MICHAEL WEX ORAL HISTORY

PAULINE KATZ: This is Pauline Katz and today is December 29th, 2010. I'm here at KlezKamp in the Catskills with Michael Wex and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Michael Wex, do I have your permission to record this interview?

MICHAEL WEX: Yes, you do.

PK:Thank you very much. To start off, I'd like to ask you about your family, as far back as you know.

MW:As far back as I know goes to my grandfather's grandfather, who was a well-known rebbe, head of a khsidishe group -- a Hasidic group in Poland. His 1:00name was -- actually, I can go back a couple of generations past him. His name was Wolf Landau and he was known as Wolf Strykower. Stryków was the name of the town that he came from. And he became the leader of a Hasidic group after the death of his father, who was Abraham Landau, who was known as Avramele Ciechanower, who was known as the Ciechanower Rebbe, who was his father. Wolf Strykower was also the grandfather of the famous Yiddish poet, Zishe Landau, who would've been a first cousin of my grandfather's, although they apparently never met, didn't know each other, although they were roughly the same age, born 1890, 1891, something like that. But my great -- what is he? He was my great-grandfather? My great-great grandfather, I guess. My grandfather's grandfather had been a student of the Kłodzko rebbe, who was the last of the 2:00sort of classical rebeyim [rabbis], the ones that you'll read about in Martin Buber books. He was kind of the last one, although controversial in his own day, to be generally accepted across the Hasidic world. So, this was, as I said, this was my grandfather's --

PK:How do you know about your grandfather's grandfather?

MW:They told me. (laughs)

PK:Who's they?

MW:My parents, my grandfather. I knew my grandparents, or three out of four of them. So, that's the kind of background I come from and my family remained quite religious. The group that my great-great grandfather founded continues to exist. There's a rebbe in Israel. I don't know the current rebbe. I knew or I had met the preceding one, who was roughly a generation older than me, would have been 3:00the same general age group as my own parents and had come from Poland. But I, yeah, otherwise I -- they were in Israel. I wasn't close with them or anything, but I did meet them on a couple of occasions. And that's as far back as I can go. My grandfather came to Canada but I don't know exactly when. Sometime in the 1920s, that much -- late 1920s, possibly even early '30s. I don't know. And he was there for a number of years and brought the rest of the family over after -- obviously after his own immigration there.

PK:Do you know why he moved?

MW:To Canada? I think 'cause he lived in Poland. There seemed to have been a sufficient reason at the time. Had he not done so, I don't think -- he had eleven brothers and sisters and he was the only one alive in 1945. And I have no 4:00relatives from his immediate -- not just my grandfather's siblings, but none of their children or anything survived the war. Although I have relatives from my father's side of the family, I have no immediate relatives like that. They were all killed during the war. So, he eventually brought the rest of the family over. My father came later in the '30s, whenever -- these people were never clear on dates and -- with the result that, unlike many people from my background, from a Yiddish-speaking background, my parents were not Holocaust survivors. My father spent World War II as a soldier in the Canadian army, which is where he basically acculturated himself as far as I understand to North 5:00American life, et cetera. And my mother's family had just simply come to Canada also sometime in the '20s, I don't know when. She was very young when she came to Canada. So, spoke English and Yiddish without any trouble.

PK:And you grew up in Canada?

MW:Yeah, I was born in a place called Lethbridge, which is a small town, small-ish town in southern Alberta, not far -- in American terms, it was about -- it's a little under an hour's drive from the border with Montana. So, this is not exactly the throbbing heart of North American Jewish life. There was a Jewish community there, though. We weren't the only Jews. There were, at the time, about ninety families in a town of somewhere between twenty and 6:00twenty-five thousand people. So, there was a shul, there was all that stuff. There was all these grown-ups who, like my own family, had come from Poland pretty much in the '20s and '30s. And there a few Holocaust survivor families, as well. But it was one of those things where -- and Canada, in this sense, was different from the US, where most people a generation older than I were either the children of fairly recent immigrants or had come as kids or teenagers themselves. So, what had happened in the US in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century happened in Canada after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act here in 1924 when they stopped letting any number of East European Jews into the US, that's when you started to get large numbers going to Canada. So, 7:00linguistically, as far as all of that goes, Canada can be seen -- it's a little patronizing, but it can be seen as a generation or two behind the US in terms of cultural assimilation and linguistic assimilation. So, like I said, we lived in Lethbridge, which is where I was born and lived for a number of years. Lethbridge has a strange Jewish fate now that there's only one -- the only surviving major Yiddish writer, who is, unfortunately, no longer writing, Chava Rosenfarb -- now that Sutzkever is dead -- is now living in Lethbridge, where her daughter has a teaching job in the English department at the university there. So, Lethbridge appears to have this Yiddish fate that it can't escape. Lived in Lethbridge, then moved to Calgary, which is, of course, a much larger city, and eventually ended up in Toronto.

PK:And what was going on in Lethbridge, Yiddish-wise, when you were there?

