DC: You earlier emphasized that your familial, religious, and social origins have all shaped the course of your intellectual life, and you’ve said you remain quite attached to all of them. Does your past explain for you why you look at history in certain ways? Can you now reconstruct your family tree, beyond what personal memories and what others have told you, because I’ve read that secrets were hidden from you during your childhood? Your mother spoke Yiddish so you couldn’t understand her.
NZD: I come from a family of immigrants. I belong to the third, or in one instance, the fourth generation. Mine is a typically North American story. The grandparents and parents don’t speak of their past, or if they do, it’s only among themselves, not to the next generation. Letters arrive from Europe written in Cyrillic or Hebrew characters, which the children couldn’t read…In my family, there was no tradition of telling stories about their past in the old country or even about the first years of their arrival in the United States. Today, when so many families are seeking roots, that may no longer be the case. But for my own generation and that right after mine, when the Holocaust complicated everything, one often had to seek the family’s past or pasts by oneself.
DC: Wouldn’t the mystery of this past have directed you toward the historical profession and have given you this method of questioning that always seeks to unlock other enigmas?
NZD: My turn to history may have been partly due to the sense of being deprived of a concrete past. My ancestors arrived in America in the nineteenth century, one branch in the middle of the century, the rest toward the end. And because we were Jews, the history of America that I learned at school did not seem my history. Although I’m American, it nonetheless seemed the history of others. [laughter] I learned my family history only later, little by little, and some I’ve discovered only recently as the cousins on both sides piece the story together.
On my father’s side, I have ancestors who came to Michigan from northeastern Poland a few years after the Civil War. Who knows why? Probably there was someone in their town who had already come to Michigan…Whatever the case, by the 1870s Solomon Goldman moved from Detroit with his wife, Gussie, to Elk Rapids, Michigan. Elk Rapids is not exactly a household name in France or even in the United States: European settlers arrived to live there among the Ontario Indians around 1850 and, located in the midst of the Michigan forests, Elk Rapids soon became the center of an active timber industry. There, with another Polish Jew, Solomon Goldman opened a general store, selling the usual mixture of hardware, soaps, garments, dry goods, and so on. After several years, the partners must have quarreled—a custom among Jews [laughter]—and for a while there were two general stores across the street from each other. I have a photograph of my great-grandmother, looking very American. And I inherited from her a diamond broach, which coincidentally is in the form of the Eiffel Tower! I guess the family had become somewhat prosperous. Anyway my grandmother Mary Goldman was born in Elk Rapids in 1878 and was a schoolgirl there for a decade till they moved back to Detroit. I was pretty amazed to find my great-grandfather buying land from and having other business with the Ojibwe Indians (today they’re known as the Anishinabek).
DC: So it was in Elk Rapids that he came into contact with Native American peoples.
NZD: Yes. And I learned of his transactions in the late nineteenth century at the very time I was working on Marie de l’Incarnation, who lived among Algonquians and Iroquoians in the seventeenth century. Québec is not next door to Elk Rapids, but the two places are part of a northern world of indigenous peoples. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “Marie de l’Incarnation had relations with American Indians and so did my own great-grandfather.” It blew my mind: I had never imagined that anything in my family history could have any resemblance to the people whose past I was studying. And yet here was Solomon Goldman trading with the Ojibwe! [laughter]
Anyway, Solomon Goldman finally moved his wife and children to Detroit, where eventually my paternal grandfather, David Zemon, became part of the family. David Zemon came from Lithuania to Michigan in 1891, when he was only fifteen or sixteen: again an example of a Jew who didn’t go to a big center like New York. There are two types of Jewish immigrants in the late nineteenth century (perhaps this is true of other groups as well): those who head for the great urban centers, where there are already many Jews, and those, like my ancestors, who go to places where there are very few coreligionists, perhaps only one or two from their village or town. That’s how it was for my grandfather. I have a photograph of him at around eighteen years old, which shows the transformation he was undergoing. He was peddling goods in central and northern Michigan: he is completely shaved and dressed in very snappy clothes. He was something of a dandy. He looks very different from a drawing I have of his father, who stayed in Vilnius and who was somewhat modernized, but nevertheless, still had a beard.
DC: Did you know what his father did in Lithuania?
