So, the main focus of today is going to be a certain writer
in your family. Could you tell me the writer's name and how you're related to him?
DF: Yes. So, we'll be talking about Shloyme Simon, Solomon Simon, who was my
grandfather. My mother is his third and youngest child, his daughter.
CW: And what do you know about Shloyme Simon's -- when and where he was born?
DF: He was born around 1895, in a shtetl [small Eastern European town with a
Jewish community] near Kalinkavichy in Belarus in White Russia. AndKalinkavichy itself was a railroad town, so it was starting to grow then. Buthis surroundings were a very small Yiddish -- Jewish village. Later, he wouldsay he was born on the Fourth of July. He was a proud, patriotic American. In the Yiddish, you see that he was born -- so, there's some reference -- Idon't remember if it was in an obituary or in one of these jubileeappreciations. There's a note in the Yiddish newspaper that he was born onshabes nekhome [Shabbos after Tish'a B'Av, lit. "Shabbos of consolation"]. So,that could date his birth a little closer on the Jewish calendar, which, ofcourse, varies from year to year. 2:00
CW: And what do you know about his parents and family background?
DF: His -- he had many siblings. I think eight. His parents were very
poor. His father was a bootmaker, and his mother was a bagel baker. And hewrites about them; they're the only of my great-grandparents that I knowanything about. And so, I know nothing about my mother's father's family. Imean, I'm sorry, about my mother's mother's family going back. Nothing aboutmy father's parents' parents. But because he's an author, he wrote anautobiography. And so, I know about them. They had an affectionate andcontentious marriage, from his child's-eye view of them. They were always verypoor. And apparently, her baking took in much more of the family income thanhis boot-making did. 3:00
CW: Do you know anything beyond that back--
DF: Bits come out in stories. He has a really interesting book called
"Amolike yidn," which means "Jews of long ago." And that book's fascinating,because it begins with old folk stories and then medieval legends and then morecontemporary stories, and it works up more and more modern and less and lessfolk and legendary material and more and more real material until he's talkingabout people he knew, like his teacher and his teacher's upbringing -- and then,finally, on to stories about his own family. But because it's in this book oflegends, it's a little hard for me to know exactly what was true, exactly whatwasn't true. It seems as though one of his grandfathers drowned in the PripyatRiver, bringing either matzah or special flour for matzah to the shtetl in --you know, as the spring thaws -- you know, Pesach time, when the spring thaws 4:00came. So, that's the only thing I might know about that ur-generation beforemy great-grandparents. Other than that, my grandfather was the onlyintellectual. He was a prodigy. They made great economic sacrifices to makesure that he could study with the best teacher in their little shtetl, andeventually sent him off to yeshiva.
CW: So, they were frum [pious].
DF: The family was -- yes, they were observant. He was not from a family of
atheists or free-thinkers or agitators or -- they were simple people and theywere in a fairly backward place for the time, I think so. In hisautobiography, he writes about the ferment in his teenage years and about howthe synagogues began to empty and the woods began to fill. And that's quite an 5:00interesting image. So, as the young people were not going to services anymore-- instead, they were arguing about socialism. They were still passionatelydebating ideas, but not in that observant context anymore.
CW: What do you have -- so, what's your mental image of this -- of the town?
DF: (laughs) It's interesting. I've been reading a lot about the Old
Country, but I don't have any clear mental image. I just imagine their smallhouse and people coming and going from it. I know there were all the thingsthat were in the shtetlekh. There was probably a bathhouse somewhere and asynagogue somewhere. And there were probably houses of people who were moreprosperous than him, although, I gather, not that many. But I really don't --I really mostly just draw a blank when it comes to all of that. And the 6:00landscape of the Old Country is a story landscape more than it is throughpictures or -- and it's interesting, I've never really had a desire to go backand try to find the physical spaces where he grew up, or any of my othergrandparents or great-grandparents grew up. For me, it's the stories they tookfrom there to this world that are most fascinating to me. And so, I have astoryscape, but it could be from my grandfather's stories. It could be -- andyou know, from other people's stories, too. And so, I imagine woods and riversand towns, the big towns and the little shtetlekh, but I don't have any --anything really concrete to peg those stories to.
CW: Can you say a little bit more about his education and what you know about that?
DF: He was, as I mentioned before, he was brilliant, and he was sent off to
7:00yeshiva. He went to two different yeshivas, at least. Maybe three. He wentto yeshiva in Kremenchuk, it says in his autobiography, and then, I believe, inRadun. He talks about studying at the yeshiva that Chofetz Chaim founded, Ibelieve, or one that followed that path. Also, between the lines, or maybeexplicit -- I haven't -- I actually haven't read his autobiography againrecently -- he was searching. So, he was searching, he had doubts, and the wayhe dealt with having doubts was that he doubled down and went from a moreliberal maskilish or Enlightenment yeshiva to a more Orthodox, stricter, morehigh-level intellectual yeshiva. And I think that that instinct -- I thinkthere's two possibilities. I don't think he was trying, necessarily, to quench 8:00his doubts. I think he was -- at some point in his teen years, decided he wasgoing to go all the way into Judaism, because the goal was not going to be toleave it behind, but to create some kind of synthesis between Talmudicscholarship, traditional Jewish learning, the holy books, all those practices,and modernism: scientific truth, politics, the whole sort of world of modernlife. So, it's possible he was just sort of making good on his family'ssacrifices and going as far in that direction as he honestly could. It'spossible he was trying to silence his doubts, but I don't -- really don't thinkso. I think that he was -- he somehow -- there was a point at which he knewthat wasn't -- he wasn't going to be a practicing rabbi. But he wanted to knowwhat a rabbi knew. And so, he did. He was, in fact, ordained. He passed 9:00the -- you know, the ordination exams and so on. But then, when he came to theUnited States, he left that behind him.
CW: And when did he come here?
DF: He came to the United States to avoid the draft -- to avoid being drafted
into the czar's army. If he was born in 1896 and he was seventeen, that wouldhave been about 1913. If he was born in 1895, it could have been -- so, it'ssomewhere around 1913, 1914. I think he was not quite eighteen when he leftthe shtetl. Not many years later, he enlisted in the US Army at the very endof World War I. And we have some of the letters that he wrote to histhen-girlfriend, Lena, who later became his wife and my grandmother. And he 10:00wrote -- they exchanged letters in English when he was in the army. And Ithink -- I don't have this solid. Maybe my uncle, David Simon, knows this. Ithink his job in the army was to censor the letters of the Yiddish-speakingsoldiers so that they wouldn't leak any classified information in their lettershome. So, he wasn't fighting. You know, he may have trained to fight, butthe war was probably even winding down by 1918.
CW: And do you know or has -- did he write about his immigrant experience or
the journey over?
DF: He didn't. To my great, great distress and dismay, he didn't. So, one
of the things that I've been fascinated to find out is how a man comes here withnothing and with no one, knowing a tiny bit of Russian, all kinds of Hebrew andAramaic and Yiddish, a -- very well-educated in religious subjects. Not in thesecular world. And a decade later, he's a dentist, married, has a son. And I 11:00don't know how he did that. I really don't. I'm starting to get a little bit-- of hints from other people, but he never wrote about it. And hisautobiography is called "Roots" -- the American title, "My Jewish Roots." Andthen, his second volume is called "Branches." And there was to be a thirdvolume called "Fruit," from what I always was told and understood. And when I-- this summer, I was in New York City at YIVO, studying Yiddish, and I went andlooked at his archives. And one of the things I really wanted to find waswhether there was a sketch of that third volume, because what that -- his firsttwo whole volumes of his autobiography were all about his childhood up throughhis teen years, and then he gets on the boat for America, and then it's done. 12:00And so, I was hoping for an outline, for a sketch, for a little vignette thatwas later going to be incorporated into "Fruit." Something of -- how did --how did he meet my grandmother? More -- I got a little bit here or there, adetail or two, but some from her, actually. But how did -- how did thatprocess of becoming an American work for him? What did he experience in NewYork? Did he experience anti-Semitism? Did he exp-- who helped him? Youknow, because, clearly, he must have had some help getting from housepainter todentist. I found a little essay that was to be read when "Branches" came outcalled "Roots, Branches, and Fruit" and I was so excited. And I struggledthrough the Yiddish. I still read slowly. And I read -- you know, here'swhere I'm going to find out what his plan is for book three. It was a talk to 13:00be given in Buenos Aires, when the book came out, but he wasn't able to traveldown there at -- in the fact, so he actually never delivered this talk. And inthe tal-- in the paper, he talks about the shtetl. He talks about how theshtetl -- and this is one of the themes that comes up in several of his writings-- how the shtetl life was undervalued. How people char-- people of hisgeneration characterize the Old World as blote [muddy] in spirit and in physicalconditions. Physical and spiritual conditions. It was grubby, really. Andwhat it is is the people came here and they wanted a better life forthemselves. They wanted to put the old life behind them and everythingassociated with it. But he believed that the shtetl was a jewel. A moraljewel, even though physical conditions were very, very difficult there. Eventhough they were oppressed politically -- but that the life of the shtetlekh was 14:00a good life. The communities were good communities of good people. And heidealized it, really, in many ways, I think. And the talk is all about how hecame to realize that -- realize these thoughts in himself, that all of his peerswere always putting it down, and there almost wasn't room to write about theshtetl in the way that he wanted to honor it. And he could only do itindirectly, through folk stories, he says in this talk -- but that finally, now,as an older man, he was able to really write about the shtetl the way he wantedto. And so, that was when he started to write "Roots" and "Branches." And inlooking at this, that was when I realized I was never going to get myautobiography of how he made it in America, because that wasn't why he set aboutwriting his autobiography in the first place. He wrote his autobiography,these beautiful stories about the Old World, as an homage to that world, not as, 15:00really, a story about himself. And so, yeah, so that's what I don't know. (laughs) I don't know the young man -- the twenty-five-year-old tothirty-year-old Shloyme Simon very well. Then he started writing, and that --then, after that --
CW: So, in the -- in America, he starts?
DF: He -- I thought -- yeah, so, you get a totally different picture from his
books. I told you this before, and we can come back to it. I'm now startingto find the things he wrote that were not in books, that were in literaryjournals and in newspapers and in children's magazines and so on. From hisbooks, you would think he was first a children's writer, because the first bookshe published were "Shmerl nar" -- "The Wandering Beggar," in English. "Robert's Adventures." "The Clever Little Tailor." All his children's bookswere first, and then only later did his books about politics, about Biblical 16:00criticism, about Jews in the modern world -- they came out later. But allalong, he was writing about those themes, about issues of Jewish education inthe modern world. The earliest things that I have from newspapers or journalsare 1920, one little fragment of a story, and then 1923 is the firstnon-fiction. So, by the time he got his dental degree in 1924, as atwenty-nine-year-old, he was already also a writer at the same time. Andapparently, he also wrote for dental journals, which I didn't know until I sawyour interview, actually, with another family member. So, he was a writersimultaneous with becoming a dentist. And from that period on, it's possibleto just do research by reading and figure out what he thought about things. 17:00What were his concerns in the '30s? What were his concerns in the '40s? Butthat little piece, between his childhood, where he wrote his memoirs and youknow, the time that he was a mature adult with children and working as a writer,that -- there's a little blank spot there.
CW: So, before, you said that he was patriotic. What was his attitude
towards America, as you -- I mean --
DF: He loved America. He loved America. And again, most of this, I don't
remember directly from my childhood, but my brother, Dan, has a letter mygrandfather wrote to him after the Kent State shootings. And my brother Danwould have been about thirteen at the time. And apparently, they had had anargument at some family gathering or another. And my grandfather, in theletter to my brother, Dan, praised him for standing up to all the adults who had 18:00different points of view from him. But also, you know, argued for ourdemocratic system, the way it is now, and for -- you know, and againstrevolution and riot and so on. He -- you know, as I mentioned, celebrated hisbirthday on the Fourth of July. And apparently, also, he had this expressionhe used to say that to really appreciate America, you had to have been born inczarist Russia. And I think that that's also very telling. And in fact, Ihad a little experience of that right after the recent election of DonaldTrump. And I was unhappy. Most of the people in my circle were veryunhappy. And I remember the day after the election, I walked into a Subway toget a sandwich for lunch. And there was a woman who was wearing a Muslim head 19:00covering working behind the counter at this Subway. And you know, I ordered mytuna sandwich and I went to pay, and I said to her, "I'm really sorry." Andshe said, "Why?" And I said, "Oh, you know, the election. It's just --" --and she said, "Oh, no, no, it'll be good." And I was just stunned. I wastaken aback, because someone who was really overtly Islamophobic, who wanted toclamp down on Muslim immigration, had just won the presidency of the UnitedStates. And I just looked at her, baffled, and she said, "This many peoplecan't be wrong. It's -- it's really, it's going to be okay. It's going to begood." And I thought, Where has she -- and she had an Arab accent, and I was-- what conditions did she grow up under? She knows something I don't know. She knows, really, how good it is here, how when it gets really bad here -- andit's going to, mind you, get bad here -- we got a long way down to go, (laughs) 20:00you know? We are prosperous, we are free. We have a long way between hereand it being really, really bad. And there's a m-- there's a -- many, manypeople in the world who know that so viscerally, because where they grew up, itwas very bad, right? So, for my grandfather, if he was going to go into thearmy, that's a twenty-five-year bid in the legal structure of Russia at thatti-- wouldn't have to be for everyone, but that was the possibility, that hegets taken away from his family for his whole -- the only -- really, you know,his whole adult life, really, and then sent back for some leftovers. And todefend a country that gave them no civil rights. So, yeah. America's apretty good deal. (laughs) It's -- pretty good deal, so -- so, it's good tokeep it in mind that -- that perspective. It helps to have been born in 21:00czarist Russia. Of course, we don't have that privilege. (laughs) Of that perspective.
CW: I'd like to ask you if you could describe him.
DF: So, from my little boy standpoint, he was -- he was just my grandfather,
right? So, kids don't really think in comparing people. He was short, hewore suits. He smelled of cigars and whiskey. He -- in several of thepictures I have of him from my childhood, he's wearing sunglasses indoors. Idon't know what the deal was with that. But I do remember looking into hisbright eyes. And so, he must not have always been wearing sunglassesindoors. (laughs) I think that may have been a later phenomenon. He wasancient to me. Course, now both my parents are well older than he was when hepassed away. But he seemed ancient to me when I was little. And hairy. And 22:00he was -- energetic. So loving towards -- he so delighted in hisgrandchildren. He -- my existence was just a source of delight to him. Andso, of course, I loved being with him. And the whiskey smell or the cigarsmell (laughs) was no barrier. I would get on his lap and he would tell mestories and, you know, it's just wonderful. He was just a wonderful, wonderfulgrandfather to have. The other thing was he took children very seriously. And so, he would talk to you like a person. And when you're four or whenyou're eight or whatever it was, he would talk to you like he was interested inwhat you had to say. He would -- he would argue his point with you, too. Imean, so it was like you could have a real conversation in a way that a lot ofpeople don't, I think, you know, across that span of years. He had four 23:00fingers on his left hand. That's another striking thing when you're a child. And he was such a storyteller. So, I would say, "Zeyde [Grandfather], whathappened? Why do you only have four fingers?" And every time I asked him, hewould tell me a different story. So, one time, he would say, "Oh, I wasworking in the fields, you know? I grew up in a -- you know, a very ruralplace and I was working in the fields, and I was using a pitchfork to shovelsome hay, and I dropped the pitchfork and it just cut my finger clean off." And I don't remember the other stories, and -- but I think one time he told methat an animal had attacked him and eaten his finger. And I didn't know. Inever knew until -- I think until after he died, I never really knew why he hadlost his finger. And actually, the way he lost his finger was -- was alsotake [really] interesting, right? He lost his finger because he was a dentist, and he used 24:00to hold the X-ray film in his patient's mouth with one hand and take the X-raywith the other. And so, this hand would get exposed to the X-rays, and he gotcancer in his fingers. And you know, people didn't know that X-rays werecarcinogenic when they first came out. And so, he got cancer and then he hadto have surgeries, and eventually got it amputated. And you know, to someonewho now -- you know, a dental office is all so -- you know, you've got these bigmachines with the long arms, and then they either -- they put lead on you andthey leave, and the idea of someone sort of holding it in and taking the --(laughs) you know, that's kind of cool. That's kind of interesting, youknow? That's how they used to do it. It's like my mother saying, as a child,that she used to put her -- at the shoe store, she used to put her foot under anX-ray to see what the bones -- how the bones of her feet fit inside the shoe. And they had these in shoe stores, all the time. And people -- whenever youwent shopping for shoes, people -- or just for the fun of it, people would puttheir foot under the X-rays to see what their bones looked like. So, he was -- 25:00he was a storyteller, and you could always count on him to say somethinginteresting. And so, that's -- you know, again, it was that connection -- wasthrough the words that I remember him, more than -- you know, I've got picturesof him. I know what his physical form looked like. He wasn't much to lookat, I guess. (laughs) You know --
CW: When you --
DF: -- but to be with is a different thing.