MW:Gossip. (laughs) That's about it. There was very little organized activity. It wasn't a big enough place to have -- in Calgary, there were things, like there was a Workmen's Circle branch. I had nothing to do with it, but it existed, and people as various as -- I know, what's -- Yosl Mlotek, Zalmen Mlotek's father, taught at the Peretz Shule in Calgary at some point after the war. Not when I was there. But, I mean, he himself told me this. "Oh, you're from Calgary? I lived there." I believe Pesakh Fiszman may have been there, as well. I'm not entirely certain if he was there. The well-known -- I mean, this is much before my time, but there was a fairly well-known poet named Esther Shumiatsher who came from -- she married Peretz Hirschbein, the famous Yiddish 9:00writer. They met in Calgary, where she was living and he was on some sort of lecture/reading tour, sometime around 1919. So, there was stuff going on there. Her family, her extended family, Shumiatshers, they owned a famous hat company called Smithbilt Hats, who make real cowboy hats. People think that they're Stetsons but they're actually Smithbilts. So, a good deal of Yiddish literature was funded on the proceeds of the sales of cowboy hats originating in Calgary. Dr. Zhitlowsky dropped dead in Calgary, apparently at a lecture around 1943, when my father was in the army. But I know my aunt and my grandmother were -- they didn't go because they wouldn't go see these linke [leftists]. But they were in Calgary when he died and knew about it. So, there was more going on 10:00there. But my family was fairly religious -- was, in fact, quite religious -- and we didn't have a great deal to do with kids. And Calgary -- and again, Canada's different from the US -- Calgary, when I was living there, had a Jewish population of about three thousand people in a city of about three hundred thousand. So, that's the rough proportion of Jews to the general Canadian population. But in that city, there was a full-time -- there was a talmud-toyre [Talmud Torah], a ivrit b'ivrit [Hebrew taught in Hebrew] day school, and a Peretz Shule. And from what I know, from people I know otherwise in Canada, this was the case. I started the first grade in 1960, just to give a time. This was the case in any city of any size. Edmonton would have been the same. Vancouver, I'm pretty sure -- probably Regina. Winnipeg, of course, had many more -- didn't 11:00have just one of each. Winnipeg had multiple day schools going pretty much across the general spectrum. So, this wasn't that unusual. Organized Yiddish life, like I said, the Arbeter Ring, the "miter-farayn," as it was called, the Mother Society in Calgary, which published the Jewish phone directory. We got the phone directory. We weren't members of the farayn. We were members of the shul, which most of those people were, too, for that matter. But --

PK:And which shul was that?

MW:Which shul? There isn't a which shul. Later on, there was which shul. There was the shul. (laughs) But what was I gonna say? Even the kids, there was a real -- especially in the younger grades, there was a real division between kids from the talmud-toyre and kids from the Peretz Shule. And part of it was just inter-group rivalry and stuff. But it was --

PK:This is a Yiddish day school?

MW:The Peretz Shule was the Yiddish day school, yeah. I went to the Hebrew day school. And you'd run into these kids. The difference was many, not all -- but there were kids at the Hebrew school who, of course, could speak Yiddish. There were not kids from the Yiddish school who could speak Hebrew. So, we could yell at them, too, as far as that went. And then, I moved to Toronto and went also to religious schools there, for the most part.

PK:When did you move to Toronto?

MW:Nineteen sixty-eight or '69. I don't actually remember. I was in high school. I was fourteen or fifteen but I was also -- I was ahead of myself in school, so --

PK:Well, going farther back, why did your family move to Calgary?

MW:Everybody started to leave Lethbridge around the time that kids born after 13:00the war would have -- within about a five or six-year period, the community kind of emptied out because the kids were growing up. And, of course, there was nobody for the kids to date, basically. There were no Jewish boys and girls in Lethbridge. It was a very small number of people. Out of ninety families, you had kids of various ages. And the people started to leave. And I think there was just not seen to be a lot of future there.

PK:And why did you move to Toronto?

MW:Partly my mother's family was there, partly because there was no advanced Jewish education in Alberta. You could finish elementary school there, at a day school. And then, for the rest of the time, you had to go to public school. So, I went to public junior high school in Calgary.

PK:And how was that experience?

MW:It was all right, was --

PK:Were there other Jews?

MW:Yes, a few. Not vast numbers. And I had run-ins with non-Jews, but that had as much to do with the neighborhood I lived in as the school, which had an odd catchment area. On one side of the street was very nice and very upper middle class. The other side of the street wasn't so nice. I, typical of myself, lived on the other side of the street. And I didn't have trouble actually at school. But back and forth, on occasion.

PK:Can you describe your home?

MW:In what sense?

PK:In the religious sense.

MW:Well, we did it all. (laughs) Shabbos, yontev [holiday], I davened every day 15:00of my life for a very long time. That kind of thing. Totally kosher, totally all of that stuff. My mother didn't wear a sheytl [women's head covering], which was not considered the sine qua non of anything at the time. But she did go to the mikveh [pool for ritual immersion]. Beyond that, it's twelve sets of dishes. Milkhiks [dairy dishes], fleyshiks [meat dishes], paysekh [Pesach] -- I think we had shvues [Shevuos] dishes or something -- all of that. But we also -- we had a television set. The religious world, the Orthodox world has changed a lot in half a century. But nobody needed to worry about eating in our house if they were -- you'd get mishlochim, emissaries, as they were coming through and these are basically fancy schnorrers. And they didn't have any problem staying with us 16:00and they would certainly eat the free food. So, it had to have adhered to some basic standard.

