IRENA KLEPFISZ ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is September 26th, 2017.  I am here in Brooklyn, New York, with Irena Klepfisz, and 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?

IRENA KLEPFISZ: Yes, you do.

CW:  Thank you.  So, I wanted to start with some family background.  Starting with your grandparents' generation, where did your family come from?

IK:  On my mother's side, they were not originally from Warsaw, but I'm not quite sure exactly where.  But she was born in Warsaw, though some of her older sisters were not.  And that was a really kind of working poor class family of 1:00six children -- five daughters and one son.  My mother was the next to the youngest.  And her father was a watchmaker.  And he died when she was twelve.  And that was sort of the end of her schooling, as she went back -- went to work.  The older children became -- were more kind of upwardly mobile.  The significant thing about her, I think, in terms of what happened to her afterwards, was that the older children insisted that she go to Polish schools rather than folkshuls [Yiddish secular schools].  She spoke Yiddish at home with her parents -- with her mother.  But she went to Polish schools, partly because of their insistence.  They thought that she would be better off 2:00and that she could function better in society.  And it was certainly one of the contributing elements to her survival during the war, because she really had no accent.  She didn't speak like it was a second language; it was like a first language.  And it was quite impeccable.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

IK:  The professions?  I'm not totally sure.  A couple of them were teachers.  They had sort of a little bit better education.  There's a photograph of one of them with a microscope -- I'm not sure what that means.  I have to confess that one of the things that I'm thinking a great deal about -- my mother just died a year ago in March.  She would have been -- she was four months short of her 102nd birthday.  And one of the things, of course -- I think this happens with everyone -- is you start really regretting what you didn't ask and what you didn't find out.  And I'm sort of thinking a great deal about that right now -- I mean, in the last few months -- especially with the trip to Poland.  So, I don't know totally, but it was not -- it was very much 3:00her -- I mean, the fact that she had to go to work at the age of twelve and that she went to night school and she was actually very interested in literature and was -- she worked in the library.  She was a volunteer in the library; I don't think she got paid.  She was always a big reader, and she passed that on to me.  So, the father was a watchmaker.  I think I've actually found the gravestone in the Warsaw Cemetery.  It was in a very older part of the cemetery that had not been cleared out -- you know, the cemetery after the war was very overgrown and very much abused.  And his -- I've been back to that cemetery a number of times, but this time they had cleared that part of it, and I think I found his grave -- which was sort of amazing.  And it was also interesting, 4:00because it was to Herschel Perczykow.  The year was actually -- just the "19" is visible -- the actual year -- but the reason I think it's him is because of the name, and also because it's in the corner of where the 19-- if my mother was twelve and she was born in 1914, it would have been around 1926, '25, '27 -- it was in that corner of the cemetery.  And so, I think it's his grave.  And also the -- the person at the cemetery told me it was a very unusual stone, because it was really the only stone written in Yiddish as opposed to Hebrew -- than most of the other gravestones.  Because it says "fater un man" -- "father and husband."  So, that was sort of -- that's what I know -- a little bit about her family.  Her older sisters were all married.  One had a child, Majus -- my 5:00cousin Majus -- they all died during the Holocaust in various ways -- with their husband.  The younger sister also didn't survive; she was younger than my mother, and my mother was sort of taking care of her.  There was a big gap between my mother and the older children, so my mother was sort of the caretaker of Krisya.  The brother survived -- Benjek, with his wife and son -- in Siberia during the war, and they all -- one of her sisters and the brother ended up in Australia.  That's my connection to Australia.  And the family was very apparently politically diverse.  My mother was originally in the Hashomer Hatzair movement.  She even went on one of these outings where she learned how to raise tobacco when she -- if she were to go to Palestine.  So, there were a 6:00couple of Zionists, there were a couple of communists, and there were a couple of Bundists.  And my -- after she met my father, she turned into the Bundist.  So, I -- but apparently, there were some tensions among all the in-laws around these politics, so it was sort of an interesting -- sounds like a really interesting family.

CW:  So, not frum [pious]?

IK:  Not from?

CW:  Not frum -- not observant?

IK:  Not frum.  My mother, I think -- my grandmother, Rikla, who died during the war, I think probably lit Shabbos candles.  I don't know if they kept kosher.  I don't think so.  I just don't.  I don't know quite why.  I think that, but I don't know specifically.  It's one of the things I don't know.

CW:  And can you just say your mother's name?

IK:  My mother's name -- well, my mother had very -- a lot of very different names.  She was -- I think her Hebrew name was Shoshana, which means "rose," 7:00and in Polish, that's Róża.  In Yiddish, that would be Rushke.  During the war, she acquired the name of Lodzia -- that was her Aryan name.  And a lot of people kept their Aryan names after the war, neither using their Polish or their Yiddish names.  And I was sort of amazed by a number of times -- of people that I had known for, like, forty years -- like, when I was in my forties -- to discover that somebody had a Yiddish name, because I had always called them by their Polish, Aryan name.  So, she was called Lodzia.  My father called her -- before that, my father used to call her Mała, because he was six feet and she was practically not five.  And "mały" meant "small."  During the war she was Lodzia; after the war, when we were in Sweden, Gabi, who we used to call Gaga -- there's a photograph of him over there -- couldn't say "Lodzia," so she became 8:00Mama Lo.  And then, when we got here, she was Rose.  And then, I don't know, I got to calling her Mamashi, finally.  And the last few years of her life, a number of -- a good fifteen years, I think -- I don't even know how that came about, but that's -- so she had a lot of names, you know?  Shoshana, Rushke, Mama Lo, Lodzia, Mama Lo.  And Rose, and most recently, Mamashi.  Yeah.  My father's family was very, very different.  His grandfather was a well-known, important rabbi, Zanvil Klepfisz.  Peretz wrote a eulogy to him when he died.  He was a man who married twice and had endless children with both wives.  One of the children -- and I'm not sure which wife -- was my grandfather, Yankev 9:00Klepfisz, who was -- grew up Hasidic and broke with Hasidism and, I think, his whole family in his middle, late teens, and became a Bundist -- and an ardent Bundist.  My grandmother also came from a Bundist family.  She came -- it was the Szulmans -- it was Salamons.  She had a sister who married Victor Szulman, who was an important Bundist.  And so, my father, between these two parents, was raised in very much of a socialist home.  Both grandparents knew Yiddish, but as far as I know, they spoke Polish in the house.  And that Polish was their first language.  (pauses) The grandmother Salamon lived with them, and I 10:00heard a story that my aunt Gina, my father's older sister, would leave the -- would go and sleep at her best friend's house when religious holidays came around, because the grandmother insisted on some stuff; I don't know what.  So, there was I guess that tension from that side -- but it wasn't coming from the Klepfisz side, it was coming from the Salamon side.  And both my aunt and my father grew up in very much a socialist, Bundist atmosphere.  Gina, I believe -- and my father were very big sports people, so they belonged to Morgnshtern, but my father, I think, was also in SKIF and Tsukunft, so I don't know if -- specifically.

CW:  Do you happen to know which Hasidic --

IK:  I don't.  I know I could look it up probably, but I don't.  As I understood it, the break was quite final, and that there was no contact with the family afterwards.  I don't know whether that's true or not.  My grandfather was a Yiddish teacher.  And I got a letter -- and I never got a response back -- from a woman who found a textbook written by a Yud Klepfisz -- Yankev Klepfisz -- and she wanted to know whether it was my grandfather.  Now, it could be; I don't really know.  And I asked her, in fact, to send me a photograph of it, and I never heard back.  I have to write to her again.  I was kind of curious about it, whether he was involved in any kind of -- I think she told me it was, like, dated 1919 or 1920.  He would have been -- my father was already born by then, so -- I think that's what she said.  I don't remember 12:00exactly now.  I have to look it up.  But he was a Yiddish teacher.  My grandmothers, I think, taught in Polish schools.  They were both teachers.  So, it was really a middle-class family, very much in contrast to my mother's family.  I don't think they were crazy about him marrying her; I think they thought he was marrying down.  I asked her -- and when they got married, they moved in with his parents -- with my grandparents, the Klepfisz grandparents.  When I asked my mother what that was like -- did she like living there? -- she said what she liked was that her mother, my other grandmother, Rikla, could come over and take a bath once a week, because there was a bathtub.  So, it was a class difference that I think sort of impacted sort of a little bit some of the relationships.  So, that's the background, basically.  I mean, they met -- my parents -- one of the places I wanted to go this time to -- when I was in Poland was Zakopane, because my parents met in Zakopane.  Zakopane was a kind of 13:00resort, and a lot of the people went camping there and skiing in the winter and mountain climbing in the summer and that kind of thing.  And the Bund had outings there.  And I don't know whether she was there with a Zionist thing and he was there with the Bundists, but they met skiing one winter, apparently.  And they had, like, a four-year courtship.  And they got married on her birthday, in 1937.  And that was the beginning.  And he was still in engineering school -- he was still studying.  He hadn't completed his studies at the Polytechnic.  And that was sort of the story of their marriage.

CW:  How would you describe the Jewish Labor Bund to someone who didn't know what it was?

IK:  How would I describe the Jewish -- the Jewish Labor Bund began as a kind of socialist movement aimed at Jewish workers and evolved into -- very quickly, 14:00actually -- it evolved into a kind of socialist, self-consciously culturally identified movement, so that they weren't just -- that it wasn't only interested -- or understood that just either having better wages or better working conditions was really not enough, and that people needed schools and libraries and sports organizations and theater and art and literature in order to lead a kind of enriched life.  So, it's not a typical kind of just socialist -- you know, kind of union organizing movement the way I perceive it.  When I was 15:00growing up and hearing -- I grew up among Holocaust Bundist survivors, so I heard a lot of talk about what their life was like before the war.  And it was really interesting, because it -- I never really got lessons in the Bund, sort of.  I was never -- and it took me a while to realize that everything that they were talking about was the Bund.  You know, it wasn't like it was an isolated thing; it was like their whole lives were Bunds.  I mean, they went to shule [secular Yiddish school] as they -- they went to theater, they went to concerts, they -- you know, everything was Bund, which I didn't realize.  It took me a very long time to sort of process that, and to realize also that everything that they were telling me was from a Bundist perspective and that there were other perspectives.  But because I had never had that formal-- you know, that formal 16:00-- I was too young -- I mean, I was too old for Hemshekh.  By the time the Bundists organized Camp Hemshekh, I was already, like, eighteen.  So, I was -- I had done my counseloring in the summer and stuff, so I never -- I sort of -- in fact, Mimi Ehrlich and I always lament the fact that we could not participate in Hemshekh.  The people that went to Hemshekh got a real formal education about the Bund.  I really didn't get it.  I didn't get that.  I got that from just listening to people -- talking to them, asking questions or whatever, and being answered.  So, to me it's always been sort of -- a very -- I don't know how to put it -- saturated kind of -- saturated everything.  I mean -- I almost could not think of Jewish life in interwar Poland without thinking it had to be 17:00Bundist, you know?  Because, you know, I used to tell the story that when I first came to the States and I moved into this working c-- we moved into this working-class Jewish, very, very Jewish neighborhood, but when Friday night came and my girlfriends would suddenly say, Oh, look, there's a star and we have to stop playing, I have to go home, I just didn't understand it.  I just thought -- I really thought they were fake Jews, because you had to be a Yiddishist, a socialist -- (laughs) I don't know, in order to be -- those were the authentic Jews, to me.  And that was partly because that's all I ever knew, really, and all of this other stuff was just very strange and alien.  So, that's sort of the Bund, to me.  The Bund is sort of everything.  It's the stuff you read.  It's the stuff -- it's your politics.  It is -- a lot of it is political in the sense of a socialist belief in economic equality and other kinds of 18:00equalities.  But it's also a lot beyond that, as well.