CW: Yeah. When you see pictures of him younger, what are you -- what are
your impressions?
DF: Well, he had a funny -- he had a little mustache, which Jews after World
War II didn't have anymore. He was clean-shaven, and he looked dignified andauthorly and pleased with himself. (laughs) And he was pleased with himself. He thought very highly of himself. That's quite clear. He thought he wasright. This is something that runs in my family. A lot of people in myfamily think that they're right, are willing to trade that off for some other 26:00virtues, (laughs) and other pleasures in the world. And -- what else do Ithink of when I see those pictures? I -- it's interesting, there aren't a lotof pictures of him with his wife, except at sort of formal occasions, likebanquets. I have a picture of him dancing with his wife at my mother's weddingthat I like. But -- you know, they loved each other, but I think a picture wasa very different -- somehow than it is now, you know? I think you -- it --taking a picture was a sort of document, and he -- so, there are pictures -- Ithink pictures of him tend to be pictures of his professional self and not ofhis candid self. So, that's what you get.
CW: Hm. I'd like to sort of back up a little bit and ask about your growing
27:00up. So, first of all, when and where were you born?
DF: I was born in May of 1960, and although I was born in a hospital in the
city, I lived in the suburbs. I grew up in Great Neck, New York, and I spentmy whole childhood in Great Neck, New York. Youngest of three boys. And whatelse can I say about my growing up? It was -- there were wonderful anddifficult things about growing up in the suburbs in the '60s. There were many,many children on my block, and we used to run around and play outside a lot. And my brothers and I would play baseball or football or something in thebackyard, but also kids would almost -- it felt like we ran in packs in thestreets, that, you know, when it came dinnertime, someone would call someoneelse to find out where the kids all were and tell them all, you know, time to gohome for dinner. And then, we would all go off home for dinner. Great Neckwas a place where people moved for the school system. It was heavily Jewish. 28:00Prosperous. And -- my house was not comfortable, despite all of that. Andso, there was a kind of disjunction, in a way, between the outside and theinside. We were -- I had wonderful friends. I was physically comfortable. I went to good schools. I was well taken care of. My parents weren't happywith each other. That was part of it. Things -- also, my mother was amiserable housekeeper. Things that broke in the house never got fixed. Myfather worked very hard. And so, there was a sense -- although they were bothextremely loving toward their children -- and really, I have nothing to reproach 29:00them with -- nevertheless, there was the sense of not enough to go around,somehow. And so, my brothers and I were quite rivalrous. And there -- weweren't -- I mean, when I was very little, my brother Danny and I were prettyclose. But sometimes, that was just like, we were in an alliance. Bill wouldattack me and then Dan would attack him for attacking me, you know? He wouldlook out for me 'cause I was the youngest or something. But there was thisfeeling of riv-- Dan liked vanilla ice cream, and so, therefore, Bill likedchocolate ice cream. And so, therefore, I liked strawberry ice cream. And Ididn't have a choice. By the time you got to me, it was strawberry, (laughs)which was fine, 'cause I liked it. But I wasn't also going to fight with themover, you know, who got which or what -- and later, when my brother, Bill,declared that he would be a musician when he grew up, I stopped playing in the 30:00high school orchestra. So, there was some -- there was a sense ofcompetitiveness. There was also a lot of warmth. It was not a broken familyin that sense. There was no abuse, there was no violence. There was -- butthere was -- it wasn't comfortable. It was -- that's -- that's how I woulddescribe that.
CW: And what were your parents' work --
DF: My father worked in retail and then later, when I was a teenager, became a
manufacturer. But at first, he worked in retail. Home furnishings,fabrics. And my mother was at first at home, and then went back to work in ahospital, briefly, and then went to graduate school to become a psychologist. And at that point, there was a fair amount of just coming home after school and 31:00just passing the ti-- it either being with friends or just being at home andpassing the time. And so, I read a lot. And I loved reading, and I had, youknow, large stretches of unhassled, unharassed time to sit and read.
CW: What were -- what were your early interests in reading?
DF: I read about sports, I read stories of all kinds. I don't really
remember. I know I read all the s-- and I read --"Sounder." I mean, I readwhatever kids read. "Homer Price." I -- I don't -- I don't know little kidbooks. So, "The Phantom Tollbooth" and "Harriet the Spy" and just, so -- butmostly American -- I read American English literature. So, we're here talkingabout a Yiddish writer, and books and literature were very, very important tome. But I wasn't reading Jewish literature. I was reading just plain old 32:00secular American literature.
CW: So, what, -- want to get this up here, but what was Jewish about your home?
DF: (pauses) The word Jewish, to us, meant a kind of loyalty to a people. It
didn't mean religious practice. And it didn't mean a certain set of beliefs. And it didn't mean Zionism. So, it was an extremely negative Judaism. It wasall about what kind of Jews we weren't. We didn't go to synagogue. And yet,we were proud Jews. And that double message was given to me firmly and earlyand -- so, we didn't light Sabbath candles. Jewish issues were discussed 33:00often. Politics was discussed often. When there was a holiday, we knew aboutit. Whether we observed it or not was another matter. I mean, we hadwonderful seders with my grandparents, and then after my grandparents died -- athome, we had Jewish foods. We knew --
CW: Like what? What foods?
DF: Well, my mother learned to cook from her mother, so ev-- first of all,
when we went to our aunts and uncles or when we went to our grandparents, thenit was all the traditional whatever. You know, my grandmother made blintzes orshe made chicken soup or she made brisket or, you know, there's a certainrepertoire that -- and my mother could make all those things, too. And shemade the seder, you know, every year. She still makes the seder. She's noweighty and she still will make this year -- she'll still be making her matzahfarfel muffins and her chicken soup and the whole deal. So, I don't know. 34:00Macaroons and matzah and so on. We -- so, we didn't keep kosher, but we didn'teat pig. When we went out, my brother would order shrimp and there was nohassling him about that. You know, whatever people wanted, that was fine. And in fact, I went to Yiddish school for a year, and then this question came upabout whether I wanted to keep going, and -- because I was seven and I didn'tknow anything, I said no. And so, then I didn't --
CW: Do you remember anything from that year, looking back?
DF: I mean, I just remember that it was in Little Neck and it was under an
overpass and then there was the building and -- I remember very little. I gotbar mitzvahed later. We went to Israel when I was ten, and then a littlelater, my brother, Bill, decided he wanted to be bar mitzvahed because of hisexperience in that trip to Israel. And then, I sort of followed suit afterhim. And I do remember that we had to cover -- I had to cover in two years theentire -- from childhood up to age thirteen -- Hebrew school curriculum. And I 35:00already knew -- because of my Yiddish, I knew the letters of the alphabet. So,that's what it got me. It got me sort of a quick -- a quick in to bar mitzvahHebrew. Bar mitzvah Hebrew, of course, is how much Hebrew do you need to say acouple of blessings, to read your Torah portion, and then forget about it forthe rest of your life, so -- but I had a leg up on that minimal curriculum(laughs) that I had to do in order to get bar mitzvahed. Don't rememberanything else from Yiddish school. And similarly -- I mean, I felt like --it's funny, my family has a talent for being at the fringes of things, for beingoutsiders. So, we were -- Boiberik was a big thing in my family. My parentswent to Boiberik when they were young. My mother was a camper. I think myfather was a counselor for one year. And my brothers went and I went, but Ionly went for a year and a half. And now, there's even a Boiberik Facebookpage, and they're all talking about these experiences and these shared memoriesand I have nothing. So it's like, I know what it was, but it didn't quite take 36:00with me somehow. I was at the trailing end of something that was already verymuch diminished and fading fast. So, that's like -- you know, what we callGeneration Jones, I had that experience, also, in my -- in -- you know, inAmerican culture, there was the Baby Boomers and there were the hippies andthen, just as I got to teenhood, the party was over. (laughs) You know, I came-- I was a teenager in the mid-'70s, and there was this sense of somethingreally exciting had just almost happened. And then, didn't. So, I think that-- that may be part of my identity, this idea of being at the edges of things orbeing a little bit on the outside of things. And, course, Yiddish is perfectfor that. Yiddish is neither flesh nor fowl, as they say --
CW: So, what place did Yiddish have in your growing up?
DF: We sang Yiddish songs at Pesach. My mother would occasionally sing
37:00Yiddish songs at other times. I knew and was very proud of the fact that mygrandfather was a famous writer in Yiddish. But we read those stories in theEnglish translations. So, I grew up on Chelm stories and on the beautifulbook, "The Wandering Beggar," which is now sadly out of print -- about a holyfool named Shmerl who causes miracles to happen just by showing up. It'swonderfully, wonderfully written and wonderfully translated, also. So, I grewup on those like mother's milk, you know? And so, that's the Yiddishculture. It's not the Yiddish language, so much. When we sang the songs, Iprobably didn't know much, even, about what they meant. But it's interestingwhat sticks sometimes. I was in YIVO last summer, as I mentioned, studying 38:00Yiddish. And there was a little music hour. And the music teacher had beenmusic director at Boiberik. And he -- we sang some songs. We sang "Di grinekuzine [The green cousin]" -- oh, that's another -- so Theodore Bikel records,we had those when I was growing up. So, we had that -- that music, as well. But besides "Di grine kuzine," none of the songs he taught me were familiar --he taught us in this little music hour that we had at the language class. Andthen, I -- I was like, Do I even want to go to this? It was one of theseoptional bits and -- but I went back and he sang a song -- a song, a Tisha B'Avsong, which had been a song that was sung at Boiberik. And so, this issomething that had been -- I figured out, I think it was forty-nine years sinceI had heard this song, and I immediately recognized it and was moved by thissong. You know, and it's a song about a child who has been made homeless by 39:00the war around the destruction of the Temple. And it's, "Come my child, tome." And -- "Come lay your head in my lap." And it's just a sweet, lovelylittle song, but it was -- it was in there. (gestures to heart) Somethingabout it was in there. So, it's -- there may be more -- I may have moreYiddish from direct but forgotten experience than I know. I'm -- I'm sure Ihave. I mean, I -- when I began learning Yiddish, it felt very comfortable tome. And not just because I had prepared myself over time. So, I did -- youknow, I studied German when I was in college. I prepar-- I -- I was going tolearn Yiddish someday. I knew I was going to learn -- but even beyond that,the cadences of it, the -- you know, that was how people spoke around me. There was Yiddish around me when I was little, but not -- it wasn't from me. 40:00It wasn't -- I wasn't raised in Yiddish, at all.
CW: Looking back, do you remember seeing Yiddish or hearing Yiddish?
DF: I, occasionally, would hear my father's mother speaking to her sisters in
Yiddish or my mother's parents maybe saying something to her in Yiddish. Butthere was very little. It was -- only old people spoke it, and when I visitedmy grandparents in Miami Beach, they spoke Yiddish with their friends. Yeah. So, I got that. It was the language the old people spoke. My parents'generation did not speak Yiddish in my hearing.
CW: Looking back on that, on what you just described, did you have any
feelings about Yiddish growing up?
DF: I did, because my mother did. My mother believed that there was -- that
41:00real Jewish soul was a Yiddish soul. I don't know how else to describe it. We're a family of atheists, but proud Jews, who are not interested in what therabbis have to teach. Right, this was the sort of received identity. What Idid with it later is a different issue. But, the sense that I got from her wasthat anything that had a Yiddish word in it -- that that was like the salt inyour food. That that was the spark that brought something to life. And itwasn't the way people do now -- people throw a Yiddish word in now as shtick. And this makes me very unhappy. People throw in a Yiddish word to make fun ofsomething, and it's always off-color and it's always a kind of denigration. Aschmuck, a putz, a mamzer [bastard], or they get it wrong. They have this sort 42:00of Americanized Yiddish. You know, Oh, I'm so farklemt [depressed], you know,and I hear my Italian friend go, "Oh, I'm so farklemt!" You know? And thatwasn't what I mean by throwing a little Yiddish in. It was like, you'rethrowing in a phrase when you know the whole song. You're throwing in a word,and the word sort of is -- has -- there's a certain dignity to it. I don'tknow how else to describe it. It wasn't shtick. It was -- and -- I now writea blog sometimes about my process of learning Yiddish, and the way that Idescribe is the differences between laughing in Yiddish and laughing atYiddish. And I think now, much too much of -- people think that they're payinghomage to Yiddish and Yiddish culture. They think they're expressing theirJewish identity, but they're really expressing their distance from Judaism. And -- I don't know if you've experienced that, you know, that the -- sort of 43:00the more you know about Yiddish as a real, spoken language or as a real, writtenlanguage, the more peculiar it seems, this relationship Americans have towardsthrowing in a Yiddish word here or a Yiddish word there. I mean, I still likeit when a rapper says oy vey, you know, don't get me wrong. (laughs) There isthis, Oh, good, you're from New York, too. There is a little bit of that in --in there, you know? But, a lot of the time it feels like it's a l-- it's notthat thing that I got, that I witnessed as a child, which was that -- that itwas there, at someone's left shoulder, and they could go to it. You know, thatshe could draw on Yiddish culture, on Yiddish language, and that it was alwayssomething positive if a Yiddish phrase popped in or if a Yiddish song wasreferred to. 44:00
CW: So, when would you see your grandfather?
DF: All the holidays. But they lived in Brooklyn and we lived in Great Neck,
and it was less than an hour away. And I -- I think we were there often. AndI remember going to Miami Beach more than once, once he went there in thewinter. I don't have dates on that in my mind. But I don't -- I don't knowexactly, but it was not like a once every couple of months thing. It was amuch -- it was more often than that. I was comfortable in their home, and theywere comfortable -- maybe a little less comfortable in ours. But, you know,older people, right, like their own digs. Yeah, but they were a realpresence. But still, he died when I was ten, and I only really knew himthrough the mind and eyes of a child. And that was very hard for me, when he 45:00died. That was a real blow. So, I know I felt very close to him. I -- youknow, I felt his -- his delight in me, and I had felt his love of me. And youknow, my father's father had been ill for a long time when I was a child. AndI experienced him as somewhat remote. It turned out that he -- he was checkedout because he had had six heart attacks by then or something. Um, okay? (laughs) But my -- you know, my zeyde Simon was really in there with me. Hecame to my school and told stories when I was in first grade, to my classmates,you know? He was at Boiberik once when I was at Boiberik, I think. Yeah.
CW: What do you remember about that, when he passed?
