CATHERINE MADSEN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is September 18th, 2017. I am here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Catherine Madsen. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

CATHERINE MADSEN: Yes, ma'am.

CW:Thank you. (laughter) So, just as a place to start, can you tell me what you know, briefly, about your family background?

CM:Well, I know a little more about it thanks to my mother selling the family home just a few months ago, because there was a box in the attic of photographs from my father's side of the family going all the way back to Denmark in the 1:00late nineteenth century. So, his father's parents came to Denmark -- came from Denmark in the 1880s to Minnesota and settled there. And my grandfather grew up on a dairy farm and eventually moved with his two brothers to Detroit where they worked on cars instead of cows and my parents were both born in Detroit. My father's mother was Irish. My mother's mother was mostly Irish and her father -- I'm not really sure. There's some English in there but I think there's some other stuff. I think there was also some German on my mother's mother's side. But, at any rate, they were all goyim, and I converted to Judaism in my late thirties, largely for philosophical reasons.

CW:Yeah. So, I'd like to get a sense of the home that you grew up in. So, first 2:00of all, who were the people in the house?

CM:Just my parents and me. I don't have any siblings. And there was a dog. (laughs)

CW:And how would you describe the culture in your family in terms of what was valued?

CM:Well, my parents were both the first in their families to go to college and they were really excited about learning and ravenous for culture. And, you know, my mother had pretty much grown up in the public library and the museum and my father's mother was very literate, much more so than my grandfather. And so, she read all sorts of things to him and made him into a literary person. And so, he was doing various kinds of work. He worked for the city of Detroit when I was very small as a welfare counselor, then he wrote a novel about it, and then he 3:00was going to graduate school in English, later on at Wayne State. But he always really thought of himself as a novelist and so that was the constant in his work life. He was an English professor for three years at the University of Alaska when we went there. But then, he decided he didn't want to be a professor anymore, although he enjoyed the work. It was interesting work to him, but he came back, finished the novel he was working on at that point while my mother supported the family -- I'll get to her in a minute -- and then worked as an editor at Wayne State in the publication -- the alumni publications department for a while and then did other kinds of editorial things and all that. My mother was trained as a librarian and she worked mostly in elementary schools around Detroit, mostly in the inner city. She was very committed to that work. She also taught preschool when I was very young and in preschool. And that was what she 4:00did when we lived in Alaska. She took over the university preschool. It was a co-op kind of thing so the mothers came in and it was pretty interesting and she had lots of stories about the kids, some of whom were my friends, them and their older siblings. And then, when we went back to Detroit, she got into -- actually, the first thing she did was teach in a program for pregnant high school girls. It was a very new thing, just groundbreaking. And so, she did that for a couple of years and then she got a job as media specialist in an elementary school and then she stuck with elementary schools after that. And she did that for the rest of her career.

CW:So, what were the kinds of things you would do as a family?

CM:They always had season tickets to the Hilberry Theatre at Wayne State. So, we went to all the plays. I thought for a while I would be a playwright. We went to 5:00a lot of concerts.

CW:What kind of concerts?

CM:All kinds of classical. They got into jazz just as I was getting ready to leave home. And so, they had a whole life with that that I didn't really participate in very much. But it was always classical when I was growing up. And we did a lot of museum trips. Ever since I was very little, I would go to puppet shows. And Maurice Sendak came to town and we went to that. And I guess I was very excited about it and kept squealing and carrying on. I must have been three or so. And finally, he looked up at the other -- the parents and said, "Honestly, I'm not paying her!" (laughs) And that became a family story. (laughs) And so, lots of things along those lines. But I did listen to Top 40 6:00all through high school. I was a normal kid to that extent. (laughs)

CW:And can you just briefly say what your education was?

CM:Yeah, Detroit public schools and Fairbanks public schools. And then, I applied to a bunch of schools and got wait-listed for, I don't remember, Antioch and Oberlin or something like that and ended up going to Michigan State because they had a little residential college within the great big school that sounded kind of interesting. And, as it turned out, I didn't -- I mean, I took some courses there and lived in the dorm the first year. But then, I got involved with these Tolkien fans and kind of stuck to them as my main peeps all the time I was in college. And we lived in a house off campus and stuff like that. Then, 7:00I got married. Then, I got a job in the library at Michigan State after spending a year as a proofreader for a local business, which was kind of interesting but I didn't like it that much. And several of my friends were working in the library, so I worked there for quite a while, trying to figure out what to go to graduate school in. And I was very interested in religious studies as an undergraduate, but the more I looked at graduate programs in the field, the less I liked them. And so, I didn't do that. And finally, I heard about Goddard College where you could kind of write your own curriculum. So, I did that and I did sort of a Jewish studies, women's studies/philosophy MA. And then, they got their MFA program back. They had sold it off when they were in a financial 8:00crisis, which they perennially are. And so, I went back for an MFA and wrote a book of pagan rituals. I was hanging out with neo-pagans at the time. But as I was working on that, I discovered Jewish thought and I thought, This is way more serious. This is what I want to do. Yeah, I did finish and publish the book but --

CW:So, just to make that connection and circle back, what was the religion you were exposed to growing up?

CM:Well, my family was not doing religion at that point after I left home. That's another thing that they did very, very seriously after (laughs) kind of castigating me and making fun of me for doing it in college. But the thing was that my mother always had the Sunday morning Episcopal service on because it was the cathedral, St. Paul's in Detroit, which had a wonderful choir and still 9:00does. I mean, they tour England and the Brits are very impressed with their technique and all of that. And they, at the time, they had a dean with a nice English accent and he gave intelligent sermons and the old prayer book was still in use and it was just beautiful. And so, I grew up hearing that --

CW:On the radio?

CM:On the radio. And very occasionally, we'd do something for Christmas Eve or something like that. And when we came back from Fairbanks, where I had been pursued by many young evangelicals who wanted to save my soul, we came back and my mother turned the radio on again and said, "Oh, yeah!" I said to myself, Oh, yeah, I remember this stuff. And I had some of it by heart, even in -- I'd be playing ping-pong in the basement, she'd have the radio on and I'd be listening to it. And I was reading some writers, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, who were -- 10:00they were friends of Tolkien's, which was how I found out about them. But they were very serious Anglicans and so I got interested. And when I went off to college and found these Tolkien people, they went to Episcopal and Lutheran services at various times of the week and I fell in with them. And so, I was quite serious about that for a while until I found out that being in the church isn't anything like reading intelligent Christian writers. It's just a bunch of people who aren't necessarily that smart trying to police your private life. And I said, This is not for me. And a similar thing happened when I started reading Jewish thought and just being enormously excited about it, just obsessed. And they kept saying themselves, these writers, this isn't what you'll find in shul. But moving to Amherst, it kind of was. There are a lot of other things you find 11:00in shul, as well. A hefty dose of politics dating back to the '30s that are a little warmed-over from my point of view. But at the same time, I remember being at some study session where we were going around doing introductions and Haim and Yaffa Gunner were there and we got around the table to Yaffa and she said, "Well, I'm an atheist." And Haim leaned over and said, "Shh!" And nobody turned a hair and I thought, These are my people! (laughs) And it's a place where you can sometimes talk about Jewish thought and be understood. And even the people who don't read in that vein are usually interested and want to know more, so --

CW:Yeah. Just to clarify, how old were you when you were in Fairbanks?

