Interview with Ruth Wisse
Ruth Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University emerita. She is a fellow of the Tikvah Fund in New York.
Awful and Such Small Portions
Contents
Max Raskin: I obviously am going to ask someone who writes about humor if you have a go-to joke or a favorite joke.
Ruth Wisse: Well, that’s a very funny question. I wrote a book about Jewish humor, and on the basis of that book, I was invited to give a talk at Princeton. Afterwards, there was a wonderful reception, and I was quite taken by surprise when I was asked, “What is your favorite Jewish joke?” and I totally blanked. I could not remember a single Jewish joke, and the only one that came to mind was a quip by Shmaryahu Levin, great Zionist thinker. He said, “yidn zaynen a kleyn folk ober paskudne” – Jews are a small people, but rotten.
Well, I love this, I just love it…
…the silence in that room was deafening because though it was a room full of Jews, nobody thought this was funny and nobody responded to it. Then I had to go into an explanation of the dynamics of this joke – that when you say Jews are a small people, you expect it to end the other way, right?
MR: This is the Catskills joke – “the food is awful, and such small portions.”
RW: Exactly, exactly, but this is more biting, right?
MR: Of course.
Do you like Chelm jokes?
RW: Not really. I appreciate them, but no. Chelm humor is interesting because I think it pokes fun at the hyper-ratiocination of the Jews. We’re so hyper-intellectual – Chelm gets it right theoretically and is always proven wrong practically. It’s a good set of joking and humor, but it’s not my thing.
The Wimbledon of Argument
MR: One of the things you said in your book was that, when you moved to Israel, you felt like the first part of your life was like prepping for debate camp. And that Israel was like the…
RW: …the Wimbledon of argument.
MR: The Wimbledon of argument. When you were there, how were your expectations different, particularly in that vein?
RW: Well, they weren’t really. It could be pretty painful because I get into arguments with people, and there, everybody does. I never held back ever in my life, but, there, there was no impulse to hold back because everybody else was at least as ferocious as I was in arguing.
With some friends, especially with Ezra Mendelsohn, who was really a marvelous historian and a very, very dear friend – there was a point at which almost all our conversations became arguments. At one point, it was so bad that – and this is the only time this ever happened – my husband actually took me by the hand and dragged me out of the room. He just felt that if we stayed at it any longer…
MR: Do you remember what you were arguing about?
RW: Of course – we must have been arguing about Israel and his affiliation with Peace Now, which became very strong.
Buckley, Bach, and the Band
MR: Where do you live right now?
RW: In New York, in Manhattan – close to the Tikvah office.
MR: Do you go to shul now?
RW: I do now – for the first time in my life, except for the summers. In the summertime I’ve attended shul pretty regularly. I wrote a piece in Commentary some years ago about how this comes about. We have a little place in the Adirondacks, and the community where this camp is located happens to have a vibrant little shul. It’s a very unusual arrangement. Anyway, there, because it’s a community of only 20 families, I go to shul every week and make the kiddish once a summer.
But usually it’s my husband who attends shul. Nowadays, since it’s hard for him to get there on his own, I go with him every week. This has become marvelous for me.
MR: Do you wish you had done it earlier?
RW: No.
MR: Really?
RW: No. No, I never wish for anything retroactively. That’s not in my nature.
MR: Do you have a prayer that you love singing along to?
RW: [Recites the Aleinu prayer.]
MR: Do you sing it with the tunes from when you were growing up or do you have new tunes?
RW: No, some of them are new tunes. My favorite tune is [sings Louis Lewandowski’s melody to Tzadik Katamar]. That’s my favorite melody.
MR: What Leonard Cohen song comes to mind right now?
RW: [Sings “Bird On The Wire”]
MR: Do you listen to him now?
RW: I used to a lot.
I confess that I didn’t think much about my hobbies in preparation for this interview, but in thinking about it now, the biggest change in my habits is probably that I haven’t listened to much music in recent years. I don’t listen to much music. I can’t listen to anything in the background, and now listening to music is too emotional for me.
