Transcript of conversation between Barry Lenson and Judy Kipnis. 12/11/99 in New York City.

Judy Kipnis was the wife of Igor Kipnis. She was close to her father-in-law Alexander Kipnis. In the following transcript, which is lightly edited, she and Lenson discuss details of Kipnis’s early and later life. There is valuable information here for readers who are interested in the personal life and beliefs of Kipnis. 

JK: Before I get into any complication, there’s also something very odd about information about Sasha’s childhood. His mother was very defensive about it. Igor is very defensive about it for some reason. And now that I have learned a great deal more about ghettos and shtetls in Eastern Europe, there’s a lot of it that doesn’t make too much sense. On the other hand, we’re not writing an 800-page biography. And this is an introduction to a lot of information about that, so, I think within the confines of the project, it can be contained. 

The thing that doesn’t make sense has to do with being Jewish. When Sasha was growing up, he lived in a combination ghetto/shtetl in Zhitomir in Ukraine. Thousands and thousands and thousands and millions of people have lived in exactly the same situation in exactly the same circumstances. 

BL: That’s actually where my dad’s family started out also.

JK: Well, so then you know what this was like. Sasha never had a good word to say about it. And while I know living in dire poverty is not something that you rave about, there are good times. There are shabbat celebrations. There are the holidays. There are all kinds of special occasions and first day at schools, at shul, and all kinds of stuff at the cheder, and none of this did Sasha ever talk about. I didn’t know enough to ask the right questions, and that’s unfortunate. I did ask what he ate and what he did and how he lived and what his father did. And I got the impression that they lived on the margin of their Jewish society. 

BL: You mean. . .

JK: At the margin, both economically and culturally. There don’t seem to have been any village happenings that Sasha took part in. He didn’t seem to go to the synagogue with his father. In fact, one thing he mentioned over and over again as the very bad relationship he had with his father. His father was a very severe man. He never smiled. He never played with anybody. Well, I can understand that. He was always studying Torah and he, I guess, tried to teach Sasha, but was not a good teacher. He wasn’t home a great deal of the time. That’s common, no matter what kind of a Jew you are.

I begin to wonder, possibly in Zhitomir, he wasn’t a chasid. They had the court there. And it would probably have been the main Judaism of the place. Chasids are generally looked down upon by mitnadvim and if the main Jewishness of the place was midnadvim, he wouldn’t have been included. Sasha said he had one year of schooling. That’s almost impossible, because the very, very poor were subsidized in their education at least up through the elementary school for the young, from three or five up through seven or eight. They would be subsidized by the community, and Sasha had a lot of subsidy by the community in other places as he was going on to become a singer.

So for some reason, he didn’t have this. Because if he only had one year, and the family couldn’t afford any more, nobody subsidized him, what I have to ask is, why? Very unusual for a young Jewish boy not to be educated. Sasha was not an uneducated person either. He could read Hebrew, not terribly well, but neither can I. (Laughs) Although I can read some of it. You know, Yiddish, because that’s what they used. He could read Yiddish and apparently had no difficulty reading Yiddish. Whenever I saw him with a Yiddish newspaper, which was seldom. He knew Russian, which of course he picked up after he left. German was the family language, which he was fluent in. 

BL: So German was. . . used in the home?

[BL: We got mixed up here on the generations; JK meant to say that AK and MK used German in their home, not in AK’s childhood home in Zhitomir.]

JK: They used German. And that was because they spent the longest time at the beginning of their marriage in Germany, which I will get to.

BL: His parents?

JK: His parents, yes. He sang at Berlin Opera.

BL: Oh, I know, but. . .

JK: Igor and his parents were there until, they came back and forth, because Mildy’s parents lived in Chicago.

BL: Okay, sure, I just got displaced by a generation . . .

JK: No, no. What happened with his parents. Well, he told me all about, first of all, all about the house that they lived in. And I gather it was a kind of a hut, maybe a two- or three-room hut, which is odd for a city like Zhitomir. But it had a dirt floor. And they lived in one room of it. And there was himself and, I think, he had two sisters and a brother. Which I may have wrong, since this was a while ago. And Igor’s got accurate information on that. 