CM:Oh, between the ages of ten and thirteen.

CW:And what part of Detroit did you live in?

CM:The east side and it was the Warren-Alter neighborhood most of the time I was there. And then, my parents bought a house in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood on a canal. It was just beautiful. Very quiet and peaceful. And they adopted a stray dog and named him Jefferson Chalmers because he came from the neighborhood. And they lived there from 1969 until -- well, my father had to move to a nursing home at the end of 2016 and my mother had to move out right after my father's death in April of 2017 because she wasn't in good health, either, and she sold the house in June or July. But they had lived there all that time and the neighbors still bring her back to block parties and that kind 13:00of thing, so --

CW:What was the impact, just looking back, on growing up in Detroit and then, very differently, a few years in Fairbanks on your own identity?

CM:Well, up until the age of ten, I was kind of listening to Rodgers and Hammerstein records and staging plays already. I was into that. But the neighborhood gestalt was kind of that you would start -- oh, doing sexy poses in your new clothes and things like that. And there are old pictures that I kind of can't believe. That's not really what my parents were into or approved of but it was kind of what my friends were doing. In Alaska, it was just such a different 14:00thing. And the severity of the weather and the landscape -- and my mother had found out from a famous children's literature scholar about this book called "The Hobbit" that was going to be big. And she had given me a copy of it and we were going to read it on the trip there because we drove up there and I didn't want to read a story about a journey, thank you very much. So, we read "The Wind in the Willows" instead. But we started reading it in our first apartment there. So, October through December. And I ended up devouring the rest of the book on my own rather than waiting to be read aloud to. And the combination of reading -- the death of Thorin Oakenshield and having this view of the Alaska range right out the windows of this kind of wacky apartment building that newcomers 15:00lived in -- it's not there anymore, Fairview Manor -- it was like in the Rilke poem about looking at the statue of Apollo, you must change your life. And a whole different kind of world opened up to me of trees and cold and severity and, I don't know, just what there is out there besides cities. And when we came back to Detroit, those three years were kind of critical in the decline of the city. My mother's actually reading a book about it right now. So, what we came back to was very different and whole neighborhoods were being written off by the realtors as, Well, these are going to become ghetto. And it was appalling the 16:00way nobody was trying to keep race relations in anything like what they should be. And, in fact, I was in a summer school choir at Wayne State in '67 and we were about to -- we were doing "The Man of La Mancha" among some other, more elevated material. But I was gonna play the guitar on "The Man of La Mancha" and all of a sudden, the city just erupted the week before that concert was supposed to happen. And the concert was canceled.

CW:So, what do you remember of that?

CM:Of the --

CW:The city erupting, yeah.

CM:Well, we could hear shooting about a mile away in this park. It was near where my mother's parents lived. And my mother was taking courses at Wayne. She 17:00was working on her master's. And so, the university opened then, again, and we drove down but there were all these military guys with trucks along the way. And it was just very difficult. The accompanist of the high school choir at Wayne, the summer school choir, immediately after that got a job at my high school and he was this amazing guy, [Dewar?] Johnson. He was at my father's memorial service. It was so nice of him to come. And he looks pretty much the same, except his hair's turned white. But he -- and is cut shorter. At the time, he wore this giant 'fro and loud clothes and all that. And we all loved him dearly in the summer school choir and we all loved him dearly in high school. And he 18:00was the best thing that ever happened to race relations in that school, because he worked at such a rigorous level with us and we were doing Bach and Lili Boulanger and all of these very demanding composers. And it was just so electric. It was wonderful.

CW:Well, before we get back to Amherst, when did you start writing?

CM:Oh, I guess when I was about nine or ten, 'cause I saw my father doing it and I admired him.

CW:When would he write? What are your memories of that?

CM:Well, every chance he got. I remember him throwing an actual tantrum about going to his parents' house for Thanksgiving because he wanted to write. We went anyway. (laughs) I think I was six or seven at the time but it really made an impression. And then, when we came back to Detroit during my high school years, 19:00he stayed home and he wrote. And he would do that pretty much all day until I got home from school. And he would pace the floor and he would talk to the dog if I wasn't home or my mother wasn't home about the great new phrase he was coming up with and he had so much fun with it. And so, it just seemed an interesting and exciting thing to do. And, of course, I wasn't any good at it for years. But I remember the time when I was about thirty-two, maybe, that I gave him something I'd written. Oh, yeah, even before that, a play that I wrote for the women's community in East Lansing. I guess I was maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, in there. And he liked both of those things. And with the one when I was thirty-one, he said, "Well, gee, I guess you're maybe a better thinker than I am." And that was very heady stuff. (laughs)

CW:So, how'd you end up in Amherst?

CM:Well, I wanted to go back to Fairbanks. I still do. And my partner didn't want to live that far from her family. And she was attached to Florida in much the same way and so -- and I really wanted to get out of flat Lower Michigan. I kept scanning the skyline for mountains and they were never there. And it was just physically painful. And so, we compromised on New England. And she was more employable than I was because she actually had an MLS and so she sent out applications and got this job at UMass and we drove out here for her interview and I was sitting on the hillside near the UMass library while she did the interview, looking out over these hills and looking at how the clouds floated 21:00over them and made shadows on them. And it was a lot like some hills near Fairbanks. Not the mountains, but the hills to the north and I was just so moved. And I said, "Yeah, I could live here." So, we did.

CW:And what did you know about the Yiddish Book Center before you saw the job?

CM:Well, in the last year or two before we moved here, they were being reported in places like "Time" magazine and I think once I got on some Jewish mailing lists, I actually got a begging letter from Aaron before we ever lived here. And when we moved here, they were just moving into the East Street School. And so, that was in the "Amherst Bulletin." And so, I knew a little bit about it and what they were doing and just the amazing work they were engaged in. And I was trying to get jobs teaching writing at the time and I had no idea I would ever 22:00work here. But after several years of adjuncting around the Valley and applying for full-time jobs and other people getting them based on demographic things that I didn't have, it became clear to me that this was really going to be a difficult way to earn a living and classes are canceled on you at the last minute and I was writing a novel at that point. And so, I was making twelve thousand a year in a good year and maybe eight thousand in a bad year. And there was some time when I said, Shouldn't I just go out and get a job? And Sarah said, "You're having so much fun writing this novel. Write your novel." But after I finished it -- and I'm really glad I had the time to do it. It was the most fun thing I've ever written, just so exciting to have those characters 23:00talking in my head. As a kid, you don't know what's plausible when you write. You do ridiculous things. And in my forties, I realized that, Wow, I did have some notion and I could still do the implausible stuff because there's a character who does these kind of magic realist visions. But it all kind of balanced out. Anyway, then I started working in bookstores. I worked at Jeffery Amherst textbook store doing temp work. College store, they called it, and I met some really interesting people there. And then, I worked in the front store for a little while and then I got laid off. And I worked in LAOS Bookstore at Grace Church part-time and I worked for Ken Schoen part-time. And then, one day, Sarah 24:00went to shul on a day that I didn't and she saw this job posted at the Yiddish Book Center and she said, "They're looking for somebody who has library experience and writing and editing experience. Doesn't this sound like something you should look at?" And I said, "Yeah!" And I came in, I did the interview, I got the job. I don't know who else applied, if anybody, but I remember saying during the interview -- oh, they said, Do you know any Yiddish? And I said, "I've got some Hebrew and some German and I'm not afraid of languages I don't know." And so, they took a chance on me and they said, Take the evening course with Henny Lewin, and I did that for a couple years and I was working with the books constantly. And so, I picked up a lot of Yiddish and I still can't really converse in it worth a damn because there weren't that many opportunities. But I read it pretty well.