MR: What music is too emotional for you?
RW: Any music I would care to listen to.
MR: Do you do classical, rock?
RW: Classical mostly. The Band was terrific and their songs meant a lot to me at the time, and, of course, Leonard’s music meant a lot to me at the time, but I didn’t keep up with it afterwards. I don’t know the later songs all that well. I know them on the page, but I don’t know them musically.
MR: You did listen to classical music?
RW: Oh, yes.
MR: Do you have a favorite composer?
RW: Well, Bach, I suppose.
MR: Do you have a piece that you would listen to?
RW: We got married at home, and for the music of us coming down the stairs, we used a part of one of the Brandenburg Concertos.
MR: Like Buckley! He used the second one for the intro to Firing Line.
Estetik Est Etik
MR: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
RW: The Wall Street Journal.
MR: Do you read it in hard copy?
RW: Yes. In my apartment building, the wonderful woman who delivers newspapers used to actually bring up the Wall Street Journal to my door. I wake up very early, and one morning I happened to open the door as she was putting the paper there and she saw that I was elderly. From that point on, she always left it in a bag on my doorknob on the outside instead of on the floor. I got into the habit of sending her thank you notes twice a year for this wonderful effort. Now, however, with COVID, she’s not allowed into the building to distribute the papers, so every morning at 5:00, I go down. I have to get dressed very early these days, so I go down to pick up my paper, and guess what?
MR: What?
RW: She leaves it for me in a bag.
MR: That’s great!
Will you drink coffee with it?
RW: Yes, I do.
MR: How do you like your coffee?
RW: The easiest way – a spoonful of instant.
MR: Do you take it with cream or sugar or anything?
RW: Just a bit of milk – no-fat milk. My life is meant to make everything as simple as possible for me to be able to do what’s hardest for me to do.
MR: And is that to write?
RW: Yes.
MR: Is there anything you like that you’re a feinschmecker about?
RW: I try not to be.
MR: But is there anything?
RW: Well, ethics.
MR: You mean you think very carefully about it?
RW: No, what I appreciate in people is that kind of refinement.
MR: But you’re not into Scotch or wine, lipstick, pens…nothing that you get really obsessed about?
RW: I’m afraid not. I’ve always said, “Look at my hands. They’re the hands of a peasant.” I’d like to keep it that way.
MR: I interviewed Chomsky and he said he’s just a laborer – just a worker, but his work is with the mind.
RW: I would hate to align myself with Chomsky on anything at all. I don’t think of myself as a laborer. That’s not it. But I have tried, I don’t know how consciously, to keep what you’re implying – the cultivation of taste – at the absolute minimum. A great many years ago, I began to feel that there was not only a contrast, but a contest between refinement of taste and human refinement. One of the literary groups that I’ve always been interested in is a group called Yung-Vilne, the young Yiddish writers of Vilna in the 1930s and they had a saying, “estetik est etik” – “aesthetics eats ethics,” which is a play on words that works wonderfully in Yiddish.
MR: When you sit down to write, do you have any rituals?
RW: Not rituals, no. But I find it very hard to go on to the next sentence if I don’t think that the one that I’ve written is already there.
Potato Vodka, Neat
MR: Do you write your first draft on the computer or by hand or a typewriter?
RW: That has changed more than anything else in my life. When I started, I used to write on the yellow rag paper – the second sheet under carbon paper. I used to write with a ballpoint pen and I’d get reams of these yellow pages. It was very laborious because I couldn’t go on to the second sentence until I had the one before, so it would add up to pages and pages of crossed out passages. Well, when the computers came in, I thought, “I’m never going to be able to master this.” There are millions of people like me, and, of course, now that I work on a computer, I don’t know how one could ever work on anything else.
MR: So you enjoy writing on a computer?
RW: I do.
MR: Do you keep your phone near you when you write?
RW: Oh, I have distractions all the time. I’m a mother.