His father’s name was Yeshua, and he always went by nickname, which was Shuya. For a long time, Sasha wouldn’t tell me that his name was Yeshua, because that of course means Jesus, or Joshua. And he was very unhappy with that, I think. He didn’t want me to get the impression that maybe they were Christian. (Laughs heartily.) He didn’t want me to get the impression they were Jewish, either. And he helped his mother a lot, doing some gardening. I guess they grew nothing but turnips. Because whenever we had Thanksgiving dinner, it was traditional in my family to have yellow turnips, and Sasha would not eat the turnips. We always had peas for Sasha. They would sort of, they’d get very cheap meat like veal’s head or some fatty chunk that nobody else wanted. He would go and fish in the stream there in the Sthetl and he’d bring home fish for supper, which he always loved. Always loved fish. 

And he said his mother had to work extremely hard. I’m sure she did. All those women did. There was something odd in that his father didn’t want his mother, or his sisters, to work. This is very odd, because Jewish women were expected to generally have some kind of cottage industry in which they would bring in some money. 

BL: Sure.

JK: There are some stories about that which I think are on the tape. Something to do with his sister and a sewing machine. Somehow she had saved up for and his father wouldn’t let her use it to make clothes to sew. Why this should be, I do not know. There is a streak in both Chasidism and mitnadim where you trust God to the point of being provided for without doing anything. 

These and. . . few and far between to the extent that you wouldn’t let somebody work. I just, I think it’s an odd fact and maybe Sasha’s singling out one particular thing, he was mad because she used the money to buy the machine or some other thing. I don’t know. You can probably make sense of these things too, because your father came from a similar place. 

He had no fond memories of any of the celebrations. In fact, he seemed to think being Jewish was a rather poor, broken-down thing to be. And he would never celebrate any of them at home. When I was married, thought, “Oh goody, now we can have Succoth and we can have . . .and we can do Seders and all of these wonderful things.” And have a happy bicultural family. Well, nothing doing. They literally had nothing in the home that was Jewish. Except for a mezzuzah which someone had given to him, that he put on the door to the living room.

BL: This was later.

JK: Later. He had a very poor opinion of anybody who converted to Christianity because he assumed it was just because they wanted to get a better job. 

BL: Currying favor.

JK: Something like that.  On the other hand, I can understand in Nazi Germany why you wouldn’t be Jewish. Perfectly, perfectly clear. But this apparently was such a, whatever was happened in his childhood, the memory of it was so dreadful that he just simply wanted nothing whatsoever to do with this kind of religion. Now, of course, it was very different from American Judaism. But there was nothing about it that he had any fond memories about at all. It was a lot of hard work on his mother, on the family. His father was busy studying Torah and not paying any attention to their needs. He did have a cart which he moved, he was a moving man. He had a two-wheeled cart which he moved goods from one place to another. And that was what they survived on, as far as I can tell. 

His father died when Sasha was twelve years old, of pneumonia. 

BL: That I did read.

JK: That left Sasha having to make money for the household. He was a boy soprano and, now this sounds more like mitnadim, because if he sang in synagogue services as a boy soprano, he would have been in the choir and done solos. Not be chasidic. So there’s all these contradictory things. 

BL: Maybe it was matter of getting a job. . .

JK: My impression he would get a job where he could get a job. He also took up carpentry, particularly when his voice changed. And did some kind of, with furniture. That kind of thing. He became fascinated by Jewish theater. There were traveling troops around. And at some point, while his voice was changing, he became attached to one of these traveling troupes. And he went quite far afield. 

BL: Traveling with them.

JK: Yeah. Yeah. And he’d send money home to his mother.

BL: So this was the beginning of the unraveling of the (inaudible).

JK: When his voice came back in, he was a baritone. And a very good one. His mother apparently had some kind of a good voice. And she would sing to him Schubert songs. Thing like. And she particularly liked to sing Leiermann. 

BL: Winterreise.

JK: Winterreise, yeah. And there’s a piece of information which I didn’t get from Sasha, but which Igor has. See, I don’t know. I think you better interview Igor too, because I’m not sure how much of this is written down. His mother was said to have come from a much better family and married beneath her. 

BL: Judging from my father’s family, that seems to be something that was said in a lot of families too.

JK: I mean, who knows? Anyhow, she married beneath and her family wouldn’t have anything to do with her. So they cut her off. But that’s where she got her knowledge of music. If that’s true, I don’t know.

BL: Well if somebody knows Leiermann, sitting in the middle of a Shtetl in Zhitomir, that comes from someplace.

JK: I think so. It does come from someplace. There are other Kipnises. Now . . .one of her daughters went to Kiev and married a judge. So this . . .