CW:What did you know about Yiddish before coming here?

CM:Well, I had seen things quoted like Kadia Molodowsky's famous line, "God of 25:00mercy, for the time being, choose another people." So, I knew there was exciting work being done by Yiddish writers. I knew a little bit about Glatstein. Not sure I knew about anybody else. And so, it was so interesting to find out about all the warring schools of poets and all the kinds of fiction that got written and in all the different places around the world and all the things that were translated into Yiddish. When I was fairly new here, I found the Yiddish translation of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and it was a great incentive to learn more Yiddish and find out what they had done with those bits. And actually, they only cut them. That was published in Warsaw in 1939 of all places and years. Must have been in the spring. But they would just draw a line of dashes and -- 26:00they just couldn't say those things in Yiddish. (laughter)

CW:So, what was your first impression?

CM:Well, walking in for the job interview, there wasn't a docent at the desk at the time and so I walked in. There was nobody. I was looking out over this sea of books and I saw that there was this ramp descending into the basement and I thought, Gee, that ramp, that's in really poor taste. I just thought kind of -- the ramp to the gas chambers or whatever. Later on, I knew that it was for purposes like storing pallets of books and four or five of us would be holding a pallet back as somebody hung onto the pallet jack and lowered this pallet 27:00dangerously down that ramp. But also, the floating banners and the shelves and shelves of books and the sense of being -- some kind of museum or preservation thing. And I didn't really know what to make of it. I know that people come in and they're excited and moved and that one of the board members used to look out over the books and say, "It's like Atlantis." We think the culture is gone, but there it is. But I wasn't sure and it was this gorgeous building and what was that all about? And so, the first couple of years were just trying to make sense of the aesthetic and the meanings of things, what we were working with as an institution.

CW:So, what was going on when you arrived? (laughter)

CM:Well, I think my first job was assigning ISBNs, international standard book numbers, to all the books we were gonna digitize. And so, that was just sitting at a computer and sometimes going and pulling books off a shelf in the basement and bringing them up and putting these little tags on them with the ISBNs I was generating. And then, we would pack up the books. We were sending four hundred books a month -- if it wasn't four hundred a week. I remember they were sending us proofs because nobody at the factory that was scanning the books read any Yiddish and they didn't even know which way was up. And so, we had to proof everything and makes sure that it was bound on the right and the pages were in order and right-side up and that everything was clear enough to read. And there were five full-time people in the department then and several part-timers --

CW:Who were they?

CM:-- and work studies. Gabe Hamilton, who was masterminding the digitzation project, Fay Zipkowitz, who was cataloguing the books, Kim Guise, who was in charge of book orders, and I was officially her assistant. So, that was me. And then, Neil Zagorin, who was bibliographer. And gradually, through mostly retirements or transfers to other places and, in one case, being canned, it shrunk down to me.

CW:So, can you describe a little more about the digitization project that you were involved in as your first project here?

CM:Well, yeah, it was an effort to digitize every Yiddish book, except that a lot of them were not scannable by the automated process that we were using then. 30:00We were trying to send only duplicate copies because they were gonna have their spines sliced off and the pages fed through a machine. And then, the paper was just gonna be recycled. And mistakes were made. There are some things that we never saw another copy of that were sent. And in theory, there's a copy of everything at YIVO. I hope that's true. Yeah, 10,500 things actually were digitized and the purpose at that point was to produce on demand reprints for libraries to buy when the original copies were too fragile. And there were a lot of very important literary titles that were printed on paper that went bad rapidly. Beautiful, beautiful books. The covers, the production, the end papers, particularly the Kletskin-farlag [Kletskin publishing house] from Vilna, just so 31:00lovingly produced but the paper was terrible and you would unpack a copy and lift it up and book crumbs would fall out. And Kletskin was a very discerning publisher and he picked up everybody who was worth anything in literary terms. And so, libraries wanted those books. So, that was what the reprint biz was about. But Aaron told the story that when he and Gabe were going to visit this factory where the scanning was going to be done, they were going up in the elevator to somebody's office and Gabe said, "Well, the real wave of the future is in online digital libraries." And Aaron had never heard of such a thing but that was what we eventually ended up doing. Basically ten years after I started here was when the Spielberg Library went online.

CW:And what was your sense of how Yiddish books had been handled before you arrived?

CM:At the Center?

CW:At the Center, yeah.

CM:Well, there's that picture on the ramp coming down from the entry into the repository and it's got piles of books up to your neck. And that had all been cleared up and catalogued and shelved by the time I arrived, which I was just as glad of. (laughs) And it was still the era of big university orders and we were still producing a catalog. I don't think we ever did that after I got there, but there was a newsprint catalog that we would mail out still at that point to show what was available. And --

CW:And it listed everything?

CM:It listed the main titles that people were likely to be interested in. And then, if they knew enough to ask about other titles, we could say, Yes, we have that or, No, we don't. And I remember some of my first book pulling adventures in the stacks (laughs) and it was tough coming in with some Hebrew and some German and trying to learn to shelve books and pull orders in Yiddish, just remembering the alphabet. I was doing that little Debbie Friedman "Alef bet bet" thing in my head until I got used to it. But there'd be five hundred books going off to Johns Hopkins and a thousand books going off to Princeton and taking up great big sorting carts whose wheels still worked in those days. It was before the rubber went bad living under the skylights and they started chipping off. 34:00So, they had a very smooth ride at that point and we would just take them up and down and pull everything and stack it up and put slips in each book so that the people unpacking them who didn't read any Yiddish would know what they were. And it was very, very labor-intensive.

CW:So, can you just explain where the --

CM:Oh, a lot of -- excuse me.

CW:No, go ahead.

CM:A lot of international orders at that point because that was before surface mail was abolished and there was cheap surface mail and people would buy what were called M-bags, these big canvas bags, and they would put a couple boxes of books in it, each weighing twenty pounds to build their libraries, so --

CW:No, just trying to understand where the books were, the mechanics of this work that you're describing when you arrived.

CM:They were in the book repository where they are now. And then, the rest were in a warehouse in Holyoke where we had two floors the size of football fields. 35:00And on one floor, there were unsorted books on pallets. And on the other floor, they had been organized and shelved. And so, when we ran out of something here at the Center, we'd run down and we'd have a list and we'd pull the books off the fourth floor shelves where they had been organized. And it was a crazy place. It was an old mill. The floors were soaked with machine oil; it was probably kind of dangerous. Pigeons would fly into the windows and so there were owls put in the windows to discourage the pigeons. But occasionally a pigeon would get in and set off the alarm and you'd have to net the pigeon.

CW:Did you ever do that?

CM:No, Hector was good at that. (laughs) Yeah, Hector was the original building manager, for all you people out there in webland, and just an amazing person who 36:00was so dedicated. Yeah, we all miss him. There were mice occasionally. There were bug traps around, mice traps around, mouse traps. And yeah, it was a wild place.

CW:So, you've described pulling books for the digitization. What else did your job entail at the beginning?

