Embracing Yiddish Language, Theater, Culture, and History, with Rokhl Kafrissen
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Clarissa talks to Rokhl Kafrissen, a Yiddish cultural critic and playwright. You may know her from her column in Tablet Magazine, Rokhl’s Golden City, or her blog, Yiddish Praxis. Rokhl and Clarissa talk about her venture into the world of Yiddish, and what it's like to fill the gap in her knowledge of our own history. They also talk about Rokhl’s new play that explores the ethical dilemmas that can show up when collecting Yiddish folklore. This conversation was recorded in the summer of 2020.
EPISODE NOTES
Follow Rokhl on Twitter at @RokhlK
Shin is for Shtumer Shabes (or Behind the Scenes with Shtumer Shabes (Silent Sabbath))
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On Wandering is produced and presented by Clarissa Marks, with intro music by Ketsa and outro music by Gillicuddy.
The show is recorded on the traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People past, present and emerging. As a land-based people in diaspora, we recognize first nations and indigenous people as the stewards of this land from time immemorial. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish Tribe.
TRANSCRIPT
Clarissa Marks: I'm Clarissa Marks and you are listening to On Wandering, a podcast that explores the nuances and complexities of Jewish identity. I'm so glad you've decided to tune in. Welcome to the brand-new season. We have some amazing conversations to share with you this year. The episodes will be released about monthly but we may not have a strict schedule to allow for more flexibility and breathing room for myself and the guests during this time. So make sure you're subscribed via your favorite podcast app so you get the newest episodes when they're released.
This episode today is with the amazing Rokhl Kafrissen. She's a Yiddish cultural critic and playwright. You may know her from her column in Tablet Magazine, Rokhl’s Golden City, or her blog, Yiddish Praxis. When we spoke in the summer of 2020, Rokhl and I talked about her venture into the world of Yiddish, and what it's like to fill the gap in her knowledge of our own history. We also talk to her about her new play that explores the ethical dilemmas that can show up when collecting Yiddish folklore. I started off the conversation by asking Rokhl about how she gave herself her Yiddish name.
What's the story behind your name?
Rokhl Kafrissen: My parents gave me the name Rachael, which quite a few people still call me Rachael, including my family. And I've always been, well, first of all, I'm a weirdo, but second of all, I've always kind of had a very romantic view of names, or that has to do with reading Wizard of Earth Sea. When I was in junior high, I had this idea somehow that like, your name was this, like, essential mysterious part of you that like really spoke to who you were. And I never really cared for the American or English, ‘Rachael.’ It was just not very euphonious. And then I started taking Yiddish when I was in college. So the English version of Rachael's ‘Rokhl,’ and I was like, “Oh, I like this a lot better. Just more me.” So I started going by that and, little by little, sort of taking that on as more of just who I was. That's, that's the story. Part of it is my, sort of, childish, romantic notions, and part of it is becoming me.
Clarissa Marks: How was Yiddish or being Jewish part of your life growing up?
Rokhl Kafrissen: I would say, probably in a certain way, very similar to many people of my age. I grew up in in New York suburb and there were Jewish words around and even use words that my family use, sort of unremarkable Yiddish words, they were not lamp shaded, as they say, in any way, they weren't necessarily punchlines. They were just part of our working vocabulary. But the flip side of that was that nobody ever explained what Yiddish was, or how it might have fit in with our families. And certainly, I mean, forget about Hebrew school. I mean, there's no Yiddish going on there. But in the domestic sphere, there were just little, I like to think of them as sort of breadcrumbs. Like a breadcrumb trail of Yiddish words scattered around that, when the time was right, I started to follow. And that time was the time I think, in every young person's life, like in high school-ish, where you really start to think about who you are, and where you belong, both in the larger world and also vertically.
In terms of the historical picture, I knew I was Jewish, and I had certain notions about Jewish historicity. But once I started to look at them, they didn't really make a lot of sense because I still couldn't figure out where I fit. I didn't know where my family fit in. Because it was the Great Leap model where you went all the way from the ancient land of Israel, to the Holocaust in 1948, and Israel. I was like, “Well, I’m not really sure where my actual family fits in there.” So, at that moment that I started to wonder, Well, okay, where do I fit in? What is being Jewish really mean? And what might it mean to be? And that literally started to mean what's going on? What are my symbols? How do I identify how do I identify as Jewish?
