DAVID FORMAN ORAL HISTORY

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 an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Do I 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.  And Kalinkavichy itself was a railroad town, so it was starting to grow then.  But his surroundings were a very small Yiddish -- Jewish village. Later, he would say 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 -- I don't remember if it was in an obituary or in one of these jubilee appreciations.  There's a note in the Yiddish newspaper that he was born on shabes 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, of course, varies from year to year.

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 he writes about them; they're the only of my great-grandparents that I know anything about.  And so, I know nothing about my mother's father's family.  I mean, I'm sorry, about my mother's mother's family going back.  Nothing about my father's parents' parents.  But because he's an author, he wrote an autobiography.  And so, I know about them.  They had an affectionate and contentious marriage, from his child's-eye view of them.  They were always very poor.  And apparently, her baking took in much more of the family income than his boot-making did.

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 more contemporary stories, and it works up more and more modern and less and less folk and legendary material and more and more real material until he's talking about 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 of legends, it's a little hard for me to know exactly what was true, exactly what wasn't true.  It seems as though one of his grandfathers drowned in the Pripyat River, 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 before my great-grandparents.  Other than that, my grandfather was the only intellectual.  He was a prodigy.  They made great economic sacrifices to make sure that he could study with the best teacher in their little shtetl, and eventually 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 they were in a fairly backward place for the time, I think so.  In his autobiography, he writes about the ferment in his teenage years and about how the 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 passionately debating 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 small house and people coming and going from it.  I know there were all the things that were in the shtetlekh.  There was probably a bathhouse somewhere and a synagogue somewhere.  And there were probably houses of people who were more prosperous 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 through pictures or -- and it's interesting, I've never really had a desire to go back and try to find the physical spaces where he grew up, or any of my other grandparents or great-grandparents grew up.  For me, it's the stories they took from there to this world that are most fascinating to me.  And so, I have a storyscape, but it could be from my grandfather's stories.  It could be -- and you know, from other people's stories, too.  And so, I imagine woods and rivers and 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 went to yeshiva in Kremenchuk, it says in his autobiography, and then, I believe, in Radun.  He talks about studying at the yeshiva that Chofetz Chaim founded, I believe, or one that followed that path.  Also, between the lines, or maybe explicit -- I haven't -- I actually haven't read his autobiography again recently -- he was searching.  So, he was searching, he had doubts, and the way he dealt with having doubts was that he doubled down and went from a more liberal maskilish or Enlightenment yeshiva to a more Orthodox, stricter, more high-level intellectual yeshiva.  And I think that that instinct -- I think there'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 was going to go all the way into Judaism, because the goal was not going to be to leave it behind, but to create some kind of synthesis between Talmudic scholarship, traditional Jewish learning, the holy books, all those practices, and modernism: scientific truth, politics, the whole sort of world of modern life.  So, it's possible he was just sort of making good on his family's sacrifices and going as far in that direction as he honestly could.  It's possible he was trying to silence his doubts, but I don't -- really don't think so.  I think that he was -- he somehow -- there was a point at which he knew that wasn't -- he wasn't going to be a practicing rabbi.  But he wanted to know what 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 the United 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 would have been about 1913.  If he was born in 1895, it could have been -- so, it's somewhere around 1913, 1914.  I think he was not quite eighteen when he left the shtetl.  Not many years later, he enlisted in the US Army at the very end of World War I.  And we have some of the letters that he wrote to his then-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 I think -- I don't have this solid.  Maybe my uncle, David Simon, knows this.  I think his job in the army was to censor the letters of the Yiddish-speaking soldiers so that they wouldn't leak any classified information in their letters home.  So, he wasn't fighting.  You know, he may have trained to fight, but the 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 with nothing and with no one, knowing a tiny bit of Russian, all kinds of Hebrew and Aramaic and Yiddish, a -- very well-educated in religious subjects.  Not in the secular 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 his autobiography is called "Roots" -- the American title, "My Jewish Roots."  And then, his second volume is called "Branches."  And there was to be a third volume 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 and looked at his archives.  And one of the things I really wanted to find was whether there was a sketch of that third volume, because what that -- his first two whole volumes of his autobiography were all about his childhood up through his 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 that was 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, a detail or two, but some from her, actually.  But how did -- how did that process of becoming an American work for him?  What did he experience in New York?  Did he experience anti-Semitism?  Did he exp-- who helped him?  You know, because, clearly, he must have had some help getting from housepainter to dentist.  I found a little essay that was to be read when "Branches" came out called "Roots, Branches, and Fruit" and I was so excited.  And I struggled through the Yiddish.  I still read slowly.  And I read -- you know, here's where 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 travel down there at -- in the fact, so he actually never delivered this talk.  And in the tal-- in the paper, he talks about the shtetl.  He talks about how the shtetl -- 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 his generation characterize the Old World as blote [muddy] in spirit and in physical conditions.  Physical and spiritual conditions.  It was grubby, really.  And what it is is the people came here and they wanted a better life for themselves.  They wanted to put the old life behind them and everything associated with it.  But he believed that the shtetl was a jewel.  A moral jewel, even though physical conditions were very, very difficult there.  Even though 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 he idealized it, really, in many ways, I think.  And the talk is all about how he came to realize that -- realize these thoughts in himself, that all of his peers were always putting it down, and there almost wasn't room to write about the shtetl in the way that he wanted to honor it.  And he could only do it indirectly, 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 wanted to.  And so, that was when he started to write "Roots" and "Branches."  And in looking at this, that was when I realized I was never going to get my autobiography of how he made it in America, because that wasn't why he set about writing 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 to thirty-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 starting to find the things he wrote that were not in books, that were in literary journals and in newspapers and in children's magazines and so on.  From his books, you would think he was first a children's writer, because the first books he published were "Shmerl nar" -- "The Wandering Beggar," in English.  "Robert's Adventures."  "The Clever Little Tailor."  All his children's books were 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 all along, he was writing about those themes, about issues of Jewish education in the modern world.  The earliest things that I have from newspapers or journals are 1920, one little fragment of a story, and then 1923 is the first non-fiction.  So, by the time he got his dental degree in 1924, as a twenty-nine-year-old, he was already also a writer at the same time.  And apparently, he also wrote for dental journals, which I didn't know until I saw your interview, actually, with another family member.  So, he was a writer simultaneous with becoming a dentist.  And from that period on, it's possible to 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?  But that little piece, between his childhood, where he wrote his memoirs and you know, 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 my grandfather wrote to him after the Kent State shootings.  And my brother Dan would have been about thirteen at the time.  And apparently, they had had an argument at some family gathering or another.  And my grandfather, in the letter 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 our democratic system, the way it is now, and for -- you know, and against revolution and riot and so on.  He -- you know, as I mentioned, celebrated his birthday on the Fourth of July.  And apparently, also, he had this expression he used to say that to really appreciate America, you had to have been born in czarist Russia.  And I think that that's also very telling.  And in fact, I had a little experience of that right after the recent election of Donald Trump.  And I was unhappy.  Most of the people in my circle were very unhappy.  And I remember the day after the election, I walked into a Subway to get 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 my tuna sandwich and I went to pay, and I said to her, "I'm really sorry."  And she 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 was taken aback, because someone who was really overtly Islamophobic, who wanted to clamp down on Muslim immigration, had just won the presidency of the United States.  And I just looked at her, baffled, and she said, "This many people can't be wrong.  It's -- it's really, it's going to be okay.  It's going to be good."  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 -- and it'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 here and it being really, really bad.  And there's a m-- there's a -- many, many people in the world who know that so viscerally, because where they grew up, it was very bad, right?  So, for my grandfather, if he was going to go into the army, that's a twenty-five-year bid in the legal structure of Russia at that ti-- wouldn't have to be for everyone, but that was the possibility, that he gets 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 to defend a country that gave them no civil rights.  So, yeah.  America's a pretty good deal.  (laughs) It's -- pretty good deal, so -- so, it's good to keep 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, he wore suits.  He smelled of cigars and whiskey.  He -- in several of the pictures I have of him from my childhood, he's wearing sunglasses indoors.  I don't know what the deal was with that.  But I do remember looking into his bright eyes.  And so, he must not have always been wearing sunglasses indoors.  (laughs) I think that may have been a later phenomenon.  He was ancient to me.  Course, now both my parents are well older than he was when he passed 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 his grandchildren.  