CW:  Where were you born?

IK:  I was born in Warsaw during the war.  And I was -- survived partly because I was hidden in a place in a Catholic orphanage.  And my parents arranged for that.  My father was killed in the uprising.  He was one of the people involved in the uprising -- in organizing it.  And he provided a lot of -- well, the possibility that -- he established sort of Molotov cocktail factories in the ghetto and he smuggled in arms and he was -- actually, I just -- I mean, I always knew that he was killed on the second day.  I didn't realize he was really the first Jew in battle to be killed, which I just learned this summer.  I always learn a little tiny bit -- something that you didn't know -- which sort of surprised me.  I hadn't realized it.  And I realize now 19:00that that's one of the reasons, I think, that his -- I don't mean to minimize what he did, but the fact that he was the first I think gave a lot of attention to him in a way that, if he had been, like, the fortieth, wouldn't have -- as other people.  So, he -- despite the fact that I really d-- the last time I saw him I was one and a half -- I have no memory of him at all -- we are -- I've always felt very connected to him.  Because first of all, we share a birthday; I was born on his birthday.  And then, he was killed -- our birthdays are -- (clears throat) excuse me -- our birthdays are April seventeenth, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was April nineteenth, and he was killed on the twentieth.  So, 20:00the uprising and his death and our birthdays have always been very, very close together, and sort of interlinked.  So, it's a hard thing to get away from.  (laughs) And so, that's sort of my beginnings.  After the uprising and after he was killed --

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

IK:  -- came the Warsaw uprising.  And the orphanage was being moved and my mother was kind of nervous about losing track of me and she basically kidnapped me, because they didn't really want to let me go and she just took me.  And we went somewhere outside of Warsaw and we -- she was very isolated, but she reconnected with the underground, eventually, by accident -- and they helped us.  And then, after the war we went to Łódź.  Warsaw was just destroyed, and we spent a year in Łódź with other Bundists, sharing an apartment.  And eventually, we went to Sweden.  And we were being supported by the Jewish Labor Committee.

CW:  Could you just say your father's name to me?

IK:  Michał Klepfisz.  And my aunt Gina, Gina Klepfisz.  His parents were Mariem and Jacob Klepfisz.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

IK:  One of the things that I did this summer was I put up -- my mother put up a stone for my father, even though he's not buried there in the Jewish cemetery.  She did that in the '50s, I believe, at some point.  And I decided this last year that I wanted a memorial to my mother's family and my father's family, because there was nothing.  And so, I was able -- because you can't put up new stones there, but they gave me permission to put, like, a plaque on the foot of my father's stone, and I put down all the names of my father's family and all the names of my mother's family.  So, I'm glad you made me say the names, because I think it's important.  And there -- and I -- and that was 22:00actually completed before I left for Poland, so I was able to see it.  So, I was really happy to see it.  (laughs)

CW:  What are your first memories?

IK:  You know, at my age, it's very hard to say that, because at this point, what I remember is remembering.  You know, they're not -- (clears throat) -- and I also have a number of photographs.  They were all after the war, really.  They're, like, starting maybe around 1945 -- which is when the photographs also start.  And my most -- I have a few memories of Łódź -- not that much.  I don't know how much I was really reinforced by the photographs.  I have much more clearer memories of Sweden, but even then, when I actually think about it, we were there for three years -- you know, I can isolate certain images in my eyes about that period.  I remember much more kind of -- what I 23:00remember or what I, I guess, hold on to, is the fact that I was very happy there, that the mood was good, that -- and I think the photographs there also reflect that.  We lived in a communal house, in which sort of each family or broken family had a room, and there were communal kitchens.  You know, it was a kind of communal space.  One of the things I think about -- or I've come to realize or I've thought about or thought through -- is that my mother must have been deeply depressed, I can't imagine that she wouldn't have been -- and that I really don't remember being affected by it, because I had an enormous amount of 24:00attention.  I think children like me, who survived, were very rare, and we were really special.  And I got an enormous amount of wonderful attention in Sweden.  I was very happy there.  I was very comfortable there.  I felt very safe.  And so, I remember that part -- I mean, the memory is more emotional than visual.  And I remember it as being really -- I always said Sweden was Eden, and that's what it felt like.  I was totally unaware of the Holocaust.  I don't remember ever hearing about it; I don't remember any commemorations about it; I just -- I don't think I heard of the Holocaust until I came to the 25:00United States.  I don't think I knew what it was or how I was in it or what my -- you know, what my connection to it was.  I didn't -- never heard of it till I came here.  And by then, I was eight, so that was pretty late.  I'm not sure that they had -- I don't know what they did in Sweden.  I don't know if they commemorated on April nineteenth or not.  I just -- I just don't know that.  And I don't have too many people to ask, so -- another question that I didn't ask.

CW:  What do you remember about coming over to the US?  Do you remember the trip?

IK:  I remember the trip.  I even -- my mother saved -- one of the things -- my mother saved everything after the war, as I found.  We came on the Swedish ship, the Gripsholm, and my mother had the ribbon from it -- this blue ribbon with gold writing on it.  Gabi -- I have a photograph of Gabi -- we brought 26:00Gabi with us, because Hannah had to go earlier.

CW:  Can you explain who Gabi and Hannah are?

IK:  Gabi was the -- is the son -- was, he died -- he was like my younger brother.  We lived together in Sweden and in Poland, in Łódź.  Hannah was -- Hannah and her husband survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  They were involved in the uprising and they became partisans afterwards.  Her husband, Gabrisz, was killed as a part-- when he was -- when they were in the woods, and Hannah was pregnant.  And she gave birth during the Warsaw uprising -- the Polish Warsaw uprising a year later.  And Gabi was born.  And there's, like, a famous description of what happened by Bernard Goldstein in "Five Years in the Warsaw Ghetto," where he talks about it.  So, I have photographs of Gabi, like, right after the war in Łódź when he's just -- he can't even stand up, he's just an infant.  And we lived together in Sweden.  And then, Hannah had to -- 27:00was coming to the States, and I didn't understand why, but she could not come in together with Gabi, and so she left him with my mother, for a few months, and then we came together.  And I had -- I suffered enormously for years, even after coming here, from any kind of motion sickness.  Put me on anything that moved and I threw up: boat, car, train, bus, anything.  I did not want to be moved.  (laughs) And I was horribly sick on the boat for seven, eight days.  We were downstairs in this -- I think I shared a bunk bed with Gabi.  He was four years younger than me, so if I was eight, he was four.  And then, we got here, and I have a photograph of Gabi in his little sailor's suit on the deck of the Gripsholm, when we landed.  And he was immediately taken away.  Nobody told me he was leaving; I never got a chance to say goodbye.  They didn't go 28:00far -- I mean, they were in New York City -- but it was just, like, this -- nobody thought about these things.  Nobody was particularly psychologically minded.  I was deeply unhappy.  I really was very happy in Sweden.  I was going to school.  I knew Swedish.  I had Swedish friends.  I loved where I lived -- it was very rural.  It was out -- it was about twenty minutes outside of Stockholm; it's probably a totally built-up suburb by now.  But it was rural; it was woods.  I went to school on skis, on my bike.  I went skating.  I mean, I loved it.  And I was thrown -- and also we lived in this communal house.  And then, we came to the United States and my mother and I shared a one-bedroom apartment with somebody who didn't like kids, and we lived in the living -- you know, living room -- and it was very bleak.  And I have to say, I didn't find the Jewish kids that I sudden-- I was the only Jew in Sweden, in my 29:00Swedish school, and I had no problems, but when I came here, I had real problems from other Jewish kids, being a -- you know, a greenhorn or whatever.  My mother dressed me funny: I had funny braids, I had funny stockings, I had funny hair bows.  I mean -- (laughs) I wasn't pleased.  And I'm -- it was a big trauma for me to -- I mean, I always considered coming here more of a trauma than anything else I had experienced up until then, which is probably not true, but it was certainly more conscious that I was very much wrenched from an environment that I really wanted and loved.  And suddenly, I was a Holocaust survivor, which I didn't even know.  And I was pointed to, and I was my fa-- I had no s-- I wasn't aware of any specialness in Sweden, and suddenly I was special 'cause I was Michał Klepfisz's daughter and -- and there were these terrible, frightening memorials.  It wasn't much fun.  It wasn't much fun.

CW:  Did you understand why you had left Sweden?

IK:  No.  But everybody left.  I mean, slowly -- I think by the time we were left, we were -- I don't know if we were the only people still left in the house, but a number of people had left before us.  We just knew -- I think people were -- -- well, the thing was, also -- the other piece of that, which I really did not understand until much later, was that really we weren't coming to the States; we were going to Australia.  My mother -- and I still have it -- had a visa for seven days.  We were supposed to stay in New York for a few days, then go to California, and then go to Australia.  And I had one relative left in my father's family, my aunt Fela, who was my grandmother's sister.  And Fela convinced my mother -- she came here before the war -- and my mother 31:00convinced -- and she convinced my mother that -- or maybe my mother intended it to begin with; it was very hard to get in here, so -- but once you're here, you get a lawyer and so on -- and she convinced her to stay.  I don't think I was aware of any of that.  I mean, I don't think I -- not that I remember at all, that there was a change of plan or anything like that.  I just -- you know, within a very short time, I was registered at a school where I didn't speak the language, and -- you know, it was, like, trauma all over again.  It was -- so, no, I didn't understand why we came here.  I didn't understand why we had to leave.  I don't -- it wasn't an age in which people explained a lot of things to kids.  Really.  I mean, we're so careful now about, is this gonna traumatize the child and all of this.  Nobody even thought about it.  (laughs) It was really interesting, because the daughter of a friend of mine was taking a 32:00course on bilingualism and trilingualism, and she had to write a paper, and she wanted to interview me because of sort of my linguistic background.  And so, she said, "Well, how did you learn Swedish?"  I said, "I don't know."  And she said, "Well, did they -- did anybody tutor you?"  I said, "No.  They just stuck me in a Swedish class, and somehow I learned Swedish."  (laughs) And then, we got to -- and she said, "Well, how did you learn English?"  I said, "Well, they just put me in a classroom, and -- I learned Eng--"  (laughs) And she was just dumbfounded, because, you know, now you have all these -- you know, second language, ESL, and all of that kind of stuff.  And it's true; they just dumped you into an environment, and as a kid -- you know, kids do pick up very quickly.  It's true.  Up to a certain age.  You know, Noam Chomsky says it's genetic, and it is, and you do pick it up.  But there was no preparation or anything like -- you know, my mother studied English before she came here, 33:00'cause she knew she was going to Australia; it wasn't about the United States.  But she never thought about preparing me.  Because I don't know, they just assumed, I think, kids would just pick it up.  And we did.  We did.

CW:  So, can you describe the neighborhood that you grew up -- that you were in here in the Bronx?

IK:  I was -- grew up -- we were very fortunate in many ways that we were -- we got this apartment.  It was a one-bedroom apartment in the Amalgamated Houses, which were established by the ILGWU, in -- I believe in the early '40s or late '30s.