PK:How many people were in your home?

MW:Not very many. I have one sister, so there were four of us.

PK:And your grandparents?

MW:What about them?

PK:Where were they?

MW:Oh, my grandfather was in Alberta, my paternal grandfather. My grandmother died before I was born. His wife, so I didn't know her. And my mother's parents were in Toronto.

PK:What did you think about your family history when you were a kid?

MW:Not a lot, really, although I heard about my famous ancestors a great deal. They were ancestors. My father and my grandfather were fairly well-educated 17:00Jewishly. But they didn't -- I'm trying to think of the right way to describe it. Firstly, they weren't professionals. They weren't rabbis, they weren't Hebrew school teachers, for whom they had the lowest contempt. They didn't act -- "he's a college graduate in English" implies a certain level of refinement. They didn't have that. (laughs) So, like I said, I heard a lot about the famous ancestors and I was expected to keep up as far as learning things when and studying and all of that goes. But for the rest, they came from that generation. They would not talk about Poland if you asked them directly. It was, "What was it like? How did it happen?" They were, Just thank God you weren't there. It was 18:00a horror story. And, like I said, these are not people that were there during World War II for the Holocaust. They talked about mud and poverty and everything else. I heard a bit more because my parents both worked when I was young and I would be left with my grandfather and his cronies, who were all of the same basic age as him. These are people who would have been in their sixties in 1950s or in their late fifties. I mean, they seemed vastly old to me but they were probably not much older than I am now and may even have been the same general age. And I picked up a lot from them because these were old guys that didn't really give a damn about anything. They'd already done whatever they were gonna do. They were gonna have fun now. And to their way of thinking, they did. They 19:00sat around drinking and playing cards and watching television and talking about each other and telling jokes and doing most -- almost all of this in Yiddish, except once in a while, one would nudge the other about -- and point at me and then they would speak Polish, which they could all speak to some degree, at any rate. They all claimed they spoke it badly, but I don't know if that's really true or not. But one of the things they did do was they reminisced a lot, 'cause they were, as far as they were concerned, at the ends of -- my grandfather didn't die until 1976. But they were old and they knew it and they also knew because they were old -- there's a wonderful line in Mel Brooks's earliest movie, "The Critic," which is a voiceover of an old man talking through an abstract animation. And one of the other people in the audience at the theater goes, "Shh! Be quiet!" He says, "I don't have to be quiet. I'm seventy-one, I'm 20:00gonna die soon." This was their basic at-- I mean, this was very much that attitude. And they reminisced a lot and they used to do imitations. And one of the things they did imitations of was their old men. So, the guys that would've been to them what they were to me, and their Hebrew school teachers. So, I picked up a lot of Yiddish that even, I would venture to say -- I can't say for sure, but even somebody growing up speaking Yiddish here, and that's what I spoke at home -- my parents could speak English and they were not nuts about it. They were not yidishistn [Yiddishists] in any sense of the word. If I came over with a kid who didn't speak Yiddish, they spoke English in front of that kid and they were very careful about that, in fact. They didn't want to embarrass me. Once in a while, out of the house, they would speak to me in Yiddish. And if I said, you know, "Enough already," they would usually go along. And they spoke 21:00English, like I said. Even my father, who had a knack for languages, had no real accent in English and people were sometimes -- like if he was on the phone, he sounded, in English, pretty much like somebody from southern Alberta would sound. People would be shocked if he lapsed into Yiddish 'cause he didn't sound -- he talked like a farmer (laughs) from down there and had the kind of vocabulary that you learn in the army. So, they weren't crazy like that as far -- they weren't farbrente yidishistn [ardent Yiddishists] in that sense. But even people from homes that would have been, I don't know if they would've gotten the exposure that I got just by having to sit in a room with these old men who -- I didn't find it all that interesting much of that time and a lot of 22:00the time I didn't understand it. What I liked was when they did imitations, because that I could -- I was a little boy. I could understand it. And of course, they would imitate not just the behavior of these people but the accents and the vocabulary and all of that. So, I picked up a lot of that. Also, because I learned a bit at home, I knew how to fartaytsh, how to translate Hebrew in the Bible into Yiddish, which is that kind of taytsh [interpretation], that kind of official kheyder [traditional religious school] elementary school translation is quite conventionalized and hasn't really changed a great deal. And it's a language sub-dialect, if you will, all on its own. And outside of the khsidishe world -- and I was, in that sense, although I never really lived -- I did used 23:00to get sent to New York City in the summers to study with -- basically one-on-one with old guys, 'cause everybody else was in the mountains at Camp Torah Fun, which -- believe me, the old guys were better than that. Unless you went to that kind of khsidishe school, I don't think that mode of education survived the war and it was already -- it was on its way out even in Europe well before the war. And yet, that's one of the things that really did nurture Yiddish culture for centuries, both in terms of what it added to it but also why Yiddish was really the only Jewish vernacular that wasn't abandoned when people left its place of origin. Judeo-Spanish or Judezmo or Ladino, people took it with them but they took it with them because they still thought of themselves as 24:00Spanish. And Sephardic Jews continue to think of themselves as Spanish in a way that Ashkenazim certainly do not -- I do not think of myself as German. I was shocked -- I had a part-time job, a part-time summer job when I was in college working for the Canadian government in an office. But they had this thing, if you or your parents hadn't been born in Canada, you had to bring in proof of citizenship or their citizenship and when they'd come in. It wasn't a big deal, but I was amazed and thought it was pretty funny to realize that as far as the Canadian government is concerned, I am a Polish Canadian. I had never in my life thought of myself as Polish. I heard Polish. I can't speak it. People are always telling me and I'm sure other people who work in Yiddish, Oh, Yiddish is what my 25:00parents used to speak when they didn't want us to understand. For me, that was Polish and I -- it worked. Plus, the fact I had no interest in it.