He -- my existence was just a source of delight to him.  And so, of course, I loved being with him.  And the whiskey smell or the cigar smell (laughs) was no barrier.  I would get on his lap and he would tell me stories and, you know, it's just wonderful.  He was just a wonderful, wonderful grandfather 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 when you're eight or whatever it was, he would talk to you like he was interested in what you had to say.  He would -- he would argue his point with you, too.  I mean, so it was like you could have a real conversation in a way that a lot of people 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], what happened?  Why do you only have four fingers?"  And every time I asked him, he would tell me a different story.  So, one time, he would say, "Oh, I was working in the fields, you know?  I grew up in a -- you know, a very rural place and I was working in the fields, and I was using a pitchfork to shovel some 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 me that an animal had attacked him and eaten his finger.  And I didn't know.  I never knew until -- I think until after he died, I never really knew why he had lost his finger.  And actually, the way he lost his finger was -- was also take [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-ray with the other.  And so, this hand would get exposed to the X-rays, and he got cancer in his fingers.  And you know, people didn't know that X-rays were carcinogenic when they first came out.  And so, he got cancer and then he had to have surgeries, and eventually got it amputated.  And you know, to someone who now -- you know, a dental office is all so -- you know, you've got these big machines with the long arms, and then they either -- they put lead on you and they 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, you know?  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 an X-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 you went shopping for shoes, people -- or just for the fun of it, people would put their 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 something interesting.  And so, that's -- you know, again, it was that connection -- was through the words that I remember him, more than -- you know, I've got pictures of him.  I know what his physical form looked like.  He wasn't much to look at, 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 and authorly and pleased with himself.  (laughs) And he was pleased with himself.  He thought very highly of himself.  That's quite clear.  He thought he was right.  This is something that runs in my family.  A lot of people in my family 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 I think of when I see those pictures?  I -- it's interesting, there aren't a lot of pictures of him with his wife, except at sort of formal occasions, like banquets.  I have a picture of him dancing with his wife at my mother's wedding that I like.  But -- you know, they loved each other, but I think a picture was a 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 -- I think pictures of him tend to be pictures of his professional self and not of his 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 spent my whole childhood in Great Neck, New York.  Youngest of three boys.  And what else can I say about my growing up?  It was -- there were wonderful and difficult 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 the backyard, but also kids would almost -- it felt like we ran in packs in the streets, that, you know, when it came dinnertime, someone would call someone else to find out where the kids all were and tell them all, you know, time to go home for dinner.  And then, we would all go off home for dinner.  Great Neck was 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.  And so, there was a kind of disjunction, in a way, between the outside and the inside.  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 happy with each other.  That was part of it.  Things -- also, my mother was a miserable housekeeper.  Things that broke in the house never got fixed.  My father worked very hard.  And so, there was a sense -- although they were both extremely 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 -- we weren't -- I mean, when I was very little, my brother Danny and I were pretty close.  But sometimes, that was just like, we were in an alliance.  Bill would attack me and then Dan would attack him for attacking me, you know?  He would look out for me 'cause I was the youngest or something.  But there was this feeling of riv-- Dan liked vanilla ice cream, and so, therefore, Bill liked chocolate ice cream.  And so, therefore, I liked strawberry ice cream.  And I didn'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 them over, 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 of competitiveness.  There was also a lot of warmth.  It was not a broken family in that sense.  There was no abuse, there was no violence.  There was -- but there was -- it wasn't comfortable.  It was -- that's -- that's how I would describe 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 a hospital, 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 and passing the time.  And so, I read a lot.  And I loved reading, and I had, you know, 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 read whatever kids read.  "Homer Price."  I -- I don't -- I don't know little kid books.  So, "The Phantom Tollbooth" and "Harriet the Spy" and just, so -- but mostly American -- I read American English literature.  So, we're here talking about a Yiddish writer, and books and literature were very, very important to me.  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 was all 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 early and -- so, we didn't light Sabbath candles.  Jewish issues were discussed 33:00often.  Politics was discussed often.  When there was a holiday, we knew about it.  Whether we observed it or not was another matter.  I mean, we had wonderful seders with my grandparents, and then after my grandparents died -- at home, 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, then it was all the traditional whatever.  You know, my grandmother made blintzes or she made chicken soup or she made brisket or, you know, there's a certain repertoire that -- and my mother could make all those things, too.  And she made the seder, you know, every year.  She still makes the seder.  She's now eighty and she still will make this year -- she'll still be making her matzah farfel 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't eat pig.  When we went out, my brother would order shrimp and there was no hassling 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 up about whether I wanted to keep going, and -- because I was seven and I didn't know 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 got bar mitzvahed later.  We went to Israel when I was ten, and then a little later, my brother, Bill, decided he wanted to be bar mitzvahed because of his experience in that trip to Israel.  And then, I sort of followed suit after him.  And I do remember that we had to cover -- I had to cover in two years the entire -- 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 mitzvah Hebrew.  Bar mitzvah Hebrew, of course, is how much Hebrew do you need to say a couple of blessings, to read your Torah portion, and then forget about it for the 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 remember anything 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 being outsiders.  So, we were -- Boiberik was a big thing in my family.   My parents went to Boiberik when they were young.  My mother was a camper.  I think my father was a counselor for one year.  And my brothers went and I went, but I only went for a year and a half.  And now, there's even a Boiberik Facebook page, and they're all talking about these experiences and these shared memories and 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 very much diminished and fading fast.  So, that's like -- you know, what we call Generation Jones, I had that experience, also, in my -- in -- you know, in American culture, there was the Baby Boomers and there were the hippies and then, 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 something really 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 or being a little bit on the outside of things.  And, course, Yiddish is perfect for 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 my grandfather was a famous writer in Yiddish.  But we read those stories in the English translations.  So, I grew up on Chelm stories and on the beautiful book, "The Wandering Beggar," which is now sadly out of print -- about a holy fool named Shmerl who causes miracles to happen just by showing up.  It's wonderfully, wonderfully written and wonderfully translated, also.  So, I grew up on those like mother's milk, you know?  And so, that's the Yiddish culture.  It's not the Yiddish language, so much.  When we sang the songs, I probably didn't know much, even, about what they meant.  But it's interesting what 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 been music director at Boiberik.  And he -- we sang some songs.  We sang "Di grine kuzine [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.  And then, I -- I was like, Do I even want to go to this?  It was one of these optional bits and -- but I went back and he sang a song -- a song, a Tisha B'Av song, which had been a song that was sung at Boiberik.  And so, this is something that had been -- I figured out, I think it was forty-nine years since I had heard this song, and I immediately recognized it and was moved by this song.  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, to me."  And -- "Come lay your head in my lap."  And it's just a sweet, lovely little song, but it was -- it was in there.  (gestures to heart) Something about it was in there.  So, it's -- there may be more -- I may have more Yiddish from direct but forgotten experience than I know.  I'm -- I'm sure I have.  I mean, I -- when I began learning Yiddish, it felt very comfortable to me.  And not just because I had prepared myself over time.  So, I did -- you know, I studied German when I was in college.  I prepar-- I -- I was going to learn 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.  But there was very little.  It was -- only old people spoke it, and when I visited my 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 the rabbis have to teach.  Right, this was the sort of received identity.  What I did with it later is a different issue.  But, the sense that I got from her was that anything that had a Yiddish word in it -- that that was like the salt in your food.  That that was the spark that brought something to life.  And it wasn'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 of something, and it's always off-color and it's always a kind of denigration.  A schmuck, 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 that wasn't what I mean by throwing a little Yiddish in.  It was like, you're throwing 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't know how else to describe it.  It wasn't shtick.  It was -- and -- I now write a blog sometimes about my process of learning Yiddish, and the way that I describe is the differences between laughing in Yiddish and laughing at Yiddish.  And I think now, much too much of -- people think that they're paying homage to Yiddish and Yiddish culture.  They think they're expressing their Jewish 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, written language, the more peculiar it seems, this relationship Americans have towards throwing in a Yiddish word here or a Yiddish word there.  I mean, I still like it when a rapper says oy vey, you know, don't get me wrong.  (laughs) There is this, 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 not that thing that I got, that I witnessed as a child, which was that -- that it was there, at someone's left shoulder, and they could go to it.  You know, that she could draw on Yiddish culture, on Yiddish language, and that it was always something positive if a Yiddish phrase popped in or if a Yiddish song was referred to.