CW:  That's the Lady Garment --

IK:  Yeah, International Ladies' --

CW:  -- Ladies' Garment Workers --

IK:  -- Ladies' Garment Workers Union.  And at the time, you still had to be a union member, I think.  Not necessarily ILGWU, but you had to be a member of a union in order to live there.  And they were subsidized housing; they were relatively cheap.  But my mother couldn't even afford that, and so we had to 34:00share it with an older woman who was a well-known Bundist.  She had the bedroom and we had the living room.  She didn't really like kids, so it wasn't a great match.  And it was a working-class neighborhood, predominantly -- the Amalgamated at the time was, I would say, like, ninety-eight percent Jewish.  The school was sort of like that -- maybe a little bit less, ninety-five percent Jewish.  Working-class.  We had a Workmen's Circle and an Arbeter Ring shule, shule dray [school #3], which was one of the largest shules in the city -- partly because the neighborhood was so intensely -- there were a lot of Bundists, there were a lot of Holocaust survivors, there were a lot of Yiddishists in the area.  So, the school had, at one point, like, a hundred kids.  And I was going to that in the afternoon and I was going to PS 95 during the day.  The shule was five days a week.  From the people that I knew in -- 35:00like, in my -- at the time, we lived in what was called the first building, which was a wonderful building of -- it was really two buildings built around a huge courtyard, with a fountain in the center and privets and gardens.  It was really lu-- you know, when I think about what they do with sort of subsidized housing now compared to what they did then, this was really a beautiful setting -- with ivy -- it's a four-floor walkup, two buildings, many entrances.  We were H-22.  Ivy on the walls.  During the summer, a gushing fountain.  Tulip beds, privets.  The pathways were colored slate -- you know, great for roller skating.  It was gorgeous.  It was a gorgeous, gorgeous setting.  Of course, it's not there anymore.  But for the most part, the kids that I knew were 36:00American-born and were from American-born parents.  I knew children of survivors, but there were not many of them, and they were not necessarily all in the Amalgamated.  So, like, Mimi and I -- Mimi lived in Manhattan; I didn't really see that much of her, even though our parents knew each other and so on.  But we did -- I mean, I have a photograph of Mimi on her ninth birthday or something that -- on the piano over there -- that I'm in.  And I found the kids very cruel.  I mean, I found the whole switch to here -- I was never made fun of in Sweden; I was never mocked; I never felt like an outsider.  But I was very distinctly, I think, in many ways -- certainly in dress, I was a European.  My mother dressed me still like a European -- like she would.  And I didn't know the language.  And that was apparently -- I was -- you know, I 37:00was mocked for it, in a way that I wasn't in Sweden.  So, I found it a much -- (laughs) ironically, a much crueler atmosphere than I had in Sweden.  And it's sort of ironic.  I mean, it was  Jewish neighborhood, supposedly a safe neighborhood, but I -- I had a lot of trouble.  I mean, kids beat me up.  I was sort of -- it was not good.  It was not fun.  And when I -- I know that when I finally got to high school, which was a non-districted girls' school, Walton High School, and got away from the neighborhood kids, I had a better time.  I made better friends and -- and so on.  I mean, I just never really got along with the kids that -- in that neighborhood and in that -- especially in that courtyard; we'd call it the court.  I don't know, there was something 38:00mean about it that I experienced and that made me feel very different.  And the Yiddish was al-- I mean, the fact that I was going to this Yiddish school -- none of them went.  The people that went were not people from the court.  They were from other buildings or they were -- you know, somehow, the mix -- the immediate mix of five or six friends that I had in that courtyard was very mean.  And I had a hard time.  (laughs)

CW:  So, earlier you said you weren't aware of the Holocaust in Sweden.  Do you remember when you became familiar with that word or "khurbm [Holocaust, lit. "disaster"]" or whatever the word was -- and what that meant?

IK:  I don't remember the first time, but I know it was here.  I was -- we came here April eleventh.  Now, I know for a fact that -- and there were 39:00usually at the time numerous memorials -- they were called akademyes [commemorative gatherings] -- that my mother went to one -- already -- just a few days after landing here.  I didn't go with her to that one.  Whether she went to others and I was taken, I don't remember.  I remember probably the first one was probably the year after.  And I found them very frightening.  I think I was very, very shy.  I mean, my experience here made me -- I don't think I was that shy in Sweden, but I was very shy, and suddenly I was the focus of a lot of attention in a way that I didn't like -- with strangers.  It was one thing to have attention from people you knew, but strangers, and being looked at, and you know, I didn't know what it meant to be Michał Klepfisz's -- 40:00but suddenly I was this -- (laughs) I was even weirder.  I just didn't understand a lot of it.  And it was very frightening, you know, in those days.  I've described this.  First of all, there were hundreds and hundreds of survivors in the city, and they would come.  And these meetings were -- these akademyes were very frightening to me.  First of all, there were a lot of people with a lot of disabilities that I wasn't used to seeing.  People with a lot of numbers on their arms, which I had begun to understand what it meant.  And the talk from the podium was very -- (clears throat) very unguarded -- talked very much about tortures and camps and -- I mean, there were always performances of songs from the war years and ghetto lider [songs] and -- and 41:00always -- you didn't applaud because it wasn't a performance, it was a memorial.  And at the same time, there would be people who were openly, openly just weeping out loud.  I mean, to a nine-year-old, that's a pretty (laughs) scary scene, and mixed in with the fact that I wasn't there anonymously, even.  I couldn't really even hide.  It did not leave a great impression on me.  I mean, it was very, very frightening.  And it made me feel in some way that I was in great danger, in a way that I don't think I'd ever experienced before.  And I think it was very destructive for me personally, and really traumatizing me for -- it took me a long time to get over it.  And I reached a point -- when I was about fifteen -- the thing was, see, they always used me as a symbol for 42:00all the children that didn't die.  I had to light a candle for the million and a half children that died.  That was my job.  And I don't think it was every year, but it was quite a few times.  And one time, when I was standing on stage, they had the six people that were gonna light the candles, I don't know, something like that.  Somebody said -- pointed at me and said, "She was snatched from the -- she was snatched from the ovens."  And I almost fainted.  I was, like, fifteen when they said that.  I could barely keep standing.  It really terrified me.  And I told my mother afterwards that I would never go again.  And my mother, who was very conscious -- I mean, she wanted me to go to these things; she felt it was an obligation -- surprisingly didn't fight me on it.  So, she must have understood that they went a little bit too far.  But -- 43:00and I didn't.  I didn't go for many, many years.  And even now, I just go to -- the one place I go is Der Shteyn [The Stone], which is on Eighty-Third Street.  I won't go to -- I went a few times -- I hated -- there was a period where every politician would show up at one of these things and make a pitch.  I just hated it.  I just thought it was hypocritical.  I just thought it was -- I don't know.  It made me really angry.  I just wanted to stay away.  I didn't feel it was, like, real -- paying tribute.  And -- so I go to the Shteyn, which I think is very -- usually a very simple one.  And there's not too much fanfare and stuff.  And we do our shtik [thing], and I'm very happy.  And it's actually usually on the nineteenth.  And that does it for me.

CW:  What is the Shteyn?

IK:  The Shteyn was really the first Holocaust memorial, I believe, in the United States.  It's a stone in Riverside Park on Eighty-Third Street.  And it was done for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and for the Bund.  And the idea was 44:00that there was gonna be a statue there, which has never materialized.  But Bundists and children -- children of Bundists -- and now children of Bundists and friends of Bundists now gather there usually every April nineteenth, no matter when, rain or shine, at two or three in the afternoon, work or no work, and we have a gathering.  And there is usually at least one speech in Yiddish, and the rest are in English.  There's -- somebody will sing a cappella some songs or recite a poem, some kind of memorial, and that's it.  People lay down flowers on the stone.  It's on Facebook if you want to look at it and connect with people there.  It's called "Der Shteyn" or the -- they may even call it "The Stone," I don't know.  And that's what we usually do -- that's -- a whole bunch of us -- I mean, it's dwindled.  There were a lot of survivors coming to 45:00it, Yiddishists and -- people from Hemshekh usually show up there.  So, that's Der Shteyn.

CW:  What are your memories from shule?

IK:  I had some -- I have nice memories of shule.  Partly I didn't want to go, of course, because it was in the afternoon.  And I remember learn-- I think some of my best memories are sort of memorizing -- I can't remember 'em all, but I remember some poetry and some songs.  I think that was the thing I loved best.  I think my introduction to loving poetry and literature came from Yiddish, very much.  And I remember stuff that I didn't like, which was  -- we had to do performances, you know -- and I didn't like that.  I never liked doing that kind of stuff in public -- reciting in public.  But on the whole, it was sort of -- it was really interesting, because, you know, the '50s were so 46:00culturally different than what -- anything that we have now.  I mean, there was no bridge between that public school and that shule.  In public school, we did Easter -- even though it was, like, ninety-eight percent Jewish, we did Easter, we did Christmas.  There was not one mention of anything Jewish.  And in the shule, it was like the rest of the world didn't exist.  (laughs) And why aren't you speaking to everybody in Yiddish was the kind of thing.  So, it was sort of -- but it was more heymish [cozy], you know, in the shule.  It was looser.  We were -- I was less well-behaved.  You could fool around more.  But I took it as part of my life.  I mean, it was something that I understood I needed to do.  And I graduated and went on to mitlshul [high school], which was also a -- 47:00that was really a struggle when I think back on it, because the Arbeter Ring mitlshul was on Saturday and Sunday, downtown, which meant I was in school seven days a week.  And I think that that's really unfair to children.  It does not -- I think it's just unfair.  And it -- I don't think it builds good will, (laughs) to say the least.  But I went for four years.  I think I was even more badly behaved (laughs) there -- which I wouldn't have acted out in high school at all.  I think I graduated from mitlshul when I was in my junior year of English high school.  So, I was on -- I mean, that was a long trek.  I loved some of the other students.  I mean, we had a good time with each other.  Again, I think I liked some of the literature or I didn't like some -- I think we were obnoxiously terrible, and teenagers, and I always feel very 48:00guilty, because one of the teachers, Khaver [Comrade] Kazhdan, was my father's teacher, and I think he was looking forward to teaching me, and I think he was gravely disappointed.  And I always feel really, really bad, 'cause he was a lovely man.  And, well, you don't -- you don't recognize lovely men at the age of fifteen.  (laughs)

CW:  Were there any teachers from shule or mitlshul that were meaningful to you or left an impression on you?

IK:  (pauses) No.  I remember them -- I mean, one of my problems in mitlshul was also -- (clears throat) -- that -- and this was a problem throughout growing up, was -- I'll tell you the following story.  Khaver Bernshteyn was the principal of the mitlshul.  I think this happened either in my third or fourth year; it might have happened in the -- well, maybe -- I don't know, it was either the third or fourth year.  It was very long on.  And somebody came to 49:00the mitlshul and Khaver Bernshteyn introduced me and said, "Zi iz [She is] Michał Klepfisz's daughter" -- you know, "tokhter [daughter]."  And I got very enraged.  I got very upset.  And I said to him, "You know, I have a first name."  And you know, he didn't know it.  And that was really a problem.  (laughs) That people kinda knew who I was in relationship to my father, but they didn't really know me.  (laughs) And that plagued me a lot in that world.  I didn't like it.  But I was very timid.  And that I even said that to him was really totally uncharacteristic, 'cause I was extremely timid.  I did not confront people in that way.  And if I was bad, I was bad together with other friends, not by -- standing by myself.  (laughs) So, that was a problem for me 50:00in that world, in that I was too identified -- that I felt then -- and it took me a very -- many, many years to get past that.  Sort of -- it was a long shadow, and it was -- it followed me.  I had this really interesting experience in the '80s; I interviewed -- I don't know if you know who Alice Shalvi is.  She's a major -- she's quite elderly now -- she's a major feminist in Israel, and I interviewed her in the '80s.  And she said something when I -- after I finished the interview, she said, "You know, Klepfisz," she said, "that's very familiar."  I said, "Oh, you know about my father."  You know, I just -- I was, like, in my forties already.  She said, "No, I never heard about your fa-- I never heard of your father."  And she said, "Oh, I read your poem!"  (laughs) It was, like, the first time that somebody who didn't know my father 51:00knew me.  It was -- I was already in my forties.  I had never come across that before.  It was very, very strange.  But I lived with that as a teenager and into my twenties.  It was very difficult.  It was another thing that kept me away.  I mean, I just didn't like it.  I wanted to be able to -- you know, it wasn't that I didn't want to be associated with him; it had nothing to do with that.  It just -- I just felt I had no space for myself somehow.  You know?