DF: I didn't -- oh, this is hard. I didn't let myself cry. I had not cried
46:00when my father's father died, and it was not long before. You know, and kidsget funny ideas about things. And in fairness, I told you there was a lot ofsibling rivalry in my -- fairness was very important. Everything should alwaysbe fair. And I hadn't cried for my father's father, so it was like, if I criedfor my mother's father, then somehow that was a disloyalty or s-- I don't knowwhy I got that idea in my -- so, I -- that was one thing about it that washard. But there was, even before that -- there was another piece of it, whichwas that I knew when he died, and that was very, very odd. We were at dinnerand the phone rang. And when the phone rang, it -- the thought just poppedinto my head, Zeyde is dead. He was not sick. It was out of the blue. Noone had ever told me -- and my mother went to the phone, and she burst out with 47:00a wail and I ran upstairs to my room. I didn't tell anyone what hadhappened. But it was -- it was -- it was the only sort of inexplicable -- youknow, something that other people would label spiritual event in my life, Ithink. I mean, I've had other things that are, okay, you know, coincidence. This one felt like, somehow, I knew. Of course, one has a striking idea thatdoesn't happen, and then you don't remember it. But this felt like, whoa. So, anyway, that -- it was a moment -- it was a hard part of a hard time in mylife. My gran-- my father's father died, my mother's father died. The nextyear, my parents separated. Not long after that, I broke my leg and was intraction for many months. So, there were like, four really hard things thathappened to me in about a two-year period of time, between when I was -- just 48:00before when I was ten and just after when I was eleven. And that was a sort ofturning point in my growing up. And -- which I'll come back to in a second. But -- so, around the death itself, I was -- there was a sort of tightening,because I didn't let myself cry. But there was also a feeling ofdetermination. And I vowed -- and I don't know, I don't think it was -- youknow, I think it was sometime within a couple of days of his death, I said tomyself, I will learn Yiddish. I will learn Yiddish, and someday, I will readmy zeyde's books. And I just vowed that I would do that, and I never let go ofthat feeling that someday, I would learn Yiddish. So, that was my response togrief, was that I was -- I was not done with that relationship. And that 49:00stayed there. I went to college. There was no Yiddish when I went tocollege, so I learned German. I spent a couple years learning German. Andwhen my brother, Bill, moved to Germany, I went there to visit him a coupletimes, so I didn't lose my German, so -- and I -- and, you know, I had my littlebar mitzvah, Hebrew. And I figured that I could learn Yiddish, you know? Iwas -- like, I had set myself up. I'd prepared myself that someday I was gonnalearn Yiddish. And when my first career ended and I was casting about forsomething to do -- in the meantime, I started translating "Kluge hent [Smarthands]," one word at a time, looking up the words in Uriel Weinreich'sdictionary. And I got many pages in, until I said, Wait a minute, you know? This was a crisis time. The reason I had lost my job was because I was -- Ihad become a father, and it was time to, you know, have another career thatwould make some money. So, I -- you know, I started doing that just because I 50:00had the time free, but then I stopped myself and -- no, no, you know? Time togrow up, take care of business. So, I had my career as a psychologist and aresearcher and a college professor. And when my wife died, and then, afterthat, later, my children, not long after that, went away to college and I wasleft an -- an empty nest. And then, my second career ended and I was in avacuum. I was done. I was -- I was a poet, I was writing poetry. I was ina town that I didn't have deep roots -- what do I do with myself? And that'swhen it was time. And that's when, in my early fifties -- little over threeyears ago, I started learning Yiddish again. So, it sort of -- again, maybeit's tied into grief. It's a kind of answer to grief in some way. Soon -- 51:00not long after -- I started engaging with one of my grandfather's pieces aboutthe Jewish schools. And I went and I meet with Gella Fishman, and I talked toher about it. She said, "Well, what does it mean to you, personally? Why areyou studying Yiddish now? Why did you pick this to read?" She was reallyinterested in that question, and I didn't have an answer for her. But I thinkit was -- I think my quest for Yiddish and for renewing this relationship withmy grandfather is an answer to grief -- to go back to that living civilizationand that living well that had given rise to him and that he could tap into atwill, you know, across all those years.
[BREAK IN RECORDING]
CW: I'm curious to know about -- just a little more about the context about
that first time, when you were saying you were going word by word in "Shmerl 52:00nar," first of all --
DF: No, no, that time, that was "Kluge hent."
CW: Oh, "Kluge hent."
DF: Because it hadn't --
CW: Right.
DF: -- been translated.
CW: Right, so -- so what was going on? Can you -- I mean, give a little
context to that?
DF: Sure. When I was in college, I visited my brother in Germany. I
mentioned that I had studied some German in college with this idea to -- tolearning Yiddish someday. And I remember one time when I was with my brother,Bill. We picked up "Roberts ventures," "The Adventures of Robert," achildren's book. The only book set in America that he wrote of his children'sbooks, and one that had never been translated. And we thought we would take acrack at reading it, just for fun, using, again, what we knew of the Hebrewalphabet from having learned Hebrew for a year or two as teenagers. And now,we both knew German. So, what could we do, you know? And I remember opening 53:00the book and saying, you know, (pretending to sound out words) "Af elen strit"-- Allen Street? (laughs) You know? It was like, it's -- it begins withEnglish. It's kind of funny. And -- but I remember that we were able tosound it out. We were able to understand most of the German origin word-- manyof the German origin words. And we were able to sound it out and make somesense of it. So, that was almost like a proof of principle, that it waspossible, with a bit of the Hebrew letters and with the bit of German that Ihad, that I could possibly teach myself Yiddish. But I didn't. So, I got outof college. I became an artist, I lived in Boston and fell in love. Married-- but my livelihood as an artist was not going to cut it. My wife wanted to 54:00be married to a grown-up. (laughs) She wanted her children to have a fatherwho had an established sort of, you know, something.
CW: So, what medium did you work in?
DF: I was a calligrapher and a designer. And calligraphy was -- I loved
calligraphy, but it was looked down on by the artists as design or graphicart. Like, it was commercial. The craftsmen didn't know what to do with it,either. It was sort of -- it was -- again, my talent is for being at themargins of things. So, I remember bringing expressionistic calligraphic workto this space that used to show art in my little neighborhood, and the personthere wouldn't even look at it because calligraphy isn't art, from her point ofview. It's like, craft. Worse yet, computers were coming around andreplacing the work that calligraphers did for bread and butter. So, puttingnames on diplomas, writing addresses out for people for their weddings -- therewere now fonts, and it was possible to put an envelope through a printer, and 55:00that work went away. So, the -- so I was very marginal in the first place andthen I got, like, non-marg-- so, there was this little interlude where I wasworking in bookstores, trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up,but at least drawing a paycheck, when, as I said, I had a little bit of time. And I just -- I thought about the -- my desire -- you know, it never left me,the desire to learn Yiddish. I went to the Yiddish Book Center right when itopened. I looked in used bookstores for Yiddish books on the shelves, and I --once every several years, there'd be one, you know? And I began collecting mygrandfather's books, even though I couldn't read them. So, I had several ofhis books and I picked this one. And I just started -- as I said, with theWeinreich dictionary, and I'd start one word at a time. And that book began 56:00deep in the country of Moldavia, where they have the best vineyards and the best"perishkes seder." And I could not, for the life of me, figure out what"perishkes seder" were. So, I moved onto the next sentence. And there wereholes like that everywhere. There were just holes. This was -- you know, mychildren were just about to be born. It was twenty-four years ago or so. AndI got about thirty pages in. It's a lot of work. And then, I sort of woke upand said, What are you doing? It's not going to be a real translationanyway. You don't know Yiddish! (laughs) Just, you know, what are you doingthis for? You have a family now. So, I went to grad school and I -- youknow, I did what I had to do. And -- but I -- that was there, and then myuncle, David, translated that book. And so, now, we have it. But, of course,I'm like, Oh, I wish I had done it. (laughs) And then, I looked at -- I read 57:00his translation and he didn't say what "perishkes seder" were, and I -- so, Istill didn't quite know, because he anglicized -- he sort of made it -- it's notthat he anglicized it. He left out the details that didn't move the story. Some of the details. And so, only like a year ago, I learned the answer tothis twenty-four-year-old puzzle.
CW: And?
DF: "Perishkes" is really "fershkes," which are peaches. And the "seder"
really stumped me. That was the part that had really stumped me, because youcan't look it up in the dictionary as "seder." You get seder, like Passoverseder. The order of things -- I didn't understand how it -- one word connectedto the other within the sentence. But it turns out that "seder" is plural of"sod," which means "orchard." So, they have the best peach orchards inEurope. And, you know, I love that. That. When there's, like -- it's like 58:00there's this little hole, and it's still there and -- it's like a hole is athing, also. That little gap is in my brain there, and it stayed intact forall that time, (laughs) then -- and there it is. And now it's -- now I haveit. And you can Google Moldavia, and they still grow fruit orchards there andthey still have vineyards there, you know? And that's where he set thatstory. For that reason, it was, you know, set in a vineyard. So -- so thatwas my little stint as a Yiddish autodidact. It lasted for a couple -- fewweeks, and then I put it down again for years, again.
CW: And this most recent iteration?
DF: A little over three years ago, I was in Rochester. I was writing poetry
and unemployed and haunting bookstores. And in a bookstore, someone mentionedto me that there were Yiddish classes at the Jewish Community Center. Oh! 59:00So, I think class had already started, but I went anyway to see if maybe I couldtake a class. I didn't know what -- you know, quite what would come of it. And I went and I walked into the JCC. The class was held in a Yiddish resourceroom that had walls and walls and walls of Yiddish books. And the teacher, hername is [Devorah Rothman?] was a wonderful, open, bright, just engagingperson. Teaches beginners who are ninety years old who know Yiddishperfectly. How can you be a beginner and know Yiddish perfectly? Becausethey never learned to read and write, right? To people who -- really don'tknow Yiddish but know the Hebrew very well because they're practicing Jews. So, there's such a mish-mosh of different levels of people and different 60:00interests. And they age everywhere from fifty up to a hundred. (laughs)Right? I mean, I was the youngster. Very welcoming. Wonderful place tostart. And she teaches Yiddish in context. So, she taught about -- she wasusing the "Bintel Brief" as material, these letters to the editor of the"Forverts." And so, she would talk about Jewish life in New York in thatperiod of time. And women's issues -- she would pick letters that were aboutwomen struggling with abandonment or with, you know, other issues. So, she wasvery good at contextualizing it and giving people just a little bit of Yiddishat a time so they weren't overwhelmed or intimidated. And a -- somefascinating things happened right away there. So, one of the things thathappened was during the first break in the first class, I, of course, went over 61:00to the bookshelves and started looking and trying to decipher what I could, andthere's one of my grandfather's books and there's one of my grandfather's booksand the next week, when I came back again -- the books were in a funny order,you know? Ostensibly fiction here and history here and poetry here andcontemporary religious issues and memoirs over there. So, not all the "samekh"books would be in the same place. So, I wandered over to a different part ofthe library and found the twentieth and last of his books that I did not own,right there in the library, at the Jewish Community Center. So, that was --that was a kick. And there were other reasons, too, that I -- I justimmediately felt like this was the right place and this was the right group ofpeople for me to start learning. But, she was -- she was teaching in a very 62:00s-- and I don't want to say surface, because that's not right. She was tyingthe Yiddish word to customs and to history. So, a very deep way, in one sense,but very slowly in terms of the grammar. There was almost no grammar goingon. Reading, but reading just little bits, you know, and then a song. And Iwanted more, and so I immediately grabbed someone in class and said, "Do youwant to read Chelm stories with me?" And her name was Esther. She's afantastic -- just up for anything, bright, organized, which I'm not. And so,we started a reading circle of two people, and we began reading my grandfather'sChelm stories together on the side. And then, I started translating "RobertsVentures" the way I had before, with the other book, but now that one's alreadytranslated. So, I started with a newer, better dictionary, the Beinfeld andBochner dictionary, and I started looking up one word at a time in "Roberts." 63:00But now, I had a teacher to help me, and she was incredibly encouraging. She'slike, "Oh, this is what you were put here on Earth to do." That kind of levelof encouraging. And so, I hit with all cylinders, really. I startedlearning, and even so, it's not so easy when you're in your mid-fifties, I willsay. I'm three years into being a Yiddish student -- mir hobn dis-- afenglish, mir redn af english, vayl ikh kan nisht -- ikh red yidish nisht vi avaser [We dis-- in English, we're speaking in English, because I can't -- Idon't speak Yiddish fluently, lit. "like water"], right? I'm not fluent, I'mnot comfortable speaking. Reading, I can read. That's -- see, that'sYiddish. Reading -- I can read, right? Redn, red ikh gants gut [Speaking, Ispeak well].
CW: Right. (laughter) Leyenen [Reading]. So, what -- what has it been like
64:00for you to return to the books themselves, in these different phases?
DF: It has been the delight of my life. It has been a deep, deep source of
joy and of meaning beyond anything I could have imagined. Absolutelyastonishing. And for so many reasons and in so many ways. But I -- take one,just as -- how -- the experience of getting to know someone whom I love but whois dead is a very strange and wonderful thing. It's a one-way relationship,obviously. He's getting nothing out of this. But -- although, you know, mymother says, "Oh, he would kvell if he" -- yeah, okay, but we don't get to kvellafter we die. It's -- it's a sad thing. So, that's what I believe. But forme, getting to know him is such a privilege, because he's a brilliant, 65:00brilliant, funny, interesting, fascinating, tormented man. And I mentionedthat I was a poet. You know, and I also mentioned that I started reading, andI could talk either about Chelm stories with my friend Esther or about the"Robert's Adventures" book, which I began translating soon after I startedlearning. So, "Robert's" began "af elen strit, es shteyt a hoykhn roykhgemoyrt hoyz [On Allen Street, there is a tall, red brick house]." And the --the Chelm book begins, "Finf furn forn fun khelm keyn shedlits [Five wagons ridefrom Chelm to Siedlce]," okay? So, the Chelm book begins with this wordplay. It -- in English, it just means five wagons rode from Chelm to Siedlce. But inYiddish, "Finf furn forn fun khelm keyn shedlits," and as a poet, the fact thatmy grandfather delighted in wordplay was something I didn't know about him. I 66:00didn't remember it, I didn't know it. No one ever mentioned it to me that hewas a storyteller. I remembered him as a storyteller, but I didn't rememberhis love of language and his delight in puns, his delight in alliteration. Youknow, for a poet, it's just like, a -- here's -- that's where I got it from. There's my -- there's my well. There's my kindred spirit. So, that was justfantastic. And through reading about his books, I've learned more about hisrelationship to poets, which is quite interesting to me. I knew from my motherthat Mani Leib was a friend, not just acquaintance of his. And -- so, a coupleof things have come up about that. And -- sorry, drawing a -- stutteredthere. I don't quite know in what order to talk about -- 67:00
CW: Sure.
DF: -- these --
CW: Yeah.