NZD: No, I’ve never found out. He was definitely not a rabbi; perhaps he was in business or trade. I know that my grandfather’s brother Moses Ziman (that’s how the name was spelled in the old country) became an important physician in Bialystok, where in 1919, he was one of the founders of the Bialystok Hebrew Lyceum; a few years later he moved to Palestine.
DC: Has there always been a branch of the family in Israel?
NZD: On my father’s side, this was the only branch. Moses Ziman presumably had descendants there, though I don’t know anything about them. But to return to my grandfather, I think his marriage to Mary Goldman was something of a social ascension for him. Often Jewish immigrants, like other immigrants, marry among themselves. But Mary Goldman, born in Elk Rapids, married David Zemon, born in Prienne: you’ll note that this is where the Zemon comes from, which I always insert into my name when I publish. Here’s another story relevant to the assimilation of immigrants. Mary Goldman did well at Central High School in Detroit—I have her school yearbook—and she wanted very much to go the University of Michigan, along with her best friend, also Jewish, who did study there. But her parents opposed it as inappropriate for a woman. Later when she saw me with my head stuck in a book all the time, she said to my aunt (who later laughed about it with me), “That girl reads too much for her own good.”
So Mary Goldman married David Zemon, who went on to do very well in business in Detroit. To start off, he had a small factory, manufacturing cloaks and suits. He was quite an admirer of Henry Ford, who was starting his automobile manufacture at the same time—ironic when you think of how anti-Semitic Ford later became. According to my father, what led David Zemon to turn away from manufacture were the demands of his workers—what a story for me, on the left! He sold his factory and went into real estate, where he prospered—not a great fortune, but wealthy.
DC: Did they always live in Detroit?
NZD: Yes, they did. David Zemon was very active in the Jewish community there. He was a pillar of his synagogue, Shaarey Zedek, a Conservative synagogue. (You don’t have the same organization of Jewish congregations in France as we do in the U.S. We have three—the Orthodox, the Conservative, and the Reformed.) He was a major figure in a Detroit organization that you’ll recognize from its Christian variants: the Hebrew Free Loan, which made loans without interest to Jewish immigrants to help them get started. A Jewish Mons Pietatis.1 [laughter] He and my grandmother also loved American technology. They were the first in their neighborhood to have automobiles, he one with gas fuel, she an electric car. I even have an electric machine that my grandmother used to make milk shakes, one of the earliest manufactured.
That’s the family of my father, Julian Zemon. He went to the University of Michigan just after World War I. His sister, many years younger than he, went there as well in the 1930s, the first woman in the family to attend university. My father also wanted to go into the theatre: it was his dream. He even went to Harvard for a year to study Shakespeare under the great George Lyman Kittredge.2 I think he would have really loved to become one of those Jews who wrote Broadway musicals, like his contemporaries Rodgers and Hart.3 He did write some songs—but perhaps he didn’t have their talent…
DC: There was thus, prior to you and your passion for history, an aspiration to write in your family. Do you feel any connection with him, especially because you’ve sometimes had a theatrical idea about reconstituting the stories from the past that you’ve analyzed, for example with the letters of pardon?
NZD: Yes, I do feel a connection. But let me comment further on his dream: for him it was a Jewish dream. First there was Irving Berlin4 and all his songs, and then George and Ira Gershwin.5 All these Jews who assimilated to America through the world of music and theatre and also contributed to the transformative ferment of those years.
DC: And in exalting and recasting the great American myths?
NZD: For sure. Just think of Porgy and Bess, which the Gershwins wrote together with DuBose Heyward, and what it meant for the Afro-American story and presence on the American stage.6 As for my father, he became a businessman in the wholesale textile firm of my mother’s family, but he always kept his attachment to the theatre as an avocation. He wrote, directed, and acted in popular revues for the clubs he belonged to, like the Rotary Club and his country club. During the Second World War, he had a United Services Organization troupe, which performed his plays and reviews for American soldiers still based in the States. I remember his typewriter clacking away and his excitement about the performances. His dream surely marked me.
DC: On several occasions, you’ve said you finally realized that cinema was a tool, that it was a means of making history. As you’ve explained it, does a trace of your father’s own aspirations resurface here?