CW:  I'm wondering if you can think back on those early years and think about -- do you remember any -- how you felt about Yiddish?

IK:  I do.  I mean, you know, Yiddish is very -- I can't totally accurately describe how -- what it was in my life.  My mother, for example, once told me that somehow, I don't know when or where, somebody taught me a Yiddish song 52:00during the war, and it drove her nuts.  It was like, (sings) "Sorele, sorele, fort in vald avek, vek, vek [Sarah, Sarah, goes out into the forest away, way, way]."  And she said I sang it obsessively, and she was -- we were passing, and she became very frightened.  I don't know who taught it to me, and I don't even know if it's a true story, but -- and that she immediately translated it into Polish and made me sing it in Polish, and that's how she got me off of it.  I know that after the war -- immediately after the war -- we were surrounded by people who spoke Yiddish, in Łódź.  And certainly in Sweden in the house, there were people who were speaking Yiddish.  Whether -- how many of them spoke Polish to each other, I don't know.  I don't know whether she spoke Polish to Hannah or she spoke Yiddish to Hannah.  Same thing with Bolek.  But I do know 53:00that I understood it.  I don't know whether -- maybe I did speak it.  I don't know.  I definitely think I had a head start when I started the shule from the other kids.  At that point, it was a question now of reading and writing and speaking.  And I had enormous -- my mother had enormous pressure, first of all.  My mother continued always to speak to me in Polish.  I never spoke Yiddish in the house.  People always say I was a native Yiddish speaker; it's just not true.  In fact, I had and maintain a kind of phobia about Yiddish.  A lot of it stemmed from the -- there was enormous pressure on my mother and on me to speak Yiddish.  I was always -- I mean, you have to understand, I've been through Polish, Swedish, English, and now Yiddish, and now people wanted me to speak Yiddish.  And I was always afraid that I didn't speak it well, that I 54:00would make mistakes.  And I was embarrassed.  And I don't really know how well I spoke it at that time.  I just don't know.  Eventually, what happened was that my reading of it was much, much better than my speaking of it.  I didn't use it for a long time.  I moved awa-- I mean, I was living in Chicago, I was in graduate school, I was really focused on English.  I came back for a while and I switched careers and I was gonna go into Yiddish and I went to YIVO and I was studying -- doing sort of postdoc work there -- and I was teaching Yiddish in the summer program.  But even then, I had to really brush up on my grammar.  I mean, I didn't -- up until then, I had never formally looked at Yiddish grammar.  We had -- whatever I learned -- I mean, I didn't learn official grammar in shule or even in mitlshul.  But again, it was always -- I 55:00was very -- I've always felt very insecure.  I mean, Mordkhe Schaechter, who I adored as one of my teachers -- I thought he was one of the great teachers -- always said I -- told me I had -- that my Yiddish was fine and that I had just a complex and that I had to get over it.  (laughs) I don't think I've ever gotten over it.  I'm very self-conscious.  I don't know.  And I've sort of given up on working on it, because I feel like I -- I'm tired, I'm old, and I don't need to be anxious about things.  So, I could probably hold this interview in Yiddish, but I don't even want to think about it.  It just -- it's hard for me.  It's just -- part of it is -- well, a great part of it is just psychological.  And I sort of regret it.  I mean, it's sort of interesting -- I've always considered myself, like, bad in languages, but when I look back, you 56:00know, and I've thought now about sort of -- I think I was actually quite good in languages.  And it was funny, in my mother's apartment, one of the things I found was -- a couple of months after we came they sent me away to Workmen's Circle camp -- to the Arbeter Ring camp -- which was another terrible trauma, because I'd lost everybody in Sweden; now I lost my mother, too.  And they sent me because they said that -- they had those polio epidemics then, and they said it was safer to go out of town.  So, it was a very Yiddish-oriented camp.  Zalmen Mlotek's father, Yosl Mlotek, was the head counselor then, and Chana Mlotek, his mother, was, I think, the head counselor on the --

CW:  Was this Kinder Ring?

IK:  Yeah, this was Kinder Ring.  And so, I went there the first summer.  I mean, we arrive in April; in July, I'm stuck in this camp.  But what I found were these Yiddish -- I had apparently written Yiddish poems -- now I don't know I learned to even write Yiddish -- that Yosl sent to my mother and my mother 57:00kept.  So, I didn't even know these things existed until, like, a few months ago when I found them in my mother's apartment.  So, I don't really know.  I mean, I don't -- I'm surprised that I was actually writing in Yiddish.  'Cause I don't know whether I went to the shule or I learned it -- I mean, I had just gotten here, and I don't think I'd ever written a Yiddish word.  I had written a little bit in Polish with my mother's help, but I don't think I had ever written in Yiddish.  So anyway, I wrote some Yiddish poem that Yosl was just thrilled with (laughs) -- and sent it to my mother.  So, I'm very foggy about what it was like for me -- at that period.  I don't remember it.  I don't -- I certainly don't remember writing the poem.  I know my English was still bad; I mean, I was still struggling with it.  But it was -- I mean, that's the way to do it.  You send somebody away to an all English-speaking camp and nobody speaks to you in Polish or Yiddish and -- and you survive.  (laughs)

CW:  Do you remember when you started writing?

IK:  I started writing in high school.  I was a terrible English student; it was my worst subject.  But around sixteen, I became -- I had always been a reader, but at sixteen, something clicked in a way that it hadn't before, and it had much more meaning -- gave me -- I don't know why I read before, but at sixteen, something happened that made me realize that what I was reading had some impact and meaning and -- (laughs) and a world in a way that I hadn't before.  And so, I badly wanted -- I mean, I was kicked out of honors English 'cause I was so bad, and -- I think -- I mean, I always struggled with English.  That was the other thing about Yiddish that I want to put into perspective -- that English was very difficult for me, and I think it was all 59:00psychological.  I think I didn't want to come here, I didn't want to learn another language.  And it plagued me into graduate school.  I mean, I just did not understand English grammar.  But I also have to say that nobody took the trouble to sit down with me and really work on it, like, Why are you so terrible in this?  And I think writing secretly and writing poetry was a way of just -- I did want to express myself, but I didn't want anybody to tell me it was wrong.  I didn't want critiques.  I didn't want anything -- I just wanted to be left alone.  And that's when I started writing.  A lot of it was -- I don't even have it.  I mean, I remember looking at some of it; it was just junk.  But I think it was a way of -- there was a need, in some way, to sort of externalize and to try to articulate things.  And English would have been the only language that I would have tried it in.  There was no thought of doing it in Yiddish or anything like that.  I mean, I had been struggling with Yiddish 60:00-- I mean, with English -- for many, many years.  And that's where my battle was.  My language battle was really with English.

CW:  Were there writers that were particularly meaningful for you as you -- in that time when you were talking about at sixteen when the books started having a different meaning for you?  Are there writers you remember?

IK:  Well, one of the things -- I remember two things.  One of the things that I always liked was, I sort of liked the kind of Yiddish poetry of like, Morris Rosenfeld.  I liked somebody telling a story -- narrative.  I liked narrative in poetry.  And I liked what -- I just had a sort of mini-disagreement with somebody about characterizing somebody as -- some poet as folksy, which I think is a put-down, but I think the sort of folk writers always sort of impressed 61:00me.  And on the English side, the first -- I mean, I -- most of it was incomprehensible to me.  I remember reading "The Ancient Mariner" in the eighth grade and just having no clue what the hell it was about.  I mean, I didn't understand the language, I didn't understand the story, I didn't understand the Christian -- you know, anything about it.  But when I got to high school, I was introduced to Robert Browning's sort of dramatic monologues, and they intrigued me a lot -- the idea of somebody speaking, and kind of through their speech evokes an entire context and an entire story, even though it's just from one perspective.  So, I loved -- very early on, I liked Robert Browning's -- I liked that form -- which was not that far, really, from the form in Yiddish that I sort of liked.  So, that's -- I think that's sort of -- has stayed with me.  62:00I still like -- I think I write narrative poetry a lot -- not always, but predominantly.  I like things -- and I like, to some degree, the dramatic monologue.  I still like that thing of a voice kind of articulating something in a charged atmosphere somewhere.  So, that -- and I think both Browning and Rosenfeld are really -- there's something about the aural quality that I like.  And I think a lot of my own poetry is very aural.  And I -- even when I write, I will say it out loud to myself over and over again.  I want to hear it.  I want to hear how it sounds.  Not only -- I like to manipulate it on the page and how it looks, but I also want to be able to hear it.  And so, I think -- 63:00and I think sometimes people are surprised when they hear it, because they didn't read it the way I read -- the way I hear it and the way I read it.  So, I think that's stayed with me.  And I think it was a great -- a really great influence.

CW:  So, I'm curious about another part of your life -- about realizing you were a lesbian and when that happened and how it fits in with what we've been talking about.

