{"id":2328,"date":"2011-10-11T04:10:29","date_gmt":"2011-10-11T08:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=2328"},"modified":"2011-10-11T10:59:50","modified_gmt":"2011-10-11T14:59:50","slug":"cnf-conversations-beth-kaplanpart-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=2328","title":{"rendered":"CNF Conversations: An Interview with Beth Kaplan (Part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Beth Kaplan, Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin<\/em>. Syracuse University Press, 2007 (Paperback 2012).<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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In this revelatory biography, Beth Kaplan sets out to explore the true character and creative achievements of her great-grandfather Jacob Gordin, playwright extraordinaire and icon of the Yiddish stage.<\/em><\/p>\n

Born of an Anglican mother and a Jewish father who disdained religion, Kaplan knew little of her Judaic roots and less about her famed great-grandfather until beginning her research, more than twenty years ago. Shedding new light on Gordin and his world, Kaplan describes the commune he founded and led in Russia, his meteoric rise among Jewish New York\u2019s literati, the birth of such masterworks as <\/em>Mirele Efros and <\/em>The Jewish King Lear, and his seething feud with Abraham Cahan, powerful editor of the <\/em>Daily Forward. Writing in a graceful and engaging style, she recaptures the Golden Age and colourful actors of Yiddish Theater from 1891 to 1910. Most significantly she discovers the emotional truth about the man himself, a tireless reformer who left a vital legacy to the theater and Jewish life worldwide.<\/em><\/p>\n

Beth Kaplan is a writer and actress in Canada. She has taugh<\/em>t\u00a0memoir writing at Ryerson University\u00a0for sixteen years and at the University of Toronto for five. Her essays have appeared in the<\/em> Globe and Mail and other newspapers and magazines. Visit Beth Kaplan\u2019s website at <\/em>www.BethKaplan.ca<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Julija \u0160ukys: In your bio in the opening pages of the book, we read that you <\/strong>spent twenty years raising children and writing this book \u2013 \u201cthey both <\/strong>left home together.\u201d My writing became entangled with and <\/strong>inextricable from my private life once my son was born four years ago. <\/strong>In light of the connection you draw between your kids and the process <\/strong>of writing, I\u2019m interested to know more about the relation between them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beth Kaplan:<\/strong> I had my first child in Vancouver when I was nearly 31. I\u2019d been working as an actress in Vancouver for eight years; when I got pregnant, I left the stage and registered to take an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. So it was as if pregnancy gave me permission to finally sit down and write.<\/p>\n

And then the birth of my daughter took that permission away \u2013 or at least, made the process difficult. I adored being a mother and didn\u2019t know how to focus on anything else. I\u2019d take the baby to a YMCA daycare for a few hours every few days, so that I could write – but often instead I\u2019d grocery shop or sleep or read the newspaper, things I couldn\u2019t do when she was around. And I felt alone. Almost none of my friends in the theatre or at UBC had kids, and I didn\u2019t know, or even know of, any mother writers.<\/p>\n

Someone said once that of the 3 things of vital importance to a married woman \u2013\u00a0husband, children, work \u2013\u00a0she could only successfully have two of the three. I thought about Virginia Woolf with husband and work, Margaret Laurence with children and work, L. M. Montgomery with all 3 and a wretched life. There were very few examples of a writer with all 3 successfully. Later I discovered Carol Shields as one very good example, and there are now lots. But around me in the eighties, there were few.<\/p>\n

I wrestled with that constantly. I managed to finish the degree long-distance \u2013 we moved to Ottawa for my husband\u2019s work in 1983 where I had my son, and then to Toronto in 1985, where I finished my thesis on my great-grandfather and decided to keep going with research and to write a book. When my kids were 6 and 9, my husband and I separated, he moved shortly after that to the States, and so I was a single mother with financial support from him but 100% custody of two difficult children and an old, disintegrating house, in a city where I had no work connections and no family.<\/p>\n

The result \u2013 the book wasn\u2019t published until 2007. I don\u2019t blame that solely on being a single mother. I also completely lost confidence in myself, was isolated with no support group, had no idea what I was doing \u2013 in academic research, there are methods, I just didn\u2019t know what they were. I compared the book to an octopus with its tentacles around my neck \u2013 the minute I pried one away, another had me in its grip. And that\u2019s just the writing, let alone getting the thing published. It\u2019s a miracle it ever appeared, in fact.<\/p>\n

So this is a very long answer to your question, which is \u2013 that I came too late to understand something I call beneficial selfishness. I think writers, artists, have to be selfish sometimes, even with their children. That is, not selfish to the point that their needs are neglected. But selfish in asking them to recognize that their mother has important work that requires something of them. Writing is so invisible. If I were playing the cello or painting, they could hear or see that. But they could see nothing of my work. That was hard for me too, as most of the time, I didn\u2019t believe either, with very little published, that I was a writer.<\/p>\n