BL: Meaning one of whose sisters?

JK: Sasha’s sister. And in fact, Igor was instrumental in bringing her son and his family over to the United States a couple of years ago. So as Sasha went roaming with his theater group and when it was noticed he had a good voice, the underground, now I don’t know what the Jewish underground consisted of in these times, but apparently if somebody needed to leave the Shtetl and go someplace else to study, there were people they could stay with and their studies would be subsidized.  So when he got into that network, apparently everything went very well for him. Well he ended up in Warsaw, but there were placed in between which I am not altogether certain about. Igor has something on that. Sasha was always a very hard worker and he always made a part of his living singing in synagogues as a cantor finally. And in fact, I think at various periods that was his main occupation. And he ended up in Warsaw, presumably at the conservatory and said that he majored as a bandmaster because they didn’t’ have something in singing. Again, Igor knows more about this period. 

In his. . . he apparently took very little out of his early life and what is with him, he just wanted to get rid of the whole thing. And when he was in Germany, which is where he went after Warsaw, he was singing in the synagogue there and having free vocal lessons from a man named Grenzebach who. . .and he wrote to his mother now that he had a little more money that he would send her things. And I think he wanted her to come and join him, and she wouldn’t. Or he wanted to help set the family up with some work or something so they could better their lot, and they wouldn’t. I don’t know precisely what went wrong, but he never was in contact with her again. Just cut the whole part of his life out. They were massacred by the Nazis when they went through Zhitomir, just lined them up and shot them and dumped in a trench. That’s what happened to his mother and I think there was one sister who stayed in Zhitomir. The other sister married the judge in Kiev and 

BL: A Jewish person, the judge?

JK: I don’t know. We have a picture of him. He had a little black mustache. I don’t know if he was non-Jewish or not. I never thought of that. 

BL: So this would have been about when?

JK: She was younger than Sasha. So, and he was twelve so I don’t know, how much younger, she probably wasn’t that much younger, a couple of years. Well, pre-revolution, sure. 

BL: So probably would not have been a Jewish judge?

JK: Well you know, we never have discussed this and her son had a stroke. I don’t know how compos he is. He lived in Brooklyn. Hum. There is a man in Minneapolis who has been doing a lot of research on the Kipnises. He has done a lot of stuff that is helpful . . .Sasha’s brother went, I think he went in the army eventually. I don’t know how he did that either, being Jewish. But anyway, he had a son who died right after the Second World War, somewhere in the Urals of leukemia. That piece of information came through. 

Anyway, once Sasha got to Germany, that’s where he built up his career and that’s not necessarily something that I need to get involved in, because I’ll come up with the wrong date and everybody will swear at me. But his voice was of such an exceedingly high calibre that he was immediately taken up and began to make a living. And he didn’t marry Igor’s mother until he was in his early thirties. And she was very young. She was a lot younger than he was. And he had already started getting citizenship papers because his future mother-in-law was very good at all the arrangements and she said, “This is what you’re going to need, and you have to do it this way. . .” So she brought the whole business. . .

BL: For. . .

JK: Well, for Sasha. He came to the United States with a touring company from Germany in the twenties. And that was when he met Igor’s mother. And that apparently, she thought he was a good prospect for a son-in-law, so she was getting his citizenship papers in order so that he because a citizen at 30. . . 31? Because Igor came into this country on a Russian passport, they didn’t register him at the American consulate, I don’t know why not, because Igor’s mother was an American. And Sasha was still traveling on a Russian. . . passport at that point.

BL: I need to ask too, and you can come back to this at another point. Did he talk much . . . the Warsaw years seem to be a little bit of a void in terms of what kinds of things. . .

JK: It’s very odd, because when Igor was in Warsaw last, it was a couple of years, he went and looked on all the papers there, and there was no record of his father having been a student there. So the question is, did he study at the Conservatory, or was it someplace else. Could have been. He studied to be a bandmaster, that he told me. Not singing. And he had private singing lessons for nothing, and he sang in the Synagogue for money. And that’s about all we know. . .

BL: Yes. It’s funny. I think you can make the assumption based on what was going on in Warsaw during those years, because obviously it was an important musical capital. I think it’s a safe assumption that he was going to the concerts and hearing the traveling singers. 

JK: If he could afford it and get free tickets. Because obviously, he was dirt poor.

BL: One of the puzzles is how he became such a cultured and fully-developed musician, being from the background that he was from.