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.  And I remember going to Miami Beach more than once, once he went there in the winter.  I don't have dates on that in my mind.  But I don't -- I don't know exactly, but it was not like a once every couple of months thing.  It was a much -- it was more often than that.  I was comfortable in their home, and they were comfortable -- maybe a little less comfortable in ours.  But, you know, older people, right, like their own digs.  Yeah, but they were a real presence.  But still, he died when I was ten, and I only really knew him through 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 -- you know, I felt his -- his delight in me, and I had felt his love of me.  And you know, my father's father had been ill for a long time when I was a child.  And I experienced him as somewhat remote.  It turned out that he -- he was checked out 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.  He came 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 kids get funny ideas about things.  And in fairness, I told you there was a lot of sibling rivalry in my -- fairness was very important.  Everything should always be fair.  And I hadn't cried for my father's father, so it was like, if I cried for my mother's father, then somehow that was a disloyalty or s-- I don't know why I got that idea in my -- so, I -- that was one thing about it that was hard.  But there was, even before that -- there was another piece of it, which was that I knew when he died, and that was very, very odd.  We were at dinner and the phone rang.  And when the phone rang, it -- the thought just popped into my head, Zeyde is dead.  He was not sick.  It was out of the blue.  No one 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 had happened.  But it was -- it was -- it was the only sort of inexplicable -- you know, something that other people would label spiritual event in my life, I think.  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 that doesn'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 my life.  My gran-- my father's father died, my mother's father died.  The next year, my parents separated.  Not long after that, I broke my leg and was in traction for many months.  So, there were like, four really hard things that happened 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 of turning 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 of determination.  And I vowed -- and I don't know, I don't think it was -- you know, I think it was sometime within a couple of days of his death, I said to myself, I will learn Yiddish.  I will learn Yiddish, and someday, I will read my zeyde's books.  And I just vowed that I would do that, and I never let go of that feeling that someday, I would learn Yiddish.  So, that was my response to grief, 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 to college, so I learned German.  I spent a couple years learning German.  And when my brother, Bill, moved to Germany, I went there to visit him a couple times, so I didn't lose my German, so -- and I -- and, you know, I had my little bar mitzvah, Hebrew.  And I figured that I could learn Yiddish, you know?  I was -- like, I had set myself up.  I'd prepared myself that someday I was gonna learn Yiddish.  And when my first career ended and I was casting about for something to do -- in the meantime, I started translating "Kluge hent [Smart hands]," one word at a time, looking up the words in Uriel Weinreich's dictionary.  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 -- I had become a father, and it was time to, you know, have another career that would 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 to grow up, take care of business.  So, I had my career as a psychologist and a researcher and a college professor.  And when my wife died, and then, after that, later, my children, not long after that, went away to college and I was left an -- an empty nest.  And then, my second career ended and I was in a vacuum.  I was done.  I was -- I was a poet, I was writing poetry.  I was in a town that I didn't have deep roots -- what do I do with myself?  And that's when it was time.  And that's when, in my early fifties -- little over three years ago, I started learning Yiddish again.  So, it sort of -- again, maybe it'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 about the Jewish schools.  And I went and I meet with Gella Fishman, and I talked to her about it.  She said, "Well, what does it mean to you, personally?  Why are you studying Yiddish now?  Why did you pick this to read?"  She was really interested in that question, and I didn't have an answer for her.  But I think it was -- I think my quest for Yiddish and for renewing this relationship with my grandfather is an answer to grief -- to go back to that living civilization and that living well that had given rise to him and that he could tap into at will, 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 -- to learning Yiddish someday.  And I remember one time when I was with my brother, Bill.  We picked up "Roberts ventures," "The Adventures of Robert," a children's book.  The only book set in America that he wrote of his children's books, and one that had never been translated.  And we thought we would take a crack at reading it, just for fun, using, again, what we knew of the Hebrew alphabet 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 with English.  It's kind of funny.  And -- but I remember that we were able to sound it out.  We were able to understand most of the German origin word-- many of the German origin words.  And we were able to sound it out and make some sense of it.  So, that was almost like a proof of principle, that it was possible, with a bit of the Hebrew letters and with the bit of German that I had, that I could possibly teach myself Yiddish.  But I didn't.  So, I got out of 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 father who 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 graphic art.  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 the margins of things.  So, I remember bringing expressionistic calligraphic work to this space that used to show art in my little neighborhood, and the person there wouldn't even look at it because calligraphy isn't art, from her point of view.  It's like, craft.  Worse yet, computers were coming around and replacing the work that calligraphers did for bread and butter.  So, putting names on diplomas, writing addresses out for people for their weddings -- there were 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 and then I got, like, non-marg-- so, there was this little interlude where I was working 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 it opened.  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 my grandfather's books, even though I couldn't read them.  So, I had several of his books and I picked this one.  And I just started -- as I said, with the Weinreich 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 were holes like that everywhere.  There were just holes.  This was -- you know, my children were just about to be born.  It was twenty-four years ago or so.  And I got about thirty pages in.  It's a lot of work.  And then, I sort of woke up and said, What are you doing?  It's not going to be a real translation anyway.  You don't know Yiddish!  (laughs) Just, you know, what are you doing this for?  You have a family now.  So, I went to grad school and I -- you know, I did what I had to do.  And -- but I -- that was there, and then my uncle, 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, I still didn't quite know, because he anglicized -- he sort of made it -- it's not that 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 to this 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 you can't look it up in the dictionary as "seder."  You get seder, like Passover seder.  The order of things -- I didn't understand how it -- one word connected to 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 in Europe.  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 a thing, also.  That little gap is in my brain there, and it stayed intact for all that time, (laughs) then -- and there it is.  And now it's -- now I have it.  And you can Google Moldavia, and they still grow fruit orchards there and they still have vineyards there, you know?  And that's where he set that story.  For that reason, it was, you know, set in a vineyard.  So -- so that was my little stint as a Yiddish autodidact.  It lasted for a couple -- few weeks, 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 mentioned to 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 could take 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 resource room that had walls and walls and walls of Yiddish books.  And the teacher, her name is [Devorah Rothman?] was a wonderful, open, bright, just engaging person.  Teaches beginners who are ninety years old who know Yiddish perfectly.  How can you be a beginner and know Yiddish perfectly?  Because they never learned to read and write, right?  To people who -- really don't know 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 to start.  And she teaches Yiddish in context.  So, she taught about -- she was using 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 that period of time.  And women's issues -- she would pick letters that were about women struggling with abandonment or with, you know, other issues.  So, she was very good at contextualizing it and giving people just a little bit of Yiddish at a time so they weren't overwhelmed or intimidated.  And a -- some fascinating things happened right away there.  So, one of the things that happened 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, and there's one of my grandfather's books and there's one of my grandfather's books and 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 and contemporary 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 of the 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 just immediately felt like this was the right place and this was the right group of people 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 tying the 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 going on.  Reading, but reading just little bits, you know, and then a song.  And I wanted more, and so I immediately grabbed someone in class and said, "Do you want to read Chelm stories with me?"  And her name was Esther.  She's a fantastic -- 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's Chelm stories together on the side.  And then, I started translating "Roberts Ventures" the way I had before, with the other book, but now that one's already translated.  So, I started with a newer, better dictionary, the Beinfeld and Bochner 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's like, "Oh, this is what you were put here on Earth to do."  That kind of level of encouraging.  And so, I hit with all cylinders, really.  I started learning, and even so, it's not so easy when you're in your mid-fifties, I will say.  I'm three years into being a Yiddish student -- mir hobn dis-- af english, mir redn af english, vayl ikh kan nisht -- ikh red yidish nisht vi a vaser [We dis-- in English, we're speaking in English, because I can't -- I don't speak Yiddish fluently, lit. "like water"], right?  I'm not fluent, I'm not comfortable speaking.  Reading, I can read.  That's -- see, that's Yiddish.  Reading -- I can read, right?  Redn, red ikh gants gut [Speaking, I speak 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.  Absolutely astonishing.  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 who is 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, my mother says, "Oh, he would kvell if he" -- yeah, okay, but we don't get to kvell after we die.  It's -- it's a sad thing.  So, that's what I believe.  But for me, getting to know him is such a privilege, because he's a brilliant, 65:00brilliant, funny, interesting, fascinating, tormented man.  And I mentioned that I was a poet.  You know, and I also mentioned that I started reading, and I could talk either about Chelm stories with my friend Esther or about the "Robert's Adventures" book, which I began translating soon after I started learning.  So, "Robert's" began "af elen strit, es shteyt a hoykhn roykh gemoyrt 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 ride from 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 in Yiddish, "Finf furn forn fun khelm keyn shedlits," and as a poet, the fact that my 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 he was a storyteller.  I remembered him as a storyteller, but I didn't remember his love of language and his delight in puns, his delight in alliteration.  You know, 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 just fantastic.  And through reading about his books, I've learned more about his relationship to poets, which is quite interesting to me.  I knew from my mother that Mani Leib was a friend, not just acquaintance of his.  And -- so, a couple of things have come up about that.  And -- sorry, drawing a -- stuttered there.  I don't quite know in what order to talk about --