CM:Well, I wrote for "Pakn treger" quite a lot, something which trailed off eventually. I was busier when I was the only staff person, but there may have been other reasons about where the magazine was going. Don't ask, don't tell. But I really enjoyed doing that and --

CW:What would you write about?

CM:There were a few pieces about Yiddish writers. There would be feature articles like when the yizkor books were digitized, I did a long piece on that. The dictionary project that became the comprehensive Yiddish-English dictionary, I did a long piece on that. I did concert reviews and book reviews. When Dara Horn's first novel was published, I knew her a little bit because we had a program for sending free books to graduate students and she had been a graduate student at Harvard, getting free books, and so I got to interview her when "In the Image" came out. Oh, a Yiddish bird book turned up in a box of books and so I found out about that and wrote about that. The Yiddish Gilbert and Sullivan translator, Al Grand, I got to interview him and write about him. You know, just 38:00sort of odd things that would turn up. It was a lot of fun.

CW:What were the programs at the Book Center in that era? This is in the early 2000s, right?

CM:Yeah.

CW:Yeah.

CM:Well, there were weekend programs but they tended to be more entertainment than -- well, I don't remember that for sure. I remember one about Jewish humor, and Moshe Waldoks was the main speaker. And he was hysterical, this very funny rabbi (laughs) who just came in and made us laugh the entire time. I don't remember what some of the other educational programs were. But they're historical things, you can look it up. There were a lot of concerts on Sundays 39:00and films.

CW:And in the summer, there was the internship.

CM:And in the summer, there was the internship and they were shlepping books then when it became the Steiner program and became fully academic. There were a few years when we tried to -- the first students really wanted to shlep books and some of them were extremely helpful, like the spring we got five thousand books from Belgium. And a couple of the Steiner students said, Yeah, we want to do that. And they unpacked them and some of them -- they'd all been wrapped in black plastic and it was damp in there, which we didn't realize until we started unpacking them and seeing live mold growing on them. And I was so glad these students were there. And they put on masks and they got rubbing alcohol and cotton balls and cleaned the mold off, and we saved those books. We should have taken the plastic off them before that. But it looked a little more decorous, so 40:00we didn't. But the internship was amazing and you yourself were an intern back in the day. And there was all this kind of heavy work and esprit de corps that would happen and --

CW:And what was your relationship to the internship?

CM:Well, I never supervised it. I kind of co-supervised it a little bit, but it was always Kim Guise or Eva Greenberg or Neil Zagorin or Aaron Rubinstein, who were really in charge. And I would be the back-up. And that was good. I probably don't have the right character for large groups of people in that way. Maybe 41:00that's part of the reason I wasn't that good at teaching. (laughs) But anyway, it was always fun. There was a year when we only had money to get four interns and they were all young women and they bonded instantly and they went up and down the stacks shelving books, making up parodies of commercials in Yiddish. (laughs) And it was so funny to listen to them. And that was the year that "A Bridge of Books" came out with Aaron talking about how he had started the Center. And there are parts of that that are very moving and parts that are just interesting and so on. But it happened that we had discovered a cache of Yiddish Book Center sippy cups over at the Holyoke warehouse and brought them over. And we were giving them away for free. We had this big pyramid of them as soon as 42:00you walked into the book repository. And there was a swinging gate at that point, which was subsequently taken down. But you'd go through the gate and here's this pyramid of sippy cups. And so, the interns were all saying to each other, in the exact words of "A Bridge of Books," which played continuously in those days so we all had it memorized, it was driving us nuts -- and they were saying, Here I was, twenty-three years old in jeans and a t-shirt and somehow, it had fallen upon me to collect all the sippy cups in the world. (laughs)

CW:Are there people that you -- students that you got to know through the internship or the other programs that you have followed later in life that you remember still?

CM:Oh, yeah, yeah. David Schlitt in particular, we got to be very good friends 43:00and have kept in touch on and off and that's really nice. And Josh Friedman, who came here to do research for his PhD in anthropology and pestered us all so much with questions that I started calling him Pippin, whereupon he started calling me Gandalf. (laughter) Oh, several other -- I could try to name them all but I would forget some of them and --

CW:That's fine.

CM:Yeah. But going to AJS is a lot of fun because I run into a lot of them still.

CW:So, how did your job change since that -- as you describe sort of what was involved when you first arrived? How did it change?

CM:Well, I've mentioned the "Pakn treger" stuff eventually trailed off. But that 44:00was just in recent years. But a lot of things were from external causes. For example, when Congress abolished surface mail, the whole process of sending international packages became much more cumbersome and much less frequent. But there was a lot of negotiating with international customers over how much you can fit in a flat-rate box. So, it was always time-consuming with the M-bag and all that stuff, but a different kind of time-consuming, just trying to psyche out how to use what the post office did allow to best advantage. When the reprints became available, there was a different procedure for ordering them 45:00than there was for just pulling books off the shelves. There was a relationship with Bridgeport Bindery, which was producing the reprints for us. And so, I always knew somebody over there who was our contact person. And kind of a fiddly process, which eventually, when I was about to leave the job, I said, "Can't we streamline this instead of having to teach it to somebody else?" And it turned out there was a perfectly easy way to do it and we could've been doing it all along, but there it is. And when digitization was basically finished, we weren't doing that anymore but then there were smaller projects and so we had money to digitize -- I think it was eight hundred titles. And so, I spent several weeks selecting those titles and then we sent those off to be digitized. And they were rare and fragile books, so they were not gonna be fed through a machine and it 46:00was very exciting being able to do some of them. And then, we did a two-year project here at the Center on a grant where we actually had equipment and did the scanning ourselves. And that was after the fellowships came into being. And so, I think it was David Schlitt one year and Josh Price another year who were kind of under me supervising the nitty-gritty of it. And that was really good and it was more rare and fragile things. And it was fun to have it taking place right on site because if somebody said, "Do you have a copy of this book?" and we had one, I could sneak it in and say, "Can you scan this?" and there it would be. And it would be nice to be able to do that. And then, Gabe Hamilton went off to law school and Neil Zagorin decided he wanted to teach. He was always 47:00wonderful with groups of kids. Yeah, groups of third graders, he could talk to them about the Haskalah (laughs) -- or haskole -- and say it in a way that a third grader could comprehend. And so, he went off to teach at the Solomon Schechter School, which became the Lander Grinspoon Academy. And I thought that was just the ideal thing for him to be doing. But then, I got his job and had to really buckle down and learn more systematically about Yiddish literary culture.

CW:So, can you talk about that a little bit? How did you go about that sort of --

CM:Well --

CW:-- grappling with this whole huge culture?

CM:-- I took Justin Cammy to lunch and said, "Tell me what to read," and he gave me a list. And so, I read through David Roskies's books and a certain number of 48:00Yiddish books in translation, fiction and poetry that were very important and getting somewhere with them in the original, as well. And the other thing I was involved with at the time was the New Yiddish Library. I kind of took the minutes for that when the editorial board would meet and --

CW:Can you explain what that project --

CM:Yeah, yeah, it was a project in cooperation with the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature and Yale University Press to translate certain important Yiddish works. And they picked up a few titles that had been published and then had gone out of print. But then, there were several others that we initiated and sponsored the translations of. And so, it was really interesting to sit through 49:00these meetings and just hear these people arguing about what to translate and --

CW:Who would be in on those, do you remember?