NZD: Probably. When I was an undergraduate, my initial hope was to make documentary films. I followed the path of becoming a university professor, mostly because I married Chandler—but it’s also true that I tried twice to become an apprentice with documentary film companies, once as an undergraduate, and once just before I entered graduate school, and was not accepted. And as far as I knew at the time—the late 1940s—there weren’t good film schools. So it was years before I could return to that interest.
DC: And your mother?
NZD: I want to add a last detail on my father’s experience, since I think it’s typical of his generation of American Jews born in the U.S. My father, like his brother and my mother’s brother, was very good at tennis. They were all champions. (I have good tennis genes, or at least I ought to have them; unfortunately, my game was just middling.) One of my family’s stories concerns my father’s years at the University of Michigan, where he was part of the tennis team. The main tennis coach did not want to accept him formally on the top team and present him with his M (for Michigan), despite his talent, because he was Jewish. So in a typically American twist, there was intervention from a Jewish athlete who had already been accepted on the University of Michigan football team, where he was a star—we’re talking of an event that took place around 1920 to 1921. He went to the coach and persuaded him to give Julian Zemon his M. The M finally passed to me, and I gave it to one of my grandsons, also a fine athlete. [laughter] What I take from this story is my father’s determination to succeed as an American, but also sustain that Jewish identity. Despite my very different path, his double goal certainly influenced me.
DC: A desire to be integrated into the fabric of society by signs that show the individual the ways to embrace common values…
NZD: Well, yes, but it is connected with a desire to hold on to certain distinctions from the common values, or at least a distinctive way to connect with them. This is perhaps a routine story in the lives of all immigrant families, or minority families. But there are different solutions adopted. In France, you have the mode of resolution provided by the Third Republic: one is a Jew at home, one is French in public. In America, there was and is more overlap: the Jewish side is more public, less secret.
DC: And your mother’s family?
NZD: Their story is similar to that of Solomon Goldman and David Zemon. The Lamports, my mother’s family, came from Belarus to Vermont. The first to arrive was Nathan Lamport, who came to Franklin Falls, New York, in 1877, peddled up and down Lake Champlain, and then in 1884 made Burlington, Vermont, his base. He brought over his sister and brothers and their families, including my grandfather Moses Lamport. Like Solomon Goldman, the Lamports were among the first Jews in their town. Nathan was one of the founders of Burlington’s first synagogue, and in 1900 my grandfather Moses, now known as a merchant, was one of the charter members of a Jewish lodge of the Knights of Pythias.7 Jewish firsts. [laughter] When I visited the Ohavi Zedek synagogue while I was giving lectures at the University of Vermont, I was welcomed as a Lamport descendant.
DC: Do you know what part of Belarus they came from?
NZD: Nathan was born in Navahrudak, but his father had been a rabbi in Nesvizh and other relatives spoke of Minsk and Slutsk. These places are very near each other, and not far from the Lithuanian birthplaces of the Zemons and the Polish birthplaces of the Goldmans. Nathan Lamport had been a Jewish wunderkind, a young genius rabbi in the old country, and continued his sermons and even circumcising among the peddlers’ families in the New World. My mother said to me one day with some indignation: “But there were never shoemakers in our family!” And I asked myself, “What did she mean by that?” I think this must have been a kind of adage, a way of saying we’re above the artisanal status—as there were certainly shoemakers among the Jews. My mother must have heard this said to her in Yiddish.
I’ve tried to learn about the family of my maternal grandmother, Ethel Herzog, who also came from Belarus. I heard nothing from my mother, who perhaps knew very little—she was born in Burlington—or at least she didn’t pass on to me what she knew. As for my grandmother, she spoke English very poorly. Despite all those decades in the United States, she preferred Yiddish, and then for some years (and I’ll come back to this), she lived in Palestine.
When I visited Israel for the first time, in 1976, I met one of my Herzog cousins, Naftali Herzog, who was then quite elderly. Naftali showed Chandler and me family photographs and told us something of the family’s past. The pattern was typical of Jews in the Russian Empire: one branch departed for Palestine, one branch stayed in Belarus, one branch came to America. Naftali had taken the first path, studying engineering in Berlin before going to Palestine. He told me about a nineteenth-century ancestor celebrated in the family, Alexander Sender Herzog, a merchant of peat from Nesvizh—“the tsar of peat,” Naftali called him—who was also a fiery preacher. He carried both bricks of peat and Talmuds on his travels and preached from his cart. Chandler wrote a lovely poem after that about my roots, my mixed origins: he contrasted me with Alexander Sender Herzog, “a giant with an archangelic beard, / selling his Talmuds from his horse-drawn cart. / A mitzvah. You’ve harked back and deeply known / his old faith. But you know it more than are it. / It kindlier shines through your eyes than his own.”