And then somehow, really what happened is that coincided with the moment of the klezmer revival, really kind of going as mainstream as it was going to go, which meant it made it to NPR. And there were a couple klezmer CDs at my local independent bookstore in the town where I lived and my dad bought one home, and I guess I heard it and I was like, “Whoa, what is that?” And that really kind of revolutionized me and sent me out on this trail to pick up all the breadcrumbs that had been scattered about and follow them.
Clarissa Marks: Yeah, when you say, “Whoa, what is this?” it a feeling of like…? I mean, did you enjoy klezmer? Because I'm actually not a huge klezmer fan, but I do remember that being one of the few places I heard a full sentence in Yiddish, was in klezmer music growing up.
Rokhl Kafrissen: Yes, yes, I very much enjoyed it. It really resonated with me, the first time that I heard was the cosmetic and the Klezmatics and the Klezmatic Conservatory Band, which are very, very different bands. But both of which I really, they both resonated with me very strongly. And I was also the kind of kid for whom music was sort of a key to me, I was very musically oriented, not that I was necessarily a great musician. I played an instrument, but it was more that the media that I consumed the most assiduously was music. So it's not a surprise that I had that kind of epiphany through listening.
Clarissa Marks: One of the things that I like to ask all of my guests. and I'm interested in, in your answer, especially as someone who grew up in New York suburb, is when did you first realize you were a minority? Because I think that's something that a lot of Ashkenazi Jews come to at different times in their lives.
Rokhl Kafrissen: Oh, that's such an interesting question. Because for people like me for Ashkenazi Jews who grew up in New York, there are so many of us, I would say our primary experiences is being a majority. Or, I would put it this way, that on the one hand, until the age of 12, I lived in a place where I certainly looked around and felt myself to be in the majority, I understood myself to be in the majority. But I also know at the same time, that culturally, like when you turned on the TV, it was clear that I lived in a Christian hegemony. I mean, I wouldn't have called it a Christian hegemony. But when everything around in December, the assumption is that you celebrate Christmas, right? That's the most obvious sort of marker there is. So I would say I knew from a very, very young age that I live in a world that celebrates Christmas, and that assumes that everyone celebrates Christmas, and I knew that was not correct. So in one sense, I knew I was in the minority from as early as I had an awareness of being Jewish and Jewish equals no Santa.
Clarissa Marks: So it sounds like you became interested in Yiddish in high school, but then I decided to major in college. And I actually read a quote on your blog where you said that you became “a born again Yiddishist.” That your, “adult life has been spent remembering and requisitioning memories,” and I thought that was a really powerful way of talking about approaching learning Yiddish. Can you talk more about what the process felt like of diving into Yiddish language and history when you started out?
Rokhl Kafrissen: Yeah. Well, first of all I want to clarify, it was not possible to major, or even minor, in Yiddish at Brandeis. When I was there, I was actually a French major, but I took as many Yiddish language classes as were available. And again, there's sort of a tension inherent in the process of learning the Yiddish language, which is that one of the strongest memories I have is, that in one class, at the very beginning we were poring over the table of cases… So unlike English and Spanish, and it's sort of like German, although there fewer cases in German, you have to learn dative and accusative nominative, dative... And for English speakers, it's not easy. Especially if you don't have a facility for language, it's very hard. So there's the sort of technical struggle of learning the language, which can be quite challenging. If you don't speak a Slavic language, if you don't speak Hebrew, or German, German can also be helpful in certain ways. So it was really hard, it's really hard, like I had to put in a lot of effort.
But with the quote that you just read, there really was, again, the sort of, I know, it sounds very capital ‘R’ romantic, but it really was the sense of feeling very, very connected to the language in a way that I didn't feel connected to French. I loved French, and obviously, I loved it enough to pursue it as a major. But I definitely felt like it was something that belonged to me in a way that French didn't belong to me. And I think part of that was that, by learning English as a language, I was able to make sense of a lot of things that had been in the background, those breadcrumbs that had been scattered about my childhood that had never really been discussed, or I had never really even thought about. But once I started to learn Yiddish, not just the Yiddish language but also folk ways and cultural attitudes, so much of my childhood and my community started to make sense. Why people had the attitudes they did why they did things certain ways. And that was, that can give you that feeling of awakening to something that you already maybe previously knew.