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 of Yiddish and Jewish ideas.  And he writes complaining about how all the -- in the last issue, it was just all poems.  All it was was poems.  Why are people just always only writing poems?  Why can't they write serious essays about serious things?  And I was crushed.  I was like, Oh, poems!  (laughs) We like the 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 attitude towards poems and poets and poetry?  When I studied at YIVO, one of the first things I did was I looked up Mani Leib's letters to him, and I couldn't find any.  But there were some letters from H. Leyvik to him.  So, I went for those, 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't come to Sholem Aleichem Folkshul when you invited me for the graduation."  You know, "Congratulations to all the children," blah-blah-blah.  But one was a letter saying, "Well, here's the sonnet that I owe you."  And enclosed on the second page was a sonnet.  And I got just -- I was so thrilled and so excited.  And this is the funny thing about being a learner, is that you sometimes make these really beautiful mistakes.  So, I looked at the sonnet and it 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 my grandfather?  I looked in H. Leyvik's collected works and there's no "Sonnet to Teeth" 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 poem somewhere and my grandfather liked it, and so he copied it out and sent it to him.  Nevertheless, clearly, then, they were friends.  And -- I have been sort of trying to find some of my grandfather's writings that were not published in his books.  And reading -- I was reading Ruth Wisse's book about -- called "A Little 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, the last word on Mani Leib, just about when he dies, she quotes a letter that my grandfather wrote to "Di prese," a Yiddish newspaper in Buenos Aires.  Everyone had, 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 think the 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 traditional Jew, and bury me like a traditional Jew."  It's like, where does this come from?  You know, he was buried -- he wasn't buried -- you know, he was -- he was buried in a suit.  (laughs) He wasn't -- but more than that, it was just like, what is it with our old people that they just want to go back to the orthodoxy of their childhoods?  And again, I took a couple of things from that: 71:00his issue about hypocrisy, about orthodoxy, about whether Judaism must be something of the past that's imitated inflexibly in the present or whether it can be a living, breathing thing is one issue.  But there's still this poet part of me that's -- that was just happy to know the friendship was a -- was not something 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 in the library and I picked up Shmuel Niger's "Togbukh [Diary]."  Shmuel Niger was a famous literary critic.  His "Togbukh" is his -- his diary.  And what did I look in it for?  I immediately looked to see if my grandfather's mentioned in the book.  And there were just a couple of mentions of him, and both were about poets.  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 or discussing important topics in Yiddish?  He wasn't really denigrating poetry.  He was saying, you know, Where has our communal intellectual life gone?  Is there -- 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 ago when -- when I was in -- five days ago, when I was in New York City, at the New York 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 I knew.  He taught Hebrew school.  That makes sense.  He was a Talmudic scholar and an ordained rabbi.  So, in New Jersey and in New York, he taught in Hebrew school.  He was a house painter.  He worked as a presser in a laundry, and I knew 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't even realized that in New York of the nineteen-teens, I guess cars were still very 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 delivery coach.  I don't know if he -- what he did.  I don't know whether he was like a teamster -- did he haul stuff from one store to another?  But he did something related to driving.  And then, as I said, I had already known about the house painting -- 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 -- I think he also had some help from some relatives or some friends or he -- I think he had some kind of support.  I know we didn't have a G.I. Bill after World War I, 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 have any 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 I don't know if he was the equivalent of a principal and set policy and hired teachers, 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 newspaper articles about him that I've read, in the way my mother talks about it -- that that was his school.  And then, in the larger world of Yiddish education, he was 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 and longstanding assistant editor.  But then, he was chief editor for a period of time, also, of the "Kinder zhurnal."  And that was really an important piece of the 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 of schools.  Of course, he was also a children's author, but he wrote a pamphlet called, "The Fate of Our Yiddishist Schools" and he describes the battle over how much religious content would be included in the Jewish schools, and describes at length in that pamphlet -- and he was the champion of having first khumesh [Pentateuch], Tanakh -- so, "The Five Books of Moses" and then the Prophets, also, and the writings in -- taught in school to the children, even though it was a secular school.  And there were people who were very against this, who said, No, we are secular schools.  We're not a religious school.  We do Yiddish language and Yiddish literature, but not religion.  And he said, "How can you understand Yiddish language and Yiddish literature without our source texts?  This is where our literature comes out of.  This is what Jewish culture and Jewish history come out of, and you can't really understand our 77:00history, our culture, without understanding the Torah."  And he won that battle.  And he wrote "Khumesh far kinder [Pentateuch for children]," which was an abbreviated khumesh for children, and it was incorporated into the curriculum of those schools.  So, he was not just a teacher, but he was more like a principal, a policy guy, a director.  He was on -- on that level.  He apparently also taught Torah to the teachers' institute.  So, at the highest to -- preparing the people who would teach in the Yiddish schools.  So, that was him as an educator, and then he wrote about education, also, and he was a children's author, of course.  And he -- but he also wrote about being a children'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 the culture.  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 of Yiddish education, he was very respected as a leader, although always controversial.  [BREAK IN RECORDING] This book is called "Hakhomim, akshonim un naronim: mayses fun alerley felker [Wise men, stubborn people, and fools: stories from all kinds of people]," and I translate that title, roughly, in English as "Wise Men, Fools, and Stubborn Mules." (reads from book)  "Tsu di leyener fun di mayses -- di ershte mayse fun dem bukh heybt zikh on, 'Amol, amol hot.'  Di tsveyte mayse oykh 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 mayse derfun iz, vos ale sheyne mayses, vos ikh leyn un hern, shtamen fun di vaytn gor a mol, ven keyner hot gekent shraybn oder leyenen, ober take keyner nisht.  Vi azoy ken es amolt zayn?  Gants poshet!  Keyn alef-beys iz af der velt nisht geven.  Mentshn hobn zikh shoyn oysgelernt reydn, ober oystsuleygn di verter in oysyes, 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, but slightly different,  'Once upon a time, there were' -- practically all the stories are like that.  Why 'once upon a time'?  The way it happened is that all the beautiful stories you read in here come from the far distant time when no one knew how to write or read.  But really, no one at all.  How can that be imagined?  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 or letters.  They just didn't know how to do it.  But even then, they told stories from 'once upon a time.'  Who told the stories?  Who remembered them?  For the most part, usually grandfathers and grandmothers and overall, in general, old people.  There were few older people in those times.  Not even one per family.  Two, three in a village.  People died young, from plagues, floods, hunger, and from the smallest illness or sickness.  A lot of people were killed by wild animals.  Lions, leopards, bears, wolves, and tigers.  Young people had little time to learn things thoroughly and well.  They were busy getting their daily food.  Only those who did not die young gathered wisdom and had the need and remembered a lot of things.  In those days, people lived 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 always going.  In the long winter nights or in the cold, biting winter days and in the rainy summer days, they would sit, huddled in their holes around the fire and listen to some stories from the grandfathers and grandmothers.  Ah, 'once upon a time.'  What does 'once upon a time' mean?  You think there's a big storm outside now.  My father told me that once, long ago, it snowed for thirty days and 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 was flooded.  People and animals and birds died.  Only those who hid at the tops of mountains, all the way up near Heaven, remained.  'What's Heaven, 83:00grandfather?'  'Once upon a time, before God created Heaven and Earth, the world was formless and void.  A wasteland, without' -- the grandfathers had a story for everything.  'Once upon a time' -- and often the grandfather added something himself, and the number of stories grew and the people multiplied on the Earth.  So passed thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, generation after generation.  And as the people multiplied, families became clans, large groups of families with the same name.  And those grew into tribes, and from the tribes, whole nations.  And the Earth filled with different nations, separated from one another.  Thousands, then hundreds of thousands of years passed and people forgot they all originated from one mother and one father, from one family.  In every place, a different language was spoken, different delicacies were eaten, and different clothing was worn according to the 84:00different climates in which the different peoples lived.  Not only had people become estranged from each other, they even began to have wars.  Now there were all types of races in the world: white, black, yellow, and every folk had its own language.  But no matter how separate people might be, no matter how far they are from each other, they still tell similar stories.  The same stories, just a little bit different.  People call these variants.  The stories are changed a little: a little is put in, a little taken out.  But it's all the same story.  The Hindus by the river Ganges, the Englanders by the Thames, the French by the Seine, the Lithuanians by the Neman, the Indians by the Mississippi River, the Russians by the Volga, the Iraqis by the Tigris and Euphrates all tell one and the same stories, changed only according to their language 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 the world.  We have to remember this and remember it well.  This is what our prophet Malachi believed.  He said, 'Do we not all have one Father?  Have we not all been created by one God?'  My whole life, I've loved to read stories from different peoples.  Now, in my old age -- you should know, I'm already a grandfather of four grandchildren, they should live and be well -- I have chosen fifteen stories, and I bring them as a present to you, the Jewish children of Argentina: fifteen stories about wise men, fools, and stubborn mules.  You will laugh a lot, but you will also think a lot, and you will see every time that people 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 both particular and universal at the same time.  So, he was a great teller of folk stories.  Many, many of his children's books were based on traditional Jewish folk stories.  And the story of Chelm, of a town full of fools, is not only a Jewish story.  Everywhere in the world, people make fun of people who are stupid, 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.  The Chelm stories are stories about Jewish fools.  And that idea that there is this human 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 doing it.  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 of multiculturalism, of -- issues of intersectionality, inter-- issues of cultural appropriation are very much on people's minds.  Who has the right to this story?  Who has the right to this God?  Who has the right to this kind of dress or this kind of practice?  How do we respect people who are -- who hold different 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 human about all of us.  We need to be able to reconcile this issue of the minority and 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 I love 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 feeling about 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 published in 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, in fact -- so, there are four grandchildren that are older than me, and I actually wanted 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 him buying them a birthstone ring or about giving them Juicy Fruit gum.  My brother, you know, would maybe remember the pink rubber ball that, you know, he would go -- I did this, also.  I would go to the corner store with him.  He would get his tobacco and he would buy us a pink rubber ball and we would throw it 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.  As I 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 have the love absolutely intact from that childhood.  And then, I have getting to know him as a grown-up now.  It's a weird kind of double relationship that I have 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 work than 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.  His Chelm stories were the stories on which generations of American Jews grew up and learned 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 Chelm stories that people grew up on, both in Yiddish and then in the English translations.  And he wrote other things: "The Clever Little Tailor," "The Wandering Beggar" -- again, straight out of the Jewish folk literature.  But he had 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 longer narrative arc.  He made them very particularly Jewish and used them as a way to teach people about how -- the ways Jews used to live.  And he -- he accomplished all of that in a way that retained a tremendous amount of humor and charm and connected directly with young people.  So, that was, in some ways, I think, his most important contribution and his greatest talent.  However, he was also a pedagogue.  He wrote educational materials for children, particularly about religious matters.  So, he wrote an abridged "Khumesh for Children," and he wrote about the prophets for children.  And he wrote about the commentaries for teachers of children.  So, that was another aspect of his work.  He was a memoirist.  His two-volume autobiography was very, very well-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 in the modern world.  He wrote about Israel and Zionism, and he wrote about identity in the largest sense of the word.  His -- so, his interests were always grounded in Yiddish language and in Judaism, but within that universe, he had broad-ranging interests.  The other thing about his works is -- you know, I mentioned that he was best known for his children's work.  Part of that is that people didn't appreciate some of the things that he wrote about religion and about the modern world and about Israel.  He was a fierce -- I guess now the word is diaspora nationalist.  He believed that the two thousand years of Jewish history, from the beginning of exile to the founding of the modern State of Israel, could not just be waved away.  They were not a mistake.  They were not all bad -- that what we -- the civilization that we had created under those 93:00conditions was a beautiful civilization and was worth celebrating, was worth preserving, even for Jews who wanted to live in the modern world.  The religious people didn't appreciate him because he did not advocate beliefs.  The secular -- the staunch secularists didn't appreciate him because he did advocate Jewish practice.  He believed Jews should know the holy texts and he believed that we should do something Jewish.  We should -- and he didn't do much of this in his own life, but he preached it, I suppose -- something that he didn't practice, which was that we should try to return to halakha and incorporate more of the tradition in our everyday lives and strive for a Judaism that was more integrated, more whole than just something you do on a Saturday on occasion, 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 writings than I do about his writings for adults because of my own language level.  I've been studying Yiddish for three years.  At this point, I've read most of what he's written -- what he wrote for children.  I've translated a couple of his books for children.  But I'm only beginning to crack the books that he wrote for 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 Judaism down.  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, he learned Talmud.  You know, he started up as sort of this -- the direct, old-fashioned -- it wasn't even a modern kheyder [traditional religious school].  It was a -- you know, he was in a small shtetl, and so the Enlightenment hadn't even made it there, basically, or it felt like that in the way that he describes it in his autobiography.  So, did he miss having those kinds 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 [mother tongue], and he didn't go to school until he was six, and he -- so, he spent more time with his mother, for a longer period of time, than most little boys did in his culture and in his community.  And he was very much under her influence.  I think she was, in some ways, the stronger person in the family in terms 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 mother would not have known Hebrew and Aramaic.  Would have told him stories in Yiddish.  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 reason why 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 thing to admit in some sense.  He was from a generation that wanted to free Yiddish of the stigma of being a women's language.  He wanted it to be a language for women and men and everyone, for workers and intellectuals and -- yeah. 