DC: Did you pursue this research into the question of origins because you were a historian, because you didn’t want to lose the history of your ancestors, because you knew better than anyone else the French women and men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Or was it because you felt a more personal need, for yourself, to rediscover these traces of lives far removed, quite different and distant from your own, but by the light of which you hoped to try to understand or appreciate a piece of yourself, about why you made your choices, your refusals, and your commitments?
NZD: It was a combination of personal and historical curiosity, aroused in me rather late in life. When I find a crossover between the Ojibwe of Michigan with which my ancestor had dealings and the Algonquins of Marie de l’Incarnation, I’m tickled pink, as I mentioned. Sometimes it’s just interesting for a historian to see how families work, that is, to see how my relatives express patterns found among Ashkenazic Jews.8 For instance, my cousin from Belarus is Naftali, I’m Natalie from Detroit, both of us linked to some deceased Nathan.
But to get back to my mother’s family—the Lamports installed themselves in Burlington. My grandparents Moses and Ethel had eight children, five boys and three girls, some born in Belarus, some in Vermont. My mother, Helen, was the youngest, born in 1904. The five sons all went to university; the three daughters, all very intelligent, did not. My grandmother thought her daughters should help with the family business, to which she herself was very committed. A little like Glikl Hamel, [laughter] but unfortunately, she didn’t leave any memoirs the way Glikl did.
DC: It is exactly what I would ask you: weren’t there written biographical testimonials that helped you in your investigation?
NZD: No, everything passed by oral transmission, and between her and her children, the language was Yiddish. Of the three daughters, my aunt Anna was the most learned in Jewish matters; she was a businesswoman, and when she wasn’t at the family store, she was at the synagogue, and when she wasn’t at the synagogue, she was at a Zionist meeting. And she was managing her Jewish household as well. If I had role models for female activity in the world when I was growing up, they were my aunt Gertrude Zemon, who went to the University of Michigan in the 1930s, and my aunt Anna, who was so politically engaged: she even took her children to visit Palestine in the ’30s. Though my politics went in a different direction from hers, including in regard to Zionism, her activity impressed me.
DC: Can you say some words about your maternal grandmother?
NZD: Ethel Herzog Lamport joined her husband in Burlington in the 1890s, and continued to have children and run a kosher household, even while helping her husband with the dry goods business. In 1912, her husband, Moses, died at age fifty, and the family began to disperse. In fact, Moses’s older brother Nathan had already left for New York because one of his daughters was dating a Christian and he wanted to be sure to have a pool of Jewish husbands. Or so the story goes—who knows whether this is the whole truth? But that’s what was passed down. As for Ethel, she was now widowed with six children aged fourteen and under. She and her eldest son, Alexander, took the business in hand—it became known as Alexander Lamport and Brothers Textiles—and Ethel and her son decided where people would live. Alexander went off to New York with one brother; Ethel took the younger children to Detroit where she opened an office, and when sons got old enough, they were sent off to Cleveland or Chicago.
DC: Isn’t there a slight resemblance to Glikl as you describe her here? Or rather wasn’t Glikl perhaps a way to pay homage to your grandmother through your artful recreation of her character?
NZD: I’m probably reading my Grandma Lamport through Glikl! Both of them active businesswomen and Jewish mothers widowed in their forties with young children still at home. And, of course, the Yiddish that Ethel spoke with her daughters and that I was never taught—a mysterious family language that I learned only when I started working on Glikl’s autobiography so many years later.
In any case, Ethel moved to Detroit, and there my mother had a very American youth: she went to Central High School, she enjoyed her goyishe girl friends, and she was an excellent athlete. She loved horseback riding—not exactly a sport that a Jewish girl growing up in Slutsk would have engaged in. One of my father’s first poems written while he was courting her was about her as an equestrienne and her favorite horse. She did not attend university, because (as I said) Ethel Lamport kept her daughters close to home, while sending her sons to university. My mother met my father through her brother, who played tennis with him at the University of Michigan. They were married in 1926; it was a grand affair in the style of the twenties.