DF: -- things. I found a -- I found a letter to the editor he wrote shortly
before he died, to the "Tsukunft," which had been the great, great journal ofYiddish and Jewish ideas. And he writes complaining about how all the -- inthe last issue, it was just all poems. All it was was poems. Why are peoplejust always only writing poems? Why can't they write serious essays aboutserious things? And I was crushed. I was like, Oh, poems! (laughs) We likethe poems! And so, that was his -- that was a sort of disappointment, right? So, I, at some point, was wondering, Okay, well, what was his real attitudetowards poems and poets and poetry? When I studied at YIVO, one of the firstthings I did was I looked up Mani Leib's letters to him, and I couldn't findany. But there were some letters from H. Leyvik to him. So, I went forthose, and I -- and I -- you know, most of them were just boilerplate, 68:00"Congratulations on the appearance of your new book" or "I'm sorry, I couldn'tcome to Sholem Aleichem Folkshul when you invited me for the graduation." Youknow, "Congratulations to all the children," blah-blah-blah. But one was aletter saying, "Well, here's the sonnet that I owe you." And enclosed on thesecond page was a sonnet. And I got just -- I was so thrilled and soexcited. And this is the funny thing about being a learner, is that yousometimes make these really beautiful mistakes. So, I looked at the sonnet andit said "Sonet tsu tseyn." "Sonnet to Teeth." And I was like, Oh my God. This great poet wrote a sonnet to teeth, 'cause my grandfather was a dentist. Did he write it as payment for his dental work or just as -- sort of to honor mygrandfather? I looked in H. Leyvik's collected works and there's no "Sonnet toTeeth" anywhere. I was like, I've discovered a new poem! It's fantastic. And then, months later, when I went to actually sit down and translate this 69:00thing, turns out it's "Sonet tsu tsyion," "Sonnet to Zion." (laughs) It wasn't-- it had nothing to do with teeth at all. He had probably read the poemsomewhere and my grandfather liked it, and so he copied it out and sent it tohim. Nevertheless, clearly, then, they were friends. And -- I have been sortof trying to find some of my grandfather's writings that were not published inhis books. And reading -- I was reading Ruth Wisse's book about -- called "ALittle Love in Big Manhattan." It's a book about two poets in New York:Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Mani Leib. And toward the very end of the book, thelast word on Mani Leib, just about when he dies, she quotes a letter that mygrandfather wrote to "Di prese," a Yiddish newspaper in Buenos Aires. Everyonehad, when Mani Leib died, reprinted this "Sonnet for my Tombstone," which I 70:00think also went on his tombstone. And my grandfather wrote a letter saying --well, it was "Three Encounters with Mani Leib," and I believe the gist of it was-- I haven't finished digging into the -- there's so much more than I can read,let alone translate at this point. I'm in an ocean of Yiddish. But I thinkthe gist of it was, "The Mani Leib that I knew -- and in conversations with --was a modern person, and this is a very sentimental sonnet about a traditionalJew, and bury me like a traditional Jew." It's like, where does this comefrom? You know, he was buried -- he wasn't buried -- you know, he was -- hewas buried in a suit. (laughs) He wasn't -- but more than that, it was justlike, what is it with our old people that they just want to go back to theorthodoxy of their childhoods? And again, I took a couple of things from that: 71:00his issue about hypocrisy, about orthodoxy, about whether Judaism must besomething of the past that's imitated inflexibly in the present or whether itcan be a living, breathing thing is one issue. But there's still this poetpart of me that's -- that was just happy to know the friendship was a -- was notsomething that had just -- oh, people told me he was friends with Mani Leib. No, he was friends with Mani Leib, so. And then again, a month ago, I was inthe library and I picked up Shmuel Niger's "Togbukh [Diary]." Shmuel Niger wasa famous literary critic. His "Togbukh" is his -- his diary. And what did Ilook in it for? I immediately looked to see if my grandfather's mentioned inthe book. And there were just a couple of mentions of him, and both were aboutpoets. And so, I think the old man who was complaining about why there's so 72:00much poetry in this journal was really saying, Why aren't we arguing about ordiscussing important topics in Yiddish? He wasn't really denigrating poetry. He was saying, you know, Where has our communal intellectual life gone? Isthere -- is there nothing else besides elegy?
CW: I wanted to just fill in one little gap, which is -- what did he do for work?
DF: I -- well, he was a dentist. So, before -- what did he do for work
before he was a dentist? I actually got a little data on this four days agowhen -- when I was in -- five days ago, when I was in New York City, at the NewYork Public Library. And I found the lexicon for "Di naye yidishe literatur 73:00[Modern Jewish literature]." And it mentions in there a couple things Iknew. He taught Hebrew school. That makes sense. He was a Talmudic scholarand an ordained rabbi. So, in New Jersey and in New York, he taught in Hebrewschool. He was a house painter. He worked as a presser in a laundry, and Iknew those things. And then, it mentioned also that he was a balegole[coachman] at some point. So, he must have -- he did a stint driving horses. Now, a balegole could, I guess, be any kind of coachman or driver. I hadn'teven realized that in New York of the nineteen-teens, I guess cars were stillvery much a rarity and horses were still very much the way people got around. So, I don't know if he drove a taxi; I don't know if he drove a deliverycoach. I don't know if he -- what he did. I don't know whether he was like ateamster -- did he haul stuff from one store to another? But he did somethingrelated to driving. And then, as I said, I had already known about the housepainting -- and the Hebrew -- so, he got what work he could, and put himself 74:00through school as he did that. And again, what I don't know is whether -- Ithink he also had some help from some relatives or some friends or he -- I thinkhe had some kind of support. I know we didn't have a G.I. Bill after World WarI, but there may have been -- things may have cost less if you were a veteran. I don't -- I don't know.
CW: Did you ever visit the dentist office? Was it around at then -- no.
DF: No, I -- I don't remember it at all. I assume the room must still have
been there in his -- yeah, when we visited him in Brooklyn. But I don't haveany memory of it.
CW: And can you explain his involvement in the school system?
DF: He was a director of Shul #15, which was a Sholem Aleichem Folkshul in
75:00Brooklyn. I don't know much about what the farvalters [managers] did, so Idon't know if he was the equivalent of a principal and set policy and hiredteachers, or whether he was one of a committee of people who did those things. But really, people talked about it as if it was his school -- in newspaperarticles about him that I've read, in the way my mother talks about it -- thatthat was his school. And then, in the larger world of Yiddish education, hewas the president of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. I think he was also-- served as some other officer with them at some point. He was editor of"Kinder zhurnal" for a brief period of time. Longstanding contributor andlongstanding assistant editor. But then, he was chief editor for a period oftime, also, of the "Kinder zhurnal." And that was really an important piece ofthe Jewish education. That was the sort of "Highlights" for children, but that 76:00went along with the curriculum of and the pedagogical aims of that set ofschools. Of course, he was also a children's author, but he wrote a pamphletcalled, "The Fate of Our Yiddishist Schools" and he describes the battle overhow much religious content would be included in the Jewish schools, anddescribes at length in that pamphlet -- and he was the champion of having firstkhumesh [Pentateuch], Tanakh -- so, "The Five Books of Moses" and then theProphets, also, and the writings in -- taught in school to the children, eventhough it was a secular school. And there were people who were very againstthis, who said, No, we are secular schools. We're not a religious school. Wedo Yiddish language and Yiddish literature, but not religion. And he said,"How can you understand Yiddish language and Yiddish literature without oursource texts? This is where our literature comes out of. This is what Jewishculture and Jewish history come out of, and you can't really understand our 77:00history, our culture, without understanding the Torah." And he won thatbattle. And he wrote "Khumesh far kinder [Pentateuch for children]," which wasan abbreviated khumesh for children, and it was incorporated into the curriculumof those schools. So, he was not just a teacher, but he was more like aprincipal, a policy guy, a director. He was on -- on that level. Heapparently also taught Torah to the teachers' institute. So, at the highest to-- preparing the people who would teach in the Yiddish schools. So, that washim as an educator, and then he wrote about education, also, and he was achildren's author, of course. And he -- but he also wrote about being achildren's author, so that he was -- he was at a higher scholarly level than 78:00some of the other folks who were doing that same work of trying to transmit theculture. He was really a creator of culture, an arguer over culture. Course,there were many others like that as well. But he -- within that world ofYiddish education, he was very respected as a leader, although always controversial. [BREAK IN RECORDING] This book is called "Hakhomim, akshonim un naronim: mayses fun alerleyfelker [Wise men, stubborn people, and fools: stories from all kinds ofpeople]," and I translate that title, roughly, in English as "Wise Men, Fools,and Stubborn Mules." (reads from book) "Tsu di leyener fun di mayses -- diershte mayse fun dem bukh heybt zikh on, 'Amol, amol hot.' Di tsveyte mayseoykh azoy, 'Amol, amol hot' -- di finfte mayse oykh azoy, ober a bisl andersh, 79:00'Amol, amol hobn' -- kimat ale mayses azoy. Far vos 'amol, amol'? Di maysederfun iz, vos ale sheyne mayses, vos ikh leyn un hern, shtamen fun di vaytn gora mol, ven keyner hot gekent shraybn oder leyenen, ober take keyner nisht. Viazoy ken es amolt zayn? Gants poshet! Keyn alef-beys iz af der velt nishtgeven. Mentshn hobn zikh shoyn oysgelernt reydn, ober oystsuleygn di verter inoysyes, bukhshtabn, hot men nisht gevust vi azoy. Ober shoyn demolt hot men 80:00dertseylt mayses fun amol, amol."
CW: Could you just hold up the book for one sec so we can see which one it's
from? Great.
DF: "To the reader of the stories -- the first story in the book begins, 'Once
upon a time, there was' -- 'A mol, a mol hot.' And the second story, too,like this, 'Once upon a time, there was' -- the fifth story, the same way, butslightly different, 'Once upon a time, there were' -- practically all thestories are like that. Why 'once upon a time'? The way it happened is thatall the beautiful stories you read in here come from the far distant time whenno one knew how to write or read. But really, no one at all. How can that beimagined? Very simply: no alphabet existed in the world. People had learned 81:00to talk, but they did not know how to set out the words in markings orletters. They just didn't know how to do it. But even then, they toldstories from 'once upon a time.' Who told the stories? Who rememberedthem? For the most part, usually grandfathers and grandmothers and overall, ingeneral, old people. There were few older people in those times. Not evenone per family. Two, three in a village. People died young, from plagues,floods, hunger, and from the smallest illness or sickness. A lot of peoplewere killed by wild animals. Lions, leopards, bears, wolves, and tigers. Young people had little time to learn things thoroughly and well. They werebusy getting their daily food. Only those who did not die young gatheredwisdom and had the need and remembered a lot of things. In those days, peoplelived in caves, crevices in rocks, and in deep holes they dug at the base of 82:00mountains. They covered the entrances with thick branches and with leaves,leaving only a small opening for the smoke from the fire that was alwaysgoing. In the long winter nights or in the cold, biting winter days and in therainy summer days, they would sit, huddled in their holes around the fire andlisten to some stories from the grandfathers and grandmothers. Ah, 'once upona time.' What does 'once upon a time' mean? You think there's a big stormoutside now. My father told me that once, long ago, it snowed for thirty daysand thirty nights and the whole world was covered in snow. In a lot of places,the snow reached up to the sky. When the snow melted, the whole world wasflooded. People and animals and birds died. Only those who hid at the topsof mountains, all the way up near Heaven, remained. 'What's Heaven, 83:00grandfather?' 'Once upon a time, before God created Heaven and Earth, theworld was formless and void. A wasteland, without' -- the grandfathers had astory for everything. 'Once upon a time' -- and often the grandfather addedsomething himself, and the number of stories grew and the people multiplied onthe Earth. So passed thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, generationafter generation. And as the people multiplied, families became clans, largegroups of families with the same name. And those grew into tribes, and fromthe tribes, whole nations. And the Earth filled with different nations,separated from one another. Thousands, then hundreds of thousands of yearspassed and people forgot they all originated from one mother and one father,from one family. In every place, a different language was spoken, differentdelicacies were eaten, and different clothing was worn according to the 84:00different climates in which the different peoples lived. Not only had peoplebecome estranged from each other, they even began to have wars. Now there wereall types of races in the world: white, black, yellow, and every folk had itsown language. But no matter how separate people might be, no matter how farthey are from each other, they still tell similar stories. The same stories,just a little bit different. People call these variants. The stories arechanged a little: a little is put in, a little taken out. But it's all thesame story. The Hindus by the river Ganges, the Englanders by the Thames, theFrench by the Seine, the Lithuanians by the Neman, the Indians by theMississippi River, the Russians by the Volga, the Iraqis by the Tigris andEuphrates all tell one and the same stories, changed only according to theirlanguage and memory. The stories of all peoples have one source, are drawn 85:00from one well: from the 'once upon a time' when there was only one family in theworld. We have to remember this and remember it well. This is what ourprophet Malachi believed. He said, 'Do we not all have one Father? Have wenot all been created by one God?' My whole life, I've loved to read storiesfrom different peoples. Now, in my old age -- you should know, I'm already agrandfather of four grandchildren, they should live and be well -- I have chosenfifteen stories, and I bring them as a present to you, the Jewish children ofArgentina: fifteen stories about wise men, fools, and stubborn mules. You willlaugh a lot, but you will also think a lot, and you will see every time thatpeople are people all over the world."
CW: So, why'd you choose that one?
DF: What I love about that story is -- well, there's two things. I love that
86:00the story is about stories and it's about how folk stories can be bothparticular and universal at the same time. So, he was a great teller of folkstories. Many, many of his children's books were based on traditional Jewishfolk stories. And the story of Chelm, of a town full of fools, is not only aJewish story. Everywhere in the world, people make fun of people who arestupid, who are foolish, or who don't understand. And everywhere in the world,people locate them. And -- but, of course, they are also Jewish stories. TheChelm stories are stories about Jewish fools. And that idea that there is thishuman nature, this human culture that transcends our group -- and at the same 87:00time, that the way our group does it is important, and it's our way of doingit. That's crucial to his thinking. It's crucial to all our thinking. Now,we're living in a world where people are grouping up, where this issue ofmulticulturalism, of -- issues of intersectionality, inter-- issues of culturalappropriation are very much on people's minds. Who has the right to thisstory? Who has the right to this God? Who has the right to this kind ofdress or this kind of practice? How do we respect people who are -- who holddifferent things sacred than we do? And we're working out that problem, and --but we need to work out that problem at the same time as we see what's humanabout all of us. We need to be able to reconcile this issue of the minorityand the whole. And that's Jewish work. That is Jewish work. That's a 88:00universal problem, but it's a task we've been at the blunt end of, (laughs)let's say, over long, long eras of our history. So, that's one reason why Ilove it. I love it, also, just because his voice comes through so clearly,because it's a story about stories and because it -- it has this oral feelingabout it -- that I just find completely charming. So.
CW: And are you one of those grandkids?
DF: No! He had four grandchildren, they should live and be well. So, that
means my brother, Bill, was born, but I was not yet born. This was publishedin late 1959. Bill was born in March of 1959 and I was born in May of 1960. So, we can -- from his number of grandchildren, we can place that. And, infact -- so, there are four grandchildren that are older than me, and I actuallywanted to say that at some point. They would have different stories, maybe 89:00richer stories of their direct memories of him. My cousins talk about himbuying them a birthstone ring or about giving them Juicy Fruit gum. Mybrother, you know, would maybe remember the pink rubber ball that, you know, hewould go -- I did this, also. I would go to the corner store with him. Hewould get his tobacco and he would buy us a pink rubber ball and we would throwit against the garage door, you know, when we visited him. But there must be-- they must have richer memories of him from their childhoods than I have. AsI said, I was ten when he died, and my oldest cousin was almost college-age. He was probably sixteen or something. Fifteen at least. So, what I -- I havethe love absolutely intact from that childhood. And then, I have getting toknow him as a grown-up now. It's a weird kind of double relationship that Ihave with him. But I'm -- you know, we talked about this before and we can 90:00pick this up now -- getting to know him very differently by reading his workthan I knew him in my life.
[BREAK IN RECORDING]
CW: How would you introduce him as a writer to someone new?
