DINA MANN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is May 23rd, 2017, I am here in Sunnyside, Queens with Dina Mann.  We are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Dina, do I have your permission to record?

DINA MANN: Yes.

CW:  Thank you.  We're going to be talking mostly about your parents --

DM:  Yes.

CW:  -- today.  And I thought we could start with your mother.

DM:  OK.

CW:  So can you tell me what her name was?

DM:  Her maiden name was Sylvia Guberman.  And her Yiddish name was Tsipe-reyzl.

CW:  And do you know where and when she was born?

DM:  She was born on March 4th, 1914.

CW:  And where?

DM:  In Brooklyn.  In the house.

CW:  And what do you know about her family?  Her family background?

DM:  I know their health -- (laughs) health stuff.  My grandmother was Becky [Titievsky?], her maiden name, and my grandpa was Isadore Guberman.  So she became Rebecca Guberman.  And they were very, very intelligent, very artistic people.  And there was some diabetes that ran through her side of the family.  There was some other things that ran, but generally they were very lovely people and my grandma had about seven siblings, so I had a lot of aunts and uncles from that side.  And my grandpa lost some of them and he had a few siblings as well.

CW:  And where did that family come from, your grandparents?

DM:  I am not sure what part of Russia, that -- I know that they used to -- my grandpa liked zhytomer barn, which is pears from this part of Russia that are very juicy.  I don't know where Zhytomyr is, I never heard of it.  And he was a brilliant chess player and a cabinet-maker.

CW:  Do you have a sense of her childhood, what it was like for her growing up?

DM:  My mother's childhood, as she described it to me, was -- it was quite violent.  Her mother -- she was the only child of this -- issue of this marriage, and her mother -- my grandmother -- had a pretty violent temper and 3:00used to beat her.  Savagely.  And the fact is, she went into menopause at twenty-five and later in life she apologized to my mother for her beatings, so my mother told me. 

CW:  Do you know what part of Brooklyn they lived in?

DM:  She used to tell me that they lived in East New York, she called it "my East New York," and Bay Ridge.  And then they moved to Manhattan and Harlem.  And then they moved to the Bronx on the Grand Concourse somewhere.  But this came up because I was working in East New York, Brooklyn for housing works and it's not a great neighborhood.  And she could always -- She would say, "Oh, my East New York, those houses," and everything.  I said, "It's dangerous now."

CW:  And did she go to school?  What do you know about her education?

DM:  She was a brilliant student.  She was good in everything.  Very smart and very artistically inclined.  My grandpa was a magnificent sculptor, painter, and cabinet-maker.  He worked for Maurice Valenci.  And she inherited, from him, some of those crafting skills, she was a brilliant etcher and did a lot of drawing, some painting, and my grandmother was an exquisite needlework person.  I have somewhere, a velvet pillow that she made with a gigantic star on it that is stunning.  And she also sewed all the clothes for my mother, because many of those immigrants worked at shops.

CW:  Are there any stories or things that you know about your mother's early life that stand out?

DM:  Well, she used to play the violin, and she didn't like to practice so she also was very fat as a youngster, and she was very self-conscious, but the whole family history of -- the whole history of fatness was not an issue because in those times people didn't want to be skinny, 'cause that represented poverty.  But she remembers her mother beating her for not practicing enough and a lot of beatings from her mother.  Brutal beatings.  And -- that's all she told me, and when she married, I was already getting into psychological stuff on my own, 6:00and I said, "No wonder she married into a family where there was so much violence."  She married someone who was also violent.  And I asked her once about it, and she said, "Well, people fight.  It's normal."  And I started to wish that I lived in another family because there was so much violence.  And she thought it was the normal way to live.

F1:  Could we pause for one second, I was just wondering if you could try to keep your back towards the back of the chair?  It looks much better on the camera.  So, like the bottom of your back --

DM:  OK.  OK, so I'm -- OK.  All right.

F1:  That's great.  Not so you're uncomfortable, just --

DM:  OK.  No, I was getting slouchy, there.

CW:  (laughs) Great.

DM:  This dancer here.

CW:  Right.

DM:  Okay.

CW:  Can you just tug a little on the front there?

DM:  Okay.

CW:  Perfect.  There we go.  Wow.  So do you know when she started writing?

DM:  She wrote all her life, she told me.  And she wrote all her life.  She was a painter and a writer, and she attended the mitlshuln [Yiddish high schools] and she knew Itche Goldberg very well -- she loved him, he was her camp counselor.  And she wrote poetry and went to all those -- she used to say that everyone called her a communist because she went to all these avant-garde 7:00Yiddish writer's meetings, which is where she met my dad.  But she told me she wrote all her life.

CW:  And have you seen pictures of her when she was younger?

DM:  Yes.

CW:  Could you describe what she looked like?

DM:  She looked very, very sad and very depressed.  And she had a large, full face, and she never smiled.  I have only one picture of her smiling.  And she just looked forlorn and depressed.  And I had a sense that it wasn't circumstantial, that she may have been suffering from some undiagnosed clinical depression or one of those depressions that is so low-grade that it's not even recognized.

CW:  And what was she like when you were growing up?

DM:  She was very moody.  And she was very, I would say -- I have pictures of her in her kind days, but she had -- she was actually very violent to me, a couple -- quite a -- very abusive.  And it was -- it was to the point where, I remember it, it was like when I was three or four years old, I used to -- I'll be graphic -- I had a little problem with my tummy.  I had a very tiny tummy and you couldn't over-feed me, otherwise it would come out.  And, I won't say, 9:00you know, the word, but anyway she got sick and tired of cleaning it up and she tried to make me eat it.  So, it's something that stayed with me, and she -- she hit pretty bad, you know, pulled and -- they thought that physical disciplinary action was in vogue at the time.  It's not like now, where people have so many more behavioral modification techniques.  This was just what she got and what she so, so she did it too.

CW:  Well, I'd like to go back a little bit to when you said she was in these avant-garde writer's groups.  Did she talk much about them?  Did you -- ?

DM:  Not a lot, not a great deal, only that's where she met my father.  And Itche Goldberg reports played a huge part because he used to encourage her to write, keep writing.  And she was part of an avant-garde movement where women smoked, and she smoked.  And it was not very big, you know, in those days, a woman smoking was not -- and she also had very curly long hair and never wore a hat.  And she recalls people saying that she was a communist.