My father decided to abandon his project to become a great writer for the American theatre. He did not follow his own father into real estate, but rather became a salesman for the Lamport textiles firm, which especially supplied the Detroit auto industry. My parents did not live in the Jewish neighborhoods in Detroit. They had a very strong sentiment of being Jews, to be sure, but they decided to move to a newer part of town. Very few Jews were in my grade school in the 1930s, and it was the same at my high school in the early 1940s. A source for my sense of difference! For high school, my parents decided to send me to Kingswood School, Cranbrook, a private school on the outskirts of the city, where most of the girls came from wealthy families. The buildings and grounds were beautiful—the school had been designed by the great Finnish architect Saarinen9—and the teaching was really excellent. I loved my courses in literature and Latin and history, and I still remember all my teachers and classes. I especially recall Miss Manchester, who taught European history and who was rather conservative in her politics. She had a different take from mine on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but that didn’t matter to me. Her argumentative style appealed to me. I was completely fascinated with history.
DC: Were there history books in your house? Did you read history before receiving this training?
NZD: Our house was full of books, but not many, if any, history books. My father owned lots of theatre books, Shakespeare and Ibsen and many more, and interesting novels. I remember seeing James Joyce’s Ulysses in a beautiful edition on our library shelf, published sometime after the prohibition of the book had been lifted in the U.S.10 I held it in my hands because the binding was so special, but I was much too young to read it. As for my mother, she especially read women’s magazines and the Reader’s Digest, which I sometimes read myself as a girl.11
DC: I’m struck by how much the move to the New World seems to be accompanied by a sort of break with history, and how, to the contrary, your own commitment as a historian has consisted of trying to return to the past, to find again the lost threads of history, the threads that reconnect you, however indirectly, with your grandparents and great-grandparents…
NZD: That break was true in many families. I recall only one relative actually recounting to me something of her past life while I was growing up: a relative of my grandfather Zemon, whom he helped bring over with her husband from Bialystok as the dangerous years began: she told me with considerable pride of her years of study at the Lyceum in Bialystok. She really thought it better than anything her son was getting in America. Still, my desire to connect with the past began first with my search for a cultural and political path with which I could identify—already in high school—and the quest for family links came only years later.
DC: After the war, when the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps became known, did anyone in your family talk about it or, even at that time, was there silence?
NZD: I was in my last year of high school when the first news and pictures of the concentration camps appeared, and I recall discussing it in my current events class at Kingswood. It’s odd that I have no memory of discussing it within my family. There was certainly talk of the dangers of Hitler in the preceding years. I wrote a poem for my Sunday School—“Fellow Jews in foreign lands / whose lives are in a monster’s hands,” it began—and I recall that my family was proud of me for that. I certainly read the newspapers that came into my house, so I had access to news if not dinner-table discussion about it. I left for Smith College in September 1945, and most of my political discussion, which was very extensive, took place there.
DC: Why do you think there was so little discussion of the Holocaust within your family?
NZD: During the war itself, they may have wanted to protect my brother and me from frightening news. Earlier, in connection with the outbreak of the war in Europe, I remember seeing a huge headline in The Detroit News and running screaming “war” to my mother, who then tried to calm me down. I certainly was afraid that Hitler was going to come and get us Jews in the United States, but I don’t think I ever told my parents about this fear. This lack of discussion may go back to the habit I mentioned from the earlier generation—about not describing troubles in the old country, because now we were living in a “land of hope.” And then, there was discussion of Palestine and Zionism, especially when my aunt Anna was around.
Oddly enough, my daughter Hannah told me not long ago that I hardly ever discussed the Holocaust with her when she was growing up, that I would simply bite my lip and look troubled. It was very difficult to believe this when she told me, as Nazism and the murder of Jews and millions of others in Europe were ever on my mind, there were books on the subject all over our house, and we talked about politics all the time. But she may well be right: Chandler and I took the burdens of the past on ourselves when the children were young, and wanted them to see other possibilities in the future.
DC: However, you’ve said it, there were letters from members of the family who remained in Eastern Europe…Did you ever find out what happened to them?