DF: He was best known as a writer of children's stories based out of the
Jewish folk tradition. So, that was one important part of what he did. HisChelm stories were the stories on which generations of American Jews grew up andlearned about that set of stor-- there are many versions of those stories. Many Jewish writers have taken a crack at them, but his versions were the Chelmstories that people grew up on, both in Yiddish and then in the Englishtranslations. And he wrote other things: "The Clever Little Tailor," "TheWandering Beggar" -- again, straight out of the Jewish folk literature. But hehad a talent for making those stories into more than just little stories. He 91:00fleshed out the characters. He chained the stories together to make a longernarrative arc. He made them very particularly Jewish and used them as a way toteach people about how -- the ways Jews used to live. And he -- heaccomplished all of that in a way that retained a tremendous amount of humor andcharm and connected directly with young people. So, that was, in some ways, Ithink, his most important contribution and his greatest talent. However, hewas also a pedagogue. He wrote educational materials for children,particularly about religious matters. So, he wrote an abridged "Khumesh forChildren," and he wrote about the prophets for children. And he wrote aboutthe commentaries for teachers of children. So, that was another aspect of hiswork. He was a memoirist. His two-volume autobiography was very, verywell-received in his time and translated into English. And then, he also wrote 92:00about everything else. He wrote about religion, he wrote about being a Jew inthe modern world. He wrote about Israel and Zionism, and he wrote aboutidentity in the largest sense of the word. His -- so, his interests werealways grounded in Yiddish language and in Judaism, but within that universe, hehad broad-ranging interests. The other thing about his works is -- you know, Imentioned that he was best known for his children's work. Part of that is thatpeople didn't appreciate some of the things that he wrote about religion andabout the modern world and about Israel. He was a fierce -- I guess now theword is diaspora nationalist. He believed that the two thousand years ofJewish history, from the beginning of exile to the founding of the modern Stateof Israel, could not just be waved away. They were not a mistake. They werenot all bad -- that what we -- the civilization that we had created under those 93:00conditions was a beautiful civilization and was worth celebrating, was worthpreserving, even for Jews who wanted to live in the modern world. Thereligious people didn't appreciate him because he did not advocate beliefs. The secular -- the staunch secularists didn't appreciate him because he didadvocate Jewish practice. He believed Jews should know the holy texts and hebelieved that we should do something Jewish. We should -- and he didn't domuch of this in his own life, but he preached it, I suppose -- something that hedidn't practice, which was that we should try to return to halakha andincorporate more of the tradition in our everyday lives and strive for a Judaismthat was more integrated, more whole than just something you do on a Saturday onoccasion, or on the holiday. So, he was a complicated person, and his writings 94:00are not neatly pigeonholed. I know much more about his children's writingsthan I do about his writings for adults because of my own language level. I'vebeen studying Yiddish for three years. At this point, I've read most of whathe's written -- what he wrote for children. I've translated a couple of hisbooks for children. But I'm only beginning to crack the books that he wrotefor adults.
CW: So, I wanted to ask first why -- why do you think he wrote for children?
DF: He loved children. He wrote for children first and foremost because he
loved children. He wrote for children because he wanted to pass Judaismdown. Beyond that, I don't know. I can't ask him. I can't ask him about 95:00his own education. He had a very traditional education. He learned Torah, helearned Talmud. You know, he started up as sort of this -- the direct,old-fashioned -- it wasn't even a modern kheyder [traditional religiousschool]. It was a -- you know, he was in a small shtetl, and so theEnlightenment hadn't even made it there, basically, or it felt like that in theway that he describes it in his autobiography. So, did he miss having thosekinds of stories? I don't know. But there's one other hint that I have,which is that he was a mama's boy in some ways. Yiddish is mame-loshn [mothertongue], and he didn't go to school until he was six, and he -- so, he spentmore time with his mother, for a longer period of time, than most little boysdid in his culture and in his community. And he was very much under herinfluence. I think she was, in some ways, the stronger person in the family interms of her psychology, maybe also her intellect, though you wouldn't know with 96:00women because they didn't have the opportunity, the educational opportunity. But there was this gendered sense of Yiddish in the Old World. His motherwould not have known Hebrew and Aramaic. Would have told him stories inYiddish. And I know they were very close. I know he admired her -- again,through what I saw in his autobiography. And so, that might also be a reasonwhy he ended up writing children's stories in Yiddish, but he never said so in-- like, directly that way. I think it would have been a very low status thingto admit in some sense. He was from a generation that wanted to free Yiddishof the stigma of being a women's language. He wanted it to be a language forwomen and men and everyone, for workers and intellectuals and -- yeah.
CW: From your perspective, what connection, if any, is there between his
DF: (sighs) There's the question. So, one of the touchy points in my family
is my mother didn't read his books. And she didn't read -- she didn't teach meabout his books directly, except the few that were translated into English, shedid. She read and she shared them with me and she loved them. But hischildren's books in Yiddish -- my parents didn't read them as children, theydidn't read them to us when we were children. They didn't translate them --you know, this is work that I'm doing now -- except my uncle, David, a few yearsago did translate -- but that was not a children's book, per se. His audience(pause) -- his audience disappeared in front of him. It melted away in front 98:00of his eyes. It slipped through his fingers like sand. The secularYiddishists came to America grounded in a traditional Old World culture and madetheir way into a modern world. And when they founded Yiddish schools, it wasbecause they wanted their children to share the things that they held dear fromthat origin, from their culture of origin. But they didn't want to raise theirchildren in Europe. They didn't want to raise their children in Orthodox,traditional homes. So, they spoke to their children in Yiddish because theygrew up learning Yiddish, but they -- some of them -- not necessarily mygrandfather, but his generation, they were pleased when their children wouldanswer them back in English, would be fluent in English without any accent, 99:00would be real Americans. America was the land of our freedom. So, when theyfounded these Yiddish schools, they were hoping to transmit the feeling ofheymishkayt [coziness], the -- this feeling of warmth that the language wasassociated with for them, from their own childhoods, this great literature thathad flared up. It had, like, sort of blown up out of nothing in twogenerations, the secular Yiddish literature. And there are such gems in thatliterature, and they wanted -- having loved them, they would want their childrento be able to read that language so they could share that. That was what they-- people who were reading contemporary modern poetry in Yiddish in the '20swould naturally want their children to learn Yiddish, because here were -- herewas a language that could do everything. And yet, they were in the UnitedStates, and so their children were not so interested in many, many cases. Notall -- not all cases. So, his intended audience was sort of -- almost like a 100:00hypothetical audience. It would be the child eager to please the parent, eagerto master multiple languages the way they had -- used to in the Old World. There was no conflict in the Old World between being good at Yiddish and ascholar of Hebrew and Aramaic and knowing the language of your country, whetherit was Russian or Polish or -- you know, so that you could do business with thepeople around you. In America, it was different. In America, there was apress from the outside, also, that we be a monolingual society. There wasalways a suspicion of otherness hovering over people who retained their homelanguage. The breakthrough really came from Latinos, I think, from -- in the'40s and the '50s and six-- people who went back and forth from America toPuerto Rico, back and forth from America to Mexico, so that they always hadliving contact with the wellspring of their language. I expect the -- maybe 101:00even a hundred years ago, French Canadians up in northern New Hampshire andMaine had this back and forth with Canada. I don't know, but it seems to methat to be bicultural in that sense requires a living culture on both ends. And the ocean was too big and the poverty was too great, and there was no --even before World War II, there was no easy exchange between the European livingculture of Yiddish, of the Ashkenazic civilization and the Jews of America. So, sometimes his audience was the children in the Yiddish schools in Mexico orin Montreal or in Argentina. And I'm sure some of them made their way out intothe Old World, also. But my grandfather was, in some ways, more honored inMexico and in Argentina and in Canada than he was in the United States. There, 102:00not just his children's writings but his works on cultural issues were alsowell-received and highly esteemed, and he published most of his later books inBuenos Aires, not in New York. So, that's something about his audience.
CW: Do you think he would have imagined that his grandkids would be reading
his stuff in Yiddish?
DF: When we were -- when the older ones were very little, he hoped for that.
When my oldest brother, Dan, when my oldest cousin, Deena -- when they wereyoung, they went to Yiddish school, they went to Camp Boiberik, and I'm sure hehoped that they would know some Yiddish when they grew up. And it didn'treally pan out that way. Boiberik became more and more an English-speakingenvironment, with -- more through the transition from one generation to thenext. Dan did go to Sholem Aleichem Folkshul through age thirteen. My 103:00grandfather actually offered to help him with his bar mitzvah, and Dan was notinterested. But it became pretty clear by the very end of his life that themilieu here in the United States was not supportive, and that his children werenot going to press this on his grandchildren. And in -- you know, he did writein English at the very end of his life. So, "Wise Men of Chelm" was translatedfrom -- "Di heldn fun khelm [The heroes of Chelm]" was translated as "The WiseMen of Chelm." "More Wise Men of Chelm" was written originally and only inEnglish. So, the sequel to it was written in the '60s in English. And his"Khumesh far kinder," which was a book about the Bible for Yiddish schoolstudents, as there were fewer and fewer and fewer Yiddish school students -- hewrote "The Rabbi's Bible," which was really the English version of the samething. It was an abridged Bible for children, but this time he got to do what 104:00they wouldn't let him do in the Yiddish, which was to put in Talmudic commentaryalong with the Biblical text. And that became a very important part of someHebrew school curricula, was this -- so, he adapted to that reality. Heacknowledged that reality. But it was a huge loss for him. And yeah, I thinkit would have -- it would have thrilled him that I now am learning Yiddish andthat I'm doing it with a certain amount of devotion, and that I'm really gonnaget it, you know? That I can really read his children's books now and that I'malmost there with his adult books. That would have been a kick, I think, yeah.
CW: And can you describe his way of writ-- I mean, I know we've -- you just
read a story, but can you describe his way of writing for kids?
DF: His writings for children were playful. They were not didactic. They
105:00-- they were folksy. What else can I say about his writing style? He -- thestyle actually change-- in "Robert's Adventures," it sort of changes. WhenRobert's a baby, he's sort of more childlike in the language he uses and in theway he sort of tells the narrative, and it gets more mature as the subject getsmore mature, as the book goes on. Sometimes he uses wordplay. He createscharacters. His books for children are really -- everyone has a name. Evenif it's a little folk story, he retells the folk story, he makes up a name forthe protagonist so that it's not a story about a farmer. It's a story about a 106:00farmer named Moyshe. You know, there's -- it's -- he wanted the children tounderstand that this really happened to a real person. And in fact, he -- inhis book, "Jews of Long Ago," he argues in his preface that if folk stories aretold again and again and again, that means it really happened to real people. You wouldn't keep telling the story if it didn't somehow map onto real, livedexperience. And maybe not necessarily historical experience, but trueexperience, and there's a distinction there. So, his characters always hadnames and were set in particular places. And -- what else can I say about hiswriting style? He wrote a -- an article in a journal called "Culture andEducation," "Kultur un dertsiung," called "Kinder literatur, oder literatur far 107:00kinder?" -- "Children's Literature or Literature for Children?" And in thisarticle -- this is one of the adult writings that I've been able to dig my teethinto and translate, one of his writings not in any of his books, and we can comeback to that in a moment. But it -- so, in this article about children'sliterature, he sort of lays down his philosophy. And he says that it's -- it'sfirst of all very hard, that children's literature does not get a lot ofrespect. This was -- he's writing in the '40s -- and that there is a problem,particularly when writing in Yiddish for children, because you have children whoare at a certain age of emotional maturity but whose vocabulary is not up totheir level of maturity. So, writing for children in a second language is --and 'cause for every child, at this point, you know, his audience -- he knewthat they were learning Yiddish, that it was not their mother tongue, for many, 108:00many of the children. And even if it was their mother tongue, they were beingschooled in a different language, so their literacy level in Yiddish might nothave been as high. So, what do you do about that? And what he wrote was thatthe most important thing to do is -- is not to write down to children, first ofall, you know. And he said, you know, children's writers start with thisformula: "Come, my little children, would you like to hear something you'venever heard before? Well, sit down and be nice children and I will tell yousomething wonderful." And he said, "If you start that way, you're just showingthat you really have no clue what children are really like or what they want." What's very funny is when I found a Moishe Nadir story that began with preciselythose words -- (laughs) that was a kick. I knew who he was making fun of. Orall the Yiddish children's writers were using that formula and he was sort ofbristling about it. So, his point was not to write down to them. So, how do 109:00you not write down to them, and yet it's -- it should be very, very simple. And he said the key to it -- and he quoted Mani Leib, he quoted PeretzHirschbein -- his writings were -- his writings for adults were veryscholarly. They tended to have footnotes and they tended to show off his broadrange of reading. But he cited other children's writers whose work he didadmire as saying that -- that it should be an experience of wonder, thatchildren are experiencing everything for the first time. He quoted the writerwho saw the beautiful blue sky in Italy and couldn't remember where he had seenit before. Such an incredible clear blue sky, and -- and then the writerremembered, Oh, when he was a little child and looked at the sky for the firsttime, it seemed that blue to him, because he had never seen a blue sky before. 110:00He said, "That's what you have to do." So, you write as though you, thewriter, are experiencing what you're writing about for the first time. And ifyou do that, then it will be simple. You'll strip away all the irrelevantdetails, you know? What's amazing about a summer day is what it feels likewhen a cool breeze picks up, you know? You wouldn't get into -- I don't knowwhat. You know, atmospherics and how, you know, the air looks when the sunradiates in a certain -- you wouldn't get -- you wouldn't talk about the detailsof the clothing you were wearing. It was just you're hot and then there's thisfeeling of relief, and you'd -- it felt like the air was cooler and clearer andlike, that you were alive again, or -- that sense of wonder. So, he -- thatwas his goal. And I think he -- he actually got to it in a lot of hischildren's writing.
CW: As you mentioned, a lot of other Yiddish writers also wrote for
111:00children. And from my understanding, sometimes it was ideological, that there-- you know, there needed to be more material for kids. Was there -- do youget a sense of an ideology behind his writing for kids?
DF: No and yes. So, we can go to the Sholem Aleichem Folkshuls themselves.
There were different wings of the Yiddish schools movement. There was thecommunist wing that had the Ordn shules, the Farband, and then there were thesocialists who had the Workmen's Circle schools, the Arbeter Ring schools. Andthe Sholem Aleichem Folkshuls were for the schools that were not going to drawtheir curriculum from a political ideology. They were apolitical as apolitical statement. They were -- basically, what they were saying was, 112:00Yiddish language and literature is our value. That's the main value. Therest of it is important, but not -- that's not what we want to -- we're notindoctrinating our children in a particular belief system. A new book has comeout about the little journals that go along with the chil-- the schools, thedifferent wings of the schools. [BREAK IN RECORDING] A book has come out and it describes how each of the children's journalswent along with the program of that school. And so, what do you do in anapolitical school system? The children had stories, mostly about life inAmerica, at first. And it's quite interesting to me that what happened was,over time, more and more Jewish content came in. And part of that was mygrandfather's doing. So, he was -- when he said our value is Yiddish and 113:00Yiddish literature and Yiddishkayt, these mean different things in Yiddish thanthey mean in English. Yiddish is Jewish. Yiddish language is the Jewishlanguage. Yiddishkayt is Jewishness. It's not Yiddishness. It'sJewishness. And so, for him, if you're gonna talk about Jewish literature,there should be Jewish themes in it. It should have something to do withJewishness. And -- so he, early on, intro-- you know, sort of backfilled, andit's interesting that, you know, he wrote about America, but mostly he liked towrite about the Old World. Mostly, he wrote about traditional Jewish life forchildren. So, the question: is this ideological? I would have to say yes. So, it started out as no, we don't have an ide-- but the -- you can't benon-ideological. When you write for children, you're making a judgement aboutwhat children should know about. What should be interesting to them? What 114:00should be funny to them? And you can't do that without imposing values orsharing values or staking out some kind of -- some kind of ideological turf oranother. His ideology, I learned much more about when I read his works aboutraising Jewish children, his works like, "The Fate of our Yiddishist Schools,"in which he argued for more Jewish content in the secular Yiddish schools. So,he did that in his writing, also. He wrote often about observant Jews in avery respectful way, and that was unusual in the secular literature of his time,I think.
CW: And do you think there's an intended audience for the adult -- you know,
the other books?
DF: When he wrote a book like "Yidn tsvishn felker," "The Jews Among the
115:00Nations," or "Tokh-yidishkayt," "The Essence of Judaism," or "Medinas yisroel unerets yisroel [The nation of Israel and the land of Israel]," he was writing tothe Jewish community, writ large. He was writing to all educated adults. Heknew that the people who read in Yiddish were a subset of the bigger Jewishworld. He knew that it leaned left. He knew that it leaned anti-religious. And so, he took that into account in the way that he wrote. He wrote -- oh,you know, he was -- he was not a socialist, but he wrote -- I think he wroterespectfully about people for whom social justice was a core part of theirJewish identity. And it was for him, too, but for him, it was from theprophets. It wasn't from Karl Mar-- Karl Marx was not a prophet of his. Buthe understood that for a lot of secular Yiddishists, Karl Marx was the sort of 116:00modern incarnation of the prophets' call for social justice. And so, he wasanti-communist. He was staunchly anti-communist, but as far as socialism wasconcerned, he was very liberal. And so, he may have disagreed about tacticswith the socialists or may have disagreed about sort of the little issues aroundcontrol of capital -- I don't know. I don't know about his mature politicalarguments. But what I do know is he knew who his audience was, and he was atleast respectful of the impulse, and the impulse was that our culture should --our culture should be for everyone. It should take into account the sufferingsof the poor and try to make them better. He was totally on board with thatpart of it.