PK:Why wasn't Yiddish the language chosen so that you wouldn't understand?

MW:Because it was the language of the house, of course, so I could understand it.

PK:Well --

MW:And they, I think they were more -- because of where we were living, I really -- I sometimes wonder if they would've hewed as closely to Yiddish had we been living in Toronto or Montreal or New York, somewhere like that. I think it's a little different because of the -- it's a small town, et cetera. 'Cause like I said, they could speak English no trouble and they had friends with whom they spoke only English. And in Lethbridge, they were friendly with the neighbors, relatively. The neighbors weren't Jewish. They didn't have any trouble speaking 26:00English in that sense. And they had -- because, I guess, they'd come here young enough and my father's wartime experiences, they were not completely cut off from North American popular culture. My father loved big band music, like '40s pop music. And the most important people in our house were various rebbes and scholars and Frank Sinatra, against whom a word could not be said. Frankie was up there. He was the model for a certain kind of North American masculinity at the time.

PK:So, where'd you go to college?

MW:University of Toronto.

PK:And what were you majoring in?

MW:As an undergraduate, English. In graduate school, I was -- I studied medieval studies, concentrating on old Middle English and old Norse, which successfully 27:00kept me from any further employment. There's just not a lot of work for Jewish Vikings these days. But it was through doing that -- 'cause I'd got into that stuff by accident. I came out of high school, I was -- I'd read a great deal. I was a bookish kid. But I had no -- the cultural experience such as I had was limited to what you would expect from teenagers in lower middle-class homes of any type. I know a lot about pop music and I'd been to see, at various occasions, various rock groups. So, I'd seen the Mothers of Invention and Jimi Hendrix. I got interested in jazz when I was a teenager and saw people like 28:00Dizzy Gillespie and Earl Hines. But beyond that, I knew a lot about stuff but only because I'd read about it. And my reading was directed to what interested me. So, I get to college and it turns out at some point you've got to take Chaucer. Chaucer is compulsory to get an English degree. And I had not studied Chaucer, we didn't -- at least in Ontario, Chaucer was not on the high school curriculum. So, I had seen this stuff and it looked like real hard and real incomprehensible. And there was a course in Old English. So, I figured, Okay, Old English must be Intro to Chaucer. So, if I have to take Chaucer, I'd better take this because I can't figure this shit out for the life of me. I didn't realize these are two virtually separate languages, that Old English and Middle English are related only as Old English and Modern English are related, pretty 29:00much. So, I took this Old English and this is "Beowulf" and this kind of stuff. I think I was the only undergraduate in the class, it was cross-listed. So, I was seventeen and there's all these people in the class -- like, old people. There were twenty-three and a couple of them were married. I couldn't believe I'm sitting here with people that are married. And the prof was probably not thirty. I mean, he's still teaching and this was 1971 or '72, so -- and that guy, the guy that taught me is still teaching at the University of Toronto. So, he must have been very young at the time. And he looked young. And I'm looking at this stuff and it looks strangely familiar to me because, of course, Old English is a Germanic language. And it doesn't mean I didn't have to learn it. 30:00But much of the basic vocabulary was kind of familiar to me. So, the Old -- "take" is not a native English word, to take something. It comes from Old Norse. The Old English word for take is "niman," which is pretty much "neymen." So, all of a sudden, I could understand the stuff that my fellow students, who were pretty much grad students in English and had no interest in this stuff except they had to have this requirement fulfilled -- so, I'm doing quite well and then we go through the language. I had a lot of trouble learning the language. Not to learn it, but the exercises in the book -- they were translation exercises and to make them easy, they were Bible passages. Unfortunately, Bible by the guys that compiled these textbooks meant New Testament. And I'm looking at these things and I can't figure out what the abbreviations mean. It's like, Matt. I don't know what the fuck this is and there's -- and I knew the Bible reasonably 31:00well. Like I said, I went to shul every week for a long time. Every week? Every day! But I heard the whole sedre [weekly section of the Torah read on Shabbos] at least once a week and generally went through it on my own, the way you're supposed to. I don't know what this crap is. So, they were a little bit ahead of me on that because -- and it wasn't like heavy -- it was stuff that Jesus said, it wasn't a -- it was parables: the sower, the prodigal son, all of this kind of stuff. But then, we started reading poetry. And, of course, most Old English poetry -- "Beowulf" is not typical. Most of the stuff has to do with religion, one way or another. And one day, the professor, I forget what we were reading, but something had come up and nobody could figure out quite -- like, I could figure out what the words meant. It didn't really make sense. And I remember 32:00looking at it and thinking, Well, there's a Rashi on this part of the toyre [Torah] that says blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And that would actually explain what's going on here. But zaynen, mir zaynen nisht keyn meshigene [we aren't, we aren't crazy people]. These are goyim from the depths of goy-land. And the prof then turns and he says, "Well, there was a medieval exegetical