Clarissa Marks: That's really fascinating. I was interested in what you just said about feeling like it belonged to you because something that I've struggled with is, Yiddish to me has… I've only been able to interact with it through mostly art and comedy produced by older generations. So people like Mel Brooks or Fran Drescher, or it would be used by my parents as kind of a punchline or they'd say Yiddish words as a joke. And I didn't really realize there was a whole history of Yiddish being used in a dramatic or intellectual way with theater and literature and whole vibrant language and culture until I was an adult. And I'm wondering if that's something you ever encountered where it felt like it belonged to another generation or that it was considered something just to make fun of?
Rokhl Kafrissen: Oh, yeah, for sure. I experienced the same things that you did. Before I kind of came to this awakening, Yiddish existed as a punchline, it was fighting with curse words. I remember, sort of very early in my process, when I was in high school, really grilling both of my parents for every Yiddish word they could recall. I mean, really, really pressing them. Because I was just so enamored with it. But also I thought it was funny. I understand why people think its funny, even non-funny words are just so exotic. And the sounds were so different. And I love the idea of cursing people in Yiddish. I also had a very juvenile sense of humor, then, and I still do that's a part for my interest in Yiddish.
And in fact, to me, the irony is that yes, there are these sort of juicy, para-linguistic aspects to Yiddish, but that is just one, one thin slice of the language and the culture and that when you really get immersed in Yiddish, you realize that it's a much larger thing, and it often Yiddish is very ironic. It's not slapstick. The tone is not slapstick in that way. It can be very prudish, especially the kinds of Yiddish that I'm interested in today, like literary criticism, leans towards the prudish. And part of that I think, comes from certain cultural attitudes. And part of that I think, then comes into a sort of over reactive overcorrection because people were so defensive about Yiddish. About Yiddish being not a real language about it being silly or this or that. So I think people just developed defenses against that.
Clarissa Marks: I'm also wondering because you've written a little bit about the social friction that comes with being a Yiddish expert. I think you wrote also on your blog that Yiddish had to die for Hebrew to live. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the, the reasons that we don't speak in Yiddish? Or how is it seen as a secondary language to Hebrew.
Rokhl Kafrissen: Well, that's a very, very big, huge topic. And I would say, just at the outset, there's no one simple answer. And there's sort of a large complex of answers. There is definitely a sort of zeitgeisty sort of feel that has a lot of truth to it, certainly in Israel, which is that in order to create a new Jewish state the new Jew the sort of Max Nordau, new muscular kind of Jew, had to take the place of the old weak ghetto Jew who spoke Yiddish.
Some people did articulate it in a very sort of cartoonish, cartoonish to me, terms that the new Jew had to replace the old Jew. Haim Brenner also spoke in very, very dark terms about the need to essentially get rid of the diaspora, because you had to get rid of the old Jew, you had to get rid of the galut Jew, and you essentially had to annihilate the galut altogether, in order to create the new state and the new Jew. And that idea kind of continues to exist through the creation of the state. And after that after 48 in various permutations, various shadings, various degrees of darkness.
And I alluded before to the great leap, which was this idea that many people took seriously as did Ben Gurion for quite a while, and then he kind of moved away from it after 48. But the great leap being this idea that we are going to create a narrative of Jewish experience that focuses on the ancient Jewish kingdom, and an ancient Jewish experience. And then we're going to kind of forget about everything else and create this new state with a unified, sort of newly recreated, quote, unquote, Hebrew.
But what exactly is even modern Hebrew? That's another question. There's a sense, I think, on the part of a lot of American Jews, and they might not even be able to articulate it, but they know it to be true, that if you somehow have any kind of love, or appreciation for Yiddish, more importantly, if you choose to use any of your resources for it, or on behalf of it, that is then necessarily a betrayal of not just the modern Hebrew or Hebrew all together, but the State of Israel. And I know this to be true only because people have said it to me set it to me or reacted in that way. So many times that I think it's not something I would necessarily even think about except when confronted with somebody like in a Sabbos lunch, for example. This is the most typical setting where I might say, “Oh, yeah I’m Yiddishist” or “I do this or that,” and the person would say to me, “why do you hate Hebrew?”