CM:Ruth Weiss, Seth Wolitz, Jeremy Dauber, Leah Garrett. Oh, I'm forgetting. I think there were eight of them. And again, the -- ask Eitan, he can look it up. I gave him all the files from that project. But I was in charge of kind of keeping the files for it, including the book proposals and the contracts and -- oh, Joseph Sherman, I think -- he wasn't at all the meetings but I certainly remember meeting him. I remember him being there sometimes. And he was an 50:00amazing intellect and an extraordinary person. And eventually, we were calling each other by our first names after doing British decorum for a long, long time. (laughs) Yeah, I just -- I don't remember everybody else. But they just had this grasp of what had gone on and it was exciting to listen to. So, that was also part of how I got my education in what it was all about. And, of course, working with certain book customers who were academics or who were writing books or who were just deeply involved or who had been -- who were related to Yiddish writers in one way or another, it was this big jigsaw puzzle, putting it all together. And I'm still doing that. Those little vids that have been coming out in the 51:00Yiddish "Forverts" about various Yiddish writers. Boris Sandler is doing them. And he just sits there and talks for five minutes about a particular writer and there are all of these visuals from the town the writer grew up in and they're just fascinating. And I wish he'd been doing that when I came here to work! Learned a lot from them.

CW:So, what were some memorable book collections or book rescues, as we call them?

CM:Well, I went to Montreal with Kim Guise and the van. So, that must have been in 2000 or maybe the spring -- no, was the spring maybe of 2001. It was spring, 52:00anyway, because the snow was still on the streets and it was kind of tricky driving the van through them. And we picked up, from Jerrick Segal, our zamler [volunteer book collector] there -- you've done that many times yourself -- and from the Jewish Public Library. And I got to meet Sara Rosenfeld, I believe was her last name. She was just a force of nature in collecting books in Montreal and around Canada generally. And so, she was this little tiny person, about four feet high but just such a hurricane. And so, that was nice to have met her. And she died a few years after that. And I went down to Brooklyn on a trip. That was also with Kim, I think, and we were using an early version of MapQuest, which 53:00kept leading us around this block until we said, (laughs) They've lied to us. (laughs) And then, with Hector Crespo and Jordan Kutzik, we did a rescue at the Tsysho Bookstore. They were getting rid of a lot of duplicates. I think they were just about to move the store to a new location. That was fairly late, 2015 maybe? I don't remember the year, but sometime around there. And so, it was packing up the contents of this amazing store and publisher of things that we wanted more copies of. Sometimes even things we didn't but we knew they would eventually be wanted. And then, there were memorable pickups that other people 54:00went on like Mexico two or three times. There was one to Uruguay, Montevideo, Cuba. Aaron and Gabe went down there, just the two of them, to see what it was like and what they could bring back and they brought back in a couple of suitcases most of what was available. And there wasn't a lot left there and there were things that the Cuban Jews wanted to keep. But that was interesting and they handed them over to me and said, Make a list! We're gonna write about these. And so, I did that. And there were books that came from Europe that we didn't go to rescue but that were sent, the ones from Belgium that I mentioned. 55:00There was a big shipment from Paris at one point. One from Stockholm. A small rescue from Dublin. It was like three hundred and fifty books, but it was the most amazing stuff and it was in the synagogue. And we just happened to have a guy in Dublin who said, "I want to be a zamler for you." And I said, "Well, I don't know how much you'll find in Dublin." But he went over there and here were these three hundred and fifty very important and very rare literary periodicals from the '20s and some books from the same period. It was just an amazing collection. Several rescues from South Africa, the one from Zimbabwe, and we still have the crate in the repository near the kindervinkl [kids' corner] because we couldn't bring ourselves to tear it down and lose that return address --

CW:Do you remember --

CM:-- from Bulawayo.

CW:-- when that came in?

CM:Totally, yeah! I was in an office -- actually, it was the same location that my most recent office has been in. But I moved around several times in between. But I was back there and we knew that the books had been sitting in their crate in Cape Town for something like three months. But we knew they had shipped and I saw this big truck backing down to the loading dock. Well, it was the old loading dock then, it was on the other side of the office. And I knew it couldn't -- we weren't expecting anything else and I knew it could only be that. And so, I went on the phone, I did an all-call and said, "The books from Zimbabwe are here. Please, everybody come to the loading dock." And people came and brought their cameras and they all watched and helped bring the books in, all of that, and then Aaron ceremonially pried off the top couple of boards and 57:00took a book out and people took pictures of him. And he put the book down and there was this giant puff of dust which the books had collected through the slats of the crate while sitting on the dock in Cape Town. And so, it became my job to unpack that crate because Kim was very busy with book orders at the time. She couldn't be spared. And so, I put on this mask and wore grubbies and got down through these thousand books. Many copies of the collected works of David Frishman in Yiddish. Who knew? And things that had come from Lithuania when Jews from there moved to South Africa. Books that were published in South Africa. I didn't see anything actually published in Zimbabwe, but many published in South 58:00Africa. And then, a surprising assortment of the usual books published in New York and Melbourne and Cuba and here and there, Mexico. Jews all over the world were sending away for the same books. So, it was just a fascinating project. And then, when I got to the bottom couple of layers, they had been chewed by rats and were only fit for discard, which was sad.

CW:Could you walk me through your process of how you dealt with unpacking books and what you were thinking about as you were unpacking books?

CM:Yeah, yeah. My successor wants to know that right now. (laughs) We spent several days just sorting books together and I'm trying to give him an idea of kind of the triage process because there are things you see over and over and 59:00over again. People still call and say, I have this hundred-year-old set of the complete works of Sholem Aleichem and it must be worth something. It was my grandfather's. And I have to say, "Well, actually, everybody had a set of those." And I don't use rude expressions like a dime a dozen, but we have pallets of them in long-term storage because everybody did have a set. And so, certainly I'm always looking for copies of that set in good condition. And there are actually a few sets. And sometimes, there are very beautiful ones and we can swap them out with copies on the shelves that aren't in such good shape. And Peretz and Mendele are other writers that you see a lot of and in varying 60:00condition. But then, there are other writers, Sutzkever. A lot of people are interested in Sutzkever and we periodically sell out. Well, Bashevis, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Everybody wants to read him in Yiddish and we didn't have permission to digitize those books. We do now, even as I speak, so it'll be probably about six months from now that those books will be available online and it's so exciting, and all because I dropped a random chance question into their agent's ear when she was ordering one of those books. And she said, "Oh, yeah, I'll remind them and I think you're right. They should be available for free and I'll recommend that." And you know, the next day or a couple of days later, she 61:00called back and said, "Yeah, they agreed." (laughter) And if I did nothing else, at least I asked her that question. But for now -- and there are still gonna be people who want the original books.

CW:So, you go through and you see all --

CM:So, yeah.

CW:-- the familiar ones and then --

CM:All the familiar ones and then the ones that we don't see that often. And there's a waiting list; it's on a little spreadsheet that I made. And I try to keep in mind who's looking for which books and who's next on the list for Volume Four of "Groyser verterbukh [The great dictionary]," which -- either not very many copies were published or not very many were distributed but it's the least common. And there is a waiting list for it. (laughs) And then, there are very obscure poets that somebody's doing some work on or children's books or Bella 62:00Chagall, there's a waiting list of about five people for her book "Di ershte bagegenish [The first encounter]," so --

CW:So, you had those in your mind as you were going through unpacking?

CM:Yeah.

CW:What would be a book that you personally would be excited about when you unpacked?