CW:  Do you know what her political views were?

DM:  I don't know.  She never talked about it.  She talked about, you know, FDR and the Depression and stuff like that, but she never spoke much about it.  11:00Except that she told me that one of the reasons they weren't religious was because that communism was the solution.  And the communist way was that they believed that religion was the opiate of the people.  So that's all I knew.

CW:  And have you read much of her writing?

DM:  Yes, I have.  I have one that I copied on my phone.  It's a beautiful, beautiful poem that's translated by the poet -- that's her -- into English from Yiddish.  And it describes, after her mother's death, she describes the empty gloves that were filled once by her mother's hands, and that she calls for her all over the house and she doesn't answer.  And she's looking for her mother in 12:00the empty gloves, the sheath of the gloves.  It's a short poem -- it's absolutely beautiful.

CW:  Did she share her work with you?

DM:  She attempted to.  She wanted very much to, that one of the things of her life was that she wanted to share all of her writings in the time that we had together.  And she read a few of her poems and she told me about some biographical short stories she wrote -- they were autiobio-- autographical short stories, changing the names.  And there was a lot of family history in them.  I've heard some of them.  And she also went into the history of her aunts and uncles, even though she was an only child, her grandmo-- her own mother had many sisters and they had many children, so she had lots of cousins and nephews and 13:00lots of uncles and aunts, so she was never really alone.  She had more company than we had, even though there was another sibling or two.  So, tha-- she always enjoyed Dadi, her cousin, and they used to go to the bathroom together and they had some intimacy when they were growing up.

CW:  So how would you describe her writing to someone who might not have read it?

DM:  Well, she -- I think that the people that read her poetry for the first time loved her poems.  They were printed in Jewish Currents, they were printed in many places.  In "Yidishe kultur," that was one of her things.  Itche Goldberg used to -- Yugntruf, her things were printed there.  But I never got 14:00to read them.  They kind of kept away their art from us, like it was their private thing.  And that's, in a way, why we were not integrated as a family.  On the other hand, they were very afraid of assimilation.  But if you're not integrated, you don't go where other people who are like you go, then you're naturally gonna incline to go other ways.

CW:  Can you say a little more about that?

DM:  Well, it was just -- it wasn't so much when we lived in the Bronx because we were not in school and not exposed to a lot.  Because they had a lot of Yiddish friends over and there was a sense of family cohesiveness, even though 15:00there was a lot of violence.  But when the violence subsided, there was this other side that was absolutely memorable and beautiful, so it makes life very complicated to grow up in, because it was not safe there.  But we went to shule [secular Yiddish school] -- they enrolled me in a yidishe shule and I was there two weeks.  And the person that I made friends with was Leyzer Ran's daughter -- you've heard of Leyzer Ran?  He spoke very, very fast, and he spoke Cubano-Spanish.  I mean, that is Spanish that's from the express train.  And I remember hearing his Spanish and I understood, I said -- then he spoke Yiddish, and it very -- as they say, "fartsoygn" -- very garbled and it was very 16:00strange.  But I remember his daughter was named Itkale and she wore gold earrings like a lot of Spanish children do.  And she was very dark.  And I met her and she came to the house and my mother's fir-- my mother was a cleanliness freak.  And she remembered that Itkale smelled of sweat -- smelled in the whole house.  And I smelled it too but I didn't know.  (laughs) 'Cause in our family, we were very, very immaculate people, but we didn't come across a young kid of eight years old to have such body odor.

CW:  So why were you only at shule for two weeks?

DM:  I don't know.  I don't know.  I still have the heft from that, and they 17:00were teaching me how to write the letters, and I could tell it was my mother's handwriting.  'Cause, my father's handwriting -- I knew a little bit about handwriting analysis -- his swayed to the right.  And usually more withdrawn people's sway to the left or straight up.  My mother's was very artistic, it was very graceful and very graphic.  My father's was very loopy, so I said, "No, she was trying to -- it was her that was demonstrating how to make a tes and how to make a beys and I learned that from the house and after that, nothing.  So then she gave me -- that was maybe two years before she died -- she gave me her textbook from shule.  And I got past the first two pages and 18:00after that, I couldn't, I couldn't.

CW:  What were the languages you heard in the house?

DM:  My father spoke seven languages.  He spoke Spanish, a little bit of Italian, he spoke Russian, he spoke Hebrew, he spoke German, and Aramaic, and Biblical Hebrew -- two different kinds of Hebrew.  But I would -- he spoke Yiddish most of the time.  But he could speak fluently to everybody in different languages.  And I remember, I picked up his curse words.  He cursed a lot in Russian.  And most of my ballet training was with Russian teachers -- 19:00they were all from the Ballets Russes and I picked up these things, like I would do a pirouette or I would fall off something and most people would, you know -- kids my age, they would say, Oh, shit!  You know, S-H-I-T, you know, or f-- you know another word.  But I'd say, "Yebu tvoyu mat' [Russian: I fuck your mother]!"  And all of a sudden this Russian teacher would come up and say, "Dyeh-na!"  They didn't say "Dina," they said "Dyeh-na."  "You never, never say that."  I'd say, "Why?"  (laughs) So she says, "Bad word!  Bad!  Don't say that.  Say something else."  And I picked up some of his -- more vulgar language.  He used to speak like that to his friends at "The Day" -- he worked 20:00at "The Day" -- and he worked with Russian-speaking people.  He would say, "Srat' [Russian: Shit]."  I didn't even know what it meant.  I didn't know.  But he'd say, "Yeti tvoyu mat' [Russian: Fuck your mother]."  And I had perfect pronunciation.  And the teachers, I had Polish ballet teacher, says, "Dina, where'd you pick that up?" -- she was Polish but she spoke Russian -- she'd say, "No, no, no, nice girl, don't say that."

CW:  Well, maybe we can switch over to your father --

DM:  Yeah.

CW:  But before that, can you just tell me how they met?  Did you hear that story?