Clarissa Marks: Oh, no. What a weird thing to say.
Rokhl Kafrissen: I mean, it really makes no sense to me like why somebody would assume saying you care about Yiddish means that you don't care about Hebrew or you think Hebrew is bad. Like it's just bizarre, except that it flows out of this oppositional, dialectic that's been set up ahead of time that we're all just kind of bathing in when I talk to somebody at a Shabbos lunch, and she says, “why do you hate Hebrew?” they're not talking about the Czernowitz Conference in 1908. They're tapping into something that's much larger.
Clarissa Marks: So I want to transition a little bit to talking about your work a Yiddish journalist and writer. I think I read somewhere that you actually started your now blog, Rootless Cosmopolitan as a printed zine. Was that your first step to publishing and actually writing about Yiddish and Ashkenazi culture?
Rokhl Kafrissen: I would say it was almost my first step. I took a class and Brandeis on semiotics. So I would say, there's a paper I wrote for that class, which is so bad, I still have it in my files, like really one of those cringy things that I was writing about things I really just didn't know anything about. But the magazine essentially was my first published effort of writing about Yiddish and Ashkenazi culture. And I actually put one of the essays from the zine on my blog and it explains the genesis of the zine. Around that time, this would have been 2000, 2001. Right about the time I entered law school, the magazine Heeb started publishing. I went to one of their initial organizing meetings, and it was like a very uncomfortable, weird experience for me on a lot of levels. It was just one of those experiences where you go somewhere, and you viscerally feel like you do not belong. So then they started publishing and I remember reading one of the first issues and again, having that feeling of just being so turned off, and just feeling yucky.
Clarissa Marks: I remember and it being a very macho magazine.
Rokhl Kafrissen: Yeah, their whole ethos is very much one of bravado. And that you know, edginess, which also felt, frankly, to me, very juvenile. And again, I have a very juvenile sense of humor, but this was like, not even funny, you know? So they had a whole read about Jewish Music. And or they said something like, “Jewish Music is the Beastie Boys and the Ramones, not some lame klezmer album.” And I was just like, “oh, give me a break.” I'm sorry, but it was just, it was really dumb. Because that's the kind of thing somebody says he doesn't actually know anything about Jewish Music. And I love the Beastie Boys, and I love the Ramones. I mean no tea, no shade, but this is boring. It's boring. It's insulting.
So I remember being just getting a wild hair and writing a very long letter to the editor. And sort of chastising them about their ignorance, essentially, which people love getting letters telling them how ignorant they are. When it came time to the next issue, they were the editors went back to me and said, “Okay, well, we're getting ready to publish the next issue and we're going to publish part of your letter up to this point, but then, after that it just falls flat and you sound like a loser. You sound like you're just a cheerleader, and nobody's gonna care about it.” It was just so dripping and condescension. Well, first of all, of course, because I had just written to them, calling them ignoramuses. But then it was that it was that exchange that really set me off.
So I was in law school, I mean, I had a lot of stuff to do. But I was like, in the computer lab of law school, and one of my classmates was a woman who was from Southern California, she was from Orange County. And she'd been part of the punk, zine, DIY scene, and then had come to New York to do law and she said, “Well, why don't you just make your own zine?” I really never thought about it before. It was not part of the culture at all. And she said, “just make your own and publish the whole letter.” And I was like, “oh, you can do that?” So I did it. And that was that.
Clarissa Marks: One of the things that I admire about your writing, is that you're not afraid to blow up some of the myths and stories that American Jews have told ourselves about our history. So for example, you wrote a piece in your tablet column, Golden City, about how a lot of Ashkenazi Jews assume their families moved to America fleeing immediate violence, but they kind of ignore all of the additional economic reasons that people probably moved to, or immigrated to the US. What do you think about when you're publishing a piece that you know is going to shake up assumptions or confront people's current beliefs about themselves and their families?