CW:  From your perspective, what connection, if any, is there between his 97:00intended audience and his children?

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 me about his books directly, except the few that were translated into English, she did.  She read and she shared them with me and she loved them.  But his children's books in Yiddish -- my parents didn't read them as children, they didn'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 years ago 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 secular Yiddishists came to America grounded in a traditional Old World culture and made their way into a modern world.  And when they founded Yiddish schools, it was because they wanted their children to share the things that they held dear from that origin, from their culture of origin.  But they didn't want to raise their children in Europe.  They didn't want to raise their children in Orthodox, traditional homes.  So, they spoke to their children in Yiddish because they grew up learning Yiddish, but they -- some of them -- not necessarily my grandfather, but his generation, they were pleased when their children would answer 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 they founded these Yiddish schools, they were hoping to transmit the feeling of heymishkayt [coziness], the -- this feeling of warmth that the language was associated with for them, from their own childhoods, this great literature that had flared up.  It had, like, sort of blown up out of nothing in two generations, the secular Yiddish literature.  And there are such gems in that literature, and they wanted -- having loved them, they would want their children to 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 '20s would naturally want their children to learn Yiddish, because here were -- here was a language that could do everything.  And yet, they were in the United States, and so their children were not so interested in many, many cases.  Not all -- 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, eager to 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 a scholar of Hebrew and Aramaic and knowing the language of your country, whether it was Russian or Polish or -- you know, so that you could do business with the people around you.  In America, it was different.  In America, there was a press from the outside, also, that we be a monolingual society.  There was always a suspicion of otherness hovering over people who retained their home language.  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 to Puerto Rico, back and forth from America to Mexico, so that they always had living contact with the wellspring of their language.  I expect the -- maybe 101:00even a hundred years ago, French Canadians up in northern New Hampshire and Maine had this back and forth with Canada.  I don't know, but it seems to me that 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 living culture of Yiddish, of the Ashkenazic civilization and the Jews of America.  So, sometimes his audience was the children in the Yiddish schools in Mexico or in Montreal or in Argentina.  And I'm sure some of them made their way out into the Old World, also.  But my grandfather was, in some ways, more honored in Mexico 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 also well-received and highly esteemed, and he published most of his later books in Buenos 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 were young, they went to Yiddish school, they went to Camp Boiberik, and I'm sure he hoped that they would know some Yiddish when they grew up.  And it didn't really pan out that way.  Boiberik became more and more an English-speaking environment, with -- more through the transition from one generation to the next.  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 not interested.  But it became pretty clear by the very end of his life that the milieu here in the United States was not supportive, and that his children were not going to press this on his grandchildren.  And in -- you know, he did write in English at the very end of his life.  So, "Wise Men of Chelm" was translated from -- "Di heldn fun khelm [The heroes of Chelm]" was translated as "The Wise Men of Chelm."  "More Wise Men of Chelm" was written originally and only in English.  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 school students, as there were fewer and fewer and fewer Yiddish school students -- he wrote "The Rabbi's Bible," which was really the English version of the same thing.  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 commentary along with the Biblical text.  And that became a very important part of some Hebrew school curricula, was this -- so, he adapted to that reality.  He acknowledged that reality.  But it was a huge loss for him.  And yeah, I think it would have -- it would have thrilled him that I now am learning Yiddish and that I'm doing it with a certain amount of devotion, and that I'm really gonna get it, you know?  That I can really read his children's books now and that I'm almost 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 -- the style actually change-- in "Robert's Adventures," it sort of changes.  When Robert's a baby, he's sort of more childlike in the language he uses and in the way he sort of tells the narrative, and it gets more mature as the subject gets more mature, as the book goes on.  Sometimes he uses wordplay.  He creates characters.  His books for children are really -- everyone has a name.  Even if it's a little folk story, he retells the folk story, he makes up a name for the 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 to understand that this really happened to a real person.  And in fact, he -- in his book, "Jews of Long Ago," he argues in his preface that if folk stories are told 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, lived experience.  And maybe not necessarily historical experience, but true experience, and there's a distinction there.  So, his characters always had names and were set in particular places.  And -- what else can I say about his writing style?  He wrote a -- an article in a journal called "Culture and Education," "Kultur un dertsiung," called "Kinder literatur, oder literatur far 107:00kinder?" -- "Children's Literature or Literature for Children?"  And in this article -- this is one of the adult writings that I've been able to dig my teeth into and translate, one of his writings not in any of his books, and we can come back to that in a moment.  But it -- so, in this article about children's literature, he sort of lays down his philosophy.  And he says that it's -- it's first of all very hard, that children's literature does not get a lot of respect.  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 who are at a certain age of emotional maturity but whose vocabulary is not up to their 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 knew that 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 being schooled in a different language, so their literacy level in Yiddish might not have been as high.  So, what do you do about that?  And what he wrote was that the most important thing to do is -- is not to write down to children, first of all, you know.  And he said, you know, children's writers start with this formula:  "Come, my little children, would you like to hear something you've never heard before?  Well, sit down and be nice children and I will tell you something wonderful."  And he said, "If you start that way, you're just showing that 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 precisely those words -- (laughs) that was a kick.  I knew who he was making fun of.  Or all the Yiddish children's writers were using that formula and he was sort of bristling 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 Peretz Hirschbein -- his writings were -- his writings for adults were very scholarly.  They tended to have footnotes and they tended to show off his broad range of reading.  But he cited other children's writers whose work he did admire as saying that -- that it should be an experience of wonder, that children are experiencing everything for the first time.  He quoted the writer who saw the beautiful blue sky in Italy and couldn't remember where he had seen it before.  Such an incredible clear blue sky, and -- and then the writer remembered, Oh, when he was a little child and looked at the sky for the first time, 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, the writer, are experiencing what you're writing about for the first time.  And if you do that, then it will be simple.  You'll strip away all the irrelevant details, you know?  What's amazing about a summer day is what it feels like when a cool breeze picks up, you know?  You wouldn't get into -- I don't know what.  You know, atmospherics and how, you know, the air looks when the sun radiates in a certain -- you wouldn't get -- you wouldn't talk about the details of the clothing you were wearing.  It was just you're hot and then there's this feeling of relief, and you'd -- it felt like the air was cooler and clearer and like, that you were alive again, or -- that sense of wonder.  So, he -- that was his goal.  And I think he -- he actually got to it in a lot of his children'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 you get 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 the communist wing that had the Ordn shules, the Farband, and then there were the socialists who had the Workmen's Circle schools, the Arbeter Ring schools.  And the Sholem Aleichem Folkshuls were for the schools that were not going to draw their curriculum from a political ideology.  They were apolitical as a political statement.  They were -- basically, what they were saying was, 112:00Yiddish language and literature is our value.  That's the main value.  The rest of it is important, but not -- that's not what we want to -- we're not indoctrinating our children in a particular belief system.  A new book has come out about the little journals that go along with the chil-- the schools, the different wings of the schools.  [BREAK IN RECORDING] A book has come out and it describes how each of the children's journals went along with the program of that school.  And so, what do you do in an apolitical school system?  The children had stories, mostly about life in America, 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 my grandfather's doing.  So, he was -- when he said our value is Yiddish and 113:00Yiddish literature and Yiddishkayt, these mean different things in Yiddish than they mean in English.  Yiddish is Jewish.  Yiddish language is the Jewish language.  Yiddishkayt is Jewishness.  It's not Yiddishness.  It's Jewishness.  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 with Jewishness.  And -- so he, early on, intro-- you know, sort of backfilled, and it's interesting that, you know, he wrote about America, but mostly he liked to write about the Old World.  Mostly, he wrote about traditional Jewish life for children.  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 be non-ideological.  When you write for children, you're making a judgement about what 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 or sharing values or staking out some kind of -- some kind of ideological turf or another.  His ideology, I learned much more about when I read his works about raising 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 a very 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 un erets yisroel [The nation of Israel and the land of Israel]," he was writing to the Jewish community, writ large.  He was writing to all educated adults.  He knew that the people who read in Yiddish were a subset of the bigger Jewish world.  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 wrote respectfully about people for whom social justice was a core part of their Jewish identity.  And it was for him, too, but for him, it was from the prophets.  It wasn't from Karl Mar-- Karl Marx was not a prophet of his.  But he 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 was anti-communist.  He was staunchly anti-communist, but as far as socialism was concerned, he was very liberal.  And so, he may have disagreed about tactics with the socialists or may have disagreed about sort of the little issues around control of capital -- I don't know.  I don't know about his mature political arguments.  But what I do know is he knew who his audience was, and he was at least respectful of the impulse, and the impulse was that our culture should -- our culture should be for everyone.  It should take into account the sufferings of the poor and try to make them better.  He was totally on board with that part of it.