tradition that" blah-blah-blah-blah-blah and it's exactly the same damn thing. And suddenly, a lightbulb, a menoyre, goes on over my head and I realize, Shit, I went to school in the eleventh century. It's just nobody bothered to tell me. I could turn this on right away, not -- I mean, I knew the material and I knew the way of thinking. And there were vast gaps, vast gulps between -- gulps? Gulfs between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages but they were people living at the same time in the same place. They weren't -- from our perspective, they 33:00had far more in common with each other than they do with us than they would, on either side, ever, ever have been willing to admit. So, I started getting interested in this stuff, which is how I ended up in grad school doing this. But it hit me, also -- it had never occurred to me that Yiddish is fundamentally a Germanic language. And later on, when I was in graduate school and fabulously bored by what -- I'd lost interest in what I was doing and -- but just didn't know what else to do. And I was quite well-funded. It didn't make a lot of sense for me to leave. I had fancy doctoral scholarships. I was making real money. I had prestige teaching assistantships, I was Northrop Frye's TA for a time. It's like, I'd read enough books like "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me" to 34:00know that I'm never gonna have it this good again. I'm not leaving until I have to, but I had nothing to do. I had no interest in the dissertation I was supposed to be writing, which I punched around with pro forma once in a while, which was not a bright thing to have done, as it turns out. But it hit me one day from all of this that Yiddish is also a Germanic language and that -- 'cause I'd started -- sorry, I lost myself -- as a sort of antidote to the pervasive -- and it really is pervasive, gratuitous anti-Semitism of so much medieval literature -- and plus the fact I was supposed to be writing a dissertation on Middle English religious poetry, so I had to read a lot of church father type stuff. And these people were, I mean -- anti-Semitism was just part of their 35:00mindset. And I remember, I was reading Augustine's commentary on the Psalms one day and it was another -- something came up about the fucking Jews and I just lost it. And he didn't really say fucking but the damn Jews, the perfidious Jews. And I threw the book down and realized, I've got to do something to balance this or I'm gonna start believing it. And of course, because I could speak Yiddish, which I had not paid much attention to -- it was the kind of thing -- I spoke to my parents, I spoke Yiddish. I went to learn shir [Hebrew poetry] somewhere, which I wasn't doing much of by this time. But if I did, I spoke Yiddish. If I went to shul, I spoke Yiddish. By this time, I should say, I was not very observant religiously. And once in a while, there'd be another guy around, somebody -- a guy or a girl from similar background. We'd tell jokes and 36:00make comments about other people. But it wasn't something -- I was never totally away from it but it wasn't a thing on its own. I started reading. I started going to the university library and taking out Yiddish books, which I'd always read and always been able to read but never systematically, never -- I must read all of Yud Lamed Peretz or Sholem Aleichem or something. Sometimes, there was a book around, I read it. I started reading a bit more seriously just as a way of killing time. And as I keep starting to say, it suddenly hit me that Yiddish is also a Germanic language and that all the stuff I've been studying for the past few years applies to Yiddish just as much as it applies to all these other languages. Where I had used Yiddish as a way -- particularly with Norse, although they're not that similar, but certain types of vowel change in bizarre 37:00languages that you have to memorize are paralleled in Yiddish and for similar reasons. So, I started getting into this and it was around the same time as the general whatever they call it now, Yiddish revival was beginning to happen. So, this is the mid-to-late 1970s, roughly. And as I did more and more of this and less and less of what I was supposed to be doing, I began eventually to find out that there were a few other people scattered around of more or less my own age group -- you know, I knew that there were people from Yiddishist families and stuff. But, as I said, their Yiddish and my Yiddish -- I don't mean linguistically. I mean Weltanschauung [German: world view] was just so different. Like I said, what I wanted to do on a Friday night was go see Jimmy 38:00Hendrix. I did not want to sing Yiddish folk songs. This was not gonna satisfy me. I wasn't interested in anybody that was gonna do this. But I started to find that there were these young people looking into Yiddish from what I thought of as a more contemporary vantage point. And I didn't do much about it for a while. I'd gone, in 1976 or '78, I don't remember which. I saw a little ad in one of the Toronto papers. It just said "Klezmorim" with a date and a place. And I thought, I just -- well, shit, maybe it really is. And I'd had not particular interest in klezmer music. I didn't even know that there was such a term. I knew what a klezmer was. So, I went and it was the Klezmorim, the band from Berkeley who were in tour and they're playing. And I knew most of the repertoire that 39:00they were playing. My parents had records and stuff. And they're doing "Di grine kuzine [My Greenhorn cousin]" and "Papirosn [Cigarettes]" and one of the things that struck me was how poor their Yiddish was -- that these guys, their Yiddish was not good. I mean, between the acts patter or between the songs patter, of course, was pretty much in English, the occasional Yiddish word tossed in. But when it came to the vocals, you could tell these guys didn't really speak Yiddish. And they were --