DM:  Yes, I told you she went to this poetry circle -- an enclave of Yiddish writers -- and she met this drop-dead gorgeous man with long blond eyelashes and long blond hair and crystal blue eyes.  And they befriended each other and she 21:00was not a goo-- she described herself as not being -- she thought she was -- her sense of self-esteem was in the toilet.  She always thought she was ugly and she covered up her face with bangs, and then she started doing the bangs thing for me.  And I said, "I don't like bangs."  And I had very bad acne -- terminal acne, terrible, all over me -- and the dermatologist, he says, "No hair on her face."  So, she thought of herself as ugly and she told me he once said to her, "Ikh bin gegangen mit miesore meydlekh."  You know what that means?  "I've been with uglier women than -- " you know.  And, you know, he was -- I know nothing about my father except that I -- what kids do is they -- their 22:00authority figures, I was terrified of his temper.  And it was pretty -- he was a very, very strong man, physically.  I mean, he had bice-- powerful man, not tall, but very -- medium size but big muscles.  I have pictures of him.  And he just -- what was I saying?

CW:  You were talking about how they met and then that the authority figure that you --

DM:  I worshipped -- I didn't worship him, I took it for granted that, this is my father and that she was the only woman in his life and he was the only man in her life, and I think in her case, it may have been, but she was amazed that he was attracted to her.  But she didn't know that he had lots of other ladies.  And I remember Mina Bern telling my mother -- they came from the same shtetl -- 23:00she says, "Ikh bin nit geshlufn mit volfn [I haven't slept with Wolf]."  And Mina Bern slept with everybody, but she said that she never slept with my father.  So, I mean, I got to know this later in my life right before -- about three years before she died, she told me a lot of it, but I never found out about all this stuff 'til I went through my father's visas, all the aliases he had.  There goes the "tigerl [little tiger]."  "Dos iz tigerl [There's the little tiger]."  (laughs as her cat walks by) She's being on film.  Anyway, I didn't know any of this.  And he had a thing for young women, and it happened that there's a woman there that I went to school with -- she was older than 24:00me.  Her name was Janet Hadda.  You know Janet?  She was a professor, she was German, her father was a doctor.  And my father just -- she was blonde and sweet and very petite, and my father never -- he never -- it was always other people's families that were better than ours.  He used to call us "di tsvey vern [the two someones]."  Life before the two vern [someones] was very good.  And then after they had us, life changed.  But anyway, he kept talking about Janet.  "Di blondinke [The blonde] (UNCLEAR)."  And he had students that -- he taught at Rutgers and Columbia Yiddish Department and I understand that there were girls there that he -- he was a flirt.  And he was extremely attractive.  25:00And women clung to him like a fly to that paper you put up.  And sometimes they would get in touch with him (laughs) and they would call the house.  And my mother would say, "Mayn man iz farnumen.  Er ken nit tsu dir redn. [My husband is busy.  He can't speak with you.]"  And finally it became so bad that, you know, she had to pick up the phone because she didn't want all this -- because there were a lot of single older women who were just -- he taught Yiddish language to older adults in the Y, the 92nd Street Y, and they gave him all kinds of presents and it was like he was a very popular -- after "The Day" closed, he had never been unemployed, and he wrote and he started teaching at 26:00Berlitz, and he got offers at Queens College.  And he taught in all these places and naturally there were younger women there.  So I mean, I didn't know anything about him, I thought I was his daughter and that was the only relationship I had, but I couldn't figure out why his favorite was not me.  Or the sister.  And it was such a combustible household because there was a lot -- I have a sister and there was mental health issues with her, and there was a lot of -- my father had the same temper as she did, and there was fireworks, and I -- people called the cops a couple of times.  It was very, very, very -- it was 27:00just combustion, it was just like an A-bomb.  Explosive, is what I would say.  [BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:  So I wanted to sort of go back and do similarly what we did with your mother for your father.

DM:  Okay.

CW:  So could you tell me what his name was?

DM:  His name was Wolf.

CW:  And last name?

DM:  Younin.  Younin, and then Hoffman, it was always very confusing to me.  And in Yiddish, it was "Velfke."

CW:  So what do you know about the last name?

DM:  Well, we got mail back -- they used to misspell his middle name Younin.  And I later asked -- it came back "Yuran" or "Yaoman" or something, and the last name was "Hoffman."  Originally the name was "Hokhman," and my mother said that 28:00he took the penname Younin because it's meant unique.  (laughs) But I did a little Google-ing and I found lots of Younins, and I said, "Oh my God, don't tell me he propagated the planet with this name.  Maybe I have more siblings."  There were more anyway that I found out later.  In an odd way, in an odd way.  I can briefly tell you about it.  When I was going through his library, it was so overwhelming, the place was packed to the ceiling with sooty, dusty books that are made, you know the lead that they used, the oily stuff -- I came out of there and I looked like a chimney sweep.  And I said, "I don't read these languages, and my mother doesn't read them either, I have to get some help."  So I told, um, Leo Greenbaum, I said, "Do you know somebody that can 29:00read some of these languages who might do a little volunteer work and help me sort this out, to know what it is?"  So I got a couple of emails and then I got a call, and I called the person back, and he says, "Oh, by the way, did you ever meet Beatrice Younin?"  I never heard of a Beatrice Younin in my life.  Sure enough, I was going through his things, I found child support checks.  You know, he kept them in his desk.  I don't know.  For a dollar.  To this person named Beatrice.  And then I found out from Bill that my father, at the time that -- we went through a very tough time in the family at one point.  He had a 30:00kidney stone, which these days can be just mutilated, they crash it, they smash it, but then he had to have a big surgery and take out half of his kidney with the big stone.  So anyway, Bill was working for one of the big publishers -- he was a writer too.  He looked just like my father, the same blond hair, the same eyes, the same beautiful face -- he was beautiful.  And he said, "Well, you know, your father came to me, he asked if I knew of any jobs for this woman."  And I said, "Who was it?"  He says, "He said it was his daughter."  My mother never said anything about it.  Then when I went through his -- all of his immigration papers, it turned out that he was married previously.  And it was a 31:00terrible, terrible shock to me.  And there were different women and one of them kept bothering him about child support.  And then there was pictures that I found of other children.  I don't know if it was someone that he saved because it was pretty, or it was an actual child.  Anyway, I Googled Beatrice Younin, and sure enough, I found that the woman he was affiliated with was not the one he married in Chicago, but he was just like -- just a quickie.  And evidently, my mother knew some of this because she filled out some of the -- he was an undocumented immigrant, and the government was after him all the time to try to deport him.  So they were always checking if he was communist and everything 32:00and that's what she told me.  And I found all these immigration papers with his contacts.  I mean, all of them.  He had a lot of passports from a lot of countries he lived in with similar names but different birthdays.  So, it shattered my -- it was hard enough, I ran away from home so many times that I can't even tell you because it was impossible to live with them.  They were just, um -- I just had no peace there.  And the desire to keep Yiddishkayt alive, and it was very bizarre to me because they never, never were observant.  They were casually observant to a point where they would say, "Oh, you know it's Yom Kippur, don't go ride your bike."  And I would say, "What's Yom Kippur?  33:00What?"  Oh, you know, they never fasted, they never went to a synagogue, and then I found out that my father attended a cheder and he was a very learned scholar -- very good biblical scholar -- I have his book that's -- and I remember, as he was dying, he read one of the psalms.  He put the little blue ribbon there and that was the last thing he read.  I have it in the bookshelf over there, and I can show you that.  And he read Hebrew -- Biblical Hebrew -- fluently, and he had dictionary that he made of Hebrew words in the Yiddish language.  And that's how come it helped me when I took biblical Hebrew in seminary.  I said, "Oh, (pronounced with emphasis on the last syllable) mishpochah [Hebrew: family]!"  But the Yiddish pronunciation, depending on what area you come, my professor said -- we read "mishpochah."  And (pronounced with 34:00Hebrew accent) "David."  I was reading "David," and whom did he marry, he had the hots for this -- I mean, we had to read biblical Hebrew, the biblical stuff and half the class were pastors of the Black community.  And we went to the -- we went to the Black synagogue in Harlem and they -- you had to get special permission to come in there.  And they were fluent people, there -- fluent Black Jews there.  So that's how come -- I mean, I noticed it was so much Hebrew in Yiddish.  I said, "Oh, that's what that means!  "Mishpochah." And (pronounced with emphasis on the last syllable) "beheymah [Hebrew: beast]."  And to me, it was -- "beheyme" is a "cow."  I said, "How did this change meaning?"  "Beheymah," I remember.  And then, there was certain other words 35:00that I understood, and --