CW: Oh, and of the children's books that you said you've been reading most
DF: So, one has to acknowledge the best books he wrote were the ones that were
translated into English in his lifetime. "The Wise Men of Chelm" wasbrilliant. "The Wandering Beggar," brilliant. The English of "The WanderingBeggar" is so brilliant, I haven't spent that much time going back to theYiddish "Shmerl nar." I will, it's on my list, but I don't feel like it needsany retranslating. I don't feel like it needs any improvement. That Englishbook just is so close to my heart, such a beautiful book.
CW: Do you know who translated it?
DF: David translated one of the -- at least one of them. I think he helped
with that one, as well. And I can look it up in a moment.
CW: Mm.
DF: So, the other major children's books he wrote were "Robert's Adventures,"
"The Clever Little Tailor," the one I just read from, "The Wise Men, Fools, andStubborn Mules." This "Jews of Long Ago" is -- really has a dual audience in 118:00some ways, but it's maybe for teenagers more than it is for young children. So, of "Robert's Adventures" and the "Hakhomim" Wise Men book and "The CleverLittle Tailor," I kind of have a soft spot for "Robert's Adventures." And it's-- the good parts are really good. The first chapter of that book would workas a stand-alone picture book for younger children. It's fantastic andcharming. It's almost like a Curious George book. The -- all of them havevery strong points, and all of them have problems with them. And at one point,I was thinking what I really wanted to do was translate all of them and thenmake a Solomon Simon reader, where I could pick out the very best parts and putthem out in Yiddish and English, side-by-side. So, I would like to say -- Imean, I'm getting to know my grandfather by reading his books, and you know, I'm 119:00not always liking everything that I get to know about him. He was -- he wasreally ethnocentric. He really thought Jews were better than other people. And the gentiles in his stories, the goyim, don't come off so well. The sortof anti-Semitism is one thing, but there's almost this assumption ofanti-Semitism -- in the plots of some of his books. And it feels defensive,and it feels oversold sometimes, the virtues of the Jews and the -- you know,compared to the iniquity of the people who have mistreated us for so long. Youknow, and it -- it feels to me almost analogous to some African Americans whocreate this glorious but imaginary African culture before the white man ever gotto the -- like, before Europe ever happened, everything black people -- or, anAfrican culture that may be, again, wonderful, without really engaging with the 120:00complexity of humans, in some sense. He sort of oversimplified some ofthose. I think it's just to be acknowledged. He saw a lot of stuff in hislife. And so, that added -- I sort of -- you can see where that -- some ofthat attitude may have come from. And then, in other cases, he was just -- itwas eighty years ago, so you've got to -- or, you know, ninety years ago, so hisattitudes from eighty years ago or ninety years ago -- you know, he was -- so,in "Robert's Adventures," there's this fantasy of the child going into outerspace, where there's a planet -- and the planet -- on this planet, all thethings you think of come true. So, if you think of a tree but you do it withyour whole heart, or you say the word "tree" with intention, then a beautifultree forms. But if you're distracted, then it's like homework badly done. The tree comes out malformed, right? Or -- and so, there are all these peoplewho are crippled or crooked, walking around, because he had evil thoughts or 121:00sinful thoughts. And in the twenty-first century, we would not talk aboutdisability in that way, as the product of bad thoughts, right? So, there aresome things that are just -- that don't make it from there into the modernworld. And of course, as our culture has matured, if he were still alive, hewould have matured along with it and wouldn't have written that way. But itwas quite common in his time to think of some -- it's better to be sighted thanto be blind. It's better to be smart than to be -- you know, to have acognitive disability, right? And some of his books couldn't -- which are aboutsmartness and foolishness can be thought of as making fun of stupid people. Infact -- in fact, he didn't make fun of stupid people. He did not. And if youread deeper and if you read carefully, you see that the fools in his book arejust like all of us. That we're, you know -- and he was a deeply compassionate 122:00man. But so, I don't know what got me off on that. You can --
CW: Yeah.
DF: -- cut it all if (UNCLEAR). (laughter)
CW: No, no, no, it's really interesting. I just thought of one thing that I
forgot to ask earlier, which was: do you know what happened --
DF: (UNCLEAR)
CW: (To videographer) Are -- are you okay? Yeah -- (turning back to David)
okay, of his -- did he remain in touch with his family? Do you know whathappened to his --
DF: He was --
CW: -- family?
DF: He was very close to one brother who lived in Israel, Binyamin. And I
think he had a sister here. Rose, I think. I wasn't close to her, so I haveno memory of her. I did see Binyamin once when we traveled to Israel when Iwas a kid. And his children, his grandchil-- one of his granddaughters and Iplayed blocks or something when I visited Israel. He -- I know from his 123:00writings that he sent money back to his parents. And -- and there's a ratherawful story about that in -- not in his autobiography, but in the book, "Jews ofLong Ago." That book begins with folk stories and then makes its way up intothe modern world until finally he's telling stories about his own family. Hetells a story about a man in America who's sending money back to his father,Ben-Zion, after the Communist Revolution. And at a certain point, anyone whohas dollars becomes a suspect. And his father is abused by and then jailed bythe secret police because he has dollars and won't fork it over, and won't forkthem over. And it's really -- and he dies shortly after he gets out of prison 124:00in this story. And I trace some of the vehemence of his anti-communism to thatstory. I believe that -- because it was clearly personal with him. Hisanti-communism was not based on an abstraction. And I think that's -- that wasthe personal piece of it, that -- not only had they abused his father, but thathis attempts to help were somehow the vehicle through which they abused hisfather. So that, you know, he was -- his feelings of -- of helplessness aroundthat must have been extraordinary. So, clearly, he was in touch with hissiblings, clearly -- and he still sent money back to his parents. What I don'tthink he ever did was -- I don't think he ever went back to Russia. He hatedRussia, he feared Russia. Clearly, while the czar was still there, he couldhave been inducted into the army. But -- but he would-- he didn't go back 125:00under communism, either. So, he never went back, far as I know. So, I think,as a teenager, when he left for America, as far as he knew, he was cutting tieswith his whole family. And then -- then he did get to have a relationship witha brother through the mail, and he went to Israel twice and -- you know, he hada sibling here, and -- yeah.
CW: Hm. Do you know how the Holocaust affected the family?
DF: I don't know. I don't know about -- there were a few siblings in
Russia. He had no one close in to the front lines, and his brother was alreadyin Israel. And I think that he -- and I believe that -- let's see, he was bornin 1895 and his parents were not young when he was born. He was pretty fardown the chain of those eight or nine siblings, however many there were. So, I 126:00believe his parents were dead before the Holocaust. Certainly his father wouldhave been. So, I think he was less touched than most Jewish families were. Ithink our fa-- you know, on my father's side, it was a little different. But Ithink that he was less directly affected. And it's interesting to me, when Iread certain interpretations of him or of his work or of his arguments about theYiddish schools -- and people say, Well, he want-- you know, there was areaction after World War II, and people started turning back to religion as aresponse to the Holocaust. And then, they cite him as an example of this,because in the '50s, he was arguing for more religion in the secular Yiddishschools. But he had been arguing since the '30s for more religion in thesecular Yiddish schools. His -- his belief, his strong belief, was that Jews 127:00in America had thrown the baby out with the bathwater, that we had becomemodern, we had become Americanized, we had thrown off all of our superstitions,but we had also thrown off all of the sustaining, beautiful parts of our culturewith it. And he started seeing that. He must have started seeing that in hisson's early child-- his son was born in about 1924, right? So, in the '30s, hewas already arguing this -- against assimilation and for Judaism, not just asthe thing you do on the side or on occasion, but as an integrated part of yourwhole life. But he didn't really get -- I think he didn't really get howtraumatized the entire people was by the Holocaust. I think that that'ssomething that he didn't -- that when he wrote his skeptical pieces about 128:00Israel, I think he didn't understand the attachment of a traumatized people toIsrael as their salvation, that this would never happen again, that these tanksand these guns in Jewish hands meant that this was never going to happenagain. That that was almost an article of religious faith, and -- or if he didget it, he -- which -- he saw that only as distortion and not as a response to akind of unprecedented shock. He -- he got that we had had a shock. I mean,he got it intellectually. He got that -- that Yiddish had been wiped out. Every Yiddish writer understood that their audience had been wiped out, that --but it -- it didn't -- I don't think it -- he emotionally integrated what theHolocaust meant in his later writing. [BREAK IN RECORDING] So, for me, this letter is just about -- just what a delightful 129:00grandfather he was. It's dated October 23rd, 1969. It's on his stationery. And it reads, "David, my youngest grandson, thank you for your beautifulletter. But you are smart, Dudl, very clever. I think when you grow up, youwill be more clever than zeyde Simon and a better writer. I treasure yourletter. It will go, as the letters of the very important people, to thearchive of YIVO. Zeyde Simon. PS -- I wait impatiently to see my threegrandsons. Bobe [grandmother] sends her regards."
CW: Did you find it at YIVO?
DF: No, no, I had this --
CW: Oh, you --
DF: -- my whole life. I went back -- when I went to YIVO, I looked for what
letter I must have written him that this was a response to, but I couldn't find 130:00my letter in the archive of YIVO. But his papers --
CW: Wow.
DF: -- are -- his papers are there, yeah. So, he thought I was going to be a
great writer when I grew up, all right, based on my letter writing at age eightor nine or whatever. And I actually wanted to be a writer when I grew up. And went to college hoping to major in creative writing, and there was a smallglitch, which cost me thirty years, and now I'm a poet. So, you know,eventually came around, (laughs) so it got back -- and a blogger and atranslator. This one is interesting because of a remarkable coincidence. Onbackground, I don't have books from my grandfather besides his books. I don'thave books from his -- let's say from his library. He had a large, largelibrary of very scholarly books in Hebrew and lots of books in Yiddish. Books 131:00from the Old World, books from the New World. And when he died, they weregiven to a synagogue, which just kept them in boxes somewhere, notwell-protected, and they got flooded and rotted and thrown away. A wholelibrary was just gone, so it -- before the Yiddish Book Center existed. Godknows what treasures were in there. But now, we do have the Yiddish BookCenter. And I go when I can, but I go quite rarely. Last time I went, I wentgathering Yiddish poetry, and one of the things that I want to do is translateYiddish poetry. And there's just a wealth of beautiful material out there. And I -- I had mentioned once that Mani Leib was a friend of my grandfather's. So, I was in the Yiddish Book Center and I -- I got -- oh, I got volume two ofYehoash's translation of the Tanakh, because I had volume one but not volumetwo, and I picked up a couple of books of poetry. Some of them, you know, are 132:00available to anyone on the web, which I think is fantastic. But it's differentto hold a book in your hands. Some -- there's a book by Glatstein, it'sbeautiful, and this book by Rokhl Korn has handwritten corrections in it becausethe typesetter did a terrible job on it, and -- so, I picked up a couple ofbooks. I picked up a book of poetry by Chaim Grade, who also was a friend ofmy grandfather's, but whose work is not digitized and available to everyone onthe web. So, I had a big handful of books, and I -- probably more than Ishould've gotten. And I'm on my way out, and I notice Mani Leib's books, whichI all -- have digitally, and I don't really need. But look how little thisbook is. I could take th-- and it's so lovely. Like, the title, "Sonetn[Sonnets]," is in red rather than in black, so it's actually printed in twocolors, you know? And it's this charming little thing. So, I saw this littlebook of sonnets, and I pulled one out and I opened it up, and it was stamped allover, "Jewish Library of Mexico," all over the title page. And so, I didn't 133:00like the stamps all over it. I wanted the -- a cleaner copy, so I put thatback and I picked up another copy, and I opened it up and there was aninscription in the book. And I looked at the inscription and it said, "Far Dr.Shloyme Simon, mit froyndshaft fun yorn. To Dr. Solomon Simon, with thefriendship of years." This was a book that was inscribed to my grandfather. And I thought -- from the poet -- and I got very excited. And I calledeveryone over at the Book Center. "Look, look, I found this book that the poetinscribed!" Well, it was not actually from the poet. In fact, this book,which I would have known if I was more erudite -- was -- actually, it came outjust after Mani Leib's death, so he couldn't have inscribed it to him, mygrandfather. Oh, it says, "Mit froyndshaft fun yorn, un mit hartsikn grusn, 134:00roshel veprinski [With the friendship of years, and with heartfelt greetings,Rochelle Weprinsky]." And Rochelle Weprinsky was his widow, his -- she was thewoman that Mani Leib lived with. And so, she dedicated it, you know, and sentit to my grandfather. So, I treasure this beautiful little volume of ManiLeib's poem-- just on a -- again, on my way out the door, Oh, I'll -- maybe I'llget this one, too, and there it is. And how it got there -- I have no idea howit got there. My only guess is that someone borrowed it from my grandfatherand never returned it, and then when they died, it made its way to the YiddishBook Center. But, yeah, so, I wanted to tell that story.
CW: And at the -- I mean, was there a personal connection to the -- you know,
DF: Yeah, first of all, Mani Leib was one of Di Yunge, and he wrote beautiful
lyrical poetry. He proved that Yiddish could sing in a way that the sweatshoppoets before him -- you know, for them, poetry was a way to move the masses, andit was -- yes, it was set to song, but it was heavy in some way. He made it --he w-- he had a very beautiful Yiddish, and even as a beginning reader, I canappreciate the lyricism of Mani Leib's poetry and of his sonnets. So, I lovethe work. I've read only a few of his poems, with help from my teachers, andI'm getting better at it. And now, I've been able to translate one or two ofthem. So, part of it is just that the -- the poems themselves are very closeto me. But again, partly, it was -- it's that relationship that my grandfatherhad with him. So, on a -- a recommendation of a teacher, I got a book called 136:00"A Little Love in Big Manhattan" by Ruth Wisse, and that's a book about ManiLeib and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern in New York, you know, in the teens and '20s andforward. And it really is a book about the wave of immigration from the OldWorld to New York and about Yiddish culture and Yiddish literary culture of thatera, told by focusing in on these two particular poets who had very differenttemperaments and very different poetic styles. And as I do when I get a newbook, I do read the book, but -- the first place I stop is in the index, and Isee if my grandfather's mentioned. And in fact, he's mentioned. At the endof the book, when Mani Leib dies, there's a sonnet of his, and the sonnet is -- 137:00well, now I don't have it right here, but it's basically words written on atombstone. And in most of Mani Leib's obituaries, that sonnet is -- isprinted. And my grandfather, Ruth Wisse mentions in her book, wrote an articleto "Di prese," to a Yiddish newspaper in Buenos Aires called "Three Encounterswith Mani Leib," and he talks about his relationship with Mani Leib and issomewhat quizzical about the way that people turn back to their Judaism at theend of their life, because the poem is really about, "When I die, bury me like aproper Jew with shards" -- oh, no -- "Here lies -- here lies Moishe Itsik's son"-- whatev-- something like that, "like a proper Jew, with shards on his eyes." And there's this sort of image of being in takhrikhim, in a shroud, a 138:00traditional Jewish burial, as a religious Jew would properly be buried. Andthen it goes on from there, and it's a sweet, brilliant sonnet. But what mygrandfather wrote was, "Who is this guy?" Like, "I know this guy. He wasburied in a three-piece suit. We were modern Jews. He was a modern Jew hiswhole life. Why is he now suddenly putting an identity on his tombstone asthough nothing had ever changed -- as though modernism had never happened?" And it's an intriguing question, and it hangs in the air at the end of RuthWisse's book. And so, I was -- that was an interesting story to me, again,because of the personal connection between the poet and my grandfather, who --who published his work in the "Kinder Zhurnal" when he was the editor, whoinvited him to come to the Sholem Aleichem schools and read to the children orparticipate as an honored guest at the ceremony. You know, the graduation 139:00ceremonies and so on. So, you know, they knew each other more than casually,quite evidently. [BREAK IN RECORDING] One of my more recent projects has been to try to identify, track down thethings that my grandfather wrote that were not in his twenty full-lengthpublished books. It's important to remember this guy was a full-timedentist. He's a full-time dentist who, on the side, wrote twenty books whilehe was also active in various community organizations. I don't know how that'shumanly possible, I really don't quite understand it. But it turns out thatthat's not all of it. So, every once in a while, I had found references tocertain things that he wrote in journals. And so, I began to try to -- Ifirst, I began searching in English using Scholar Google, you know? I havecertain basic research skills from having been an academic. But I wasn't able 140:00to find that much. But sometimes, you can find something indirectly. So,I'll tell one quick story about that.