PK:So, did you --

MW:-- they were filling a large hall. I remember where it was in Toronto and, I mean, there were about five hundred people, which, for a band like this that had an ad like that, that's not bad word of mouth. And I began to nishter [rummage] around even more in this stuff. And, as I said, started to very slowly establish 40:00contacts with other people that were kind of interested in this stuff and started looking around in Toronto for other -- and in Toronto, it wasn't that hard because the area in which I lived when we moved there, Bathurst Manor, had an incredibly high -- firstly, it was almost all Jewish and I would say anywhere between fifty and seventy percent of the adults in that neighborhood were Holocaust survivors. You could live in Bathurst Manor and never speak English if you wanted. I don't think anybody did, but it was theoretically possible. So, I began to get hold of people and there were a couple of organizations or clubs, really, that were just starting up and eventually came into the world that way. So, not from the traditional thing. I had gone -- I got interested in this stuff 41:00and actually went to New York and went to the YIVO to inquire about becoming a grad student there. And they sent me to speak to someone and I honestly don't remember who it was. All I know is they were at Columbia, it was a woman, and all the books in the office were in French, so I assume she was in the French department. So, I explained to her my background, that I'm a native speaker, I went to yeshiva, I've been studying Germanic philology. And she said, "Do you have any university Jewish studies courses?" And I had one, but it was from a guy who became quite well known. And I said, "Well," (mumbles) "and his name was Frank Talmage." And she just offered me a place on the spot. I naturally didn't take it because I got offered a large-ish scholarship to -- from medieval stuff 42:00back in Toronto. But I remember I went to my father, my mother was dead by this point, and I asked him in Yiddish, I said, "They're going to give me money, et cetera, and it's in New York, I'm really interested in this. On the other hand, I got a sure thing here with better money, vos zol ikh tin [what should I do]?" And he just looked at me, says, "Yidish, yidish? Vos darfsti in yidish? Tipish! Vos darfsti in deym? [Yiddish, Yiddish? What do you need with Yiddish? Typical! What do you need with it?] What do you need it for?" And it's possibly the only time in my life I ever actually listened to my father much and I still wonder, had I actually gone and done grad work in Yiddish if I would've lost interest in that the same way as I lost interest in the "Gawain" poet. And the answer's probably yes. (laughs) And I'd be pining away to be a knight or something.

PK:So, how did that become -- Yiddish writer or writer of Yiddish topics?