IK:  Well, it fits in a l-- it's really interesting.  You know, one of the things that I remember very much about the second wave in general was the fear of Jewish community of feminism, for example, and that it was gonna push women away and we were gonna lose these women to -- you know, to feminism.  In fact, it was almost the opposite.  What happened was that feminists decided -- Jewish 64:00feminists decided to either reclaim some stuff or -- they pushed into the Jewish community rather than -- and people who had been outside of it, suddenly, women saw that there was a way in because of these other Jewish feminists.  I then became -- I experienced a lot of homophobia when I came out.  I came out around 1974.  And I had -- and during those middle years, I was sort of immersing myself in the YIVO, I was teaching in the summer program, and so on.  A number of things happened.  I experienced quite a bit of homophobia, and I withdrew.  And to some degree, I think -- I think, I don't really -- can't say -- at the time, I thought I had really turned my back on it.  But the opposite happened, because -- (laughs) because, you know, during the second wave, everybody was telling their story.  And my story -- a lot of people said, (gasps) This sounds 65:00so familiar!  I come from a somewhat similar, not exactly socialist -- Yeah, my parents spoke Yiddish -- or, Tell me some Yiddish women writers.  Well, I was -- I don't know any.  (laughs) Here I had all this -- I didn't know any.  So, in some ways, the fact that I got pushed into this -- they pushed me right back, in a way, because people wanted -- and here I was, talking about the Bund and so on, and I didn't know a thing.  So, that pushed me back into sort of researching.  And I remember going up to -- and Aaron will remember this, too -- when he was working with Sharon Kleinbaum -- like, 1980, '81, or whenever it was -- going up there when they were -- they didn't really even have a building.  I think they had everything in a Dumpster or -- I don't know what -- they were trying to sort things and it was just really the beginning.  And trying to find just -- give me a woman -- give me a book that looks like it's 66:00written by a woman -- (laughs) whose name looks like a woman; it's not an initial, but we know for a fact it's a woman.  And that was how, basically, it started.  And you know, I think Sharon wrote to me, because she knew I was out and she -- you know, and she said, "We'd like you to come up."  And blah, blah, blah.  And I did.  So, it was like I was pushed to do and look at things that I had not been told -- I mean, I was sort of -- every minority woman did this.  They went back to their communities and they said, Where are the women?  Let me see where they've been hidden, where they've been buried, who's forgotten, who should be remembered.  We all did that with our own communities of origin, and I did the same thing with the Yiddish.  And so, when I did with Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz -- when we did "The Tribe of Dina," we highlighted Fradel Shtok, who I'd never heard of before, and Kadia Molodowsky, who I had, but I didn't 67:00even know that she wrote prose.  And we published -- I translated two short stories by both of them.  And aside, I think, from Rokhl Korn, it was, like, the first time that these people's prose was being shown.  So, it -- in many ways, they're intimately connected.  And a lot of the people that were involved were gay; a lot of the women were lesbians.  And I think altogether -- I mean, the -- I think there's been a very large proportion of gays and lesbians in the Yiddishist movement.  I mean, I remember one time at KlezKamp in the '90s where -- I don't know why somebody said this -- they wanted a photograph or something and it was, like, during one of the meals, and they said, "Everybody who's gay and who wants to admit it should go in that corner."  And, like, half the dining room got up.  (laughs) And nobod-- we didn't even know (laughs) that there were that many.  (laughs) I didn't know.  I was, like, shocked.  (laughs) And so, I think it's interesting that gays were drawn to this -- Jewish 68:00gays were drawn to this particular legacy -- and have contributed just so much.  I have a photograph -- I don't know, maybe you can take a picture of it -- I don't remember what year it was, it was very early -- there's a photograph of me and Lorin Sklamberg and Yankl Salant and Jeff Shandler carrying this thing in a gay pride march called, I guess, "dos freylekhe folk [the gay people, lit. "the happy people"]" -- the gay -- you know, something -- and then in English, I think it says "Yiddish gays," or something.  I'll show you the photograph.  "Bridges" made it into a postcard.  So, it was interesting the way I moved away 69:00and then the way I got pushed back.  And I have to say, I mean -- there was a lot of resistance.  I think it wasn't -- there's an enormous amount of protectiveness -- of sort of like, the three classic writers.  You're not -- can't say that they were sexist.  Why?  I mean, why were they -- were they really, I mean, the only three men in the last century who were not sexist?  It just doesn't make any sense.  It doesn't matter if they wrote pro-women stuff; everybody wrote pro-women stuff.  How did they lead their lives?  What did they do about it?  I mean, we always say ant-- you know, we're all anti-racist, but we accept the fact that we can't always -- and we don't always put it into action, and it's very deeply ingrained.  And socialists and Bundists were very eager to get women out from under what they considered restrictions in the religion, but once women were out in the secular world, they experienced the 70:00same sexism.  (laughs) So, the resistance to criticizing, you know, sort of Yiddish literature as being hostile to women and/or not welcoming to women or not valuing women was very -- it was quite strong.  I mean, I remember somebody standing up -- who I will not mention by name -- but standing up and saying that the only people who are interested in gender are lesbians, for example.  I mean, this was at a Jewish, Yiddish -- I mean, it was ridiculous.  It was just silly.  But it was there.  And the resistance, I think, to -- you know, at the time, in the '80s and '90s, people did not say that they were feminists.  They would either say that I'm above the fray, I'm this, I'm that.  Now everybody's a feminist, you know?  Now it's okay.  But that wasn't so true.  And -- I 71:00don't know.  It was a hard time.  But it was also a very exciting time, because there were, like, people who were dying to have this information and who really embraced it.  I mean, "The Tribe of Dina" went -- the fact that you could have a secular book -- up until then, all Jewish feminist stuff had been sort of religiously or observance-oriented, and this wasn't.  That was one thing.  Then there was -- everybody said -- I mean, in reviews -- it was interesting -- they said that everybody -- that it was a gay anthology, which it wasn't.  I mean, Melanie and I were lesbians, but we had a lot of straight (laughs) -- we were not intending to have a lesbian anthology.  I think it gave people a way back -- women a way back -- for a lot of women -- who weren't interested in the Jewish feminist sort of religious revival or transformation, but were interested in the secular.  And I think we provided that for them.  72:00But I -- you know, I can't honestly say that that's the direction I had planned to go in.  I can't -- I mean, I think circumstances pushed me there.

CW:  So, I want to get the sequence a little bit.  So, you were in Chicago, and then you said that you sort of got interested in Yiddish and came and were working at YIVO, is that right?

IK:  No.  No, no, no.

CW:  No?

IK:  I got my -- I went to graduate school in Chicago and I came and I was hired at Long Island University here in Brooklyn.  I hadn't quite finished my dissertation, but I finished it that first year.  I had very bad luck with my graduate work.  I was getting my degree at a time when we were totally oversupplied; PhDs were totally oversupplied.  It was very difficult to get a job.  Me getting this job in New York was, like, a miracle.  I mean, it was the only interview I had, and I happened to get it.  And so, I was lucky.  73:00However, also at -- this is how forces influence your life.  LIU is a private school; people pay tuition.  While I was at LIU, the City University became an open college -- I mean, that's when they had open enrollment.  And so, naturally, LIU lost students, and naturally, they had to start cutting back.  I was there four years.  I probably would have gotten tenure; I don't know for sure -- not on the basis of scholarship, but I was beginning to publish, and I was lucky enough that that English department happened to value creative work, so a number of the writers -- I mean, which was good for me, 'cause I got exposed to published writers -- were there because of their creative writing, and it looked like that was gonna happen to me.  But because they were losing so many students, they started -- the whole school started cutting back on their untenured faculty.  And it was -- you know, last hired, first fired.  And so, 74:00after four years and having my degree and being pushed by them to get my degree, I lost the job.  So, I didn't know what to do with myself.  I went out and I -- for a year I lived in Montauk, New York.  I put together my first book of poetry there.  And that's when I came out, also.  And I came back and I joined a lesbian poetry group, which -- and eventually, some of us turned out to be more successful or more -- better known.  I got a job -- I needed a job, and Hannah, who had been with us in Sweden, was then secretary of YIVO -- offered me one of these jobs to work on "Image Before My Eyes."  They were doing a show and it was, like, to do captions or something.  And while I was there and was talking to some people -- and because of my background, because of the PhD, they said, Why don't you take the Max Weinreich program?  Not the Uriel Weinreich -- the summer thing -- but you should maybe go into that, too, and formalize your 75:00grammar, and maybe you could have a career here.  So, they put me into a postdoc program, and I did that for two years.

CW:  This is all in the '70s, right?

IK:  Yes.  This is like, '74 or '75.  And I started also -- they immediately put me into teaching.  I taught with -- co-taught with Chava Lapin.  It was very frightening to me because it was all a bit fast and a bit much, and given altogether my feelings about my own Yiddish -- but I didn't find it comfortable.  I mean, I had to be closeted.  At the time, I also started editing "Conditions" magazine, which was -- it was not a lesbian magazine, but the four of us were dykes -- but it became a very influential magazine.  And it was via this magazine that I was kind of outed.  It was a complicated thing.  But anyway, I decided to leave.  I thought I -- it was over.  It didn't 76:00work.  And --

CW:  At YIVO?

IK:  Yeah.  And so, I stopped.  I taught that last summer, and then that was it; I taught for three summers.  I don't even remember what -- I think -- oh yeah, I worked in that law office for a while.  I did all kinds of -- I could not -- I mean, at the time, I -- the only jobs that I could probably get -- and probably get fairly easily -- were in the South, and I, having just come out and being a Jew, I was not gonna go to the South.  I just didn't want to do it.  But I stood no chance of getting any job elsewhere.  And that went on for a very long time.  But by then, I was doing other things -- I was also publishing, so I was earning partly some living by doing readings, lectures, and also doing office work -- temp work -- I would get various things that I did -- 77:00secretary -- I did a lot of secretarial work -- before computers.  Once computers came in, I couldn't compete.  And that's when I -- I also became -- I was executive director of New Jewish Agenda for its last two years, and you know, I wrote -- I did some performance pieces with Adrienne Cooper and some of the Klezmatics.  We did "Bread and Candy: Songs of the Holocaust."  And then, Adrienne and Joyce Rosenzweig and I did "Zeyer eygn velt" -- "In Their Own Words" -- about Yiddish women poets and songwriters.  So, we did those at the Jewish Museum.  I mean, I did all that kind of thing.  And then, also in the '90s -- well, two things -- two big -- very big things.  One was writing the introduction to "Found Treasures," which took me almost, like, nine months -- I mean, it was a lot, a lot of research.  And the other thing was, I worked with 78:00National Jewish Council for two years on producing a women in Yiddish conference, a very big conference here in New York, which we had one night at Hunter College, and the next day it was at JTS.  So, those were very -- you know, in between that, I wrote articles for, you know, "Bridges," and I did translations and stuff like that.  But it was all very unmapped and unplanned and sort of ad hoc this and ad hoc that.  (laughs) Nothing particularly organized.

CW:  At what point did Yiddish come into your writing?

IK:  In the '80s, when I -- I've written about this -- I was rooming with Gloria Anzaldúa, who was a Chicana lesbian writer from Texas.  And we were 79:00teaching in a program in Santa Cruz -- a summer three-week -- I think it was a three-week program.  It was called Women's Voices, and it was about -- it was a writing program, basically.  It had, like, four teachers; we were two teachers, and we shared a suite at Santa Cruz.  And she always joked afterwards that the reason she really began to like me right away was that I looked like one of her uncles -- which I didn't know was very flattering, but that's what she said.  (laughs) She would say this at readings.  I don't know.  (laughs) I was kind of humiliated, but we talked a lot.  I mean, she's somebody that used Spanish enormously, and she had a very heavy Spanish accent, though she was born here.  And as someone once asked her, like, "When did your people come here?"  And she said, "Well, about five hundred years ago."  And -- (laughs) -- he was very offended.  So, I'm -- you know, we started talking, because she was using a lot of Spanish and stuff -- and I don't know, she -- you know, we had such very 80:00different backgrounds.  We sort of introduced ourselves to each other, and -- she did ask me how come I never used Yiddish, and I thought that was sort of an interesting (laughs) question, since it had never even occurred to me.  I mean, I think I used two Yiddish words up until then.  Like, in one poem I used the word "rebetsn [rabbi's wife]" and in the other poem I used "bashert [predestined]."  So, I started thinking about it, and I started thinking about using it in my poetry.  I know I'm known sort of for that.  I have very mixed feeling about it, because I feel it's almost -- it's almost in opposition.  I feel like poetry is something that you really want to just let go and let flow, and then see what it is, whereas in thinking about using Yiddish in it is already an interruption of that to some degree, because it's an intellect-- to 81:00some degree, it's an intellectual act, it's not natural.  But I did -- I have played around with it.  I have to say that I find it much easier -- and it hasn't been as visible -- I'm working now on a rather very long thing where it is quite visible.  It's much easier to do into prose, because you don't have that conflicting kind -- you do think much more about prose, and I also think about characters and how they speak and so on.  So, I am interested in that.  But it's not easy.  And it's not -- it's not natural.  I know people like it a lot.  (laughs) And they think I do it all the time, but I don't.  I mean, it's almost rare.  It has to click in some way.  Because you can't just -- I mean, introducing Yiddish into a poem is not a neutral thing.  It brings with it an 82:00enormous amount of baggage.  And in some ways, that could be just totally destructive of the poem you're trying to write, you know?  So, it's a very complicated process.  And there was a point, I think, when I was -- I mean, I think a lot of it was accelerated -- I took my first trip to Poland; it was in '83; it was the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  And I went with my mother -- the only time she returned.  And that had a profound effect on me, also.  I think that also pushed me more towards trying to reclaim a Yiddish legacy, because I was sort of very -- I was particularly moved by the cemeteries, which were -- the two larger cemeteries that I saw were in Łódź and in Warsaw.  And that, I think, also pushed me, because in some ways, that 83:00trip and those cemeteries made very clear to me the Holocaust in a way that it hadn't been before.  Because the tombstones reflected the life that had been sort of destroyed in a very concrete way.  I mean, you -- it wasn't abstract words; it wasn't a photograph; it was -- these were really burial places of actual people and an actual life.  And it was something -- I once said it was like looking at a negative -- instead of looking at the photograph, you're looking at the negative.  And that was very profound.  And all of that happened almost at the same time I had just -- a couple of years before that left YIVO; I had just then met Gloria; you know, it was all sort of a -- those early '80s years were very, very critical.  In some ways, it was like a critical mass of things happening at one time.  And it's hard to attribute this 84:00thing to that -- it was all -- it was all happening at once.  And it was -- I was also -- my second book had come out; I was better known.  People were pressing me: What should I read?  What do you know?  You know, and at that point, I started reading about the Bund.  I had never really read about the Bund; I just sort of absorbed it, and I started reading real books about the Bund.  (laughs) Because I felt like I was like this ignorant messiah or something.  (laughs) You know, that I couldn't just rely on my childhood memories about the Bund.  I really wanted to know more about it, and I wanted to be more responsible and more responsive.  And the same thing with the -- I mean, the Yiddi-- searching for Yiddish women writers was just great fun.  I mean, it was very pleasurable to be able to find this stuff, and to say, "Well, here are some things."  You know?  So, that was, I think, the '80s.  It was a 85:00mix of a lot of things, I think -- an integration, I think, of things that at the time I really wasn't that conscious of, even.  I was just kind of going with whatever happened to pop up at the -- and that was when I saw Aaron and Sharon -- it was also probably around '81, '82.  I'm not quite sure.  Maybe they'd remember it better.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:  So, we were talking about in --