JK: He spent some time traveling in Russia after he left the, the touring company. And he was in Saint Petersburg at one point. I think, yes, he did expose himself. He always loved, he said to me that he always loved any kind of music that he could hear, particularly classical music. And she, I gather, encouraged him very much in this. I think she was the force behind him going out to study voice. And it may have been friends of her family that got him started, too. Uh, he didn’t say that, so I don’t know. But I think she had a lot to do with it. And he may have visited with her family and picked up some things that I have no way of knowing. 

BL: Well, it clearly came from somewhere.

JK: Well, she would be the one. It didn’t come from his father. He was studying Torah. So. Yes I think it came from her, and I think she encouraged it a lot and knew people and we don’t know anything about that, that particular. Unless he’s mentioned something on his tapes. Now I don’t know, again, what’s on those tapes because I haven’t heard all of them. But I think he mentions quite a bit of things in this period, which might be helpful.

So this his how you make your living, by getting embroiled in book writing?

Sasha seemed to feel that his career was a miracle. That he, well he wouldn’t go so far as to say he was born under a lucky star, but whatever you say, from Shtels, that . . . and he had this special guardian angel that saw to it that everything worked out well for him. And when he went to Germany, outside of the time when he sang in synagogue because he had to make money, as soon as he began singing in repertory opera companies, which was after the first World War, he was interned as an alien. And as soon as he stopped singing in the synagogues, I don’t think he ever went in one again. I mean, except for special occasions. He certainly dropped his Jewishness, and he was a religious man. But just why it is hard to put the two together. I discovered when trying to talk to him about, let’s have a Seder or something like that, that he really didn’t know how it was put together, or what the pieces were. And it was naturally embarrassing if I did. So I had to be very careful. He had no desire to do that. 

And when I came time for Igor and my son to be baptized, because I’m not Jewish, and I figured, well if we’re not going to have a mixed household, we have to have something. Sasha didn’t like that. Now I explained that my relatives and ancestors back practically past the middle ages had been Christian, and that was the only thing I knew. And that if we were going to have any religion in the house at all, since he wasn’t doing anything, I had to do something. Well, he finally accepted that. I pointed out that after all, Jesus was Jewish and lot had happened in between Jesus and now, between Christians and Jews, but I didn’t think you could blame Jesus for that. So it, you know, it sort of . . . he lived with that. But at the end of his life, when our son Jeremy was getting around 12 and 13, he said, “Oh, very soon it’s time for your Bar Mitzvah.”
(inaudible) . . . . Grandpa’s getting old. He was about to be confirmed. And I finally said, “Play along with him, he got confused.” (Laughs.)

BL: When I turned 13, I got a beautiful watch from an uncle of mine. I never had a bar mitzvah, I just took the watch.

JK: Well alright. So again, he used to read a lot of material Jews for Jesus was handing out. I never could figure what that was about.

BL: When you say he was a religious man, he was religious in his outlook?

JK: He was the type of person who had a spiritual life. For all I know (he was also a very private person), for all I know, he said prayers daily, and he could have all his life and nobody would known it. He was the kind of person, I would suspect, might have done that. He would never have told anybody that. Uh, I never discovered a prayer book or any, because I picked up the house after they both died, so I know what was in it. There was nothing religious to be found. So whatever praying he would do would have been very private. I don’t know that he did that. But the kind of songs that he sang so well, like the Brahms Four Serious Songs, that kind of material, brought out a great deal of empathy in him and I think that he just couldn’t put that together with the kind of Judaism that he had been brought up with. It didn’t go together. 

He was emotionally a very sensitive man. But there again, he had his share of being macho and it was a little sometimes to know what his private feelings were. 

There are just a whole lot of bits and pieces in Sasha’s life that don’t fit together. Outside of his career, which Igor’s done that piece. And at home, Sasha was very much the pater familias. He ran the show, and we did what he said. And Igor’s mother was perfect with that, because she was a little, fluttery person who didn’t pretend to have any great wisdom in the world and therefore, she was just fine for this. And she was very good-looking, a very handsome woman and put on great parties and did all of these things that were necessary for his career. I think she was a great asset to him. And Igor, of course, was brought up by nursemaids and saw his parents on occasion, at least when he was younger, before they came to this country. Saw his parents only occasionally. So that he really didn’t have any contact with his father, anymore than Sasha had with his father. It was a very formal kind of relationship and there are pictures of the two of them, and obviously you can see there’s more to it than that. But Sasha had his career, and that came first. And as Igor said, that was very hard to grow up with. 