CW:  Oh, and of the children's books that you said you've been reading most 117:00fluently lately, do you have a favorite?

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" was brilliant.  "The Wandering Beggar," brilliant.  The English of "The Wandering Beggar" is so brilliant, I haven't spent that much time going back to the Yiddish "Shmerl nar."  I will, it's on my list, but I don't feel like it needs any retranslating.  I don't feel like it needs any improvement.  That English book 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, and Stubborn 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 Clever Little 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 work as a stand-alone picture book for younger children.  It's fantastic and charming.  It's almost like a Curious George book.  The -- all of them have very 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 then make a Solomon Simon reader, where I could pick out the very best parts and put them out in Yiddish and English, side-by-side.  So, I would like to say -- I mean, 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 was really 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 sort of anti-Semitism is one thing, but there's almost this assumption of anti-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.  You know, and it -- it feels to me almost analogous to some African Americans who create this glorious but imaginary African culture before the white man ever got to the -- like, before Europe ever happened, everything black people -- or, an African culture that may be, again, wonderful, without really engaging with the 120:00complexity of humans, in some sense.  He sort of oversimplified some of those.  I think it's just to be acknowledged.  He saw a lot of stuff in his life.  And so, that added -- I sort of -- you can see where that -- some of that attitude may have come from.  And then, in other cases, he was just -- it was eighty years ago, so you've got to -- or, you know, ninety years ago, so his attitudes 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 outer space, where there's a planet -- and the planet -- on this planet, all the things you think of come true.  So, if you think of a tree but you do it with your whole heart, or you say the word "tree" with intention, then a beautiful tree 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 people who 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 about disability in that way, as the product of bad thoughts, right?  So, there are some things that are just -- that don't make it from there into the modern world.  And of course, as our culture has matured, if he were still alive, he would have matured along with it and wouldn't have written that way.  But it was quite common in his time to think of some -- it's better to be sighted than to be blind.  It's better to be smart than to be -- you know, to have a cognitive disability, right?  And some of his books couldn't -- which are about smartness and foolishness can be thought of as making fun of stupid people.  In fact -- in fact, he didn't make fun of stupid people.  He did not.  And if you read deeper and if you read carefully, you see that the fools in his book are just 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 what happened 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 have no memory of her.  I did see Binyamin once when we traveled to Israel when I was a kid.  And his children, his grandchil-- one of his granddaughters and I played 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 rather awful story about that in -- not in his autobiography, but in the book, "Jews of Long Ago."  That book begins with folk stories and then makes its way up into the modern world until finally he's telling stories about his own family.  He tells 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 who has dollars becomes a suspect.  And his father is abused by and then jailed by the secret police because he has dollars and won't fork it over, and won't fork them 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 that story.  I believe that -- because it was clearly personal with him.  His anti-communism was not based on an abstraction.  And I think that's -- that was the personal piece of it, that -- not only had they abused his father, but that his attempts to help were somehow the vehicle through which they abused his father.  So that, you know, he was -- his feelings of -- of helplessness around that must have been extraordinary.  So, clearly, he was in touch with his siblings, clearly -- and he still sent money back to his parents.  What I don't think he ever did was -- I don't think he ever went back to Russia.  He hated Russia, he feared Russia.  Clearly, while the czar was still there, he could have 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 ties with his whole family.  And then -- then he did get to have a relationship with a brother through the mail, and he went to Israel twice and -- you know, he had a 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 already in Israel.  And I think that he -- and I believe that -- let's see, he was born in 1895 and his parents were not young when he was born.  He was pretty far down 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 would have been.  So, I think he was less touched than most Jewish families were.  I think our fa-- you know, on my father's side, it was a little different.  But I think that he was less directly affected.  And it's interesting to me, when I read certain interpretations of him or of his work or of his arguments about the Yiddish schools -- and people say, Well, he want-- you know, there was a reaction after World War II, and people started turning back to religion as a response 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 Yiddish schools.  But he had been arguing since the '30s for more religion in the secular 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 become modern, 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 culture with it.  And he started seeing that.  He must have started seeing that in his son's early child-- his son was born in about 1924, right?  So, in the '30s, he was already arguing this -- against assimilation and for Judaism, not just as the thing you do on the side or on occasion, but as an integrated part of your whole life.  But he didn't really get -- I think he didn't really get how traumatized the entire people was by the Holocaust.  I think that that's something 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 to Israel as their salvation, that this would never happen again, that these tanks and these guns in Jewish hands meant that this was never going to happen again.  That that was almost an article of religious faith, and -- or if he did get it, he -- which -- he saw that only as distortion and not as a response to a kind 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 the Holocaust 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 beautiful letter.  But you are smart, Dudl, very clever.  I think when you grow up, you will be more clever than zeyde Simon and a better writer.  I treasure your letter.  It will go, as the letters of the very important people, to the archive of YIVO.  Zeyde Simon.  PS -- I wait impatiently to see my three grandsons.  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 eight or 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 small glitch, 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 a translator.  This one is interesting because of a remarkable coincidence.  On background, I don't have books from my grandfather besides his books.  I don't have books from his -- let's say from his library.  He had a large, large library 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 were given to a synagogue, which just kept them in boxes somewhere, not well-protected, and they got flooded and rotted and thrown away.  A whole library was just gone, so it -- before the Yiddish Book Center existed.  God knows what treasures were in there.  But now, we do have the Yiddish Book Center.  And I go when I can, but I go quite rarely.  Last time I went, I went gathering Yiddish poetry, and one of the things that I want to do is translate Yiddish 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 of Yehoash's translation of the Tanakh, because I had volume one but not volume two, 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 different to hold a book in your hands.  Some -- there's a book by Glatstein, it's beautiful, and this book by Rokhl Korn has handwritten corrections in it because the typesetter did a terrible job on it, and -- so, I picked up a couple of books.  I picked up a book of poetry by Chaim Grade, who also was a friend of my grandfather's, but whose work is not digitized and available to everyone on the web.  So, I had a big handful of books, and I -- probably more than I should've gotten.  And I'm on my way out, and I notice Mani Leib's books, which I all -- have digitally, and I don't really need.  But look how little this book 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 two colors, you know?  And it's this charming little thing.  So, I saw this little book of sonnets, and I pulled one out and I opened it up, and it was stamped all over, "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 that back and I picked up another copy, and I opened it up and there was an inscription 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 the friendship 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 called everyone over at the Book Center.  "Look, look, I found this book that the poet inscribed!"  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 out just after Mani Leib's death, so he couldn't have inscribed it to him, my grandfather.  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 the woman that Mani Leib lived with.  And so, she dedicated it, you know, and sent it to my grandfather.  So, I treasure this beautiful little volume of Mani Leib's poem-- just on a -- again, on my way out the door, Oh, I'll -- maybe I'll get this one, too, and there it is.  And how it got there -- I have no idea how it got there.  My only guess is that someone borrowed it from my grandfather and never returned it, and then when they died, it made its way to the Yiddish Book 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, the recent passing of Mani Leib and the --

DF:  So, Mani Leib was --

CW:  Just for you, personally?