Rokhl Kafrissen: I think I'm just somehow lacking the gene to able to anticipate, or care that people are going to be mad. I've always been the person who says the thing that maybe everybody else is thinking, but nobody says it, because they understand that you're not supposed to say it. It's not that I don't feel nervous about saying certain things. But I would say generally, I'm not good at anticipating what will actually make people mad, or somehow, I just feel drawn anyway. And when it comes to things like that, that column about immigration, that's, to me, that is one of the most important things, it's one of the things I feel most passionate about in terms of reaching American Jews, and hopefully, educating people, which is that we really, really, really need to think about the myths that underlie American Jewish life.
And I'm not the first person to say that. In every generation there are people like me who say, hey, these are myths and we need to talk about them. And yet, somehow, it doesn't change anything. Nonetheless, these are myths that are that can be actually quite damaging, they can be destructive, they can be, they can really help perpetuate certain kind of very toxic things in the community. So if you're passionate, because we need to talk about them. Are they going to make people mad? I saw on Facebook, there was a little bit of pushback people like, “Well, my family definitely left because of violence.” I mean, I'm sure some people did, I’m not saying nobody did. But on the whole, that's not the reality. But it definitely made a couple people mad.
Clarissa Marks: I do really appreciate your writing how much it does seem like you're passionate about filling in the gaps. And rather than just telling a sweeping story, like you said, to cover up that great leap from ancient history to modern Israel, I really appreciate how you are bringing to light a lot of little facts about different parts of what life was like for a lot of our ancestors for 1000s of years, and almost relighting their history and giving them a full picture of human beings who had a culture, who weren't just sitting around waiting for Israel to start or waiting to immigrate from wherever they were. Where do you get some of your inspiration when you're writing your column? How do you decide what to write about?
Rokhl Kafrissen: Oh, that's a good question, maybe should ask my editor. There's a number of factors, some of which are practical, and some of which are my passion. If I happen to have been at New York and talk to somebody, and they said, “Oh, I'm doing something exciting…” It's a sort of mixture of things that lead me to write about this or that. I'm sorry, that does not answer your question. But I was just thinking what’s so crazy to me is that I could understand us not knowing about how the reality of how people lived, 2000 years ago, or even 1000 years ago, I mean, it's a long time. What's really, really crazy is how little we know about the very, very, very recent past, like even like, how our grandparents lived, and the world they lived in and the decisions that they made. Even that the most recent past is like ancient history to us so inaccessible. That's what really drives me crazy. But also, I think, is what I get the most fired up about that it seems so bizarre, that that the recent past is so inaccessible.
Clarissa Marks: Do you feel like when you're doing research to write about Jewish culture, does it actually make you feel closer or like you understand the recent past a little better? Are you able to find enough information to feel like you understand who your grandparents or great grandparents were and what their lives were like?
Rokhl Kafrissen: Yes, yes. Although I think in terms of really understanding them, probably the best resource is autobiographies. It can be hard to understand even if you like, understand the economic data and like for that immigration column, I looked at a bunch of economic tables, a lot of graphs. It was like the most research heavy column I ever wrote. But for really understanding how people saw the world autobiographies are absolutely key to that.
And I would recommend if anybody's listening to this, and they're curious, you can get a volume called Awakening Lives, that YIVO published. It was all through the 1930s, YIVO had a number of autobiography contests where they asked us average regular young people to write their life story. So, a 17-year-old and Warsaw would write their life story and finish and send it off. And it's amazing. So they finally translated a bunch, I don't even think all of them are translated, but I mean, they translated a couple 100 of them. And the book has maybe I think, 50 or 60. And it's, it's really interesting. I mean, obviously, the conditions are very, very different. So people have a different perspective on the world because their, their lives were very precarious. But they, they experienced all the same things. We did you know, of becoming a young person becoming a young adult, all those feelings, they didn't live in some hazy romantic bubble.
Clarissa Marks: A “Fiddler on the Roof,” musical situation.
Rokhl Kafrissen: Yeah, life was real, it was real.
Clarissa Marks: So I want to make sure that I ask you about the play that you wrote, recently, “Shtumer Shabes”, which means “Silent Sabbath” in Yiddish. I saw that it's about a 25-year-old performance study grad who's interested in Yiddish theatre history, and a 90 something Yiddish theatre diva. What was your inspiration for writing about those two characters and putting them together?