His mother was doing her fluttery bit, and she didn’t look after him much either, but she did do things with him, take him here and there. And, but the basic life stuff was done by somebody else. So that had had its problems too. 

Sasha (long pause) Well, I don’t quite know. . .I was going to say something. Oh my, it will come. They always celebrated Christmas, which I thought odd. They said they did it for the nursemaid, who was now the cook and cleaner and she was Roman Catholic. Not very, because she never went to church, but maybe she thought that was an imposition. I don’t know. And so they all celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving was his favorite holiday. He really loved Thanksgiving, he could understand what that was about as long as he had peas and not turnips. And he always put on a good party at New Year’s and one of the interesting things, interesting thing, he had a lot of interesting glasses and plates. And he loved to go to antique stores and buy things at a bargain, of course, he was very careful with his money. And he had a gorgeous rug in the living room, an oriental, blazing red, beautiful, which he got at one of the antique stores. After we inherited the furniture, I begin to understand that he just picked up a whole lot of particular pieces here and there that he was interested in. When it went together, it gave a certain quality of taste. 

BL: I’ve had occasion to empty some family houses, and when you start looking at things closely, you realize it was all bought at Wannamakers and places like that.

JK: This was not Wannamakers. And he used to go every, well, end of the summer, beginning of September, to Saratoga because he had to lose weight, he said. Also, he liked time by himself. That was very typical of him. So he would go up for a couple of weeks and one time, Igor and I went to visit him in Saratoga, and he gave us the address where he was staying. We arrived, and this is, this is fascinating. And this was an old Jewish boarding house with one of these bells that you pull and it goes ding-a-ling-a-ling - you know, there was as kind of a bell outside. The door was opened by this very old, stooped Jewish man with a yarmulke on. Hand-knit. His name was Goldberg. (Laughs.) The reason I know his name was Goldberg was because Sasha was yelling from the second floor, “Goldberg!” 

So Goldberg opened the door and showed up upstairs. This was the kind of rooming house that had bare light bulbs and it was very old. Hoped the floor would hold you up. So we went up to the second floor, and Sasha had this large room with a bare light bulb in the middle. And a small, single cot in one corner. And a couple of bare chairs and a little tiny refrigerator in which he kept melons, and I’m not sure if he ate anything but melons, and I think he thought that was good for him.

BL: I was having a conversation last week about my father, because he was always crazy about melons. And I had this theory it was because being where he was from (in Russia), melons remained such an exotic item from the south, that they retained a certain exotic quality for him.

JK: Well it must be. Honeydew melons, he liked especially.

BL: So this is where he chose to go, even after. . . .

JK: Even after all this long time, and this was after he had retired.

BL: And he could have been touring in style.

JK: Well, he did tour in style. They stayed at the top hotels, and Igor and the nursemaid had an apartment, and Sasha and Mildy had an apartment. When he made very good money, and he was able to get it out of Germany by being very clever, and paid no income tax on it of course at that point. And, cause in the United States, I don’t remember when you started paying money, tax on money you earned abroad. But it wasn’t directly in the thirties.

BL: Boy, I don’t know.

JK: So that he made the bulk of his touring money before he had to pay tax on it. And he invested it, so he did very well for himself. And he did travel in style. He dressed very snappily, he was very particular about his appearance and about the appearance of his home. Had to give the impression of a Hausberumptemann, I was hearing Funf tausend dollar [can’t be sure just what she said there - that’s what it sounded like - BL] and he definitely gave you that impression, probably figuring all the time he’d get found out, but yet when he went to Saratoga, he stays in this old rooming house. And I don’t think there was anybody else in the rooming house, at least we didn’t run into anybody.

BL: An interesting story.

JK: Very interesting. And that’s where he felt comfortable.

BL: In my father’s family, there were stories and anecdotes and tales they would tell about their childhood. Not centered on Jewish ethnicity, but just funny things that happened in the family and funny characters in this town where they grew up and things like that. Are there any anecdotes that he would tell about his childhood?

JK: Actually, he didn’t talk about anybody else in the place. Of course, he was quite young when he left. But . . .

BL: Where my father grew up, for example, there were monks who would come and solicit alms at the door, that kind of stuff.