CW: Um-hm.
DF: A woman wrote a book called "Byron and the Jews." And she wrote about
Byron's version of nationalism and the fact that it was -- he was widelytranslated into Hebrew and into Yiddish, and what the Jews took from Byron. And in her book, she cites a book review that my grandfather wrote about atranslation of Byron into Yiddish. And my grandfather wrote several things inthat review, but one of the things he wrote was that this, in -- you know, inthis part, this translation into Hebrew is more successful than this translationinto Yiddish, even though the Yiddish matches the rhythm of the poem better andactually matches the meaning of the poem better, but that in the poem, "Cain," 141:00where Byron is talking in Biblical language -- that we have no Yiddish Biblicallanguage that's equivalent to the punch of these particular Hebrew words,okay? So, that's a point my grandfather made in his review, and this Englishscholar said, What this shows is that Simon was arguing for his -- almost likefor a return to bilingualism, where you talk about religious and lofty and highintellectual matters in Hebrew, and Yiddish is the language of the proletariatand of the masses and of the regular people. Now, I don't believe mygrandfather was making any such argument of the kind. And so, I actually wroteto this English -- the scholar who had written the book about Byron, and shesent me a copy, very kindly, of the original book review that my grandfather hadwritten. And I read it, and in fact, he wasn't -- I don't believe he wasmaking that argument at all. But I told this story to my mother, and my mothersaid, "Well, who did the Yiddish translation of Byron?" And I said, "Oh, it 142:00was someone named Dr. Eisen." She said, "Dr. Eisen? He used to call thehouse all the time. He would say -- he would call up on the phone, he wouldsay, 'Hello, good morning.' And I would say, 'Oh, Dr. Eisen.' And he'd say,'How did you know it was me?' Or if it was in the evening, he would say,'Hello, good evening.'" (laughs) Like, that was his -- he had this very -- so,what was fascinating to me was this -- she knew him as this sort of roly-polynice guy who had this charming and quirky way of talking on the telephone. Andhe was a translator of poetry from English into Yiddish, right? So, he hadthis whole -- there's this whole intellectual plane on which he and mygrandfather were having some kind of dialogue. But for my mother, he was thisnice guy who came by the house, or he was this nice guy who had a funny way oftalking on the phone. And so, to me, that's sort of interesting. It talks 143:00about what I can't do in my work about, like, getting to know my grandfatherthrough his writings and what I can do in getting to know my grandfather throughhis writing. So, I can -- I can get to know what my grandfather really thoughtabout the relationship between language and nationalism, and I can't get whetherhe liked this guy or not, or whether they knew each other, because that's notanywhere in the article. So, there's all kinds of backstory that I'm nevergonna know, that I do get to know by grace of my relationship with my sweetmother. But, you know, if it doesn't come up, then I'll never find it out inthat sense. And it is -- you know, there's this gap, there's this big,cultural gap of my generation. You know, her generation knew these people aspeople. The kids now are studying Yiddish the way they would study ancientGreek. It's like this language that the -- you know, from this culture thatwas gone. And -- unless they studied Hasidim. But I'm in this sort of funny 144:00place where I sort of knew the generation of people for whom this was a livingcivilization, but secular one. I sort of knew of them, you know? My parentsknew them and I sort of knew of them, and -- and so, I'm -- I'm in that sort ofmiddle generation.
CW: So, can -- could you talk about that a little more, how you -- Yiddish in
your generation?
DF: So, (pause) Yiddish was not spoken in my home. We heard it distantly and
had a love for the people for whom it was a living language. But we never hadit as a living language. Children who grew up in the '60s or into the '70s 145:00were presented with certain ways of being Jewish. You could be Jewish by beingin a synagogue -- it's why, when my brother wanted to be more Jewish, the ideawas, Okay, we'll go get bar mitzvahed. That's how you be more Jewish. So,you could be Jewish by going to the synagogue, you could be Jewish by being aZionist. You could be a Jewish -- you could be Jewish by never, everforgetting the Holocaust. And if you're not religious, if you don't believe inGod, the other two ways of being Jewish really are not about being here, insuburban United States, as a white person. You know, maybe my grandparentsweren't white people, but I'm a white -- like, I'm in the majority culturehere. I grew up in prosperity, I grew up in the suburbs. What way -- what isthere in that identity? I wasn't threatened with death. I wasn't going to 146:00move to another country. I didn't believe Israel was my true home. Ibelieved that Great Neck, sigh, was my true home, okay? So, it may not havebeen a home that I related to, but that was my home. (laughs) And so, I feltlike -- my grandparents were right, that there could be a secular YiddishJudaism, but it was not given to me, really, as one of the alternatives. Now,I said there still was a Sholem Aleichem Folkshul around. It still existedwhen I was seven. It probably wasn't there anymore when I was seventeen. So,the numbers were dwindling. Everyone was making the same choices. No one wastrying to do it that way. But it was -- again, there's this feeling of thefingertip miss, right, of almost being -- that almost being there. We heard 147:00the grandparents speak it, but we never heard the parents speak it. W-- no onewanted to go back. I'm not talking about nostalgia. I'm not talking aboutwanting to go back to a traditional way of life. I'm not talking about wantingto go back to that continent where we were treated so horrifically. But theidea that you could live as a Jew in your daily life, un-self-consciously, notas devotion to God but just as an authentic way to participate in a nationalculture. And it's funny, because it -- that is possible in Israel, inHebrew. There are secular Jews in Israel who live in Hebrew, who -- everythingthey do is Jewish. So, I suppose Zionism would have been an option for doingthat. But I felt like that was our only -- that was our choice. How do you 148:00-- to stay here, in the US, and to live an authentic Jewish life, you know, wasa very -- it was -- it's a sort of vanishing ideal. And I feel like -- I don'tknow that young people have solved any of this, but I look at the young peoplewho are interested in Yiddish now, and I look at the Yiddish Book Center andtheir programming for young people. And -- their -- this idea of a return backto a certain set of attitudes. But I feel like my peers, my age group, reallyin some ways were not catered to by the people who were trying to sustainYiddish secular culture. I feel like the -- the Book Center has their oralhistories with the old people and they have their programming for college-age 149:00students. And I, who am Aaron Lansky's age, more or less, have very littleavailable to me to learn more Yiddish, to join in. And I think that people arenow adapting and coming around. So, now there are book clubs and now there's aone-week thing in March, and now -- so, there's some effort to get to the fiftyand sixty-year-olds. But for a long time, the focus was on the children of theimmigrant generation, the people who are -- now the children of the survivors,the children of the immigrant generations, the people who heard Yiddish in theirhomes as children or the people who represent our future as a people. Butthere are -- I learned this in Rochester, in the Jewish community center. There are people now who -- who have a -- a living memory of Yiddish, who couldlearn and who could gain and who could approach and glean more from Yiddish 150:00literature, and not just in translation. And also, there's this -- I think --you know, I'm -- I'm a stubborn man. I'm my grandfather's grandson. So, whenI said I was going to learn Yiddish -- so, I learn Yiddish. So, it's hard. It's hard in your fifties. And I'm unemployed, so I have more time. So, whatit would take a twenty -- a twenty-year-old two and a half years to accomplishis gonna take me five. And if someone was working hard in their fifties andthey could only do Yiddish a little bit and on the side, it could take themeight years to accomplish what a college student could do in two and a half. Nu [Well]? So, what's eight years, you know? What's eight years in ourthree-thousand-year history? Do it -- people should do it, you know? I tellmy friends, "You don't have a grandfather who's a Yiddish writer? Adopt one,you know? Pretend Itzik Manger is your grandfather and read everything he 151:00wrote, and then you'll get interested in what his friends wrote. You'll getinterested in what people -- how people wrote about him and why, you know, whywas he an alcoholic, and why this person hated him. And then, you -- they comealive to you as people." You know, why did he write poems about Biblestories? He could have written whatever he wanted. Why was -- why werepeople sort of taken aback that he wrote about the Biblical characters as ifthey were alive today? These aren't -- it's not this quaint, little -- youknow, these aren't kreplach [meat-filled dumplings]. You know, this isn't,like, the warm feeling in your belly from eating a Jewish food. It's --there's a living -- in books, people live in their contradictions. They livein their arguments. They live in their disputes, and they live also in thestories that they have. And we live in a world of high technology. But the 152:00technology of the book, the printed book with pages that you turn is still amiracle. It is a miracle that I can hear the voice of a dead person. I canhear it. I can hear his voice. I know what made him laugh. I know who heloved. You know, I didn't know anything about his -- his kheyder teacher. You know, the person who taught -- the advanced one who taught him, just beforehe went away to yeshiva. No one ever spoke that person's name in my lifetime,and yet I know his love for that teacher now that I've read some stories he'swritten about it. It's incredible. [BREAK IN RECORDING] (reads from book) "'Khelm boyt a vasermil.' Finf furn forn fun khelmkeyn shedlits. Forn di furn barg arof, barg arop ['Chelm builds awatermill.' Five wagons travel from Chelm to Siedlce. The wagons traveluphill, downhill]" -- sorry. (laughs)
CW: It's okay.
DF: "Finf furn forn fun khelm keyn shedlits. Forn di furn barg aroyf, barg
153:00arop. Khelm firt korn tsu moln in der vasermil fun shedlits. Finf furn, finfferd un tsen khelmer kluge layt. Eyn khelmer, a langer, firt dos ferd baymtsayml; an ander khelmer, a kurtser, zitst oyf der kelmyer un halt di leytses. Tsvey khelmer mit yeder fur. Finf furn, finf ferd un tsen khelmer klugelayt. Der elfter iz der kligster fun ale: hilel, der firer fun 'oboz.' Hilelfort in a feyetondl. Er fort mit dray ferd nashpits vi a porets. [Five wagons 154:00travel from Chelm to Siedlce. The wagons travel uphill, downhill. Chelmtakes its rye to Siedlce to grind at the watermill. Five wagons, five horses,and ten smart citizens of Chelm. One of the citizens of Chelm, a tall one,leads a horse by the bridle; another citizen of Chelm, a short one, sits on thecoachman's seat and holds the reins. Two citizens of Chem to each wagon. Five wagons, five horses, and ten smart citizens of Chelm. The eleventh is themost intelligent: Hillel, the leader of the wagon-train. Hillel travels in aphaeton. He is led by tree horses in tandem like a nobleman.]"
CW: Do you want to do that sentence again?
DF: Yeah. "Hilel, der firer fun 'oboz.' Hilel fort in a feyetondl. Er
fort mit dray ferd nashpits vi a porets. In mitn veg, shteln zikh op dikhelmer optsuruen zikh. Shtelt zikh of hilel, der kligster fun khelm, un tut azog, 'Zogt mir nor, khelmer, farvos firn mir korn tsu moln keyn shedlits?' 'Farvos take?' fregn di khelmer. Entfert hilel, der kligster fun khelm, 'Mirfirn korn tsu moln keyn shedlits, vayl in khelm iz nito keyn vasermil.' 'Take 155:00an emes,' entfern di khelmer. 'Avade an emes,' shreyt oys hilel, 'Ober zogtmir, farvos zoln mir nit boyen keyn vasermil in khelm?' 'Take farvos nit?'fregn di khelmer. 'Veln mir take boyen, veln mir take boyen,' klapt zikh hilelmit der foyst in hartsn. 'A vasermil veln mir boyen!' 'Avade veln mirboyen,' hobn tsugeshtimt di khelmer. 'Ober, yidn,' hot hilel gevornt, 'avasermil kost gelt, an oytser fun gelt, a yam mit gelt!' Hobn di khelmergeentfert, 'Mir veln zikh fun hemd oyston un a vasermil oyfboyen in khelm.' 156:00'Oyb azoy,' hot hilel oysgeshrien mit freyd, 'iz gut un voyl' [Hillel, theleader of the wagon-train. Hillel travels in a phaeton. He is led by treehorses in tandem like a nobleman. Hillel, the most intelligent of the citizensof Chelm, jumps up and says, 'So tell me, why are we bringing our rye to beground in Siedlce?' 'Why indeed?' ask the citizens of Chelm. Hillel, themost intelligent of the citizens of Chelm, answers, 'We are going to Siedlce togrind our rye because there is no watermill in Chelm.' 'That's true,' answerthe citizens of Chelm. 'Of course it's true,' yells Hillel, 'but why don't webuild a watermill in Chelm?' 'Why not indeed?' ask the citizens of Chelm.'Let's build one, let's build one,' Hillel pounds his heart with his fist. 'We'll build a watermill!' 'Of course we'll build it,' consented the citizensof Chelm. 'But, Jews,' Hillel warned, 'a watermill costs a lot of money, atreasure chest of gold, a sea's worth of gold!' The citizens of Chelmresponded, 'We will build a watermill in Chelm even if it reduces us topoverty.' 'If so,' Hillel shrieked in joy, 'I am pleased']" -- sorry.
CW: That's okay.
DF: "'Oyb azoy,' hot hilel oysgeshrayen mit freyd, 'iz gut un voyl. Mir veln
ufshteln a vasermil fun vasermil-land. Gute fraynt veln zikh freyen un soynimveln tsupekt vern fun kine.' 'Senoyim veln tsepekt vern fun kine,' hobn dikhelmer geliarmet un getumlt. Bald nokh pesekh hobn zikh di khelmer geshteltboyen di vasermil. Zey hobn ober opgemakht nit tsu boyen di vasermil lebn 157:00taykh. Der-- ['If so,' Hillel shrieked in joy, 'I am pleased.' We will buildthe watermill of watermills. Our good friends will delight and our enemieswill burst with envy.' 'Our enemies will burst with envy,' the citizens ofChelm shouted and cheered. Just after Pesach, the citizens of Chelm started inon building the watermill. They decided not to build it by the river. The--]" Oh, sorry.
CW: No rush, it's fine.
DF: It shouldn't be this hard anymore. "Bald nokh peysakh hobn zikh di
khelmer geshtelt boyen di vasermil. Zey hobn ober opgemakht nit tsu boyen divasermil lebn taykh. Der taykh iz dokh in tol un di vasermil vet zikh nitonzen. Zey veln shteln di vasermil afn spits barg, vet men zi zen af maylnvayt. Zoln senoynim zen un tsepekt vern. Di khelmer hobn oyfgeboyt afnshpits barg -- di khelmer hobn ofgeboyt afn shpits barg a vasermil aza, vos iztake vert geven ontsukukn [Just after Pesach, the citizens of Chelm started in 158:00on building the watermill. They decided not to build it by the river. Theriver is in the valley and no one would see the watermill. They will put it onthe top of the mountain, so that it will be seen from miles away. May theenemies burst with envy. The citizens of Chelm built on the mountaintop -- thecitizens of Chelm built such a watermill that it was really worth looking at]"-- I'm gonna stop there.
CW: Great. Thanks. It really gives a taste of it. It makes me want to
read these all again. (laughs)
DF: Yeah, they're delightful. Okay.
CW: Well, one thing I meant to ask but haven't yet is actually these covers.
DF: Yeah.