Rokhl Kafrissen: So there's a couple inspirations there. First of all, the circles that I'm in, my Yiddish and klezmer friends, the activity or the field of collecting of folklore, collecting poem collecting, all those kinds of ethnographic activities are really, really important. So the play in part is about the dynamic of collecting, and what the stakes are in that if you're a grad student, and this is that this is in the play.
If you're at a university, and you want to do anything having to do with human subjects, you have to get in Institutional Review Board approval. And the reason that that exists, and it's very cumbersome, and if you have any friends or you yourself are in academia, you probably know it's strangely cumbersome. But the reason why that's in place is because I mean, you can really trace it back to 1947. And the Nuremberg Code, people looked at what Nazi doctors were doing, which is like the limit of human imagination of the horrors of human experimentation. And they said, “all right, well, we gotta have some kind of code to remind the world that you have to have consent you have to have all these things.”
Not very long after that, you have very high-profile cases where you have violations of those principles. In the United States. The Stanford Prison Experiment is a famous example of that. But also, like just really horrific, horrific examples of medical experiments being done on prisoners on mentally incapacitated people in you know, state run institutions. So, I thought, well, okay, it's obvious that like, experimenting on prisoners is wrong, but what could possibly go wrong with somebody who just wants to collect a song, a folk song, or somebody who wants to collect memories of the war? So that was one thing is that I'm thinking about. What are the stakes in the ethnographic research that is constantly going on in my circles?
This is not an academic question, because it's really happening. And I've seen it many, many times that being able to do that work is not easy. And it's something that I've never really not very well at, to be honest with you because it takes a certain kind of skill set to establish a relationship with somebody and especially with elderly people. One of the aspects of my own personal story is that I didn't grow up with grandparents. So I think that I kind of missed out on that aspect of my life of having relationships with older people. And one of my very, very dear friends, Shane Baker, from the very beginning had many kinds of elderly people.
He had very close relationships and friendships with older people all through his life in the very beginning. And as an adult, especially, there was a number of actresses he was close with and from whom he learned many things about theatre. So part of the writing the play was being inspired by the relationships that Shane had with these women. And what that what those relationships enabled him to do that he is now like, one of the most important practitioners in Yiddish theater, any Yiddish language performance.
And in the last couple of years, he started working with a drag character he created called Miss Mitzi Manna. And it's this incredible combination of both very low brow, vaudevillian type material. He alternates with these incredibly powerful, dramatic readings of Yiddish poetry and other things. It's sort of sort of inspired me to create my own character, somebody who would have all of that within her of the lowbrow and the highbrow, and somebody who's now living. She is sort of a remnant of a world that's gone. What does she want? She's at the end of her life, what is she looking for? And what happens when somebody kind of stumbles along and wants to receive what you have? I thought it was a situation that had a lot of comic potential a lot of tragic potential, which is what attracts me.
Clarissa Marks: Do you in the play, explore some of the ethical questions? Is she resistant to sharing with the younger student?
Rokhl Kafrissen: Yeah, and in fact, I was both gratified and inspired by something when I'd already started writing the play. This was in December of 2019. They had a panel at Yiddish, New York. They had all taken part in a funded project. I think it was the National Institute of Humanities, that it had given them funding in like 1973, or something. And they did this very famous folk song collecting project, they got federal funding to do it. And they got all these informants, and they did this amazing collection project, and then collected all this material. And then kind of put it in a vault. Nobody ever did anything with it.
It's a very strange story, and I don't want to miss speak about it, but it's, it's a little bit odd. But the reason why they had two panels is that, I believe there's going to be now the songs are going to be on a website, and they're finally opening the vault, as it were, and finally doing something with it. So that's really exciting. But what was so fascinating is, first of all, all the people who I just mentioned are now. I would guess, in their 60s, and they're sort of like the elders, but like elders that people in my generation and younger really look up to.
So when they were talking on this panel, they were talking about being in their 20s. This is when they were young. Some of them were grad students and they were talking about dealing with their informants, their informants or their ethnographic informants, people who were singing songs for them, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. And it was such a really, very vivid illustration of me of the exact situation that I was writing about at that moment, which was asking people who had been through very traumatic essentially mass death experiences, like asking them to go back to share memories to share songs. It showed to me that the stakes were very high, even for something that sounds innocuous collecting a folk song, but when those bonds are connected to events that are very, could be very traumatic it's not so innocuous, necessarily.