NZD: Of the letters my grandfather Zemon received, only one came into our hands and that one only much later, in the 1970s. It was written by his niece in 1916, in response to the postcards sent to his mother, brother, and sisters during World War I trying to find out where they were. His brother, Moses Ziman, went to Palestine in the 1920s; but these sisters and their children, living then in Petrograd and Vilnius and Minsk, may have all been lost in the Holocaust if not before. Grandpa Zemon himself died in 1943, and our link to his European relatives was gone. His brother once wrote my father from Palestine and reproached him for not knowing Hebrew (now that I’ve learned that Moses was a founder of the Hebrew Lyceum in Bialystok, I can see why he was so shocked by his American nephew).
These are not the only kinds of secrets kept from the young in my family. There was one Lamport who did not immigrate to Vermont with his various cousins, but stayed in Belarus in the late nineteenth century. His son Leo Lamport came to New York with his young wife sometime in the 1920s and then in 1934 decided to go back to the Soviet Union “to build socialism.” He stayed there all through the Stalin years, living as a journalist and especially as a translator into English of Russian books on Marxist philosophy and socialism and equality and the like. His name was never mentioned in the Lamport family, never. To paraphrase my mother’s exclamation, “We’ve never had Marxists in our family.” [laughter] We learned of him only from an article that appeared in the New York Times in the 1980s: his son, who had been taken over to the Soviet Union when he was only four, appealed to Ronald Reagan to be readmitted into the United States. By then Leo was dead. I wish my family had told me about him: Chandler and I could have looked him up when I attended the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Moscow in 1970. Of course, he might have been fearful of meeting with us as foreigners.
These questions of family secrets are fascinating. Some families tell all, others keep secrets. This is a great subject for historians to look at in the past.
DC: Finally, you have unearthed several bits and pieces of this family memory that operated in secret. There again, we often have the feeling that, in your books, when you take on a subject and gradually lift the veil, however thick, that covers it, you avenge all these silences, all these things forgotten. Isn’t history, for you, a form of compensation for the wordless history of this family that you so love, but with which you’ve never spoken, which remains mute, which can’t respond to your desire to learn its story? Haven’t you ever been inclined, as a result, to adopt a strategy that aims to make the people of the past speak despite themselves, even in spite of the mysteries found in the records they’ve left? Does your predilection for popular culture, for victims, the excluded and silent people, find its impulse in the unease created by this protective, reassuring culture of what’s left unsaid, the culture of your parents and grandparents? For example, in your analysis of letters of pardon, there’s speech on the one hand, in all its rawness, its repetitions, and then, on the other hand, beneath its simple literalness, you focus on the almost-hidden message of the speech, what’s left unsaid and all that which recovers social and gestural codes.
NZD: Possibly there’s a compensatory mechanism at work here, though I’ve never felt it in that way. My interest in working people, in people outside of the usually defined centers of power, was connected with my youthful politics, and that was certainly reinforced during the Red hunt. My experience of being part of what was then an out-group, of a Jewish immigrant family, may have played some role. Their stories, if they were to be told at all, would not be told by the standard political history, but only by a new social history. Perhaps, too, it’s relevant that I no longer believed in a supernatural God by the time I was in university: these unmarked lives were not going to get their recognition in another world. Only history and memory were there to try to give them their due. I had the sense—and still have it very intensely—that these lives counted for something, that they made a difference. I had a very strong sense of the humanity of these people, and that they once existed as I do now, and I wanted to recapture that. I wouldn’t want to draw on an exclusive maternal image here, because this is something men might and do feel as well—but at the time I started writing the way I did, it may have been professionally easier for a woman historian to embark upon some of these quests.
On the matter of family secrecy itself, I’d add one thing. When I began working on French family account-book/journals—what were called livres de raison—and memoirs, and later when I was concerned with the autobiographies of Glikl and Marie de l’Incarnation, I noticed that they contained omissions, that is, topics that you’d expect them to elaborate upon or events that I knew had happened from independent evidence, but were not treated in these texts. And these journals and memoirs were usually written first and foremost for children, to pass on the family’s past or the parent’s life and wisdom, whatever other audience they might have expected.