CW:  Well I wanna go back a little bit.  So do you know when your father was born?

DM:  When?

CW:  When he was born?

DM:  Nobody knows for sure, but it says in one of them that it was 1906.  But then, they were -- they celebrated his birthday on February -- leap year, he was supposedly born on a leap year.  Except that, in one of his passports, he listed it as December 21st.  And there must have been reasons for it, because they were escaping -- the same kind of asylum-seekers that -- you know, that's why I wound up working with a lot of immigrants and homeless people and people who were -- they reminded me so much of my father.  Every time I would see one 36:00of these people who came here to get AIDS treatment, who didn't speak a word of English, who were totally bereft of everything, and some of them were asylum-seekers because they were gay, and in their countries they couldn't -- and I swear, I saw my father in every one of them.  And I really -- I said, "That poor man," when I finally waded through this, Bill and I spoke, I said, "Listen, they did a fabulous job given what they -- the cards that they were handed."  Because -- my father got there through his brother, Mickey.  And Mickey was supposed to be Bill's father except that they figured out that my father was Bill's father.  And my aunt Yohana was Bill's mother, because my father lived with Yohana and Mickey during the time when he came here for about 37:00a year.  And Yohana and my father had a thing.  And he sent me a picture of them in a French kiss.  So I put together, my mother hated Yohana, and she hated that family with the most savage disgust.  And I said -- he says, "Well, why do you think your mother didn't like her?"  And she was a beautiful woman.  But she couldn't stand -- "The reason I wouldn't marry your father," he tol-- she said, "I didn't want to marry him was because he played around too much."  So she married the uglier brother who was round and fat and less attractive and less sensual.  (laughs) 

CW:  So where was he born, do you know?

DM:  He was born in Irkutsk.  That's what I understand.  And Bill -- "Velfke" 38:00we call him -- he decided that he wanted to know -- he actually made a pilgrimage to see the sites exactly where my father and Mickey lived.  And it was actually the edge of Siberia.  And one of the things my father could do -- he had thicker blood than we do, and he was used to -- he told me he bathed in the snow.  And he would go out and shovel snow in a t-shirt in the dead of winter.  And his hands were always warm, very warm hands.  And he would never close his coat.  He wore the lightest of clothing in the dead of winter but he sweated terribly in the summer.  So it was very -- he said, "Oh, no, we bathed in the snow."  He was like the Coney Island -- what do they call those people 39:00that swim in the ice? 

CW:  What do you know about his childhood?

DM:  Very little except that he had a couple of brothers.  His original -- the original mother died, and the father -- my paternal grandparents, there were two.  His father lost his first wife, who was Mickey's mother, and then Mickey, or Morton, it's -- what a weird -- Morton Salt.  (laughs) Mickey's father -- their father remarried the most drop-dead gorgeous woman.  An Eastern Orthodox Christian woman who wore an enormous cross, and she was part Russian Orthodox 40:00and part of her was Norwegian.  She was about six feet tall.  And I showed you the picture of her -- beautiful woman.  And that was my father's mother.  But she also died.  So he didn't have -- my father didn't have much of a mothering in his life, which my mother always said, "Well, you know, he lost his mother at such a young age, and he didn't have that kind of nurturing.  And he was forced to go through all of that and come here."  And I said, "I feel bad."  And I just heard all these stories of my clients and I said, "Boy, I really respect that he made it through."  That he made it through.  And he told me he had a brother named Shepsl that was killed there.  And the rest of his family was 41:00wiped out -- I think there was maybe another brother after that.  And I don't know the rest of it.  But I never met my paternal grandparents.  But in a way, when my parents got together, the family -- my mother's family was only happy to -- said my mother got chosen to this beautiful man with the long lashes who's so talented, you know -- they didn't know the rest of him.  But my mother saw his temper a couple of weeks after they were married.  And she kept it hush.  But the grandparents knew -- my grandparents knew -- and they never interfered.

CW:  And when -- he was involved in theater as a young person as well?