JK: You wouldn’t have thought there were any Christians anywhere in the world, except “out there” someplace. No, no he didn’t. Because he knew so little about the holidays, including sabbath, and he just didn’t. I wish I had been able to ask more questions. I almost get the feeling that his childhood kind of washed over him, and the parts that he remembered were the very unpleasant parts. And not anything else. 

BL: You’ve alluded to tremendous ambition and drive for self-betterment.

JK: Um-hum. Well, there’s no question of that. I think he had no intention of staying in this place one second longer than he had to.

BL: Which is interesting. Because in that particular universe, if that’s what you know. . .

JK: That’s what you know. 

BL: It takes a certain kind of thinking and drive to break out of that. Very interesting.

JK: I’m wondering if maybe he might have visited his maternal grandparents at some point and found out that people didn’t live the way he did. He never mentioned this. He did mention that his father’s father was a scribe. Presumably copied Torahs. So they were not uneducated at all. Didn’t talk about his mother’s people. 

BL: Interesting. The other famous people from the area seem to include Sviatoslav Richter. 

JK: But they probably didn’t’ live in the same place. 

BL: Well, I don’t think Richter was Jewish and of course, he was from a later city. And Dostoyevsky, who I think was from there too [I think I was wrong on that one - BL]

JK: Well, it’s a big city. So I would assume that it had a ghetto and that perhaps where Sasha was brought up was kind of like a barrio, tacked on. . .

BL: That was, I think pretty typical. . .

JL: . . . to the end of the ghetto. He told a story of, apparently they had theatrical productions or band concerts in the center of Zhitomir in the park. And he recalled sneaking out of the Shtetl ghetto to go and hear these concerts. And that at one point, police caught him and beat him and said, “Jew boy, get back to where you belong.”

BL: That’s the kind of story that’s very valuable. That stuff, that kind of information has just vanished.

JK: Well, I think it vanished because he never talked about it too much. And if it was all disagreeable, I suppose you don’t want to remember it so much. 

BL: Interesting. Some people after the fact find very disagreeable things the material of being a good raconteur. And other people. . .. 

JK: Well, Sasha was a good raconteur about incidents mostly connected with his performing, or who won the poker game in between acts, or jokes that were played on the stage by a musician. Those are, I think, are all on the tape. And Igor knows a lot of these things too. But he never talked to Igor about his childhood at all. Which is another thing that I find very odd. 

BL: Yeah, but maybe as you mention, the fact that he wasn’t there a lot of the time.

JK: When he was very little, but when Igor was about ten, they moved to Westport and then the situation was quite different. The nursemaid turned into a housekeeper, cook, and before that they lived also in apartments in New York, on Beekman Place and that sort of thing. And so he began to live with the family at that point. 

I think it was a question of asking questions. I think if you asked the right questions, you got an answer. But Sasha would not go off on his own and just improvise. 

BL: I guess part of the mechanism for all this sort of raconteurism in my father’s family was that my father had six brothers and a sister, and when you got them all together, it was a natural mechanism.

JK: And of course, Sasha left when he was twelve or thirteen years old, and was on the road ever since that time. So it was a very vagabond existence. 

(Recorder turned off and turned on while JK’s host in NYC arrived with an extension cord for the recorder.)

JK: (continued) . . .if I have anything too much more. I wish I could explain a little better about Sasha’s religious. . .approach. Or the fact that his performances. I think it was a question of being eternally grateful to a God who had blessed him for no reason at all. And that he was undeserving, but everything had turned out so wonderfully for him. And that he wanted, he wanted to have a relationship with this person, but didn’t quite know how. I think that’s why he liked Thanksgiving as a holiday.

BL: It was a way to say thanks?

JK: It was a way to say thanks for this great miracle of his life.

BL: It was a great miracle.

JK: Well, in a sense, yes. And I think that this, it wasn’t even something he knew how to talk about. And couldn’t imagine that Judaism would have anything that would give him any tools to talk about it. I really don’t think he had too much idea what Judaism was all about. Now, how you can grow in a Shetl and not, I don’t know. But I think it was a very, very different kind of life than anything we can imagine. 

BL: I think so too. 