IK:  Oh, the reading --

CW:  -- when you were going up to the Yiddish Book Center.

IK:  Yes.  I read -- I remember -- I believe that that was the first time that I read that my poem, "Etlekhe verter fun mame-loshn [A few words in the mother tongue]" -- which I think had been published, but I had never read it in public.  I mean, you know, one of -- there's a really big difference between being brave on paper and brave in life.  (laughs) And I remember -- this is -- I repeat this story, because it's so true; it's totally true.  I remember sitting there thinking -- there was this audience, and I'm thinking, Why did I 86:00have to say "lesbianke" four times in this poem?  Like, wouldn't it have been good enough to say it once?  Why do I have to go up and say this now (laughs) four times?  And I was really scared.  I mean, literally, with -- people don't realize, you know -- even now, people that experience and are afraid of homophobia -- I mean, your adrenaline goes, your heart rate goes, you're really scared.  So, I read it.  I did read it.  And -- nothing happened.  (laughs) In fact, if anything -- my experience with that poem has been that people react much more to the word "khurve," which is "whore."  I read that in a couple of synagogues and I thought the men were gonna faint when I said the word "khurve."  I mean, they sort of -- I don't know what they think about "lesbianke," but -- yeah.  But it -- I think -- my feeling was not off.  I 87:00mean, I think it was a good audience or they didn't care or it was a more progressive audience or whatever -- that it was a really -- it was a difficult time.  And being out was difficult.  I didn't have a choice about it.  It wasn't only that it was in my -- like, that poem, but it was in all my bios.  I mean, this was, like, a principle that you had to write a bi-- in your bio, you had to say that you were -- you just felt that that was part of -- part of your activism was being very public, if that's what you were gonna do.  And it was difficult.  I mean, my mother hated it.  My mother was very frightened of it.

CW:  Do you want to talk about that at all, about her reaction?

IK:  Well, she had a classic reaction, you know?  She said to me -- the way she put it was, "The world's not ready for this."  She was -- I think she was -- I think she was frightened just from her own life experience, she was frightened, as a survivor.  I think she also understood -- and she was right -- 88:00that she lived in a homophobic society and that she lived even in a homophobic community.  I mean, I was the -- I was the first person that was out -- I was the first one to do everything.  I was the first one who got a PhD in that group; I was the first one to come out.  And I think she was very embarrassed by it.  One of the things that I realized much later is, you know, when we came out -- when we would come out as individuals, it was our choice; our parents didn't have much choice about it.  You know, they had to just live with it.  And they didn't choose the moment or the time or the explanation or whatever.  But I think what -- ironically, I think what ended up happening is that more people had kids who had started coming out, and they ended up going to my mother.  My mother became the wise person of how to deal with your gay child.  (laughs) It was kind of funny.  So, in some ways, eventually, it gave her status.  (laughs) And I think she liked that.  But it wasn't a happy -- you 89:00know, it was not a happy piece of information.  She was very upset by it.  I think she wanted me to stay away for a while.  We had a lot of conflict around it.  It was not an easy process.  I think she came around.  I mean, one of the things that I did when I went to Poland this summer was, I insisted that there were lesbian -- because I know what's going on over there -- that I insisted that the word "lesbian" be in my bio.  And it was interesting -- in Kraków, three young people came up to me, one of them in tears, just ecstatic that I had done it, and that I actually -- I had talked about it.  I mean, they had -- somebody had asked me even about my mother and stuff, but that I had been standing on a platform and openly talking about it.  Now I don't -- I mean, I don't feel threatened doing it right now.  Maybe I should be.  (laughs) I don't know.  But at the time, it was not an easy process to come out in the Jewish community.  And very often, I voluntarily was a token.  I mean, I knew 90:00I was being used as a token.  But I think that that's also part of the process.  I think you allow yourself to be a token just so often, you know.  But I think it's part of a process of people getting adjusted and having a token out there that they can -- that makes it easier for somebody else not to be a token.  So, yeah.  It was not easy.  And it's not fun being a token, either, so.  (laughs) Yeah.

CW:  I wanted to ask a little more about this process that you alluded to of discovering some Yiddish female -- women writers -- Yiddish women writers.  Can you talk about how that worked?

IK:  I'm trying to remember.  Well, partly it worked by just looking at the books that Sharon or Chana Pollack showed me.  Chana Pollack was -- I met Chana 91:00up there originally, also.  I don't know if you've interviewed her.  You sh--

CW:  Not yet.

IK:  You've gotta.  And Myra, too.  Both of them.  I mean, Myra was from Hemshekh also, and Chana comes from a totally wacky back-- (laughs) different background.  So, that was part of the process.  And sort of checking -- I did a lot of cross-checking with the encyclopedias of who was written up.  Of course, Korman's "Yidishe dikhterins [Yiddish women poets]," which was this "Yiddish Poets" that came out in 1929, was also a resource.  And so, I did hunt around.  And also, you just kind of poked around and found stuff.  You know, like, I don't remember how I found Yente Serdatsky's -- I remember thinking that somebody alluded to her story -- the confession -- "Vide" -- they alluded to it, and it sounded to me like it might be a feminist story.  It was just, like -- 92:00just something -- and I went and searched for it and read it.  And I was right; it was a very feminist story.  So, I translated it and we had it in "Bridges" -- we put it into "Bridges."  So, that was -- it was very hit-or-miss, because I didn't have -- I was not an expert, first of all, in Yiddish literature to begin with.  But I mean, I was studying it and I was boning up on it, but I didn't have the total grasp of it.  And I certainly didn't know very much -- I also was interested in not only the writers; I was interested, like, in Bund activists.  And I started -- I have the complete -- I have a lot of Bund material here, both in Yiddish and English.  A lot of it is on the table over there because of this project now.  And so, I started going through "Doyeres bundistn," which is this three-volume -- you know, the translation is, I guess, "Generations of Bundists" -- of this -- incredible biographies of these people, 93:00and I started just looking at the women and who they were.  So, I did, like -- it was very gumshoe work, you know?  It's grungy work.  You just gotta turn a lot of pages, look at a lot of indices, mark down every time somebody's mentioned, look them up.  And this is before the internet, I mean, so it's a little bit easier now, but -- so that's how I did it.  I mean, I -- it was just hit-and-miss.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

IK:  I think I found out that Fradel Shtok had a collection of short stories, which were -- which I was able to get through the National Yiddish Book Center, and I just started looking for feminist stories, and I found them.  So, I mean, it was interesting.  It was -- I never -- I don't feel like I'm an expert in the field at all.  I mean, in many ways, I've stopped doing it -- now.  I've had sort of -- partly for personal reasons in the sense that I've had responsibilities -- for Judy and for my mother, and trying to teach at 94:00Barnard.  I've been really overwhelmed.  And I'm just getting back to stuff and trying to figure stuff out.  I mean, the new wrinkle sort of in my life is that when I was in Poland, some of my Polish came back -- because I hadn't been using it; I only had spoken Polish with my mother.  And it was sort of interesting for me to start using it again.  It's quite limited in the sense that I never read in Polish.  I mean, it didn't develop intellectually in any way, so if it wasn't said in my mother's kitchen, I don't know it.  But still, it was interesting for me to sort of have that pop back into my life in a way -- in a stronger way than Yiddish ever was, because I did speak it at home for many, many, many years with my mother.  And I have now a whole bunch of books -- yesterday I bought a -- when I was at Barnard for my class I went in and I got this workbook in Polish.  I sort of wanted to see if I could brush up on my 95:00Polish.  So, I feel now a little bit -- you know, when I was in Poland, people were pressing me to really sharpen and develop my Polish, and I said, "Well, what am I gonna do with my Yiddish?"  And they don't know what to say to that.  (laughs) So, right now, at the moment, I sort of feel like I'm being pulled in these two different directions, and frankly, I don't know where it's gonna end up.  I don't -- I don't know.  I'm not sure.  I think right now I want to finish what I'm working on, which is very much Yiddish-oriented, and then maybe take a step back and think about what I'm doing.  But it's an interesting dilemma that I didn't have before I left.  It never even occurred to me.  But, you know, when you start using a language and you hear a language, you start wanting to -- you start incorporating it in some way, and so it was very difficult to sort of just push it out and pretend it's not there.  We'll 96:00see.  (laughs) Tune in next week.  (laughs)

CW:  Could you talk a little bit more about the motivation for looking for these -- uncovering these women Yiddish writers?