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 sweatshop poets before him -- you know, for them, poetry was a way to move the masses, and it 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 can appreciate the lyricism of Mani Leib's poetry and of his sonnets.  So, I love the work.  I've read only a few of his poems, with help from my teachers, and I'm getting better at it.  And now, I've been able to translate one or two of them.  So, part of it is just that the -- the poems themselves are very close to me.  But again, partly, it was -- it's that relationship that my grandfather had 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 Mani Leib and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern in New York, you know, in the teens and '20s and forward.  And it really is a book about the wave of immigration from the Old World to New York and about Yiddish culture and Yiddish literary culture of that era, told by focusing in on these two particular poets who had very different temperaments and very different poetic styles.  And as I do when I get a new book, I do read the book, but -- the first place I stop is in the index, and I see if my grandfather's mentioned.  And in fact, he's mentioned.  At the end of 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 a tombstone.  And in most of Mani Leib's obituaries, that sonnet is -- is printed.  And my grandfather, Ruth Wisse mentions in her book, wrote an article to "Di prese," to a Yiddish newspaper in Buenos Aires called "Three Encounters with Mani Leib," and he talks about his relationship with Mani Leib and is somewhat quizzical about the way that people turn back to their Judaism at the end of their life, because the poem is really about, "When I die, bury me like a proper 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.  And then it goes on from there, and it's a sweet, brilliant sonnet.  But what my grandfather wrote was, "Who is this guy?"  Like, "I know this guy.  He was buried in a three-piece suit.  We were modern Jews.  He was a modern Jew his whole life.  Why is he now suddenly putting an identity on his tombstone as though 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 Ruth Wisse'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, who invited him to come to the Sholem Aleichem schools and read to the children or participate 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 the things that my grandfather wrote that were not in his twenty full-length published books.  It's important to remember this guy was a full-time dentist.  He's a full-time dentist who, on the side, wrote twenty books while he was also active in various community organizations.  I don't know how that's humanly possible, I really don't quite understand it.  But it turns out that that's not all of it.  So, every once in a while, I had found references to certain things that he wrote in journals.  And so, I began to try to -- I first, I began searching in English using Scholar Google, you know?  I have certain 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 widely translated 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 a translation of Byron into Yiddish.  And my grandfather wrote several things in that review, but one of the things he wrote was that this, in -- you know, in this part, this translation into Hebrew is more successful than this translation into Yiddish, even though the Yiddish matches the rhythm of the poem better and actually 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 Biblical language 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 English scholar said, What this shows is that Simon was arguing for his -- almost like for a return to bilingualism, where you talk about religious and lofty and high intellectual matters in Hebrew, and Yiddish is the language of the proletariat and of the masses and of the regular people.  Now, I don't believe my grandfather was making any such argument of the kind.  And so, I actually wrote to this English -- the scholar who had written the book about Byron, and she sent me a copy, very kindly, of the original book review that my grandfather had written.  And I read it, and in fact, he wasn't -- I don't believe he was making that argument at all.  But I told this story to my mother, and my mother said, "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 the house all the time.  He would say -- he would call up on the phone, he would say, '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-poly nice guy who had this charming and quirky way of talking on the telephone.  And he was a translator of poetry from English into Yiddish, right?  So, he had this whole -- there's this whole intellectual plane on which he and my grandfather were having some kind of dialogue.  But for my mother, he was this nice guy who came by the house, or he was this nice guy who had a funny way of talking 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 grandfather through his writings and what I can do in getting to know my grandfather through his writing.  So, I can -- I can get to know what my grandfather really thought about the relationship between language and nationalism, and I can't get whether he liked this guy or not, or whether they knew each other, because that's not anywhere in the article.  So, there's all kinds of backstory that I'm never gonna know, that I do get to know by grace of my relationship with my sweet mother.  But, you know, if it doesn't come up, then I'll never find it out in that 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 as people.  The kids now are studying Yiddish the way they would study ancient Greek.  It's like this language that the -- you know, from this culture that was 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 living civilization, but secular one.  I sort of knew of them, you know?  My parents knew them and I sort of knew of them, and -- and so, I'm -- I'm in that sort of middle 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 had it 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 being in a synagogue -- it's why, when my brother wanted to be more Jewish, the idea was, 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 a Zionist.  You could be a Jewish -- you could be Jewish by never, ever forgetting the Holocaust.  And if you're not religious, if you don't believe in God, the other two ways of being Jewish really are not about being here, in suburban United States, as a white person.  You know, maybe my grandparents weren't white people, but I'm a white -- like, I'm in the majority culture here.  I grew up in prosperity, I grew up in the suburbs.  What way -- what is there 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.  I believed that Great Neck, sigh, was my true home, okay?  So, it may not have been a home that I related to, but that was my home.  (laughs) And so, I felt like -- my grandparents were right, that there could be a secular Yiddish Judaism, 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 existed when 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 was trying to do it that way.  But it was -- again, there's this feeling of the fingertip 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 one wanted to go back.  I'm not talking about nostalgia.  I'm not talking about wanting to go back to a traditional way of life.  I'm not talking about wanting to go back to that continent where we were treated so horrifically.  But the idea that you could live as a Jew in your daily life, un-self-consciously, not as devotion to God but just as an authentic way to participate in a national culture.  And it's funny, because it -- that is possible in Israel, in Hebrew.  There are secular Jews in Israel who live in Hebrew, who -- everything they do is Jewish.  So, I suppose Zionism would have been an option for doing that.  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, was a very -- it was -- it's a sort of vanishing ideal.  And I feel like -- I don't know that young people have solved any of this, but I look at the young people who are interested in Yiddish now, and I look at the Yiddish Book Center and their programming for young people.  And -- their -- this idea of a return back to a certain set of attitudes.  But I feel like my peers, my age group, really in some ways were not catered to by the people who were trying to sustain Yiddish secular culture.  I feel like the -- the Book Center has their oral histories 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 little available to me to learn more Yiddish, to join in.  And I think that people are now adapting and coming around.  So, now there are book clubs and now there's a one-week thing in March, and now -- so, there's some effort to get to the fifty and sixty-year-olds.  But for a long time, the focus was on the children of the immigrant generation, the people who are -- now the children of the survivors, the children of the immigrant generations, the people who heard Yiddish in their homes as children or the people who represent our future as a people.  But there 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 could learn 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, when I 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, what it would take a twenty -- a twenty-year-old two and a half years to accomplish is gonna take me five.  And if someone was working hard in their fifties and they could only do Yiddish a little bit and on the side, it could take them eight 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 our three-thousand-year history?  Do it -- people should do it, you know?  I tell my 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 get interested in what people -- how people wrote about him and why, you know, why was he an alcoholic, and why this person hated him.  And then, you -- they come alive to you as people."  You know, why did he write poems about Bible stories?  He could have written whatever he wanted.  Why was -- why were people sort of taken aback that he wrote about the Biblical characters as if they were alive today?  These aren't -- it's not this quaint, little -- you know, 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 live in their arguments.  They live in their disputes, and they live also in the stories 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 a miracle.  It is a miracle that I can hear the voice of a dead person.  I can hear it.  I can hear his voice.  I know what made him laugh.  I know who he loved.  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 before he 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's written about it.  It's incredible. [BREAK IN RECORDING] (reads from book)  "'Khelm boyt a vasermil.'  Finf furn forn fun khelm keyn shedlits.  Forn di furn barg arof, barg arop ['Chelm builds a watermill.'  Five wagons travel from Chelm to Siedlce.  The wagons travel uphill, 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, finf ferd un tsen khelmer kluge layt.  Eyn khelmer, a langer, firt dos ferd baym tsayml; 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 kluge layt.  Der elfter iz der kligster fun ale: hilel, der firer fun 'oboz.'  Hilel fort 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.  Chelm takes 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 the coachman'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 the most intelligent: Hillel, the leader of the wagon-train.  Hillel travels in a phaeton.  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 di khelmer optsuruen zikh.  Shtelt zikh of hilel, der kligster fun khelm, un tut a zog, 'Zogt mir nor, khelmer, farvos firn mir korn tsu moln keyn shedlits?'  'Farvos take?' fregn di khelmer.  Entfert hilel, der kligster fun khelm, 'Mir firn 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 zogt mir, 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 hilel mit der foyst in hartsn.  'A vasermil veln mir boyen!'  'Avade veln mir boyen,' hobn tsugeshtimt di khelmer.  'Ober, yidn,' hot hilel gevornt, 'a vasermil kost gelt, an oytser fun gelt, a yam mit gelt!'  Hobn di khelmer geentfert, '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, the leader of the wagon-train.  Hillel travels in a phaeton.  He is led by tree horses in tandem like a nobleman.  Hillel, the most intelligent of the citizens of Chelm, jumps up and says, 'So tell me, why are we bringing our rye to be ground in Siedlce?'  'Why indeed?' ask the citizens of Chelm.  Hillel, the most intelligent of the citizens of Chelm, answers, 'We are going to Siedlce to grind our rye because there is no watermill in Chelm.'  'That's true,' answer the citizens of Chelm.  'Of course it's true,' yells Hillel, 'but why don't we build 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 citizens of Chelm.  'But, Jews,' Hillel warned, 'a watermill costs a lot of money, a treasure chest of gold, a sea's worth of gold!'  The citizens of Chelm responded, 'We will build a watermill in Chelm even if it reduces us to poverty.'  '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 soynim veln tsupekt vern fun kine.'  'Senoyim veln tsepekt vern fun kine,' hobn di khelmer geliarmet un getumlt.  Bald nokh pesekh hobn zikh di khelmer geshtelt boyen 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 build the watermill of watermills.  Our good friends will delight and our enemies will burst with envy.'  'Our enemies will burst with envy,' the citizens of Chelm shouted and cheered.  Just after Pesach, the citizens of Chelm started in on 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 di vasermil lebn taykh.  Der taykh iz dokh in tol un di vasermil vet zikh nit onzen.  Zey veln shteln di vasermil afn spits barg, vet men zi zen af mayln vayt.  Zoln senoynim zen un tsepekt vern.  Di khelmer hobn oyfgeboyt afn shpits barg -- di khelmer hobn ofgeboyt afn shpits barg a vasermil aza, vos iz take 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.  The river is in the valley and no one would see the watermill.  They will put it on the top of the mountain, so that it will be seen from miles away.  May the enemies burst with envy.  The citizens of Chelm built on the mountaintop -- the citizens 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 with such 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 not have 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 a better job with the physical production of the books.  He did this because he loved children.  He did it because he wanted the schools to have good books for the 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 Yiddishist Schools," 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 losing money.  I'm not complaining because I'm losing money.  I never took a penny for 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 our education, 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 he actually was never paid.  He never took money for this work.  And he mentioned that in one or two cases, he paid the typesetter himself.  So -- so that -- I think that probably may be one reason why "Robert's Adventures," "The Clever Little Tailor," "Di heldn fun khelm," "Shmerl nar" have better covers and were able 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 there must have also been someone at the press who cared. 