JK: Igor’s mother went to a Catholic, nun’s school, which I always found very odd. She was baptized. Her family was one of these families that I think flipped back between Christianity and Judaism, depending on who was who and what the circumstance was. She was baptized when she was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her father was organist at the Cathedral, Anglican cathedral, and apparently that was what you did, and so her mother just went right ahead and had he baptized and had the party and everything else, which was what you did. And apparently didn’t think too much about it. I’m wondering if her mother was baptized, too. They were all these blond women. Igor’s mother was blond. And they apparently had come from Lithuania originally, and her mother was born in Danzig when it was German, not Polish and had come to the United States with her mother when she was in her teens, late teens. And Igor’s mother’s father was a pianist from Warsaw, a very good concert pianist and he came to the United States in his twenties, and I guess he went back and forth playing. And had various odd jobs in the United States and Canada. Finally ended up as the head of the piano section of the American Conservatory in Chicago. That was already in the twenties, because when Sasha came to Chicago with his touring company, it wasn’t his touring company, but he came with the company and that’s’ when he met Igor’s mother and they had quite a musical household and people coming and going. Apparently you entertained critics in those days. One hoped to get a good review. And so Igor’s grandmother, who was a social (hard to hear on tape) wanted to bring people together to help out the cause. And they lived a very good life. But I gather, not at all Jewish either. So Igor came from a strictly non-Jewish background he doesn’t like to have the subject brought up either, which I cant quite understand what the big, bad secret is here. Igor was born in Berlin, and he remembers Nazi rallies and things at that time but never particularly suffered one way or the other from being Jewish. So I don’t , I don’t really understand that. . . .family, but then I probably from my own Christian perspective, which is never anything that you had to worry about.

BL: Right. My father’s family too was very much divided up. In fact, my father came her in 1911, and my generation, tended to have a stronger Jewish identity than the generation that came over in the first place. I guess within the context of America and Judaism, they kind of found a context of becoming Jewish again, where their parents really didn’t. My father and most of his brothers had very little involvement. Except, as you said, for celebrations and weddings and things like that.

JK: Of course, we don’t know. The only wedding we had was ours, and that we did in a Quaker meeting house, which was fine. Everybody thought that was great. I was a Quaker at the time. 

[Speaking of Jeremy, her son with Igor] (continuing) Well, he was a person who has a great deal of talent in computers and recording and things of that kind. He started out being a recording engineer for Chess Key Records. And after four years of that, he decided he was going to form his own record company, which he proceeded to do. And he made absolutely glorious recordings. He designed his own equipment, and took great care. He’s an iconoclast, and he’s a good inventor. And everything went swimmingly and the records got rave reviews and he was much written-up, but he couldn’t make enough money to keep the company going. Because it was too small. And he couldn’t get any capital ahead, so that he was always in the red. So finally, he gave that up, which caused great depression. And at the moment, he, he is, he went and took a course in video and at the moment he is technician to adjust high-end video sets, with which he gets $175 an hour, because the pay is wonderful and it doesn’t strain his brain any. Now, I don’t suppose he’s going to do that forever but. . .

BL: Where is he located?

JK: Living in Norwalk. He got married a couple of years ago, and she was in childhood education. Public school program for the Museum of Modern Art, which she still does. And she decided they didn’t pay her enough, so she took another job in Stamford. And that’s a company that searches out CEOs for large corporations. So that’s what they’re doing. I think Jeremy’s going to go from one. . .he’s really, he can fix computers too, and all that kind of stuff. I don’t think he’s ever going to have any worry about finding some work. 

He started, he could play the piano as a kid. He was excellent. But at one point, he decided he’d had enough of it and didn’t’ want to practice the way his father practiced, it was too much work, he gave it up. He has a pleasant voice, but it’s not anything out of the way. I think the voice will come back eventually, but not this generation. (Laughs rather warmly.) They’re talking about having a family and it’s just. . . life goes on. 

BL: Things to bounce around genetically.

JK: Yes, they do. Igor had certain learning disabilities. Jeremy had a terrific number of learning disabilities, which fortunately came along just at the point when there was therapy for it. So he actually did learn to read and do all kinds of things. He’s apt to be a little maverick about it, btu he gets it done. I don’t think, and it came from Sasha’s side, I think it came from Igor’s mother’s side, as one reason why she flitted about, that was as good a role as she could find.

BL: You mean socially, flitting about. .. .

JK: Yeah. Well, she came across as a casual person, very nonintellectual. “Little old me isn’t going to get involved in anything very heavy or difficult.” Because I think she might have had trouble reading, frankly, and that was never remedied when she was young, so . . .she was still having trouble reading, but she was able to bring it off very well socially.