And I remember one of them was talking with was saying that they had one particular informant who was always kind of leading them on she say, “oh, I can't sing today. But if you've come back tomorrow, I'll sing for you tomorrow.” And then they would come back the next day. And she's like, “no, I'm not really feeling it today, maybe come back in two days.” It was somebody who realized that they had something of value and they were kind of milking that for everything they could by torturing the person who was just trying to do something very honest.
And I heard that I thought, “oh, I love it.” I knew that It was confirmation to me that I'm sort of on the right track in terms of creating this character; the 90-year-old actress who is a human being and has her own feelings and her own sort of imperfect attitude towards the world and her own neuroses that she's working out. Sometimes I think we have this kind of view of the elderly as being, “oh, they're so cute. They're like Betty White rapping. Isn't that adorable?”
Clarissa Marks: Yeah. And it's so great to have a play that has two women identifying characters who are fully fleshed out and interacting with each other. So you wrote the play as part of 14th Street Y LABA, a fellowship project. Has being a fellow influenced your writing or your process?
Rokhl Kafrissen: Well, I will say on a very basic level, and this is a lesson that I think all writers learn. Having an audience is possibly the most important aspect of your writing process. So I had written a play before, and it was very difficult to get people interested in it. And so people would say to me, “well, when are you writing your next play?” And I was like, “oh, no, I'm so discouraged.” But I got this fellowship. And as part of the fellowship, I proposed writing a play. And once I realized it was time I needed to write the play, I wrote it, because the Y said, “hey, we're going to give you some support. We'll give you this or that, or we're waiting for it, essentially.” And so I wrote it. So just as an artist, having that kind of support, knowing that there will be an audience is so incredible. It's just, it seems so basic, but it's profound. So, being in an artist, supportive environment has been, the play wouldn't exist. Otherwise, I might have for that 10-years, I might think, “oh, that's a really cool scenario,” and then do nothing with it.
Clarissa Marks: But it kind of gave you some accountability. Folks are waiting for this. I have to write it now.
Rokhl Kafrissen: Absolutely, absolutely.
Clarissa Marks: So the play was going to be at LABA fest But because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival is being rescheduled.
Rokhl Kafrissen: So I think it's sort of on indefinite hold right now, which is you can imagine, huge, huge disappointment. But no, look, I hope for everybody's sake, we're going to come out of this thing at, some point, and we will come back to the theater all our theaters, or I hope all our theaters will still exist.
Clarissa Marks: Right? Where can folks follow your work, or learn more about your play and what you do?
Rokhl Kafrissen: As it happens, because we had to put off the readings. On Wednesday, April 29, we are having a sort of 40-minute virtual online session about the play. So it's going to be called Shin is for Schumer Chavez. And it's going to be me, the director, the actor, Shane is going to be involved too. And we're going to perform very, very short excerpts from the play. And we're going to be talking about the play and also about the two-time settings, play in the 1930s. Warsaw and also turn of the century like 2000, New York. And I'm sure that that session will be on the Y YouTube page, probably indefinitely. So you can find it on there. And as soon as I have any information, if there's no displays rescheduled, it'll be on my blog, which is rokhl.blogspot.com.
Clarissa Marks: Thank you for putting all of your work out there into the world because it's super interesting, and it brings me a lot of joy.
Rokhl Kafrissen: Thank you for reading. I really appreciate hearing that.
Clarissa Marks: And thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It's really nice to have you here.
Rokhl Kafrissen: Thank you. This was an absolute delight.
Clarissa Marks: Good. I'm so glad. Okay, well take care.
Rokhl Kafrissen: All right, talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.
Clarissa Marks: This episode was produced by me, Clarissa Marks, with Intro music by Ketsa and outgoing music by Gillicuddy. If you like the show, you can support it by sharing with a friend, or by adding a review in apple podcasts. You can connect with me on Twitter or Instagram @ClarissaRMarks. And to hear more episodes, find transcripts, or learn more about the people and media we mentioned, visit out our website, OnWandering.co. Thanks for listening and see you next time.