IK:  Well, for one thing -- I mean, just on a -- I'm a person who's interested in history in general.  I think we should have accurate history, and I think we should look at people that have been erased, histories that have been erased.  It's what we could call the history that's never taught.  I mean, and the histories that's never taught is very, very -- like, here in the United States, it's just -- could fill volumes -- does fill volumes.  Other people have written it, but it's not the official history.  So, there's that.  And there's -- I feel like there's an erasure there.  Because it's a kind of paradox.  I 97:00mean, on the one hand, women in the Yiddish svive [scene] were very, very, very active.  One of the things that I experienced when I -- it was interesting to me that when I started looking for Yiddish -- for women Bundists and I started going through "Doyeres bundistn," I had one of those sort of Holocaust moments where I actually had to stop doing it.  I don't know, I'd gone through maybe fifteen, twenty -- like, the first ones.  I just did it alphabetically.  I just -- Okay, here's a woman, and I'm gonna read about her.  Here's the next one, and I'm gonna read -- I wasn't taking notes; I was just -- and it was incredible to me, reading them, the amount of energy that they had in establishing these schools, these libraries, these health centers, these children things.  I was just -- to the point that -- and I knew they had been 98:00all killed.  I mean, and I knew it had all been wiped out.  And it was like, I couldn't do it.  I mean, I had originally this idea that we would translate it and have a book of these women Bundists.  I don't know, it's still an idea I haven't totally let go of, but at the time that I did it -- which was probably about ten, fifteen years ago, I had to just stop reading, 'cause I couldn't take it.  I just could not take the fact that they were all sort of wiped out, because there was so much that they did.  And I feel like -- I mean, it's like anything.  I just -- with writers -- people -- on the one hand, women were discriminated against; I think there's a double discrimination.  Let me put it this way -- and this is what I argue with -- argue in the introduction to "Found Treasures" -- there's a double discrimination.  Women did publish, and they very often did their own publishing or they were associated with some men and they published, so they published work.  They, however, were not sort of viewed 99:00in the same way, and were not read with the same seriousness as men writers, and that could be seen in reviews and whatever.  That was one.  The other phase of that was the translation of Yiddish literature into English by the -- beginning with, like, Irving Howe, and that totally erased women, so it was even worse in English than it actually was in Yiddish.  (laughs) So there's, like, a double thing going on.  And I think -- I just think that that's horrendous.  I mean, I think it's terrible.  And I'm interested -- I'm very interested in that period.  I envy the interwar period in Poland.  Mainly -- I don't romanticize it.  I know exactly what happened and what was going on and all the forces that were -- the terrible forces.  But at the same time, I feel there was a kind of 100:00incredible energy there, and excitement of pos-- about the possibilities of what Jewish life could be that I really envy.  And there was an interaction in -- and so I'm very drawn to that period, and I want to know more about it.  I feel that it is my legacy.  I mean, if I -- not wanting to, you know, muddle things, but you know, the Bund was always -- was very strongly, before the war, anti-Zionist, and I was raised -- I don't know if I was raised anti-Zionist, because already by the time I was conscious, Israel already existed and the Bund made its peace with the fact that there was an Israel, but I never had the Zionist idea that I was -- that my home was there.  I always felt that my home was in Poland.  I felt that the home -- that my real home was that period, that 101:00sort of time -- geographic period of that time.  And that's the loss that I mourn, and that's the home that I feel I lost.  And that's where my legacy is.  And so, I want to -- I want to, first of all, make sure that it gets remembered.  I want to pass it on to other people.  I think it's useful.  I don't think it's anachronistic.  I don't think it's something -- you know, I hope people are not gonna come just to think, Oh, this is a very nice hiatus from the horrible circumstances in which we're living in on October twenty-second.  I hope it'll inspire -- I don't expect them to become Bundists, but I hope it'll give people a way of looking at things differently.  Because they lived in terrible times and we live in terrible times.  They're not exactly the same, but I know we despair a lot.  They didn't totally despair; they fought.  And I think it's important.  So, I -- I feel a -- I feel a kind 102:00of total debt to them, in some ways.  I mean, working even on this brochure with Danny Soyer has been very wonderful for me.  It's been -- the only thing I don't like about it is the pressure and the deadlines.  I can't stand it.  But the research and the putting it together has been just wonderful.  I've loved it.  It's one of the best things I could have done.  I feel like it's -- it's my homage to them, and I'm willing to give up my time and my energy for it.  I very much feel indebted to them.  I feel my world view is indebted to them; I feel my writing is indebted to them.  So, I want to -- I want others to see it, as well.

CW:  So, just the event that you're talking about is the --

IK:  October twenty-second, it's gonna be the anniversary of the founding of the Bund, which was in 1897 -- the 120th anniversary.  Founded in Vilna.

CW:  I want -- you alluded to translation, and you've done some translation 103:00from Yiddish.  Can you talk about how you came to the writers that -- I mean, to those translation projects and --

IK:  Well, I wanted -- I mean, this is always the block.  I mean, one of my essays I wrote at one point -- and Clare used this as a quote -- like, "Mother, mother, I want to follow in your footsteps, but I don't understand a word that you're saying."  And it's sort of (laughs) -- I sort of wanted them to understand what their mothers were saying.  It was interesting, because, you know, when I -- I think Yiddish translation has become more accepted and sort of respectable.  At the time when I started translating, people really argued with me and sort of put it down and said, You're putting the final nail in the coffin.  And I felt, no.  I felt that by translating, first of all, I made 104:00something accessible that was inaccessible and would remain inaccessible.  And in some cases, it actually inspired other people to learn Yiddish, by reading the -- then they said, I want to read the original and I want to read more.  What's not translated?  So, I mean, there was a tension in -- when I first started doing that.  I mean, I wasn't the only translator, so I don't want to -- but I did hear that from people, that I should be writing in Yiddish, I should be speaking Yiddish, I -- the last thing I should be doing is translating; that's the nail in the coffin.  And I don't agree with that.  I really don't.  I mean, I don't agree with that about anything.  I purposely -- I belong to websites that I get newsletters of international literature that's being translated into English.  I don't think enough stuff has been translated (laughs) into English.  And I feel that there's -- it's a reality that people don't know Yiddish, and if you want them to understand and if you want them to 105:00appreciate -- no, it's not like the real thing.  It never is.  But it's either you get this, or you get nothing.  And I feel that a good translation -- it's not the original -- gives you a lot.  It may not give you a hundred percent, but it gives you a lot.  And I think it's worth doing.  I definitely think it's worth doing.  I think more people should do it.  And I wish more stuff was available in English.  I mean, I wish I could put stuff in my classroom.  But I can't, unless it's translated.  And then, that means that students remain ignorant of it.  I don't think that that's a good option, you know?  So, that was sort of my motivation.  And people were in some ways indirectly saying, I'd like to read this stuff, but I can't.  I mean -- and I understood that.  I understood that.  It's not -- you know, I'm very restless, and I get bored very 106:00fast, and I move from thing to thing, and I don't stick -- I mean, it's not like -- I've translated -- I don't know if I would totally call -- I guess I'd call myself a translator, but it's not like it's a profession for me, any more than putting Yiddish into my poetry is the whole thing of my poetry.  You know, these are just things that enter your life.  They settle; they move away; they come back.  You know, it's not a straight line, by any means.

CW:  What was the impact for you personally of starting to read these books in Yiddish -- these writers, you know, sort of in this period that you're talking about?

IK:  I was just very taken aback.  I mean, I was surprised at the content, I was surprised at the feminism.  I shouldn't have been -- I mean, that was -- feminism was very much in the air, so to speak.  Countries were giving women 107:00their vote.  I mean, people -- everybody was, you know, sort of involved in it.  And it also -- so partly, it made me realize to what degree -- and I already knew this about American history or any other history -- the history that I had gotten was incomplete.  But that's not surprising.  You know, I try to tell my students -- you know, I said, "Nobody is ever all right.  They're never completely right."  And you want everybody to be right -- you look back, you know, on the second wave and they did this, and you look back on the suffragettes and they did that that was wrong, or they didn't do something and they should have.  Nobody's ever right -- you know, nobody gets it all right.  So, I accept that.  I think -- I accept that the Bund vision, as it was articulated, had its limitations.  I mean, to begin with, Yiddish was not the language of all the Jewish people.  (laughs) Just to begin there.  Socialist 108:00principles, maybe, yes, but not (laughs) Yiddish.  So, I think I'm mature enough to sort of accept that and just sort of say, No, they were wrong on that.  You know?  But that doesn't mean that they were wrong on everything, and it doesn't mean that they -- you have to throw 'em out.  So, I think the main thing was that I was both surprised at how much I found and also upset at how much was erased and ignored, and also about the limitations of possibility -- you know, opportunities.  I mean, somebody like Hinde now is really very expert -- I mean, she's much more expert on this field than I am.  She's done an enormous amount of research, really wonderful research.  And I'm really looking forward to seeing her.  We're going to spend a day talking about her dissertation.  But I mean, she's somebody who's really plugged away at something in a very, very focused way.  I've never done that.  I did that for 109:00maybe nine months for the introduction of "Found Treasures," but it's not anything I'm -- you know, I'm not invested.  I never wanted to really be a scholar.

CW:  I wanted to ask you about the languages that you know or have known -- and, you know, being Yiddish, Swedish, Polish, English -- and what these different languages represent or mean to you personally.

IK:  Well, Swedish is gone.  I mean, Swedish was gone within, like, six months, completely -- which is amazing, given that I still have -- I have on my bookshelf -- I have my Swedish psalm book, 'cause we used to say prayers in class.  So, I still have my Swe-- but I -- and even in the early '60s, when I saw my first Ingmar Bergman movie, it didn't even sound familiar.  I thought I would recognize stuff, but I didn't.  So, that went very -- and it's not surprising, because I -- even in Sweden, the fact that I could master it -- because nobody in the house spoke Swedish; I was the only one.  And here -- 110:00certainly, once we came here, I mean, I was totally cut off.  So, it was gone.  Period.  I think they mean -- I think, like I said before, I think Polish has sort of -- I don't know, maybe I regressed a little bit, because I so associate it with my mother and sort of my childhood.  Even though we talked -- way into my twenties and thirties, we still spoke -- maybe not consistently Polish, but a lot of Polish.  And I just -- and my mother had dementia, and so in the last, I don't know, seven, eight years, she didn't talk -- she had had a stroke; she couldn't talk that much.  She could talk a little bit.  She always responded.  I could tell just in her facial expressions that when I spoke to her in Polish, she just responded very differently.  And she was very fluent in English.  I mean, she had a job as an archivist and -- so there's something about this last trip to Poland and everybody pushing me (laughs) on Polish -- my 111:00broken Polish -- that's, I think, shifted something for me, and I'm not sure what yet.  Partly also because I've been so busy with this Bund thing that I haven't even had time to process the trip, because the second I came back, I was deep into this immediately, and now I'm also deep into school.  So, it's like, I'm waiting for this thing to go to the printer, and then I'll only have school, I think -- I hope -- to try to figure out -- I mean, I have a lot of Polish books here suddenly.  At the same time, I got the new Polish -- I got the new English-Yiddish dictionary.  I mean, it's just -- I don't know.  It's a big mishmash right at the moment.  Though I have to say, I think English remains central.  Sort of -- that's my core.  What this other stuff means, I don't know.  I really don't know.  I bought a lot of -- one of the nice things I like to do is to get bilingual books, both in Yiddish and now in Polish.  I brought a number of bilingual books home.  I have, like, poetry which is in 112:00Polish on one side and English on the other.  And that's sort of an interesting way, also, for me to think about poetry and look at things.  So, I don't really know.  I feel like at the very old age of seventy-six, I'm at a linguistic crossroad.  I don't know what -- (laughs) where to go somehow.  It was very -- I mean, I was in Poland for almost four weeks.  It's a very long time, you know?  So, it was interesting.  It's interesting.  I don't know.  I don't have an answer for you -- except that the Swedish is totally gone, and the other two, they're hanging around.  (laughs)

CW:  I want to circle back to the connection that you mentioned between, you know, Yiddish and the fact that -- you know, people often draw a connection between -- you know, talk about queer Yiddish or, you know, the involvement of a lot of LGBTQ people in the Yiddish field.  Do you have a theory on that or a 113:00take on that?