MW:In 1987, a guy I knew in Toronto, with whom -- he and I and another guy, neither of them Jewish, had started a sort of -- kind of like -- well, it was a band, but doing some klezmer and some old Yiddish novelty songs and comic songs and stuff like that. And this guy had been to Balkan camp, the Balkan music camps in West Virginia, Buffalo Gap. And early KlezKamp used the Buffalo Gap mailing list because there was a lot of crossover between the first, the ur-staff here and people that got into klezmer tended to have been -- a lot of them were people who had been playing Balkan music before that and found out about klezmer because of the geographic proximity. So, he'd actually been on the 44:00list and had been to KlezKamp, I don't know whether in '85 or '86. And he told me about it. He said, "Wex, you've got to go to this thing. This thing is made for you." And I did. I paid money; I sent in a check. I was working at the time at a Timothy's, which is like Starbucks. Came down, he also came with, and I didn't know any of the people here. I knew who some of them were because Kapelye, for instance, had already had a record out and stuff. But I wasn't acquainted with any of them. I'd heard some of the records. That was about it. But I got to meet people. And when I first came to KlezKamp, I was bored because it was mostly -- it was really narrowly -- much more narrowly about music and I don't play an instrument. And the only other thing to do in the daytime if you 45:00weren't taking instrumental classes was to go to Yiddish classes, which I really didn't need. Quite seriously, I didn't need a Yiddish class anymore than I needed an English class. So, I was bored and began to amuse myself in ways that probably were better left unsaid. But I ended up one night singing spontaneously the old Louis Jordan song "Caldonia" in a Yiddish translation that I was making up as I went along, because there is a Yiddish word that's also the title of a well-known play by Avram Goldfadn. "Koldonye" is a "witch." So, based on that -- and after that, I had suddenly lots of new friends. (laughs) And after a couple more years, I started teaching here. And I started off teaching straight Yiddish. I think I was teaching beginners or intermediate. If I was teaching 46:00beginners, I don't know what Perl Teitelbaum would've -- I mean, I know she was there. But I was teaching one of the language courses and it definitely was not the advanced course, which at the time was being taught either by Chava Lapin or Avraham Novershtern, depending on which year. And it turned out people liked my -- the shtick that was doing, the patter. They were far more interested in the patter than they were in the dative case type of thing. And eventually, we developed a course based around the patter, which was -- and I don't know who's gonna be watching this, but it wasn't just patter pulled out of the air. It was about Yiddish. Here's this word, which appears to mean -- if you look in a dictionary, they will tell you it means this, but how is it actually used and where does it come from? So, I began to teach these courses and initially, I 47:00would try to tie them in, tie the content in with whatever the theme of KlezKamp was in a given year. And that's fine -- eventually the themes started to get -- the KlezKamp themes started to get ever more rarified and ever more obscure. It was a little difficult. And so, I just moved from there to the cycle of human life or the cycle of Jewish life, depending -- part of it was just whatever struck me at a given time -- and would put together six hours' worth of lectures. After a number of years, I had a lot of hours' worth of lectures and I was being asked constantly by people here that would come to my classes and enjoy -- the people that liked the classes, and not everybody did. But those that did were always asking me, Where can I get this stuff? How can I find this 48:00out, this information? I've never seen it before. And you couldn't get it in one place in English. You could get some of it in English, you could get some of it in Yiddish. Some of it I know you couldn't get, 'cause I did do and continue to do research, talking to people and stuff. And some of it was stuff I knew I had found out or somebody had -- an informant had told me and I knew it hadn't been noted before. And during this time, I had also started writing more seriously. So, I'd already published a book in Canada, I published a novel. And one day, somebody asked me this and it suddenly struck me, Well, shit, I know all this stuff and I've already written a book. I should do it. Then I spent a number of years trying to find an agent who would touch it, which was very difficult. And 49:00I was turned down by everyone. One year, there was a guy here at KlezKamp who's a music critic, Seth Rogovoy. And Seth had come to my classes. I didn't know him before that. And he liked what I was doing and asked the usual question, "Why isn't this stuff in a book?" And I said, "I've been trying to find an agent who will handle -- try and sell a proposal." And he had just published a book. He said, "Well, I can put you in touch with my agent," which he did and she took on the project and sold it to -- sold the idea to St. Martin's Press and it eventually, a couple years later, came out as "Born to Kvetch," which was based, to a very large degree, on the classes that I'd been doing here at KlezKamp.

PK:And what do you think "Born to Kvetch" has done for the Yiddish world?

