GIDEON TELPAZ
259
WS:
Yes, I would. I've said this over and over again, and I think I've
said it several times in the book.
GT:
Could Sophie's fate have been a Jewish fate?
WS:
In a sense.
GT:
She survives, though, and you bring her to Brooklyn, where she
meets Stingo, the narrator. What was your purpose in bringing
her to Brooklyn?
WS:
That was the strategy of the story, to bring it into the American
grain. I'm an American. I'm descended from a long line of Ameri–
can storytellers. What I had tried to do was to imbed the story of
this Polish woman in some recognizable American matrix, where
the reader could begin to see the story unfold through peculiarly
American eyes, namely the narrator Stingo.
GT:
Who was the reader you had in mind?
WS:
Because I am an American, I probably think in terms of an
American reader, and was talking about the story in a kind of
American way and locating it in my own home ground, my own
territory .
GT:
Your territory? Yetta Zimmerman's Jewish rooming house and
the Yiddish spoken there?
WS:
Yiddish is not foreign to me. I know a lot of it. I've been around
Jews all my life.
If
you have as many friends as I do who were
brought up in families where Yiddish was spoken as a mother
tongue by either the parents or grandparents, you get exposed to
it too. Ever since I lived in New York, practically more than half
of my friends have had this background. They liberally sprinkle
their own conversation with Yiddishisms. I've been growing up
with a knowledge of a kind of 'pidgin Yiddish,' if you want to call
it that.
GT:
Your use of Yiddishisms in the book appears to be precise and
accurate. Every Yiddishism you use, not only do you not repeat it
twice in the book, it's always in the right place.
WS:
I struggled very hard to get that tone, and I also had a very
good book to rely on, Leo Rosten's
TheJoys of Yiddish.
That was a
great help. I don't actually speak Yiddish myself, but I know the
idioms.
GT:
In the book, when Stingo recalls his growing up in the small
Southern town, he betrays his fascination with the local Jewish
community. His fascination comes out in his descriptions of the
synagogue and the way he speculates about what the Jews did in–
side, and the mysterious way in which they disappeared into the