CM:Oh, well, one of the shipments that I left for David Mazower to unpack -- and I didn't even recognize who it came from and it was at the same time as the wonderful big donation from the Fiszman family that was full of scholarship and children's books and recent books that we didn't know about and all of this stuff. But, yeah, just off on the side there, about six or eight boxes from somebody else and there was a family here with some children and one of the kids was looking through the box and saying, "Well, that's one in English, why?" And 63:00I said, "Well, let's find out." And we got down to that layer of the boxes and I open it up and I showed him the book. It was "Learning Yiddish for Dummies." But then, I looked and there was this amazing book that we very seldom see called "Geyt a hindele keyn bronzvil [A little hen goes to Brownsville]" about this little chicken who wants to give her eggs to poor, hungry children in Brownsville. And I think we have one intact copy of it and several that are falling apart and they're in plastic bags. And here was a copy. And there were some other kids' books that we'd very seldom see in that box and in that shipment. And so, I get excited about that. I mean, partly because my mother did work as a children's librarian, but partly just because the kids' books were well-used and babies would get hold of them and rip out pages and kids would 64:00scribble on -- I mean, people left their yizkor books around and kids would scribble on those. But it's just -- the whole kids book thing is very interesting.

CW:So, what about book redistribution? What were some memorable places or sending books out to institutions that you remember?

CM:Well, I think the most memorable one was the Poland project that Aga Ilwicka did when she was here as a fellow. We had certainly sent free books. We sent free books to Birobidzhan at one point and that was interesting. And other -- Aaron's trip to the Soviet Union was before my time. It was former -- by the time I started working here. But he had sent books there. And we sent some books to Venezuela at one point and other small things. But when Aga got here and 65:00looked around and saw all of these titles that people in Poland would kill and die for, she said, "Can't we organize something?" And I said, "Sure, go talk to Aaron about it," 'cause I knew Aaron would want to be in on it and she did. And then, she spent a lot of her fellowship time picking books from the thousand essential Yiddish books list that Zachary Baker had drawn up for us. And she contacted fourteen different institutions in Poland and everything was organized by city on the sorting carts and she printed up the labels and stuck them on and they all went out and we got thank you letters from those institutions and it 66:00was such an extraordinary thing. And in the middle of it, a shipment came in from -- I believe it was Australia or maybe it was South Africa. There was a South African connection there, anyway, and maybe the Australian one came later. I wasn't thinking about it or I would have tracked it down. But the books had come originally from Vilna with somebody's father or grandfather. They'd gone to South Africa and then they'd either gone to Australia or the Australian person was shipping them from South Africa to us. I don't know if they had gone to Australia because they had essentially gone around the world. And there were titles that Aga had been looking for, to send to Poland. And so, they made it 67:00the rest of the way around the world. She was taking things from the original Vilna books to send to Poland and it made people cry. (laughs) It was during the summer and visitors were watching this happen. And it was just over the top for -- serendipity's the wrong word. Bashert [predestined] is the wrong word. (laughs)

CW:I'm curious about your relationship to the books. You spent a lot of years hanging out with Yiddish books. What was your relationship to them? How did that develop over time?

CM:Well, it's like a relationship to a family. There are people you just don't want to see that much. (laughs) You know, the umpteenth copy of -- not even 68:00Sholem Aleichem. Guy de Maupassant in Yiddish translation, which I don't know that anybody ever ordered, although I can see being interested in the art of translation and so on. But on the scale that those books were printed, not so much. And books that were icky. Books that had lived in somebody's basement and they smelled bad. And I would try to save those, but some of them you just couldn't. And everybody hates to throw out books, but sometimes that was all they were fit for and it was sad and upsetting and I didn't like to see those because that would be another of those things. And then, there were books that I was always very excited to see because I knew they were good. People were looking for them. Even if they weren't that good, people were looking for them because they were historical novels or shund [literature deemed of inferior 69:00quality] or something and there are people working on that kind of thing. And anytime I would see something that would make a connection with a book customer that I'd gotten to know, it was always nice. And there are a few things that I started translating, just little things. There's an essay by Reuben Iceland about ethics and aesthetics and that's a subject that has tormented me ever since I lived in Fairbanks and so I wanted to see what he said about it. And now that I have a little time, I'll probably finish that. And there's a story by Yudl Mark, "Ale mames zaynen sheyn [All mothers are beautiful]," that's kind of the closest thing you'll get to a Yiddish fairy tale. I mean, there are some other things out there, certainly, but I got interested in this just because he was kind of working in that vein and I started translating that and maybe I'll finish it now. And yeah, I've translated a couple of poems and I think as long 70:00as I stick to free verse I'm okay with that. I mean, I can use formal English verse and do all right with it, but I'm not sure I could do a decent job from rhymed Yiddish verse into rhymed English verse. Somebody should but -- (laughs)

CW:So --

CM:-- but I've seen it done badly a lot of times. (laughs)

CW:Yeah. So, speaking of book customers, any favorite book customers that you want to talk about?

CM:Oh, yeah. Ruth Murphy is -- she really became a friend. She was just interested in learning Yiddish and got fascinated with it and went on to become a translator. She's worked very hard and she was living in Salt Lake City when 71:00she first started ordering books and then went to Texas. Her husband is in the military and he gets moved around to various places and deployed multiple times and it's a rough life. And there isn't a lot of opportunity to learn Yiddish in those kinds of places. And so, we've been kind of a lifeline to her. And then, over all the things she was going through -- and her son's also in the military and it's -- she's had some anxious times. And then, here when the economy tanked; everybody was so upset and sad and scared. And so, I started talking to her about that and we just -- we bonded and she has her own waiting list items 72:00and so I look for those. And happily, I was able to supply her with Volume Four of the "Groyser verterbukh" before leaving. And then, Josh Cappell, who's a pediatrician in New York serving a large Hasidic population and his grandfather was a Yiddish newspaper columnist, and so he had some connection with Yiddish but he really wanted to learn to speak it with his patients and their families because people come in -- kids get sick and it's terribly scary to the family and to have somebody who can speak their Yiddish is just enormously important. And he did it by ordering old science books, things like Jules Verne in Yiddish translation, just old books that he was familiar with and he was looking for a certain kind of vocabulary. Not so much the literary stuff, but what regular 73:00people spoke at that time period. And he just devoured a whole bunch of these things and then he started using the language and the families and the kids were terribly appreciative. He can really get along with the people he's serving and he would tell me stories about it. Here was this fourteen-year-old kid and I had this book that I had ordered with the hospital library in mind and the kid just loved the book. And here's this person who comes in and I said to her, "Zayt ir fun mishpokhe oder di -- biker kholim [Are you from the family or the -- Bikur 74:00Cholim]?" -- I don't actually know what articles I should be using for which genders, but -- and she looked at him thunderstruck and said, "Di bist daytsh? You're German?" Which, as he pointed out, was kind of funny because about half that sentence is Hebrew and a German wouldn't know it. But she just couldn't imagine that anybody who wasn't from her own community would know Yiddish and be able to speak it. And it's so moving to see that kind of thing happen. And Richard Tomback, who teaches at a community college in Brooklyn and didn't know a thing about Yiddish and called up one day. He later told me the story: his wife had wanted to watch "Fiddler on the Roof" that weekend and he had never had any interest in Yiddish, although he had roots in Kovno and Vilna, I believe. 75:00But he had done his degree in Semitic languages and that was really what he was interested in. But suddenly, he said, "This was a whole culture and I have family roots there. I want to know about this and I'm good at learning languages. I can do this." And so, he called up and ordered a dictionary. And then, called several times a week for a few years, just ordering more stuff. And eventually, started incorporating these things into his history courses. And he was teaching European History from Napoleon to Hitler course and he was teaching a Holocaust course. And he would buy Holocaust memoirs and do original translations of passages from them and give them to a student body that was enormously ethnically varied. He had students from Pakistan who would say, They 76:00never told us anything about this. And Russian students who weren't Jewish, Jewish students who were from Sephardi backgrounds, black students, Italian students, whatever. And he would get them all interested in this amazing literature which they were hearing in English for the first time at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. I love community colleges. They are the hidden intellectual life of this country. People, when they're serious, when they've been out in the world doing something rather than just coming there straight out of high school because they don't know what else to do, when they're there for serious reasons or they're straight out of high school and get caught up in it, they are such amazing students. And these students were writing amazing term 77:00papers. He told me some of the subjects. I don't remember anymore, but our books were going out to that and he eventually created a Holocaust library at the college with those books. So, those were some of them. Oh, and then there's Joshua Snyder, who grew up speaking Pennsylvania Dutch, living with his grandparents and he's not Jewish. And he got interested in Yiddish just because it seemed like an easy language for him. And he's done some translation. But he also has some Native American background somewhere. And he hooked up with the Smithsonian, just two or three years ago, after some frustrations with his Yiddish translations and he's doing little pamphlets of these two or three Native American languages that he knows. Very scholarly work and he's got like, a GED. He lives in Petoskey, Michigan. And he's a wonderful person and so 78:00learned (laughs) and you meet people you would never expect, whose existence you would never expect. And it's so nice that they're there.