MR: When you’re writing, you don’t block everything out?
RW: Nothing.
MR: Do you eat when you write?
RW: No.
MR: Do you drink when you write?
RW: No.
MR: No alcohol? Water? No anything?
RW: No. I only start drinking about 5:00 in the afternoon.
MR: What do you typically drink?
RW: It’s not typical, it’s always: I drink vodka.
MR: Do you have a vodka that you like the most?
RW: Oh, yes, I only buy Luksusowa. First of all, I love Poland. Don’t tell anyone. Secondly, it’s in the moderate price range. Again, I don’t like to become finicky about this or another brand, but it is gluten-free. I’m not gluten intolerant, but there are people in my family who are gluten-free. It’s a potato vodka and that’s one of the reasons that I buy it all the time.
MR: How do you drink it?
RW: Neat.
MR: How long will you sit and write for a time?
RW: As long as I have. What I tend to do is I sit and I write depending on how agitated I get. When I write about literature, I can sit for long stretches without getting up. When I write about politics, I can’t sit for five minutes without getting up, and then I go to the kitchen. So in answer to your question, I don’t usually drink or eat while writing, but when agitated, I get up all the time to go to the kitchen.
MR: If you wanted to impress someone who has never read you with a piece of yours what would you show them?
RW: I have no idea. The only person whom I write to, if you put it this way, to be judged by, not to impress, is my very longtime editor, Neal Kozodoy. I run almost everything I write by him.
MR: Do you write with typos?
RW: Well, no. I don’t know if you know this gentleman, but if you were submitting work to him, believe me, you would not leave in a typo or a grammatical mistake if you could help it.
Aliyah
MR: I’m not really sure how to phrase this, but what do you think is the best case for not living in Israel right now?
RW: There is none.
MR: Why don’t you?
RW: At this age, one doesn’t pick up lightly, and at no point in life does one actually move unless there’s a reason to do it. Once we came back from Israel, having made a tremendous effort to move there, we were not inclined to do it again. When you’re married, and especially when you’re married with three children, you no longer make a decision on your own. Hopefully, you make it as part of a team. And, if the timing is not right…
MR: What would you say to young couples right now – would you say here or Israel?
RW: I’m not trying to avoid your question, but I would not answer if asked. I’ve been a teacher all my life and I’ve wanted to teach people, not to direct anyone. I really sense the autonomy of the best people with whom I come into contact, and I never know them well enough to imagine what could be best for them. I would have to know them completely from the inside, and I feel that I barely know my children well enough for that, and on that particular question, I would not advise them either.
It’s not that I don’t want to be an adult or an authority. Actually, I feel that many adults don’t want to be authorities, and I don’t consider this a plus. It becomes a liability. But I never wanted to be an authority. I have always wanted to persuade people of what I felt was true and right, and I feel that even more intensely now than ever. But that’s different from wanting to authoritatively tell people how they should act in their lives. This is just too much for me. I can’t take it on. I can’t take on that responsibility.
So I wouldn’t answer. I would lay out the advantages and the disadvantages. Of course, the pull of Israel these days is enormously strong.
I had a shock just this past week – I went to see someone, a very mild-mannered professional who told me he is leaving his practice here. He’s ready for retirement, and is moving to Israel. His children are already there with many grandchildren, so it makes sense. About the child who went first, he said, “She saw the handwriting on the wall.” I was astonished. I said, “The handwriting on the wall? What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, Jews have never been allowed to stay in one country for very long and the time has come for America.” I was flabbergasted. This is such a moderate individual, not hysterical on any subject…
MR: But you don’t want to preach and say, “Do this,” or “Do that?”
RW: No. No, not on this, not on aliyah. Of course, I do on some subjects. I have absolute contempt for Jews who will not stand up for the Jews and for the state of Israel.
MR: Do you own a gun?
RW: No, I never learned to shoot. I would advise it, though.
MR: Do you exercise?
RW: Yes.
MR: What do you do for exercise?