CW:  Hm.  Could you hold it up?  Thank you.

DF:  You're welcome. 

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 in newspapers outside of his books.  So, I found one such clue in a book about Byron.  I found another clue in a book about poets living in New York.  But there's also the Yi-- "Yiddish Periodic Index" now.  Someone in Israel has been compiling an index of Yiddish periodicals.  Many periodicals are not included.  But of the ones that are, there are some forty-nine or fifty listings 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 yidishe shtime."  He wrote in all kinds of newspapers, journals, literary journals.  Those are just something of his -- "Literarishe bleter" and so on.  And I have made it a little personal quest to hunt down as many of these things as I could.  I haven't read most of the things he wrote, again, outside of his books.  In fact, I haven't even read most of his -- his books for grown-ups yet.  But I had this idea that I would gather a complete set of his journal and newspaper work and have a bibliography and then have soft copies of everything I could get pictures of, gathering in the New York Public Library or YIVO or wherever 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 Public Library, and I photographed them, and I now have soft copies of them.  One of them, one of the earliest things that he wrote, called -- an article called "Pioneers" in a journal called "Oyfgang," bugged me.  And what bugged me about it 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, instead of shin for Shloyme, why was it a samekh?  Maybe he didn't write it.  I thought 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 by his English name, Solomon Simon -- which, if you spelled it out, would have a samekh instead of a shin.  And while I was puzzling this out, I went and I looked 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 articles for me.  But because she has no Yiddish, she took pictures of the cover of the journal with the table of contents.  And then, she took a picture of the article, so that -- she made sure that she didn't make a mistake and that I had the correct article identified, the right pages from the right journal and so on.  And then, I would throw away the cover once I compiled my little PDF file of the article.  But this one, for one reason or another, I had kept the title page.  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 when I 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 Shimon Shimonovich, 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 his autobiography, he writes about himself as Shimon, in the third person.  I don't know why.  So, clearly, this is a pseudonym of his.  So, that was exciting and very odd that I just happened -- my eye just happened to hit this thing, and I went to find it, and it's a book review.  Maybe it's because he had two things in the same journal that he used two different names?  You know, he didn't want to get sort of closed out.  He wanted to fill up the journal without everyone knowing everything was by the same person?  I don't know.  So, that gave me something 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 got out a reference book called the "Leksikon fun di naye yidisher literatur," and I'm reading the article about my grandfather.  It's got listed every job he ever 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 I realized that I will never know everything that he wrote.  I will never find everything he published.  There's just no way.  I have no idea what these other pseudonyms were.  This one I got just by dumb luck.  And so, there's even more -- I mean, what's amazing to me is here's someone who works as a full-time dentist, has published twenty books, and then as I'm gathering his newspaper and journal articles, there are pages and pages of bibliography of just all the different journal and newspaper articles that he wrote.  And that'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.  He never 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 ever wrote.  I'm reading -- you know, what I read, I'll read.  You know, what I learn, I'll learn.  I'm -- I'm trying, you know, year in, year out to learn a little more, to get a little closer to him, and then into the wider world of Yiddish letters, with him as my starting point.  But that was -- that was just this last week.  That was kind of a kick in the head, when I realized that he had 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 learning about my grandfather one word at a time by looking up each word in the dictionary.  Now, I'm getting to where I can read Yiddish, at least at the level of a children's book.  And so, I will -- I just read a sentence and I write it in English the way it is in the Yiddish.  But of course, it's more complicated 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 the words.  When I translate poetry, there's the sound of the words that's extremely important.  And then, it becomes a true logic puzzle.  And I am loving 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 is falling 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 are foot fingers.  And it's clear that he was playing with the sounds when he wrote that.  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, it was a very playful passage.  But in the end, what I settled for was, "He tried to 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 word funny because there were fewer Fs in the English rendering than there had been in the Yiddish "form your foot fingers into a fist."  So, sometimes the sound matters.  The sounds matter in other ways, too.  If he is purposely using a Hebrew origin word rather than a German-origin word, he may be trying for a particular connotation, a particular lofty feeling or intellectual feeling or spiritual feeling.  If you -- you know, so I try to pay attention to those things, because -- well, I love language.  And when -- so, when -- when I want the English to have the zest -- his Yiddish is extremely idiomatic.  And it's very zesty.  And it's colloquial in places, and I want to get that flavor in the 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 word order right and it's in a sentence and I understand when something is an idiom and when it's not.  The Beinfeld and Bochner dictionary is terrific, because it has idioms in it.  And so, there was one thing w-- I could have gotten quite literal about.  I was translating an argument he was making about the illustrations of a book of psalms that came out of Israel, which he thought was reflective 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, you know?  Oh, God will rain fire and pitch down upon the enemy, and there's an illustration 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 could have been worse]."  And if you took the word "khesed" literally, it can mean gentleness or it can mean piety.  And in the context of -- you know, he's commenting on a religious text.  And so, that sort of literal use of the word might be the natural way to translate it.  But, I check, because I know I don't know things.  One of the benefits of being a beginner is that I am very painfully aware of my ignorance.  And so, I looked up khesed -- which is a Hebrew word, after all, not a Yiddish one -- in the dictionary.  And it had the idiom "nokh mit khesed," which means, "it could have been worse."  So, you have that -- 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 those illustrations 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 -- it was not what he was trying to say at that moment.  For Russian-origin words, my teacher from Rochester still helps me out.  And then, some other friends I met at YIVO last summer can help me out.  Some of the Ukrainian or the Polish or some of the other Slavic origin expressions.  So, one tool of a translator is to know how much you don't know.  For Hebrew origin words, Niborski's dictionary is incredible.  He has a dictionary of Hebrew origin words in Yiddish.  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 the meanings of all the words and I compose an English sentence that sort of sounds like 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 out what is meant by a certain idiom.  And then, I really -- after that, I know what it is he was saying and how he was saying it.  And then, the third wave is to 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 on a -- on a Yiddish reader.  So, then, you want to make the English sing.  You want it to be good writing.  You want the words to be precise.  You want them to be interesting.  I don't know, you want the sentence to be put together with a certain kind of pop.  Good writing's hard.  Takes a lot of revisions.  But I would say the minimum would be those three sweeps through before, then I would show it to someone and ask, you know, what doesn't work in the Engl-- 'cause you get -- you get in a Yiddish mindset, and sometimes the English comes out in the Yiddish 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's some 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 on children's -- I mean, sorry, in his article on children's literature, he quotes H.G. Wells and translates him, of course, into Yiddish, because he's writing in Yiddish about children's literature.  So, I had to find the edition of the book from which he was quoting Wells, because the correct English would not be a translation of his Yiddish translation of Wells back into English.  It would be what Wells said.  (laughs) So, I had to find what he said.  So, you know, you get particular problems like that.  And then, it's just really a matter of having the commitment to getting it right.

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 what he cared about and I know how he argued.  He was a tempestuous man and he argued in a certain way, verbally.  And maybe slightly differently in his writings, but I still -- I get a sense of his fieriness and his passion and his intellectual reach and his breadth of interests.  And it's a legacy to be extremely proud of.  I'm very, very proud to be his grandson.  I would love his 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 way people think about Jewish literature.  He's not in the canon, except maybe "The Wise Men of Chelm."  And I think more people could benefit from reading his work, so -- but so -- but that -- that's just pride.  I mean, I have a great deal of pride in him.  I think he was brilliant and a wonderful man.  Through his writings, not just through my relationship with him.  It's deep in my relationship 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 my process of learning Yiddish in a blog.  And when I write a blog post, they email me and say, Oh, I liked your last blog post, and I would have thought of it differently, or they give me some other information that I might not have had otherwise.  So, it has -- I feel closer to my mother and she's delighted that I'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.  And there's also the satisfaction of learning something hard in your fifties.  People sometimes coast at this age.  Sometimes people are looking forward to retirement.  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 a translation and I think it's good, then I feel great satisfaction in that.  And I think it -- it eventually will make me a better writer in English, to have delved that deeply into the words of another language and into how writings of all kinds are put together.  In terms of Jewish identity, I feel I don't have to apologize anymore.  I feel like I was always going to, I was always going to, 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 to see other people.  We're in a particular moment in our history right now in the United States, and there's a lot of -- well, the Black Lives Matter movement is in 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.  And there's a particular way that being secure in who you are and where you come from enables you to listen better to other people.  And you know, I think we've made 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 contributions and we've had some losses in our culture.  And the Yiddishists were always a very small proportion of the Jewish American community.  But whatever vantage point you have, if you feel solid in that vantage point, I think you can be open to the other vantage points.  You can be flexible.  You can understand better.  So, I think that's been important to me, also.  And a little bit, in tough 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 real knowledge of Ashkenazic civilization.  That was a civilization that endured horrors 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 putting this all together, 'cause there's always too much and we just get to p-- we pick a story, we tell it the way -- the best way we can.  So, thanks.

[END OF INTERVIEW]