BL: Entertaining in the house.

JK: She had huge correspondence, both with Peter (??) writing letters and she was very helpful in his career. She wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, but then I guess mother-in-laws never are.

BL: Tend not to be, no.

JK: (Laughs) I never thought much of that, one way or another. 

BL: Wish I had more cogent things to ask. The one area of interest I had was some of the very early stuff.

JK: Well, yeah, because I wish I had asked him more. Except he did talk about his mother singing to him. 

BL: That’ a vitally important piece.

JK: And she would sing as she worked, and since he was helping her, he picked up the songs from her. 

BL: And she lived until about when, his mother?

JK: She was shot by the Nazis whenever they went through the Ukraine to go to Russia. That was part of their activity on the way, was to shoot all the people living in the Shtetls. And so I don’t know, when did the Nazis go to Russia? Because they lost and had to turn back. I think that was later, about `44, I would think.

BL: Yeah, I think so. `43 or `44.

JK: Um-hum. The family that was there was shot. Or whatever, I suppose shooting is the easiest way. I never could understand why they went to all the trouble of having these concentration camps. It’s much easier to line people up and shoot them. And I went to Auschwitz, Igor refused to go, but . . .and I was of course terribly overwhelmed, as you are. Buchenwald was the most overwhelming. They have the . . . have you been there?

BL: No.

JK: They have the ruins of this huge crematory that the Nazis blew up before they left. This thing was so involved, and they have all of the routing of different prisoners from here and there and all over Europe to send to this place, and all of the way they organized it, and who was to do what jobs, and some people were sent out to do jobs, and some Jews were supposed to monitor the camp. All of this involved stuff, plus every last gold ring that any woman who came there was wearing, so that you have these literally, like cases for them, huge cases for them. These huge cases full of these. What for? It’s mad. Of course, it is mad. But if you want to get rid of people, there are so much simpler ways of doing it. It’s just the horrendousness of the whole thing. You come away, you cannot understand it. It is impossible to understand. 

BL: But at the point that his mother was killed, they had been out of touch for a period of time?

JK: Oh yes, they’d been out of touch for a long time. They were in touch. Well, one of their friends, Uncle Leonid, who was my father-in-law’s closest friend, his family had come from Kiev. And much, fairly well-to-do family and he went back after the War and made contact with Sasha’s nephew, the one that Igor finally arranged to have come over with his family a couple of years ago.

BL: And he was in Kiev?

JK: And he was in Kiev with his family. And that’s where they came from when they came to the United States. They came from Kiev. But apparently, he had to be very careful about it, because it was communist at that point, and you weren’t supposed to have any relatives in the United States. And if you had relatives in the United States, that was very bad for you. You didn’t’ get your rations of the day, or something of the sort. So Leonid was helpful in keeping in touch with this nephew. Who was, as far as we know, the only surviving relative from the family, outside of Igor and Jeremy. 

BL: Wow. I have an old, old friend who has a doctorate in Russian, a native speaker who speaks a little Polish too, and she has a friend who is literally a native Polish speaker. (BL talks about asking her to call the Warsaw Conservatory) Maybe there’s something that could be ferreted out by someone who is linguistically and culturally attuned to how things get done. 

JK: Of course, I don’t know, they have all the records either. Do they? 

BL: Never know. Some of these old-world backwaters are very scrupulous about stuff. There may be records, who know?

JK: Well, I think maybe somebody who speaks the language would be a little bit better. Of course, he may have gone and not matriculated, but he would have . . .

BL: Hard to say. It was such a vibrant musical capital. Maybe he went there to study with the people in the Conservatory, but never matriculated.

JK: Possible. 

BL: I think somewhere in the material there is an account of a recital he heard by Mattia Battistini. So it’s clear he was exposing himself to these kinds of. . .

JK: Oh, I’m sure he did. It was a passion with him. 

BL: So I can get information about what was going on in Warsaw in those years, we can probably make some assumptions about what he saw and what was happening. 

JK: So I’m sorry I don’t have more details on the Shtetl. But he just didn’t. Just really seemed like he lived on the fringes of it, and didn’t have too much contact. 

BL: Well, my own dad, when he came here, turned his back on that part of it too. So. . .maybe a natural things to do.

So, that’s great. I should probably get out of your hair and let you enjoy some time with your friend.

JK: Sure you won’t have some tea or coffee? How long did it take you to get here?

[End of tape.]