RW: Once a week we have someone come to the house as a trainer, and I try to walk a lot every day.
MR: What restaurant do you order the most from?
RW: Park East.
MR: Do you have a favorite Jewish food? Do you have a Jewish food that you love to eat?
RW: Sushi.
MR: Were either of your parents good cooks?
RW: No, not at all, but my mother had learned to make certain dishes and I never thought about it. What she put on the table was what she put there, and I ate it.
Saul Bellow’s Favorite Joke
MR: Who was the funniest person in your childhood?
RW: Funny like “ha ha” funny?
MR: Yeah.
RW: God. I would never have thought in those terms.
MR: That’s interesting because you wrote a book about comedy?
RW: Yes, it is. You’re right. Actually, live comedy terrifies me.
Len and I were once on our way to hear Lenny Bruce, who had come to Montreal – I can remember where we were walking towards the club, and I panicked. I said, “I can’t do it, Len. I can’t go.” The pressure is too great for me because I’m so nervous about them getting or not getting the laugh that I don’t find it funny.
MR: Do you have favorite stand-up comedians now?
RW: No. When we lived in Boston, we once went together with Saul and Janis Bellow to hear Jackie Mason. Yes, that was funny, and fun. That was in a huge auditorium, so I did not have those fears.
MR: Saul Bellow is my favorite novelist.
RW: And mine. In English, for sure.
MR: What was he like to hang out with?
RW: He was funny. We were both in Boston at the same time, and we became really quite friendly. When he would come for dinner, I would sometimes say to myself when I was washing up afterwards, “I should really go upstairs and write down some of these wonderful things that happened tonight,” But I never did.
I do remember a joke that he told. This is the kind of humor he sometimes had:
A guy opens the refrigerator and there’s a rabbit inside and he says, “What are you doing here?” And the rabbit says, “Isn’t this a Westinghouse?” And the guy says, “Yes,” and the rabbit says, “Well, I’m Westing.”
MR: That’s a great joke.
RW: It’s a wonderful joke.
MR: Did you know Philip Roth?
RW: Not at all.
MR: But that was so cool that Isaac Bashevis Singer did your pidyon haben.
RW: Right. It was.
MR: Is Herzog your favorite book by Bellow?
RW: That’s almost like asking who’s your favorite child, almost. No, I would say the book I most admire is Mr. Sammler’s Planet.
MR: Do you read a lot now?
RW: I read quite a bit.
MR: What are you reading right now?
RW: I’m doing a series of podcasts, believe it or not, on the stories Jews tell. So I’m mostly re-reading these stories. This is a new series that we’re preparing for Tikvah that will probably start in a month. I’m recording all these 25-minute segments of 10 stories.
MR: Do you ever throw out books?
RW: I don’t, but I do have books that I have to get rid of.
MR: Do you have a huge library?
RW: Oh, that was the worst part about moving from Harvard to here. We had a large house that was filled with books, and I had a huge office. I had one of the most beautiful offices on the campus, accidentally, but it was mine and it was lined with books. When we were moving, I had to get rid of thousands of books.
MR: What did you do? Did you throw them out? Did you give them away?
RW: No and no. Some of them are in the Tikvah office. They were kind enough to take many boxes of books and they’re on shelves all over the place…I’ll never retrieve them. Many of them are here, as many as we can house, but it’s only a two-bedroom apartment – nowhere near the space I need.
The Lives of Others
MR: You were one of the few people who, up at Harvard, defended Larry Summers.
RW: No. That can’t be true. I was one of the few people who spoke up.
MR: When these things are going on, does it affect your life personally or is it purely an academic-type thing?
RW: You must be kidding.
MR: Why?
RW: What could it be but personal? It’s really worse than if it were happening to me. If it were happening to me, I could fight. If it’s happening to someone who doesn’t fight…
MR: I guess my question is: If you’re an alien looking at the lives that we live, you see us sit in front of our computers, pound away a little bit, go eat a little bit, go do this a little bit, and everyone’s lives don’t really look so, so different from one another. All the things we write – how do you make it real? I guess that’s a weird question.
