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that were there because my parents brought them there. I think a great deal of this came from my brothers and the contacts, the teachers they ran into in school, the friends they had, and they absorbed a lot of this stuff, and they would go to plays. To go to Broadway, we rarely ever did. But I would go to movies, I remember, with my mother occasionally, but I don't recall an impact from the family on the children of an intellectual character. My father respected, greatly respected learning, but he himself was not learned. He read the paper. He did not read books. He read the newspaper, and he did not have a great deal of time. He read the newspaper and occasionally he would read the Jewish books in preparation for the holidays., but generally speaking, that was it, as I recall it.

Were your parents in some way charismatic, charming type people, or shy and retiring?

My father was rather shy, but he had a very good sense of humor, I remember. He was always sort of twisting things into a jest, although he was usually so tired and exhausted that it was hard for him to do anything but get up and go to work, etc. My mother was a good person. She was a good mother and a good person, but there was nothing charismatic about her. I used to read to her. In that sense, I was different than the others. My mother did not read. I remember that we had the Book of Knowledge. That was the sum of the big one. We had the Book of Knowledge, and all of us read it, and I remember that I would read stories from the Book of Knowledge to my mother while she worked in the kitchen. I would do that a few times a week, I remember, by the kitchen window while she was working, to read stories, Dick Whittington's Cat and other novels. Stories were read to her because I liked the stories and my mother enjoyed them.

How old were you when you did that?

I would maybe be nine, ten, eleven, something like that.

What was the Book of Knowledge?

The Book of Knowledge was the Encyclopedia Britannica of that period, but it contained a smorgasbord of information in it. It was a series of books, and I guess that they probably had them in every home in that area, because the parents who were anxious that their children be learned would buy them from a traveling Book of Knowledge man. You know, you added a volume every time.

Did you grow up speaking Yiddish?