What helped was writing essays for the CBC and newspapers and for \u201cFacts and Arguments\u201d in the Globe and Mail<\/em> \u2013 I published a lot of short term things that got me out there, got my name in print and showed the world, and me, that I was a writer. Incidentally, many of my essays were about my kids. They grew up being chronicled on the back page of the Globe<\/em> \u2013 always with veto power, of course. But they liked it.<\/p>\n

25 years later, I\u2019m still in the same house; the kids live on the other side of town and their rooms here are rented out to help pay the mortgage. I teach but have lots of time, lots of quiet for writing, which is heaven. Except that my daughter has just told me she\u2019s pregnant. Omigod, I\u2019m going to be a grandmother. I can\u2019t wait. But this time, I\u2019ll be able to cuddle and hug and read stories, and then give the baby back and get on with my work.<\/p>\n

The fact is that unless you have a spouse who can take over, which I did not, young kids do and must come first, especially when they\u2019re very young (and again when they\u2019re teens but that\u2019s another story.) But that doesn\u2019t mean shelving the work. It means being creative with finding time, and it means taking it and yourself seriously enough to be selfish, sometimes. Otherwise, the work is constantly last, and the book takes 25 years to emerge.<\/p>\n

Finding the Jewish Shakespeare <\/em>constitutes a kind of textual <\/strong>archaeology. It tells the story of your great-grandfather, Jacob <\/strong>Gordin, a Yiddish playwright once compared to Shakespeare and Ibsen, <\/strong>now largely relegated to oblivion. Tell me about the impetus to embark <\/strong>on such a journey, and the research path down which it took you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I needed to choose a thesis subject for my MFA, and it was my husband who said, You have a great man in your family, write about him. Once he\u2019d said it, of course, I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do. Because there was the mystery I\u2019d grown up with \u2013 why did my father and other relatives have such disdain for a man who\u2019d been in his time so revered? So I blithely began, without realizing that almost all my research materials were in New York City\u2013 this was 1982, the Dark Ages before Google, so research meant writing letters, making phone calls, and getting on airplanes. The first time I flew from Vancouver to New York for research in 1983, the thrill of arriving at the YIVO Center for Jewish Research on 5th<\/sup> Avenue, asking for their materials about Gordin, and watching the cart rumble up to my desk with all those file boxes. Then opening them eagerly, and finding that nearly everything was in Yiddish or in archaic Russian \u2013 the next tiny hurdle, as I spoke and read neither.<\/p>\n

I was lucky enough to find a woman who translated from the Yiddish for me for 25 years. So it\u2019s really our book, Sarah Torchinsky\u2019s and mine.<\/p>\n

I wrote lots of letters of enquiry, discovered family members to interview \u2013 several of them just in time, as they were extremely old already when I found them \u2013 and read everything I could find on or around the subject. I didn\u2019t start using a computer for writing until 1987 or so. And Google, of course, much after that. It seems unbelievable now, how much time research took. And several people have pointed out that in the Internet age, we lose the thrill of hunting and holding the actual artifacts and books.<\/p>\n

As I read your book, I found myself continually pondering questions <\/strong>of language. Interestingly, Jacob Gordin\u2019s strongest language, and the <\/strong>language he appears to have loved best, was Russian. Yet, he wrote his <\/strong>plays in Yiddish, a language that always represented a bit of a <\/strong>struggle to him. It\u2019s not the language he used in private: with his <\/strong>wife he spoke Russian, and to his children, English (a language it <\/strong>appears he never mastered). Why, once he had gained some success, do <\/strong>you believe that Gordin never made the switch to Russian? Why did he <\/strong>continue to write in Yiddish, despite the limited audiences, the <\/strong>community politics that you describe, and despite the fact that it was <\/strong>not the language in which he planned his plays?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gordin didn\u2019t switch to Russian because nobody on the Lower East Side ever wanted to hear Russian again; he would have had no audience at all. Yiddish was the language of mothers, of home, hence not only of the theatres but of the burgeoning Yiddish newspapers. Russian was the tongue of the oppressor, the Cossack enemy, there was no place for it amongst the Jews in America. But Gordin always dreamed of going back to Russia one day. Before he died, he knew that his plays were touring Russia \u2013 one of his sisters, who still lived there, wrote to him from her town in Ukraine of her pride in going to the theatre to see two of her brother\u2019s plays. But she saw them in Yiddish, not in Russian. There were Yiddish theatres and troupes performing Gordin\u2019s plays in South America and in Eastern Europe \u2013 in fact, all over the world.<\/p>\n

This is Part I of a two-part interview. Click here to read Part II.<\/a><\/p>\n

[Images: Courtesy of Beth Kaplan]<\/p>\n

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