RW: It’s not a weird question, but it’s interesting that you put it that way because I think that maybe you are engaged in trying to raise what individuals do to a higher level, I wouldn’t say of abstraction, but perhaps to a higher level of understanding. You seem to be trying to formulate some kind of a comprehensive understanding of how people function. I don’t blame you.
MR: I want to know what people’s lives are like.
RW: Yes, you want to know how people’s lives are. Well, you ask me what I am reading, I am reading Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary. Johanna Kaplan is one of the most underappreciated American writers: O My America is one of my favorite books. I love it. It’s a very, very good American novel and a brilliant Jewish-American novel.
Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary is a reprint of an earlier collection of short stories with only two short stories added. Now one of its stories – don’t think that I’m madly scrambling subjects – is called, guess what, “Other People’s Lives,” and this is the specialty quality of her heroines. They are sharply engaged in trying to figure out other people’s lives.
MR: If you could ask personal questions to anyone alive right, do you have anyone that pops to mind?
RW: Not at all, and you’ve hit one of my flaws.
MR: Is that you’re not so interested in other people’s lives?
RW: Oh, no. It’s not that. It’s that in my area of study and teaching I became so interested in finding out about them through their writing that I did not quickly enough get to the Yiddish writers that I was working on to find out more about their actual lives.
MR: Have you ever done psychoanalysis?
RW: Myself?
MR: Yeah.
RW: Yes, a little bit. Yes.
MR: What do you think about psychoanalysis and therapy?
RW: Whatever works. I don’t have that much faith in it, but I have curiosity, endless curiosity, about myself and other people and I like to get at what I think is the truth, so anything that really tries to understand more is a worthwhile tool, as long as you don’t exaggerate its usefulness.
MR: Do you have any feelings about drugs?
RW: Well, it depends. If there weren’t painkillers…
MR: I mean recreational drugs.
RW: Oh, my god, I have no use for them whatsoever.
MR: None, zero?
RW: Zero, absolutely. No, no, not zero, minus zero, zero minus.
MR: Did you ever play a musical instrument?
RW: I did take up the guitar when I was in college, and I played piano for many years.
MR: Do you still ever play piano?
RW: No. When I left Montreal, we didn’t take our piano.
MR: Do you like doing crossword puzzles?
RW: I used to at one point, but I don’t anymore.
MR: Do you floss?
RW: Teeth?
MR: Yeah.
RW: Oh, sometimes…not obsessively.
MR: Do you use a mechanical toothbrush or an electric?
RW: Just a plain toothbrush.
MR: I think these questions…I believe in the psychopathology of everyday life.
RW: Absolutely, but it’s all of a piece, you see. You could’ve known that from what I told you about not becoming obsessive about anything…
MR: Well, that’s what I hope people who read the interviews do. There’s a great book called Listening with the Third Ear. Will you listen to your subconscious when you read?
RW: Well, I try, but it depends on what it is that I’m reading. Again, I believe a lot in contextualization and, when you’re reading a polemic, then you’re reading a polemic.
MR: Who are some of your favorite polemicists?
RW: Oh, I’m amazed at some of the younger people writing now. Look, Liel [Leibovitz] is very good. And what Bari Weiss is doing, giving voice to others is very good.
MR: There’s a saying like, “When Aeschines spoke, the people would say how great he spoke, but when Demosthenes spoke, the people would say ‘let us march.’” When Liel writes, I think it’s, “Let us march.”
RW: I think it’s “Let us march.”
Well, yes, that’s soul, and I guess that that’s the kind of writing that I am inclined to admire, but, for me, it is even more important to understand why one is marching. It’s not that you have to spend your life figuring out anything before you do it, quite to the contrary, but I think that people are afraid to know what they know.
The main task of political writing is to say what is obvious and true, but that people are not aware of or are afraid to admit – to themselves. That’s the greatest task of a writer who wants to persuade.