DM:  Yes!  Actually Bill -- may he rest in peace -- there was some German -- 42:00he lived in Hamburg, where there was the heart of the German film industry, and he took one look at my blond father and it was like -- he was gay.  And he was -- I don't know, maybe they had a thing, who knows?  But he did a movie and my father took ballet classes as a young man, he wanted to be in the movies.  And he had that profile, that face, who couldn't want it?  So he told me the name of this German filmmaker that used him in a film.  I looked it up -- somewhere I wrote it down, I don't know it.  He gave me a link, but I don't know where -- It was in Hamburg in the early days when my father was very, very young.  He was about nineteen, twenty in those pictures I showed you.  And the thing is, 43:00the guy has more eight-by-ten glossies than I've seen in a lot of places.  He had so many agents -- he was a gorgeous man.  But that was all I found, but he was very tight-knit with the writers.  They had a lot of writer's communities, the Yiddish community there had great -- they had a cohesive group there and they all knew each other from over there.  So when he started writing at "The Day," there was Feinberg and Osher Penn and there's all the names in the books.  And Lazar and, um, who else was there?  He called one "Di pave [The peacock]."  It was a short squat writer that walked like a peacock, he called him.  I mean, they're all in the phone book there.  And some of them he hated.

CW:  And when did he come to America?

DM:  It seemed like he came here in the, maybe, early '30s.  Because he -- I think he married someone here, I don't know.  I really don't know.  I didn't find anything -- I found letters from the immigration authorities, and the fact that he had to check in with immigration every year, I had no idea what year.  But that's Bill was trying to figure out, because Bill was born in 1939, and my father came here a little before then, so there was ple-- and he'd met my mother.  So they were married, I think, in the early '40s.  Somewhere -- I didn't have her marriage certificate.  But I don't know much about it.

CW:  Did --

DM:  I know that he came to America early, in about 1936, and he married someone in Chicago.  And from what I read, I found the petition for the divorce because the woman said that he refused to work and he was living off of her.  And I kept saying, God.  And then there was another woman who bore this child, that -- they never married.  But then those people married for sanctuary.  And I think, you know, green card marriages, I don't even know if it was around then. 

CW:  So when did he start writing?

DM:  The books we gave to YIVO were still from over there.  He was already a distinguished writer at eighteen, nineteen.  I have to find that book, that 46:00leaflet, that YIVO has the copy of, that you can call Leo Greenbaum and get it, but he wrote an entire page about this donation -- that it took up ten thousand square feet. 

CW:  Wow.

DM:  I mean, talk about spending money we didn't have.  He spent most of it on -- he didn't make a lot of money, but the fact that he qualified for a mortgage and paid it off and put -- you know, we didn't go to private colleges but he managed to pay for a lot.  But he also had a thing about books.  He had -- he would send for these esoteric books that they all are in that collection.  And then he published, self-published his books, his writings.  It was called "Alef."  And then he was quite a genius at getting by, he was really brilliant, 47:00brilliant man of survival.  He was a survivor.  My mother was really never impacted by that, she had a very good life, you know?  My grandparents were very -- my grandmother was highly educated, she spoke Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish and she read in -- and English -- and read in all four languages.  My grandpa was almost illiterate. 

CW:  And what was he like growing up for you?  What was it like for you to grow up with him in the house?

DM:  What was he like?  He was very, very affectionate.  He was slobbery affectionate.  You know, he would give wet kisses and -- he loved me like -- he 48:00wrote poems to me.  But on the other hand, he had such a violent temper and beat so hard.  I was terrified of the man.  And I never knew when the explosion was gonna come.  So it was, um, it was a combination.  And then after he would deliver a beating, he would take me and buy me something.  And -- no wonder it was complicated grief.  You know, and it was very difficult.  And then I had -- both of us, there were two kids in the family -- they developed eating dis-- we developed eating disorders.  And he became very angry and he said, "What did we do wrong?" and they started going to therapy and the sister became extremely promiscuous and did drugs.  And to this day, she -- 49:00something's not right with her.  And I've never contacted her in thirty years.  She's not allowed to because she -- when I was taking care of my mom a few years ago, she kept -- it's a long -- it's not a long story, but she was living on SSI in California and she was unable to work.  Or she didn't want to.  She preferred to live off my mother's stuff, and my mother was afraid of her because she threatened suicide.  And finally a social worker, my mother went for counseling, and she said, "Well, we could stop this.  You know, it's up to you.  We can take it to court and we can do this, this, and this."  Anyway, I never had much contact with the sister after she left for 50:00California.  And then she started threatening my mother.  And I was already going to grad school and I said, "This is no good, this is -- we got to do something."  And I could do nothing.  I could do nothing.  So my mother was giving away half her money to her and taking part of the estate and giving it to her to sell on eBay.  It was awful.  And I said, "How could this family have come -- come from such brilliant people, have come so horribly?"  So they put something in the estate, when we portioned it off, that she's never allowed to contact me, which is tragic.  But I'm so scared of her -- I was afraid she would shoot me or something.  But the last contact I had with her over the phone was the day Princess Diana died.  So every time I see that, it just cooks 51:00up.  But it was very odd, the funeral for my dad was very odd.  We came and we had it at Parkside.  And it was a Jewish funeral and someone recited the traditional prayers, which I didn't know, and I couldn't even cry, I didn't know what to do because -- I went with a friend, a friend of mine from theater came with me, and my sister brought a friend.  And my mother, it took her years to recover from it.  And she got through it, but she felt very deceived because she found my father had a post office box where he had private postcards to a woman in Israel.  And she could not believe it.  She couldn't believe it, how 52:00he could have done this to her in secret -- and carried on this life in the family.  So it was very confusing.  And it was all in the name of Yiddishkayt.

CW:  So what was the Yiddishkayt that you were presented with growing up?  Exposed to?

DM:  It was more like, um, it was definitely not religious.  It was casually observant in a mild way -- like light Hanukkah candles and give Hanukkah gifts and Pesach, there was some kind of thing, but not kosher people.  And my mother explained to me, because she came from grandparents that were highly, highly 53:00frum [religiously observant].  And she said, "Oh, you know, in the old days if you drop a fork on the floor you have to bury it."  And it was -- I learned a lot from her growing up because she had a very wonderful -- even though her parents, her mother beat her, she had a warm, loving connection with an aunt who owned chickens and who loved her, loved her like her own -- the woman never had a child -- and she had a dog and she was like -- she got mothered by other people other than her mother.  And I have to say that in the beginning, I also did that, I was mentored by wonderful women in my life.  I tried to figure out -- that I had a gay part of me, that was because I didn't get enough mother.  54:00So somebody said, "No, that's not mothering, you have sexual feelings for another of your own sex, leave your mother out of this."  (laughs) So I don't know.  It just was a very odd family.  But the Yiddishkayt that I got was just that, it had its own flavor, it was not this -- the kind of thing that I see a lot of Jews have, that they go to shul together and they daven together and the women wear the wig and everything.  And my mother told me that her parents, her own parents, they gave up that way of life.  They became very, very Americani-- I wouldn't say Americanized.  Irreligious.  They didn't do it.  They didn't do it, but they kept some of the -- her parents kept some of the old country 55:00Russian dishes. 