CW:I'm curious what has been the crossover, if any, between your work here and your own Jewish thinking, intellectual life.

CM:Certainly reading some of the writers has given me a breadth of understanding. I look back at my novel, "A Portable Egypt," and recognize a couple of howlers in it because I was just finishing that when I came to work here. It came out in 2002 'cause that was a palindrome year. And I just -- I self-published it because I didn't want to continue dealing with agents who 79:00didn't seem to understand what kind of book it was. And, yeah, there were some silly mistakes that I wouldn't have made if I had waited longer to publish it. And it sneaks into various things. Certainly, there are -- if somebody wants a poem for a service at the JCA, I can sometimes pull something out of a hat from the Yiddish. And in the long poem that I have been at work on for a couple of years, there are things that will sneak in. There's going to be a section on Sutzkever because the poem is all about what C.S. Lewis called Northernness. As it plays out in a lot of areas -- my life in Fairbanks and Emmanuel Levinas coming from Kovno and Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism did, 80:00too, or -- yeah, I think the family immigrated when he was just very young, when they called him Motl. And Leonard Cohen has roots there and all sorts of people. And then, there's my one-fourth Scandinavian background and then there's Sutzkever, who was born in Siberia and lived there until he was seven or nine or something and wrote poems about it, just the cold and the ice and the frost. And I understand that. I was so moved to find that out. I sort of thought Yiddish poets were Morris Rosenfeld and sweatshops and having to have a social conscience and all of this stuff. And I recognized the value of it but it's so burdensome, whence my tortured relationship to ethics and aesthetics. And by 81:00God, here's Sutzkever and he did both. His Yung-Vilne colleagues were down on him for writing nature poetry and he'd done scouting and all kinds of things. Justin Cammy's got a great chapter about him in his forthcoming book. And yet, when the Germans came to Vilna, Sutzkever was a hero. He rescued all these documents. He smuggled arms into the Vilna Ghetto. He escaped and lived with the partisans in the woods. When he was airlifted to Moscow, he wrote the first report of what was going on in the Vilna Ghetto. You can do that and write nature poetry. (laughs) And he's a great inspiration to me. And so, that's -- 82:00all these things filter into my work.

CW:I'm curious if you had a favorite and least favorite part of your work here?

CM:My favorite part was going to the weekend courses because I would meet book customers. I'd be able to put a face to the voice or the name in the emails, at least for some of the people that I worked with. And we were sitting around listening to really interesting lectures and we were eating meals together and just talking about stuff and getting to know each other as people, not doing business transactions, and I loved that. And I made some good friends that way. And least favorite, let me count the ways. (laughs) I mean, there was throwing 83:00out books. I mentioned that. And there was when books would get really out of hand. During the summers, there would be a big gap when there wouldn't be any interns or work studies or anything and so -- and people would be wondering where their acknowledgement letters were for having sent the books. And some years, it would be approaching the end of the year and they would want letters for their taxes and I would still be unpacking. And that's a roller coaster. It just depends on how much stuff people send. And then, there's the occasional irate person who's mad about something and it wasn't something I did, necessarily, but I would have to talk 'em through it and -- or when things were 84:00really busy with book orders and other things going on and visitors and then a docent would buzz me and somebody would be at the door with books to deliver and everything would be happening at once. And there were times I wanted to tear my hair out. But one of the docents recently told me that I'd been really good at taking an irate person and calming them down and answering their question or at least letting them know that it was impossible to answer, like when they'd come in and say, "My grandfather's books were sent twenty years ago, do you know what became of them?" And I would say we were so -- we, the collective, institutional we -- we were so busy at that point that we couldn't possibly keep track of who had sent what. It was all we could do to send out thank you letters. But at least I could tell them that and they would know. And he said that all the 85:00docents had appreciated the way I could calm ruffled feathers and so on. I said, "Well, it must be because my mother was an elementary school teacher. (laughs) I picked it up." (laughs)

CW:Well, I'm curious if there's something that you think that people wouldn't know about your role at the Book Center that you -- or about the Book Center in general that you -- that people might not know that you want to share, some insight that you have?

CM:Well, (pauses) I think it's interesting the way Aaron came in with just an idea, needing to do this thing because the books needed to be rescued. Found out 86:00all the ways that he had to do it, the schlepping parts of it and who to ask what kind of thing about what kind of issue, and had to learn to manage people along the way, which was not always his strong point. And yet, continued to be very focused on what he wanted the place to be and being a certified MacArthur genius, he would come up with three, four, five genius ideas every month or two and farm them out to other people to do, sometimes to the point where they weren't doable. But some of those ideas were put back on the back burner where 87:00they stayed until they could be done and they're happening now. And the education center and the oral history program and the publishing and one thing after another, they do come into being. And I think he knew where to get help with the things that weren't going right and he managed to do it and it really is enormously impressive. And certainly, there were times I thought, I can't stay here another minute. And then, I thought over what my other options would be. I wasn't gonna go back to adjuncting and I didn't really want to go back to 88:00academic libraries. I had done that and that was interesting, too, but I didn't get the degree and so you have these stratified jobs and you do a good job at whatever you're doing and it's all right. But I saw friends of mine go through that who were at a higher level in an academic library than I was and they were deeply appreciated but they were making a lot less money and they had -- their stature was based on their personal qualities and it was very high in those terms. But it was a number on a list in other terms and I thought, Do I want to go back to that? Not so much. An academic library is doing academic library 89:00things, but they're kind of the same everywhere and this job's unique in all the world, so --

CW:I have a couple more questions about your take on Yiddish sort of more broadly. But I'm wondering if there are any other stories about or reflections about your job here that you wanted to be sure to talk about?