MW:Well, for this part of the Yiddish world -- I bought shoes, I -- all that 50:00stuff. I got myself out of debt for about ten minutes. For the Yiddish world, per se, I can't really say. I mean, I know it's certainly helped, if it doesn't sound immodest, to raise the profile of Yiddish. It certainly spread the word kvetch. And I've noticed the phrase born to kvetch has now become a fixed phrase. And I can tell you, the publisher did not -- St. Martin's did not initially want that title, partly because I think they thought it was too Jewish, despite the contents of the book; partly because they had another book out on one of their smaller imprints. It was like an advice book. I forget what the full title -- something called "Kvetch and Be Happy" or something. It was about how to complain and get people to act on your complaints or something. I 51:00did actually look at the book because I wanted to be sure it didn't overlap with anything I was doing. But the phrase itself, it may have popped up before I came up with it myself but was not used as a fixed phrase. A lot of people seem to think I was playing off Bruce Springsteen, which I wasn't. I mean, legitimately, it didn't -- I'm not a huge Springsteen fan and it just hadn't occurred to me until somebody actually pointed -- "Oh, you're playing with 'Born to Run,' huh?" And I said, "Oh, shit, I never even thought of that," which is true. So, I mean, it's certainly done that. For a book about Yiddish, it has sold remarkably well. And as long as you accept Leo Rosten's disclaimer in "The Joys of Yiddish" and what it says right on the title page, "A book about English" -- if you accept 52:00the fact that "The Joys of Yiddish," Rosten's book, is a book about English rather than Yiddish, as far as I know, "Born to Kvetch" is the best-selling book about Yiddish ever written. This shirt is still fraying at the cuffs. So, it's done that. It's increased some public awareness, for sure. It's -- I don't know the degree to which it's pushed students into actual Yiddish courses. But I think it certainly hasn't harmed Yiddish courses, put it that way. Is it gonna make Yiddish the lingua franca of the Jewish people? No, and neither is anything else. Part of the reason that this book could sell as well as it did and as it still is, for that matter, is there's this vacuum in Jewish life that Yiddish 53:00used to occupy and nothing has arisen to fill that particular gap, even -- whether you're religiously observant or whether you're big on Zionism or whether you're big on more local Jewish social welfare kinds of things, those are all fine things in themselves, gezint [healthy] -- but they don't cover that area. And so much of what Yiddish is -- face it, if we're talking about a Jewish community in Canada and the US that's overwhelmingly Ashkenazi in origin, this is the book that explains to people who they are and why they are that way. And it's not what I actually -- really set out to do. And I'm saying this, not because I think I'm so wonderful but on the basis of letters that I get and emails. And I get a lot, interestingly, from people who write, "My husband or my 54:00wife is Jewish. I am not. I have never been able to figure out why they do this or that or why their extended family behaves in a particular way or treats me in a particular way or use particular terms, which are usually Yiddish terms, but nobody is quite sure what they really mean. And now I get it." I mean, my own wife said that she didn't understand why I did certain things or why I had certain attitudes until she read the book. So, I think, in that sense, it tapped into something which is we don't realize, as a community, the degree to which we were formed by this stuff because, as a language, as a quotidian vehicle of 55:00communication, it's pretty much ceased to exist outside of khsidishe world. I mean, if hadn't, I would do this interview in Yiddish. But to have subtitles that I'm not going to be able to control, you might as well misquote me directly. (laughs) But the underlying, the deep structure of -- or whatever you want to call it is still there, to an ever more attenuated degree, granted. And in some -- depending on the individual or the community, it may have vanished entirely. But I notice with the subsequent book that I wrote, which was about ethics in this world called "How to Be a Mensch and Not a Schmuck," one of the unintended consequences of that book was I found out almost immediately that virtually every Jew, whether they speak Yiddish or they don't speak Yiddish, whether they're even Ashkenazim or not, no matter how assimilated their family, 56:00they know the literal meaning of schmuck as penis. Most non-Jews knew it only the way it's used in English as a pejorative term for an idiot, a jerk, and didn't realize that basically calling somebody a schmuck is calling them a dick, except it's much more vulgar. And that became, for me, almost the defining thing -- is there's still a bit of shmuts, a bit of bad language, of nibl-pe [foul language] that adheres, that people still know, no matter how far removed. And as long as you've got that little bit, there may be -- like I said, I don't think, quite seriously, there's any hope of Yiddish becoming what it once was. But I think to lose the language, you lose a way of thought. And you lose that way of thought, you lose two things. You lose, firstly, what we have so long 57:00thought of as the Jewish advantage, you can put that in quotation marks, when it comes to going to school and getting into the professions and all of that, because it does -- I'm not saying there were no stupid Jews who spoke Yiddish. There were plenty. But the dumbest guys I went to yeshiva with are now medical specialists. Those were the morons. The smart guys, regrettably, are paupers like me. But it was a system that was designed to turn out people who knew how to go to school. They might not have known anything else, but there was a way of thinking that's ultimately -- and I do -- ultimately cannot be overstressed here -- Talmudic in origin that persisted for a very long time. One of my quarrels with places like the Arbeter Ring always was that the founders of this organization rejected something, but they were steeped in what they rejected and 58:00they knew it. To go on to the next generation, if you need a footnote to a volume of Peretz stories that explain what Rosh Hashanah -- if you don't know what Rosh Hashanah is, why are you speaking Yiddish? It doesn't mean you have to observe it. It doesn't mean you have to believe it. But you do have to know this stuff. And, of course, this is the ultimate paradox of non-heavy-duty observant Judaism -- is for it to remain Jewish, you have to basically spend your life acquainting yourself with stuff you have no intention of ever doing. But you really need to know it. But it's like they say in Jewish -- this also -- es kon nit shatn -- it's not gonna hurt you. And by losing -- pardon?

PK:We're almost done.

MW:Yeah. By losing Yiddish, you're gonna lose -- you lose that way of thinking. And I could see this when I was teaching university -- I also taught English at 59:00various times. At one time, I knew if there were Jewish kids in the class, that's probably where the A was gonna go. By the time I finished teaching, and this includes Yiddish classes that I taught, I already knew if there was a Chinese kid in the class, that's where the A was gonna go. The Jewish kids already had developed a sense of entitlement that is death to any kind of thinking. "You'll have to give me an A, sir, because I've got to go to medical school or law school or dental school." And I would say, "Well, you have every right to get an A in this class. All you've got to do is A-level work and you'll get your A." And that wasn't enough. And, of course, teaching Yiddish, I was getting a lot of students out of Hebrew schools of one form, one type or another of Hebrew school. Most of them didn't know Yiddish. I mean, it was really easy to spot the ones who thought they did. But they also weren't willing to learn 60:00it. (laughs) That was the interesting thing. They thought by virtue of having come out of a Jewish educational system, this should be an easy A. When it turns out it's not an easy A, that if you're -- taking Yiddish is not much different from taking Russian or French or Spanish or any other language that you don't already know and that it's pretty much a lot of tedious memorization for the longest time, they got really angry and upset. And that's a kind of thing that I think shows a remoteness from the old way of thinking that I think Yiddish does a lot to keep people attuned to.

PK:Well, a sheynem dank [thank you very much] --

MW:Nishto farvos [You're welcome].

PK:-- and --

[END OF INTERVIEW]