CW: Do you know how his -- I mean, they're used in a lot of graphic
representations of Yiddish books nowadays. Do you know how he ended up withsuch beautiful treatments in his books or --
DF: I don't really know. Clearly, Farlag Matones was better resourced and
had -- and took more care in their designs than other publishers. It could nothave hurt that he took no money for his writing. So, he took no payment and he 159:00took no royalties. So, it could be that that made it possible for them to do abetter job with the physical production of the books. He did this because heloved children. He did it because he wanted the schools to have good books forthe children to read, and he made his money as a dentist. He had -- you know,he had an adequate living as a dentist.
CW: And is that true with all of his books?
DF: With all of his -- the first set of his children's books, for sure,
yeah. He mentions -- there's the -- I'm sorry, in "The Fate of Our YiddishistSchools," he complains that the "Khumesh Far Kinder" is going out of print. And he says, "Well, someone may think I'm complaining because I'm losingmoney. I'm not complaining because I'm losing money. I never took a pennyfor this and I never took a penny for any of my children's books with Farlag 160:00Matones. I'm complaining because this means there aren't Yiddish children --Yiddish-reading children who are at the level -- and what that means about oureducation, about the condition of our community. That's why I'm complaining,not, heaven forbid, for the money." So, that's how I found out that heactually was never paid. He never took money for this work. And he mentionedthat in one or two cases, he paid the typesetter himself. So -- so that -- Ithink that probably may be one reason why "Robert's Adventures," "The CleverLittle Tailor," "Di heldn fun khelm," "Shmerl nar" have better covers and wereable to -- you know, were able to hire good illustrators, you know, the --anyway, it couldn't have hurt. So, that's one idea I might have, but theremust have also been someone at the press who cared.
CW: (laughs) Yeah, great, and there's one other thing you wanted to show me
over there, right?
DF: Oh, there was a -- there's another story. So -- so, I may have already
mentioned or I may not that one of my recent projects has been to try to locate,hunt down the -- the material that my grandfather published in journals and innewspapers outside of his books. So, I found one such clue in a book aboutByron. I found another clue in a book about poets living in New York. Butthere's also the Yi-- "Yiddish Periodic Index" now. Someone in Israel has beencompiling an index of Yiddish periodicals. Many periodicals are notincluded. But of the ones that are, there are some forty-nine or fiftylistings of things my grandfather wrote. He wrote book reviews regularly for-- in the late 1920s, for a periodical called "Oyfgang" -- I'm sorry, 162:00"Oyfkum." He also wrote in something called "Oyfgang." He wrote in"Tsukunft," he wrote in the "Vochenblatt." He wrote in the "Fray yidisheshtime." He wrote in all kinds of newspapers, journals, literary journals. Those are just something of his -- "Literarishe bleter" and so on. And I havemade it a little personal quest to hunt down as many of these things as Icould. I haven't read most of the things he wrote, again, outside of hisbooks. In fact, I haven't even read most of his -- his books for grown-upsyet. But I had this idea that I would gather a complete set of his journal andnewspaper work and have a bibliography and then have soft copies of everything Icould get pictures of, gathering in the New York Public Library or YIVO orwherever I could find them, and then present them to YIVO so that someone,somewhere would have a complete set of his writings. And to that end, I've 163:00made a few trips to New York and gotten some things from the New York PublicLibrary, and I photographed them, and I now have soft copies of them. One ofthem, one of the earliest things that he wrote, called -- an article called"Pioneers" in a journal called "Oyfgang," bugged me. And what bugged me aboutit was the author was listed as S. Simon with a samekh instead of a shin. Everything else he wrote was shin Simon. This was samekh Simon. So, insteadof shin for Shloyme, why was it a samekh? Maybe he didn't write it. Ithought he wrote it. Maybe he -- it was -- he was very new in his writing. Maybe it was a pseudonym. Maybe he wasn't sure whether he was going to go byhis English name, Solomon Simon -- which, if you spelled it out, would have asamekh instead of a shin. And while I was puzzling this out, I went and Ilooked at the article and what happened was my partner went with me that time to 164:00the New York Public Library, and she was taking pictures of all these articlesfor me. But because she has no Yiddish, she took pictures of the cover of thejournal with the table of contents. And then, she took a picture of thearticle, so that -- she made sure that she didn't make a mistake and that I hadthe correct article identified, the right pages from the right journal and soon. And then, I would throw away the cover once I compiled my little PDF fileof the article. But this one, for one reason or another, I had kept the titlepage. And I looked at it and there it was: shin Simon. And I read the art--the article's clearly by him. It has some themes of his and so on. But whenI went back and I looked at the title page and I looked down and I saw, one, two-- seven articles down from there is an article by someone named ShimonShimonovich, which is him. Shimonovich was his birth name. He changed it to 165:00Simon when he came to the United States. Shimon was his brother, but in hisautobiography, he writes about himself as Shimon, in the third person. I don'tknow why. So, clearly, this is a pseudonym of his. So, that was exciting andvery odd that I just happened -- my eye just happened to hit this thing, and Iwent to find it, and it's a book review. Maybe it's because he had two thingsin the same journal that he used two different names? You know, he didn't wantto get sort of closed out. He wanted to fill up the journal without everyoneknowing everything was by the same person? I don't know. So, that gave mesomething to think about. And while I'm in the New York Public Library,waiting for them to bring me some of these articles that I was looking up, I gotout a reference book called the "Leksikon fun di naye yidisher literatur," andI'm reading the article about my grandfather. It's got listed every job heever worked, every book he ever published, every communal organization he 166:00belonged to, even lists of what other people wrote about him. And then,offhand, at the end, it says, "Also published under various pseudonyms." And Irealized that I will never know everything that he wrote. I will never findeverything he published. There's just no way. I have no idea what theseother pseudonyms were. This one I got just by dumb luck. And so, there'seven more -- I mean, what's amazing to me is here's someone who works as afull-time dentist, has published twenty books, and then as I'm gathering hisnewspaper and journal articles, there are pages and pages of bibliography ofjust all the different journal and newspaper articles that he wrote. Andthat's not even counting all the children's stories that he wrote for the"Kinder Zhurnal," for the children's magazine. He just never stopped. Henever sto-- his output never ceased. (laughs) Really never slowed, even. So, 167:00it's sort of terrifying and incredibly admirable. And in a way, now,thankfully, I'm off the hook. I will never read everything he ever wrote. (laughs) So, I don't have the obligation anymore to read everything he everwrote. I'm reading -- you know, what I read, I'll read. You know, what Ilearn, I'll learn. I'm -- I'm trying, you know, year in, year out to learn alittle more, to get a little closer to him, and then into the wider world ofYiddish letters, with him as my starting point. But that was -- that was justthis last week. That was kind of a kick in the head, when I realized that hehad outwitted me. (laughs) So, I wanted to tell you that story.
[BREAK IN RECORDING]
CW: How would you go about starting to translate a new story, let's say?
DF: Well, I'm well-advanced from where I was three years ago. So, I start
translating by reading. And now, the unit of meaning for me is a sentence. 168:00So, I think I may have mentioned that I began both learning Yiddish and learningabout my grandfather one word at a time by looking up each word in thedictionary. Now, I'm getting to where I can read Yiddish, at least at thelevel of a children's book. And so, I will -- I just read a sentence and Iwrite it in English the way it is in the Yiddish. But of course, it's morecomplicated than that. Translating is a very, very complicated process. So,there are the words, there's the order of the words, there's the meaning of thewords. When I translate poetry, there's the sound of the words that'sextremely important. And then, it becomes a true logic puzzle. And I amloving translating poetry, but I also understand that it's impossible. So,what you love is the goal and the approach and getting closer and closer. When 169:00I translate a children's story by my grandfather, sometimes the sound matters,too, because sometimes he plays with -- with the sounds of words. So, in"Robert's Adventures," this child is playing in his crib and the sunlight isfalling on his fingers, and he looks at the sunlight on his fingers. And then,he tries to make a fist out of his foot fingers, because in Yiddish, toes arefoot fingers. And it's clear that he was playing with the sounds when he wrotethat. And so, when I translated that into English, I had to make a choice. You know, if you get literal, then it's really silly. On the other hand, itwas a very playful passage. But in the end, what I settled for was, "He triedto form his foot into a fist. Funny." So, I extended the F sound into -- 170:00where I would have used maybe the word strange before. I -- I kept the wordfunny because there were fewer Fs in the English rendering than there had beenin the Yiddish "form your foot fingers into a fist." So, sometimes the soundmatters. The sounds matter in other ways, too. If he is purposely using aHebrew origin word rather than a German-origin word, he may be trying for aparticular connotation, a particular lofty feeling or intellectual feeling orspiritual feeling. If you -- you know, so I try to pay attention to thosethings, because -- well, I love language. And when -- so, when -- when I wantthe English to have the zest -- his Yiddish is extremely idiomatic. And it'svery zesty. And it's colloquial in places, and I want to get that flavor inthe English. So, the first step is just decoding. Do I understand the 171:00Yiddish -- word, word, word -- or, now, at least -- at least I get the wordorder right and it's in a sentence and I understand when something is an idiomand when it's not. The Beinfeld and Bochner dictionary is terrific, because ithas idioms in it. And so, there was one thing w-- I could have gotten quiteliteral about. I was translating an argument he was making about theillustrations of a book of psalms that came out of Israel, which he thought wasreflective of a very militaristic attitude in Israel. And he talked about how,you know, God is gonna deliver us, and there are illustrations of airplanes, youknow? Oh, God will rain fire and pitch down upon the enemy, and there's anillustration of an airplane actually strafing the enemy. And he, at one point,says that, you know, these illustrations may be a little jarring, but they still 172:00sort of fit the meaning of the text. And he said, "nokh mit khesed [it couldhave been worse]." And if you took the word "khesed" literally, it can meangentleness or it can mean piety. And in the context of -- you know, he'scommenting on a religious text. And so, that sort of literal use of the wordmight be the natural way to translate it. But, I check, because I know I don'tknow things. One of the benefits of being a beginner is that I am verypainfully aware of my ignorance. And so, I looked up khesed -- which is aHebrew word, after all, not a Yiddish one -- in the dictionary. And it had theidiom "nokh mit khesed," which means, "it could have been worse." So, you havethat -- that would have been gone. If I just went one word at a time, would 173:00have been completely -- in fact, I would have distorted the meaning to say thoseillustrations are still faithful. They're still kind or they're still pious,or I might have, you know, come up with some other word that really did -- itwas not what he was trying to say at that moment. For Russian-origin words, myteacher from Rochester still helps me out. And then, some other friends I metat YIVO last summer can help me out. Some of the Ukrainian or the Polish orsome of the other Slavic origin expressions. So, one tool of a translator isto know how much you don't know. For Hebrew origin words, Niborski'sdictionary is incredible. He has a dictionary of Hebrew origin words inYiddish. There is an older one by Yehoash that's also available online. But,you know, his really does the trick. So, I go through and I write down themeanings of all the words and I compose an English sentence that sort of soundslike English. And so, wave one is writing down all the words. Wave two is 174:00going to people and asking them questions or trying to find idioms, figure outwhat is meant by a certain idiom. And then, I really -- after that, I knowwhat it is he was saying and how he was saying it. And then, the third wave isto try to make it into good English, because you want people to want to read it,and you want it to have an equivalent impact that the Yiddish would have had ona -- on a Yiddish reader. So, then, you want to make the English sing. Youwant it to be good writing. You want the words to be precise. You want themto be interesting. I don't know, you want the sentence to be put together witha certain kind of pop. Good writing's hard. Takes a lot of revisions. ButI would say the minimum would be those three sweeps through before, then I wouldshow it to someone and ask, you know, what doesn't work in the Engl-- 'cause youget -- you get in a Yiddish mindset, and sometimes the English comes out in theYiddish word order and it doesn't look wrong to you anymore. And someone will 175:00say, Well, this is all very nice, but it doesn't sound English. So, that'ssome of what I'm -- what I'm doing, at least when I'm translating prose. Different pieces have other different specific problems. So, in his book onchildren's -- I mean, sorry, in his article on children's literature, he quotesH.G. Wells and translates him, of course, into Yiddish, because he's writing inYiddish about children's literature. So, I had to find the edition of the bookfrom which he was quoting Wells, because the correct English would not be atranslation of his Yiddish translation of Wells back into English. It would bewhat Wells said. (laughs) So, I had to find what he said. So, you know, youget particular problems like that. And then, it's just really a matter ofhaving the commitment to getting it right. 176:00
CW: I want to ask sort of what all of this has meant to you, personally.
DF: The personal parts involve -- well, there's many layers of it. I have
loved getting to know my grandfather better through his writings. I know whathe cared about and I know how he argued. He was a tempestuous man and heargued in a certain way, verbally. And maybe slightly differently in hiswritings, but I still -- I get a sense of his fieriness and his passion and hisintellectual reach and his breadth of interests. And it's a legacy to beextremely proud of. I'm very, very proud to be his grandson. I would lovehis work to be more known. I would love his thinking to be more respected. I 177:00feel like sometimes -- as if he's -- he's been a little undersold in the waypeople think about Jewish literature. He's not in the canon, except maybe "TheWise Men of Chelm." And I think more people could benefit from reading hiswork, so -- but so -- but that -- that's just pride. I mean, I have a greatdeal of pride in him. I think he was brilliant and a wonderful man. Throughhis writings, not just through my relationship with him. It's deep in myrelationship with my mother and with my uncle, David, his children. So,they're thrilled that I'm doing this. And when I -- I've written about myprocess of learning Yiddish in a blog. And when I write a blog post, theyemail me and say, Oh, I liked your last blog post, and I would have thought ofit differently, or they give me some other information that I might not have hadotherwise. So, it has -- I feel closer to my mother and she's delighted thatI'm doing this. So, that's -- that's been really sweet, also. So -- but it's 178:00more than that. So, those are kind of personal, emotional satisfactions. Andthere's also the satisfaction of learning something hard in your fifties. People sometimes coast at this age. Sometimes people are looking forward toretirement. I'm unemployed; I can't look forward to retirement. (laughs) So,I have to work. And it's meaningful work to me. When I -- when I write atranslation and I think it's good, then I feel great satisfaction in that. AndI think it -- it eventually will make me a better writer in English, to havedelved that deeply into the words of another language and into how writings ofall kinds are put together. In terms of Jewish identity, I feel I don't haveto apologize anymore. I feel like I was always going to, I was always goingto, I was always going to become more -- live a more Jewish life, do more Jewish 179:00things, learn more about Jewish history, and with -- about -- our place in the world. [BREAK IN RECORDING] So, when you feel secure in your identity, it's a lens through which tosee other people. We're in a particular moment in our history right now in theUnited States, and there's a lot of -- well, the Black Lives Matter movement isin full swing. And issues of cultural appropriation are on people's lips. And there's a question about whiteness and what whiteness is in America. Andthere's a particular way that being secure in who you are and where you comefrom enables you to listen better to other people. And you know, I think we'vemade mistakes in navigating what we are like as a subgroup within the United 180:00States and we've gotten some things very right. We've made major contributionsand we've had some losses in our culture. And the Yiddishists were always avery small proportion of the Jewish American community. But whatever vantagepoint you have, if you feel solid in that vantage point, I think you can be opento the other vantage points. You can be flexible. You can understandbetter. So, I think that's been important to me, also. And a little bit, intough times, it gives you, I think, hope for the future, because a lifetime is a-- is shorter and more connected to the future and the past when you have realknowledge of Ashkenazic civilization. That was a civilization that enduredhorrors for centuries and yet is a culture of vitality, a culture of joy. So, 181:00immersing oneself in that is really comforting right now, and really hopeful. So, it -- it's meant at least those things to me and maybe more, eventually, too.
CW: Great. Well, I just want to thank you for sharing with us --
DF: Oh --
CW: -- a hartsikn dank [thank you very much].
DF: -- it's been a great -- a fargenign, (laughs) it's been a delight and --
and you know, I thank you for your interest. And I wish you luck in puttingthis all together, 'cause there's always too much and we just get to p-- we picka story, we tell it the way -- the best way we can. So, thanks.