CW:  Like what do you remember?

DM:  She told me that they pickled beets and pickled vegetables and made sauerkraut at home and made wine at home.  And made borscht and made something called "povidle" which is -- I don't know if you've ever heard of it -- it's plum jam.  All those people who came from Russia, during the winter there was nothing to eat, and they did that.  So her mother followed suit.  And even though she was not a culinary expert, these things she remembers.  She didn't bake much, but she -- in Russia, people don't eat that much pastry.  But they made wine and they chopped sauerkraut, they made that, and they pickled vegetables.  And her grandparents did the same thing.  And she remembered that 56:00part of her life that was so warm.

CW:  When you were growing up, did you -- what was your feeling about being Jewish?

DM:  I wanted to disassociate myself from it.  I did, actually.  And what happened, when I was a music major -- I mean, how could I not?  My mother listened to EVD and I would hear these old Jews singing and cursing and fighting with each other with -- WEVD had all these, you know, and my mother, she'd say, (UNCLEAR).  It's like Black people, Oh they're not dark enough, and this one isn't white enough, and -- you know?  There was in-fighting in the community.  In a community that's so much -- (meowing).  Gonna get into the movie, she's a star.

CW:  (laughs)

DM:  In a community that there's so much hatred and fear and things, instead of banding together, they had these fierce arguments about it.  And what happened when I was eighteen or nineteen, I used to always envy my Christian friends.  I mean, and also, I was a dancer, and at the time everybody who danced -- I suppose, I started in college but I had the right shape, everything, perfect, except that I didn't have a pug nose, blue eyes, and blonde hair.  So I wanted that.  And I said, "Oh God."  But then I remembered Alexandra Danilova -- have you ever heard of her?  She had a beak like that.  And everybody in my classes and all -- in my rehearsals, I said, "Oh God."  They were all getting nose 58:00jobs.  And they all came back and they looked horri-- they looked like, you know.  So she heard that I was plotting this, she says, "Darling, they will love you for your dancing, but don't touch nose."  And she never touched her nose.  She was a beautiful, beautiful woman, small woman, but she liked men, young men.  (laughs) But anyway, you know.  It was a feeling that I wanted not to be Jewish.  And then I read this book recently, very recently, that was on WQXR.  I forgot the name of it, it was about his growing up in Germany as a Jew -- In London as a German Jew.  And he said most of the people who fled Germany as Jews and went to London converted because they were sick and tired of feeling 59:00ostracized.  They became Anglican.  And lo and behold, that's sort of what happened to me on my journey.  It started earlier because when I was -- I was a piano major -- piano and dance, basically, and harpsichord.  So then I said, "You know?  I love the organ."  And on Christmas you'd hear this gorgeous music.  So I went into the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church for a concert and I asked the organ teacher, I said, "I'm a music major at Queens College, how can I take organ lessons?"  So he heard me play my piano and he says, "You're great."  So I started taking organ lessons.  And before that, I started going to services and then I started helping him out while he played a concert, turning the pages.  My parents, all of a sudden, they said, "S'hot geshmadt 60:00[You converted to Christianity]!"  This was like the most -- I said, "How could you say I never -- we're not religious, how did I -- I never beca-- I never was anything."  We spoke a lang-- I fought with them tooth and nail.  I said, "How could you say that I converted when was never this?  I just grew up here."  You didn't go to synagogue, I wasn't bat mitzvah-ed and the whole thing and you didn't do the -- er hot zikh geshoklt [he swayed while praying].  So, you know, it became like a big rift and rage.  And then came the time when I went all the way and I changed my name because I was sick and tired of the misspellings and I wanted to be a Christian.  I wanted to have the things that Christians had, 61:00normal families.  Little did I discover, when I was in grad school with all these pastors, and we had four rabbis from England, it was a mixed bag of people who were going into counseling.  And I said, "Oh God, these people are so lucky, they have Christmas and they have the white -- the things and the rings."  And I said, "I'm gonna have that."  And I never had it, really.  And then I would hear -- we had to do autobiographies, in front of everybody.  And then this woman pastor told me that she was raped by her father.  She was Presbyterian.  And I said, "There goes my --" (laughs) So as I said, it was a life-long dream that I didn't want to be a part of a house, to be with the yelling and the Yiddish sound and I just -- I was ashamed of it, I was very ashamed of it.  Because it wasn't acceptable.  Because half of people here are 62:00not Jewish.

CW:  And what has your relationship been with the Yiddish language over your lifetime?  Have there been phases of that for you?

DM:  I don't know.  I had more -- over the times that my mother died and everybody died in my family except for the one remaining -- I call her a sibling -- and my nephew, my relationship to the Yiddish language is that I'm remembering more of the warm parts.  And I want to create that for myself.  The language itself is innocent, it's absolutely innocent.  It's a mixture of German, Old English, some Hebrew, some -- God knows what else fell into it, and 63:00maybe some Gaelic.  Because Bill studied Old English and it sounded just like Yiddish.  And it just, you know, I said, you know, "They're not here anymore, how can I forgive them?"  I forgave them but I wish I would have had more supportive parents, even though they tried.  They came to see me perform.  But then there was this time when my father's show was on Broadway -- he wrote "Sing, Israel, Sing" and "Lomir zingn yidish [Let's sing Yiddish]" and I was dancing at the time, but he never once made an in-vote for me to be in the performance.  Somebody else would have said, "You know, I have a daughter, she's a dancer, put her in here."  Instead, the sister -- the sister had a thing -- it was another thing here -- my sister loved men.  Guys.  She started 64:00screwing around at thirteen.  And there was a handsome guy, there was a guy named Itamar who was a lady's man, so to speak, and he was a Yemenite, and they had a Yemenite dancer there, and Felix Fibich was there.  And he said, "Well, go to the audition."  And I said, "No, I don't have to go do an audition, you have enough connections without the audition."  That's how people got into shows.  I mean, they do the audition for the union thing, and then they already had picked somebody.  So it hurt me because the sister got in as an ar-- she painted some of the scenery and got paid, and my mother painted the scenery and got paid.  I was so hurt.  I was so hurt.  I never got over that, that he 65:00never -- he never was proud of me that I know of.  I mean, it's one thing to write little songs when a person is a baby, a baby is cute and innocent, but then how does your love evolve for that person when the person shows instincts of growth?  Never, you know, I auditioned for Juilliard and all -- I went to Mannes first, I went to a conservatory first.  And instead of being proud, they just sort of let it go.  And then my father stopped paying my health insurance, he stopped paying it when I was fifteen. 