IK:  I don't really -- I've thought about it and I've sort of watched it.  I mean, the fact that so many gays are in the music -- for example, if you go up to KlezKanada -- I mean, the klezmer phenomenon is -- a lot of it is very gay and queer.  And it's -- I don't know.  I think that one of the things -- though I -- I do think there's a trend within this now where people are more observant than they were originally when this whole thing started.  I think there's a new kind of element of more observant Yiddishists, which used to be a sort of -- you couldn't have it, you know?  But I think on the whole, the 114:00original, I think, attraction -- there were two attractions, I think, that the Yiddish and secularism -- specifically Yiddish secularism, I think, is -- more than just the language, it was the draw -- was that I think there was -- American Jewish communities are so shut down on certain politics, especially around Israel and stuff, that I think this created a space where in fact they could associate with a legitimate Jewish, Yiddish, identifiable, not self-hating phenomenon that was not necessarily anti-Israel but not strongly Israel-centered and not strongly Israel -- you know, kind of -- bound.  I don't know what word to use.  And it also -- I think, at the time, before there was a lot of -- I 115:00mean, when sort of gay synagogues sprouted, but before, it became a Jewish place where you could go to with acceptance.  And I think there is something about a kind of rebelliousness about the whole Yiddish -- sort of there's an upstart kind of feeling -- that I think gays tapped into.  I think it's kind of interesting that they tapped into a kind of joyous -- I don't mean this now as happy, but that they tapped into literature and music and they didn't totally bury themselves in the Holocaust.  I mean, there -- it seems to me that there are sort of multiple American Jewish identities.  One is the Zionist identity -- that I'm a Jew because I'm a Zionist, and I don't have to do anything else, 116:00but I can support Israel and I'm a Jew.  And then, there's the observant one -- the one that's -- you know, you go to the synagogue.  And the secularists -- I mean, when my -- when I first wrote my essay, "Secular Jewish Identity: Yiddishkayt in America" in "Tribe of Dina," which was, like, in, I don't know, '83, '84, people came up to me and said, I didn't realize I was a secularist.  I mean, it was not an identifiable -- whereas, like, in interwar Poland, "veltlekhkayt [secularism, lit. "worldliness"]" was, like, the word.  (laughs) Here, people didn't even know that -- they couldn't even say -- they didn't say -- I didn't know I was secular -- I mean, Thank you for the essay, I didn't know I was secular.  So, I think there was that.  But there was also this other identity which had to do with the Holocaust, and it had to do with either identifying yourself as a survivor or identifying yourself as the first 117:00generation or second and now third, where your identity is Jewish because of your connection to the Holocaust.  And people didn't want that either.  This other thing was music, literature -- and the literature -- it wasn't always happy music, it wasn't always happy literature, but that's the affirmative -- I mean, the arts, I think, are very affirming -- affirming, even when they're depressing (laughs) if you know what I mean.  So, I think there was that option -- that became an option of identification, in a way that Bundism -- sort of cultural -- was.  And I think together with that history of feeling that doikayt [Bundist concept of "hereness"] -- you know, hereness -- is something that's here, now, was very appealing.  In some ways -- if you think about it in 118:00the '80s, by skipping back two generations, they were into interwar Poland.  They were sort of tapping into that.  I don't know.  None of that is very conscious, but when I thought about it, I really -- I do think there are these very big forms of identifications that are not culturally necessarily bound that I think Yiddish does provide that identification for people.  And they don't have to go to synagogue, they don't have to necessarily support Israel, they don't have to necessarily attach themselves to the Holocaust, but they can still identify very strongly as Jews and feel like they have a place and a space and a historical time.  So, I think that that was one of the appeals.  I think it was -- and because they weren't, to begin with, welcome in any of these other places to begin with, that was a good place to go.  You know, 'cause -- so they 119:00created their own space, in some ways.  And that's in effect what we did.  We created -- wherever we were rejected, we created our own space.  You know, if Yiddish institutions didn't want gays and lesbians, then we created Yiddish gay institutions.  (laughs) It was that simple.

CW:  I want to ask a specific question about -- not -- sort of as a sidebar here, but about the Yiddish Book Center.  When you first encountered it, what was your first impression when you went up there?

IK:  Well, I -- it was all a lot of books.  (laughs) And they were all unorganized.  (laughs) And Sharon was looking for women -- I don't even remember.  It was just -- I didn't -- it was just -- you know, he had all these stories that he was running around picking up books from places.  (laughs) I 120:00certainly didn't think -- I mean, who knows.  It's like the gay and lesbian movement -- I mean, we didn't know where it was gonna go.  It was like a Bund -- thirteen people get together, and then they take over the world.  You see the beginning of -- I mean, I always tell my students -- I mean, my students always -- when they want to talk about activism, are always worried that they're not -- you know, Well, we only have four or five people.  And I tell them, "Don't worry about that."  You know, four or five people can do a lot.  And you don't know where you're gonna end up.  And I think -- I thought it was a project.  I didn't think it was gonna fail; I didn't think it was gonna succeed.  I thought it was another project that somebody was working on.  I thought it was an interesting -- I mean, I think it made me conscious, also, about the fact that -- I also -- I have that whole bookcase over there now of Yiddish books that I don't know what to do with.  I'm thinking of -- you know, as I said when you walked in, I gotta get rid of these books, 'cause they're driving me nuts.  But what to do with the Yiddish books is a whole other 121:00thing.  Some of them came from the National Yiddish Book Center and they may go back to the National Yiddish Book Center.  So no, I didn't -- I mean, I thought it was an interesting project.  It made me very conscious of something I had already started being conscious of -- vaguely -- what was gonna happen to all of this.  I mean, I think for decades, I just took for granted that everything was gonna be exactly as it was in the '50s, and that Chaim Grade, who lived in my neighborhood, would come down the street, and I would bump into him, and the "Forverts" would come out every day -- the Yiddish "Forverts" -- I just assumed (UNCLEAR) was gonna be there.  And then, one day I woke up and realized half of it was already gone and the other half was fading fast.  So, I think that was another indication to me that there was a real problem.  Did I know it was 122:00gonna succeed?  No.  And I didn't necessarily think it was gonna fail, either.  I just thought it was a project.  And he did incredible.  (laughs)

CW:  Yeah.  Well, I want to just look here to see if there's anything else I particularly wanted to ask you about, but are there things that have -- stories that have come up that I might not know to ask or things that you want to add to what -- all of this we've been talking about?

IK:  No.  The only thing that's been a big part of my life that we haven't touched on -- which isn't directly connected to it, though I think in some ways, it is -- is that I was -- I did teach, and I may start again next semester, for ten years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.  And I always sort of considered that part of -- I don't know where the desire came to do that.  It's 123:00something that I really love doing, and it -- you know, it made me see and opened up a whole part of sort of American justice system and society.  But I felt it was very much in keeping sort of with my Bundist connection, even though it had nothing to do with Yiddish or Jews necessarily, or anything else.  But it did have a lot to do with fairness and justice.  And so, I don't know.  It never -- it doesn't come up, because it doesn't -- it seems so out of the way, but I think it was a very important part of my life.  I hated to give it up, but it's too far and I had too many obligations and --

CW:  What did you teach?

IK:  I taught women's studies and English and literature.  They had a -- they still do -- they have a college granting degree program.  And I came in when they had a master's program, and then they stopped that, and then I went into the college program -- and liked doing it a lot.  At Barnard, I only teach -- I 124:00teach Jewish women's courses.  That's sort of my niche; that's what I'm supposed to teach.  So, I had more freedom to sort of teach different things when I was up there.  And I just -- I think it's very important to always remember these people and not -- I mean, they're so invisible that -- so, that's about the only thing that was a major -- that I thought -- I'm putting a lot of time and effort.

CW:  I'm curious about your students and what you see as sort of the future for --

IK:  You mean at Barnard?

CW:  I'm just -- I mean, you have students in various contexts, but I'm thinking -- sort of, I guess, focusing on the Yiddish field, what you see sort 125:00of happening now -- trends or the future?

IK:  You know, I don't really get students that much around Yiddish, because I teach mainly -- I mean, Agi's the person to really talk about this.  And also -- I don't know -- did you talk to Paula Teitelbaum?  Yeah.  And my -- I've taught some stories in translation in my courses.  I teach American Jewish women writers from 1900 till the present, and I teach three courses in sequence.  And especially in the first part, I taught -- I teach a number of short stories, translated from "Found Treasures" and a couple of other places, that are from that period, because I consider them part of American Jewish literature.  And they're usually -- and they're probably the only contacts that some of these students have with anything Yiddish, and it's in English.  (laughs) And so, I don't know.  Sometimes I get -- some of Agi's students come 126:00into my courses.  They're not -- I find my students incredibly ignorant about secularism.  I had a very -- I mean, to them, Jewishness is observance, and probably Israel, though we don't get into it -- I try not to get into it too much, because it's so -- such a knotted thing, and it's not appropriate necessarily for the books that we're reading.  But I'll give you an example.  One of the books that I teach is Amy Bloom's "Away."  I don't know if you've read it.  It's a sort of very strongly feminist -- she wrote it recently; it's, like, two or three years old -- feminist story -- immigrant story -- sort of in the '20s, I think.  Yeah, it's in the '20s.  And it's about a woman -- it's an immigrant woman's story.  And it's about a woman who survives a pogrom and she 127:00loses her husband and her family and her kid.  And she's very observant, but she comes to New York and she gets involved in this whole Yiddish theater scene, which is the whole first part of the book.  And basically, then she leaves, because somebody tells her that her daughter survived, and then she wants to get back to Russia.  So, she goes -- does this trek across the United States, and she's gonna get to Russia via California.  So, it was very interesting to me that my students were very concerned about whether she gave up her Jewish belief -- or her Jewish faith.  And there are, like, two episodes in the book where she sort of says either a prayer suddenly or something about God -- just, like, 128:00two.  And they were totally fixated on these two episodes.  And the first seventy-five pages -- which is about the Yiddish theater, and where the characters speak only Yiddish -- was never mentioned.  Because they didn't see that as kind of Jewishness.  I mean, it was mind-boggling to me.  (laughs) Not completely, because I've come across -- but that's a very good indication of -- that they saw more significance in those two outbursts of, "Oh my God" or saying a prayer for it -- maybe it was a Kaddish because there was a body -- I don't remember.  But it was just very small, compared to this entire time that -- when she comes here, she embeds herself in the Yiddish-speaking community.  And so, when I first came to Barnard, my very first semester, I had a student -- and 129:00I was totally unknown to them -- who had an argument with me about how anybody could be Jewish and not go to synagogue.  And that's a very prevalent idea.  They don't really understand what secular Jewishness is.  They know the word "secular" and they associate it with non-Jewishness.  You become secularized when you become non-- you know, when you're a non-Jew, you're secular.  But they don't understand that there's another way of identifying.  And that's very depressing.  And I feel that one of the -- I feel worried about the observant end of what's happening with Yiddish is gonna reinforce that in some way.  I don't know whether it will or not, but that worries me a little bit.  Because I feel like it should be viewed as a separate thing.  So, I don't think my 130:00students know very much.  And they -- in fact -- I mean, I think Jewish education is very appalling, and a lot of my students have had twelve years of Jewish education and their ignorance is just -- about Jewishness -- is, like, unbelievable.  I had a class where I asked the students -- they're very -- all interested -- incredibly -- in the Holocaust.  They've been to Israel endless times.  But when they read something that involved the Holocaust and I asked them -- this was a mixed class.  There were two non-Jews, ten Jews of mixed backgrounds, and at least six or seven with complete Jewish educations -- twelve before Barnard.  And I asked them what event and what was the date that World War II started.  Not one -- not one person in that class -- Jew, non-Jew, 131:00anybody -- knew.  They knew about camps.  They knew about -- they knew the number six million.  But when I asked them what was the largest Jewish community that was destroyed in World War II, they didn't know.  So, they don't know who the six million are.  I'm just appalled.  And I don't know what their education is if they don't know when the war star-- I mean, if they don't know when the war started and who the Jews were, and they just know a number, six million, it's just -- not good.  (laughs) It's scary.  It scares me.  But I don't think they're very much different than any -- if you went into a public school, I think -- history education is just at one of its lowest low, I think, in the country, so maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on them.  I don't know.  But I was really stunned.  I was really stunned.

CW:  Well, I want to break and look at some books and photos and things.

IK:  Oh, sure.

CW:  But I just want to thank you first of all --

IK:  Oh!

CW:  -- for taking this time --

IK:  Oh, well, thank you.  They were good questions.

CW:  -- to share all of this with us.

[END OF INTERVIEW]