CM:Well, yeah, in very personal terms, as a writer, other jobs I've had have afforded a little more time to think and even to jot a few notes down. And that just didn't happen at this one. (laughs) The amount of work and the nature of the work and the number of people who depended on me to get what they needed to 90:00them or to sort out how to think about it or how to find it. And the levels were all the way from absolute beginner to highly sophisticated researcher and that was interesting. Yeah, there was never a dull moment, as my mother says. But you had to be quite nimble. You had to do it all the time. And so, that rubs off on the work you're trying to do when you go home. And after a while, except for occasions when I had a deadline to write something for an anthology or whatever, 91:00I would just kind of think, God, the futility of it all, trying to get back into my own imagination. (laughs) Nobody cares. And I can't even bring myself to care. So, that was when I started asking my financial advisor, "How soon can I -- (laughs) what would I have to do to leave this job as soon as possible?" And that's not to say I didn't like a great many things about the job, either. But a writer is a writer.

CW:So, as a writer and as a former Yiddish Book Center employee --

CM:Yeah, I have to stop saying we. (laughs)

CW:Well, you're in the building. It's fine. (laughter) What do you see as the 92:00role that books play or don't in transmission of culture?

CM:Well, as somebody of retirement age, I was around well before the internet. And so, books were important to my parents and to my grandparents and that's -- even though we were all goyim, the same thing was going on in the community of Yiddish readers. I recognize that very closely, and so books and the transmission of culture in both those lineages I think are absolutely essential. And I still meet a lot of younger people. And I met a lot of them on the job who 93:00would say, Oh, yeah, I know it's online but I like real books. And they would visit and they would take real books away or they -- over the phone, they would order real books. And there are certainly convenient things about being able to download books. But I think real books are here to stay for now, anyway. And damn, all you really need is a great big solar flare and a giant aurora that you can see down to Mexico and it's gonna wipe out all sorts of electronic things. So, you're gonna need real books. (laughs)

CW:And have you noted any trends or big changes in the time that you've been involved in Yiddish in terms of what the organization has been doing in terms of its relationship to the books?

CM:Oh, certainly. At the time that the Spielberg Library came along, which was 94:00pretty much simultaneous with the tanking of the economy -- and that was both good and bad. In terms of book sales, it meant people could get things for free that they now didn't have to pay for. It also meant that book orders dropped way off. But also, that was just at the point when we had building the Kaplan Building with the climate-controlled book vault, the education center, the performance hall, and all of these new things that Aaron had been dreaming about for a long time and he really wanted to focus on those things. And so, books became kind of, Yeah, we used to do that, for a while. And I was running it all and there were things I needed that I knew I couldn't get money for and stuff 95:00like that for a while. And yet, the education programs have -- they just mushroomed and blossomed and the whole Great Jewish Books program, first for high school students but then for teachers and that's a really exciting program. And it's just wonderful, what's going to happen with that, so -- and the fellowship program started around the same time. And that's been a great program and people can come and do major projects and then, as in your case, they can get hired to keep doing them. Or the project gets finished and then the Center doesn't have to worry about a staff member who's still there, which caused some 96:00very unhappy times. And so, all those things worked out very well and I think that the books may have a renaissance and that David's going to be able to do some very good things.

CW:What do you see as the place of Yiddish today in --

CM:For whom?

CW:Let's say in the American Jewish community.

CM:Well, it varies enormously because there's an American Jewish community that raises its kids in Yiddish. And I would get phone calls from some of them and they would speak English with an accent because it wasn't really their first language. And they were getting interested in Yiddish literature, sometimes from a very apikorsish [heretical] point of view. Or sometimes, they'd be looking for 97:00religious texts and we could do something for either one of them. So, that's a very vital, in all senses, Yiddish-speaking community. And I think we're going to get some more literati out of it in due course. And then, there are the remnant of Yiddish speakers from the secular community and there is still some of them and some of them have a very different relationship with religious Yiddish speakers than the old secularists did. They'll actually cross those boundaries and they'll talk to each other and it's fine, really. Some of them even daven. And it's not the polarized situation that it used to be. And that's a very promising development because it makes the boundaries permeable for both 98:00communities. And then, there are people who have learned their Yiddish in school and they're doing scholarship and, again, there's some crossover in all of those areas. But scholars are focused in that particular direction. And that's a very vibrant thing, too. Thinking back over -- well, more than eighteen years of going to AJS, 'cause I was doing that before I got the job, there were not that very many papers on Yiddish when I was first going to AJS and now there are lots and lots. Of course, they always scheduled them at the same time in competing sessions no matter what, even if there were only three. Now it's really exciting 99:00and, as I said, a lot of people who've been through the Center and are alumni of one program or another go there and it's kind of like seeing my grandchildren grow up and all that, so --

CW:So, I'm curious how you feel about -- what some people talk about, the intersection between Yiddish and queerness or -- what's your take on that, is -- yeah?

CM:Well, I supposed the secular scene has enabled that to happen in a certain way because of the liberal to radical slant of the secular scene. And I suppose that's become a refuge for people from religious communities who are queer in 100:00whatever way or ways and are looking for a way to continue to speak their first language. And also, the secular scene has always been a place for creativity, music, art, theater, all those things with which the queer community, population has always been associated. So, yeah, I mean, it makes a kind of sense. I kind of did my second wave baby dyke feminist thing passionately for a while and then got fed up with the Stalinist tendencies of who you did or didn't get to associate with. And I think it's more relaxed than it used to be, but there was 101:00just a phase in the '80s that I said, I'm not gonna hang around with this bunch anymore and went off and decided what I really wanted to do in my own way. But that said, I can see that it's really exciting for a lot of other people that aren't experiencing the whole thing as I did.

CW:And what do you see as the future of the Yiddish Book Center?

CM:I wouldn't venture to guess what's gonna pop out of Aaron's mind next for genius ideas. And also, he's not gonna be around forever and what on Earth is gonna happen then? Who's going to take over? How is the direction gonna change? 102:00How are they gonna fundraise at that point? Who's going to have the charisma and the sureness of what this is all about and the becoming humility and sense of humor and all the things that Aaron has, the ability just to get the job done. So, I don't know. I worry about it a little, but I think there's so much that this Center has accomplished and that it's recognized for. And I think there'll be some way to go on building on that.

CW:So, my last question: what advice might you have to a new employee coming to 103:00the Yiddish Book Center?

CM:(laughs) Oh, wow. Well, it depends what department they would be working in.

CW:Well, maybe someone working in the book department. (laughter)

CM:Yeah, well, I just spent some time orienting David Mazower to the job and I tried to convey that time management is a huge thing and there will be times that you just won't be able to get to getting out there and sorting the books and finding out if there's anything that is on the waiting list because you'll have too many other jobs to do, and that they will range all the way from the 104:00intellectual to the clerical to the janitorial and they will range from helping scholars do their work as a reference librarian to helping people donate books that are associated with people they loved and it's very upsetting to them and you're functioning as a therapist. (laughs) And everything in between. Dispatcher, (laughs) trying to get large book shipments out of wherever they are. And it's a unique job and there will always be something really unexpected.

CW:Well, thank you, Catherine.

CM:Right, thank you. (laughs)

CW:Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences with the Yiddish Book Center.

[END OF INTERVIEW]