  And that was about the time that this other person wanted money so he couldn't afford it, obviously.  So it was like being dumped.  You know?  And I felt, you know -- I said, "I'm not gonna do this interview," maybe, because I 66:00felt mistreated and underrated and they liked my sister, first of all because she's very tall and she's very blonde and had big boobs, and she had a lot of men all around her.  I didn't have men, I had only two blind dates that ever came to that house, I was so ashamed of it I didn't want to.  And it never took.  And they -- I would have wondered that said, "What's wrong with her?  Everybody else is going out on dates and she's not interested in guys.  And she loves this woman."  And nobody thought of anything like that.  I didn't until I was in grad school, I didn't even know that there was a name for it.  So I just -- I felt mixed emotions.  But now that it's all gone and Bill is gone and 67:00-- that was my last connection to my family because he was born way before me.  And he told me the stuff about my family and he had all these pictures of his mother and my father embraced, and I said, "Oh God."  He says, "No wonder your mother hated my mother."  (laughs)

CW:  Did you ever come out to your parents?

DM:  I did.  My father wasn't around anymore, but -- I did, but she didn't make anything of it.  She says, "Oh, well, you can find somebody."  But then I wanted to have a child, and I was considering, you know co-parenting with a gay guy.  And then I said, "No, no, no, she's not gonna be a good grandmother."  Because I needed help, I was not -- I would have to not -- I would gain a little weight if I got pregnant or something and I said, "The configuration isn't 68:00right."  I wanted wholeness.  And, you know, it just wasn't right.  I would have loved it, but I said, I can't do it without a nurturing cohesive family and the whole family was so -- the whole constellation with the uncle and the brothers and everything -- it was not a family like my mother had, even though she was an only child, there was lots of family all the time.  She was sleeping over this cousin, this cousin, lots of friends, lots of boys, you know -- this had nothing.  And they were very isolationist.  And I once told them, I said, "If you wanted to have this kind of really Jewish thing, then you live in a community like the Hasidim.  You keep it all in structure.  If you wanna live 69:00outside the structure, you can't expect that people will not assimilate or leave it."  Like Amish people or the -- I have a whole book on Hasidim and how they -- it's like any kind of those kind of closed communities.  It's not an open community.  You know, and I mean, I wouldn't want to live like that.  And recently I got interested very much in, like, learning Torah and learning things -- I mean, I had Old Testament studies, which is very nice.  I mean, I have huge books of -- I had big books that I finally donated.  But Bible study is not actual study to internalize what does this mean.  So I looked up this thing under Chabad --

CW:  Just one sec, I think -- should we -- is it -- can you still hear?  I 70:00just noticed the scarf has moved.

F1:  It's okay.

CW:  Okay.

(microphone jostling)

DM:  Anyway, I started looking online and they have something called Torah partners.  And I saw that this was not for me, they were all wearing -- they were all Mrs. So-and-so and Mr., Mrs. So-and-so and a rebbetzin's wife and I said, "Uh-uh."  Because in my community, where I studied, they had mostly Reconstructionist Jews, reformed Jews.  Mildly conservative.  But no, you know, modern Jews, modern Judaism.  The Reconstructionists really hit the nail on the head.  You know, and they have a gay synagogue with Sharon Kleinbaum.  And I didn't like that particularly, but they have -- wonderful to have a Torah partner, but I could not partner with that kind of community that reproduces and 71:00marries off each other and the whole thing of -- that's not my thing, although the study of it was wonderful.  But they keep it so frum and I said, "Well, I don't know, I can't be -- not frum, I eat vegetables and I mean, the cat eats w-- I'm not gonna make her into a vegetarian."  (laughs)

CW:  So, what, sort of -- looking back and sort of bringing this together, what has been the impact of having these Yiddish artists -- that part of their identities -- what has that had an impact on you?

DM:  Great pride.  Like that -- my father was a terrific graphic artist, a terrific artist.  And that was my grandfather's, and that was their pictures, 72:00and I have two wall-hangings that my mother made of Adam and Eve.  And then that painting near my little office there, that my mother did.  They were marvelous artists.  But I think they were a little -- they were not sure what direction to go in.  They knew they couldn't shun all the old-school stuff, but they couldn't keep it either.  And it was -- I always envied, because there were some Sephardic Jews on the block where my mother lived and -- they're very dark, they come from Afghanistan and Ubekistan [sic] -- and they have a really messed up family.  Really, I mean, the mother -- they had sort of modern Orthodox, that's another gradation.  They go to shul and the women, some of them they wear wigs sometimes, some of them they don't.  But the girl Hannah is 73:00gonna be a podiatrist.  (laughs) And she wears a -- she got married at eighteen and got pregnant at eighteen and a half and continued to go to medical school.  And she's supporting her husband who is gonna be a rabbi, and they live in Brooklyn somewhere, I don't know what denomination their Jewish-ness is, but they are -- they're pretty frum.  They go on 108th Street and they buy all this kosher stuff.  And you know -- and Pinky -- Pinchas, his name is -- used to do all the repairs in my mom's house and he's not religious.  He goes to synagogue, after his father died he started going and they did a minyan of some kind -- which I don't know, a study.  And they sat shivah, I sat with them 74:00after his father died at a hundred and something.  He spoke Farsi and Hebrew.  And, you know, they're dark and it kind of was very strange because people kept asking me, "Who's the Puerto Rican that goes -- that's always at your mother's house?  He has a mustache."  I said, "He's not Puerto Rican, he's from Afghanistan and Uzbekistan."  And he used to shave his head and have a big mustache so immediately, says, "I don't know, they keep asking me at work," he's a licensed electrician and he said, "Well you know, why do they speak Spanish to me?"  I said, "Pinchas, take off the foliage here."  I said, "They think you're Puerto Rican.  Or Dominican or whatever."  He says, "I don't speak Spanish.  I don't even speak Hebrew."  You know?  (laughs)

CW:  (laughs) And do you -- I'm just curious, do you think that your parents 75:00have an audience now for their writings particularly?