Reading these texts led me to thinking about the matter of secrecy, and I used it as an organizing concept in the essay I wrote about the autobiography of Leon of Modena, the rabbi of Venice, whom I mentioned earlier: “Fame and Secrecy” was my title. The “fame” part was connected with what he was happy to broadcast to the world, Jews and Gentiles alike: all the books he’d written, all the people who wanted to meet him or sought his opinion, the crowds that flocked to his sermons, including even Christians. The “secrecy” part was double: what he wanted to withhold from Christians and what he wanted to withhold from Jews, including those close to him. His Hebrew autobiography, written for his male descendants and his Jewish pupils in the ghetto of Venice, is full of lively quarrels, complaints, and troubles—including the dire economic predicaments brought on by his own gambling habits. When he came to describe the Jewish world to Christians in his Italian Rites and Customs of the Jews, this living world is cleaned up in favor of liturgy, orderly laws, and charitable practices.12 Games of chance aren’t mentioned even in connection with the few holidays, like Hanukkah, when they were licit and even part of the festivity. These were Jewish secrets. But there were also secrets that Leon did not want to pass on to progeny or pupils, especially one concerning his son who was in some kind of liaison, presumably homoerotic, with two different men. Here there is only an allusive reference and the exclamation, “miseries of my heart.”
I’ve been using this idea of secrecy in examining other texts, including right now in connection with slave narratives—who says what to whom? I always thought that my notion of secrets in my own family came from applying my historian’s insights into my family past, but maybe it was the other way around.
DC: The more I listen to you, the more I’m struck by the fact that we cannot detach—as becomes evident for many historians the moment they write their own biographies—this familial past from your work, or rather the manner in which you’ve worked, your method in approaching the sources as well as your constant search for new characters, almost as if you’re creating a parallel family. You didn’t tell us whatever happened to your grandmother after the death of her husband.
NZD: I knew my Grandma Lamport rather little because after marrying off her three daughters—my mother’s wedding in 1926 was the last—and after being assured that the family textile firm and its branches were well established, she left for Palestine. She had relatives there; indeed, her father-in-law, Tsvi Hirsh Lamport, had long before left Belarus for Jerusalem and was buried on the Mount of Olives. But according to what I learned many years later, her desire to move there had less to do with a form of political Zionism than with religious piety: she felt she could not live with full Jewish devotion in the United States. I’ve wondered whether that feeling didn’t have something to do with the fact that two of her daughters, my mother and my aunt Esther, had stopped keeping kosher households, in both cases following the wishes of their Reformed husbands. Anyway, Ethel Lamport succeeded in her wish: my cousin Naftali Herzog told me that after her death, so pious had she been that her synagogue had a bimah cloth made from her apron.13 I met her only when she came back to Detroit for a time to live when I was five or six years old. I have a photograph of the entire family, all her children and grandchildren, at a seder in Detroit. My brother and I and one cousin from New York are the youngest, and are looking at the camera with baffled expressions. I remember her apartment with bowls of pistachio nuts, Mediterranean style, on the table. I have a very strong impression of her physical person, but we really did not have a common language.
DC: To stay in this rather simplistic vein on memory and its relationship with historical problems, could your interest in women’s history be rooted in these feminine figures from your youth: grandmothers, mother, aunts, and so on, even if this interest only became apparent much later? It was in thinking about the parallels with Glikl, incidentally, that this question occurred to me. For didn’t your grandmother do what Glikl would have wished to do, namely, go to Palestine, to see Palestine, to live in the Promised Land?
NZD: Yes, Ethel Lamport did what Glikl Hamel only theorized about. After a time in Detroit, to visit with her family and also to be able to hold on to her American citizenship, she went back to Palestine and died in Tel Aviv a few years after the establishment of the State of Israel. As for the women in my family, my first efforts at shaping myself as a young woman were aimed at being different from them in my way of life and in the breadth of my political concerns. I did recognize that I had inherited the Lamport energy, and Chandler always noted after being at a large family gathering that he saw an affinity among these many Lamport women buzzing around, all about the same size. But my aunt Esther and my mother, Helen, had not gone on as active businesswomen like their mother and their sister Anna. For them, the successful American middle-class dream was to be able to withdraw from paid work. My mother was very attentive to her husband and her children, to her house and lovely garden, to her furniture and antiques (I now have some of these antiques on my shelves), to her golf—she played very well—to her friends and bridge parties. When I first told her I wanted to be a professor, she said it might be okay if I did it as a volunteer.