MR: And what do you think is something right now that’s obvious to everyone that can’t be said.
RW: I think that there’s a collective resistance to understanding what anti-Semitism is really about. It’s too painful and it’s too hard to confront, which gets to your field of psychoanalysis. One has to understand the resistance to knowing in order to be able to explain better what it is that people are not confronting.
A Litvish Polka
MR: Do you believe in God?
RW: I believe profoundly in the God of my ancestors.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
RW: In a sense. My mother only began to live in me after she died. I spend more time with my mother now, in a real way, than I ever did during her lifetime. There was a tremendous barrier, I think on both our sides, while she was alive, and then, in her very last years, they started giving her Zoloft, and Zoloft completely transformed her. That was during her last four or five years and she died at 96. That was the first time I ever had a mother. She was very warm to me and understanding, and then I realized that she had really paid much more attention to me – known me much better than I had ever imagined. I find her so easy to get along with now.
MR: Do you think that your mother living in you now has a purely rationalistic explanation, or do you think there’s something going on that we can’t account for with pure physics and the material world?
RW: Well, please understand that among Jews, I see an almost absolute distinction between Litvaks and others. I am pure Litvak, so I don’t even think about these things. I like to say, “I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body.”
MR: But you have a religious bone.
RW: Well, yes and no. Speaking with a friend the other day, he said that Chaim Soloveitchik had written that the basis of Judaism was yirat shamayim [fear of God]. It occurred to me to ask, “Well, what do you think is the basis of Judaism?” and he said, “Obligation,” and I thought, “That’s the most profound thing I’ve heard.” That’s the way I feel.
MR: When you call yourself a Litvak – do you dance?
RW: Oh, I loved dancing, but these days…
MR: Yeah, so you’re not such a Litvak.
RW: Oh, you’ve got Litvaks wrong. A Litvak dances, but he doesn’t dance Hasidic dancing. No, I dance. I guess my favorite dance was the polka.
MR: The polka? I’ve never actually danced or seen someone dance a polka.
RW: Ah. Well, it’s too late for me now, but that was my husband’s and my favorite dance at a celebration. We would always ask for it at weddings.
MR: Really?
RW: Yes.
MR: That’s great fun.
Leonard Cohen or Robert Zimmerman?
MR: What language do you dream in?
RW: I don’t think I know.
MR: Do you remember your dreams?
RW: For a short time. Other people have told me that they wake up in the morning and they write them or whatever. I’ve never done that, no.
MR: How much are you on your phone during the day?
RW: Oh, zero.
MR: Really?
RW: Apart from my children, there are only two friends I speak to regularly.
MR: Well, do you text message people?
RW: No, no.
MR: Really?
RW: Almost never, no. My children have just set up a WhatsApp group, but I haven’t used it once. Although I look to see what they’ve posted, when they alert me.
With one friend I have a regular weekly phone call.
MR: Who’s your friend?
RW: She’s in Montreal, a very good writer in Montreal.
MR: But do you email correspond a lot? Is that your primary way of staying in touch.
RW: Yes. Yes, it is.
MR: Do you miss getting letters?
RW: I guess so, but I have a cupboard full of letters.
MR: Do you go look at them from time to time?
RW: No, but I’m going to have to because…look at me, I’m not going to live forever and I realize that I can’t leave these things like this to my children. It just isn’t fair, so I’m going to have to. I’ve been giving some papers to Harvard.
MR: Do you have any correspondence with Leonard Cohen?
RW: Yes, limited. I have a very important card from Leonard Cohen.
MR: Did you know Bob Dylan?
RW: No. I know his music. He’s not a Montrealer.
MR: Who do you like better, Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan?
RW: Oh, please, I don’t know.
MR: It’s not an easy answer?
RW: No, because I like Dylan’s song about the “Neighborhood Bully.” I’m very easy to win over. He never played it up afterwards, coward that he was. Anyway, the Leonard Cohen story, we’ll leave for another time…