DM:  I think people who are interested in historical Judaism, historical Yiddishkayt, in the more modern -- because they were really modern people -- they were very much modern human beings, modern Yiddishkayt.  Not like, um, what's his name?  What's his name?  He's Episcopalian -- Shane Baker.  I mean, there's a new crop from my generation and I kind of haven't attached to them, because the only ones I knew were like -- I'll give you an example, Rukhl Schaechter interviewed me.  You know Rukhl Schaechter?  And she said, she used to say about my father, she says, "He was such a drop-dead handsome man."  But, 76:00you know, my experience of that generation was all the men wore brown baggy pants and had big bellies and they never wore colors.  "Your father was always" -- you see the picture over there?  He was with an ascot and really, um -- he cared about his looks.  He shaved -- once he grew a beard and my mother found it so repulsive that she said, "I can't stand it."  (laughs) You know, and he was just well -- both of them were well-kept.  His students loved him.  And people who were interested in modern Judaism, modern Yiddishkayt that are not religious -- I mean, they're spiritual.  I would say spirituality -- I mean, we've had these constant battles amongst ourselves in seminary.  "Well, you can 77:00be spiritual but not Yiddish, not Jewish or not -- "  But if you don't have certain kind of laws, some structure in your life, it's kind of floating around.  Like, you know, I was very shocked because Bill Houghman -- I'll have to send you his obit -- he was cremated, he wanted to be cremated.  And even though I never lost people, directly, who were burned in the Holocaust, I cannot bear to burn anything that was living -- I couldn't do it.  I couldn't do it.  And on the other hand, to be buried underground is frightening to me.  I wanna be really dead if they do it.  So I haven't figured out what I'll do with my remains.  And I would bury her.  You know.  So it's just -- when I went to 78:00the cemetery for my mother's unveiling, you know you leave a little stone there and everything -- I want to go this year, but part of me says , "Well, you know, she lives somewhere else in me, not there."  And I'd like to visit my grandparents, but somehow the memories there are not connected with that.  Because, you know, they kept death from us, they kept it, they said they didn't want us to experience the loss.  Even when our dogs died, it was never, never -- some families do a group grieving for an animal.  This animal?  My father took him in a towel, he never said a word, never came back with him, they kept a couple of leashes and some little things, and nobody talked about it.  So I 79:00said, "So why am I taking this certification?"  (laughs)

CW:  Is there anything else that you want people to know about your parents?

DM:  I think that they did it their way.  There was a saying that I heard, that there's as many Jews as there are people and not everybody is a cookie-cutter.  They had their own spirituality, their own, you know, like my mother toward the end, she became very spiritual, in terms of using the word of a deity.  She would say, in the last few years of her life, she said -- we would take a walk sometimes around the block, and she would never hang on to me, she never even used a walker.  She refused to have that, she walked at night in 80:00the dead of midnight with a flashlight.  She was impossible!  And I'd say, "No, no you could fall --"  She fell a couple of time, which -- (brushes off hands) Picked herself right up again.  And she busted her nose twice and, "Oh, no, no, no, no, I'm gonna walk.  I'm gonna walk."  Without a walker and without a cane. 

(cat meows)

DM:  (laughs) She's saying something.  But, you know, she said, "Thank God I live to see another spring."  And that was beautiful.  And I have her -- I posted her memorial on a blog.  And it was beautiful.  I wrote about her sense of spirituality, which was in nature and it was in flowers and plants, and she used to give life to all these plants.  She had so many hundreds of African violets that I had to give them to one of my chaplain friends who had a solarium 81:00full of her plants.  And she sends them to me every spring to say, "Oh, your mother's plants are -- "  I couldn't take care of so much, but she had a sense of her own spirituality with her own Yiddishkayt that she mingled.  But she didn't want -- I mean, we studied that a lot because, like the women in the Bible -- most of those were patriarchal religions.  You know, Mary Magdalene, and Mary was an Essene.  I said, "There were a lot of ladies there but how come it's only the men that got the whole thing?"  So, you know, I did my battles in seminary and actually, one of my professors was a rabbi and he says, "You never said 'boo' until the last year, but then you became a fierce debater."  82:00(laughs) So I don't know, I would say about them that they had their own construct of it.  My father tried it, he read the psalms before he went to bed, and right -- the couple of years before he died, I have the book.  And I said, "Well, he had to make it his own, not necessarily wearing a yarmulke and a --" They were not even reform Jews, I don't know, my father called them "deformed."  But I went to a reformed -- you know that synagogue on Lexington Avenue?  I went in there once and it looked like a Lutheran church.  Because Lutherans were very stark, they had no pictures, no crosses, no -- nothing.  This place had an organ and no one wore -- they wore teeny weeny weeny little 83:00skull-caps, like they looked like pin-heads.  And nobody covered their hair.  I said, "I don't know what this is."  They didn't pray in Hebrew and the prayers were in English.  And I said, I don't know about this, this is like a mish-mosh of -- I guess everyone comes to it in their own way.  So, you know, I wish I weren't so ashamed of it, it's just that people make you f-- There's more of other things.  And I'm sure I would be even more ashamed if I were living in a deeply Orthodox community.  "Why didn't you marry? And where's your hus--"  You know?  (laughs)

CW:  Well, I'd love to look at some pictures, but before we do that I just want to formally thank you for taking the time to share --

DM:  Okay.

CW:  -- these memories about your parents --

DM:  It was very cathartic and very -- it opened a door.

CW:  I'm glad.  Thank you.

DM:  And I hope it's useful to you.

CW:  Yeah!  It is, definitely.  Thank you.

DM:  Okay.  You're very welcome.

[END OF INTERVIEW]