Grand Opera: The Life, Languages, and Teaching of Miriam Ellis Interviewed by Cameron Vanderscoff Edited by Cameron Vanderscoff and Irene Reti Miriam Ellis Speaking at Cowell College, Circa 2013 Santa Cruz University of California, Santa Cruz University Library 2020 This oral history is covered by copyright agreement between Miriam Ellis and the Regents of the University of California. Under “fair use” standards, excerpts of up to six hundred words may be quoted without the University Library’s permission, as long as the materials are properly cited. Quotations of more than six hundred words require the written permission of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, and a proper citation, and may also require a fee. Under certain circumstances, not-for-profit users may be granted a waiver of the fee. For permission contact: [email protected]. A Gallery of Posters for the International Playhouse Contents Introduction 1 Prologue 15 Early Life and Family History 16 Centre de l’art dramatique, appliqué à l’étude du français, Center of Theater Arts, New York City 24 More Family History 32 Working in the Displaced Persons Camps, Post World War II 41 Hosting Eugene Ionesco at UCSC 59 Coming back to the United States: Life in the 1950s and 1960s 62 Wanting to be More than a Wife and Mother: Going Back to School 69 Coming to UC Santa Cruz as a Graduate Student in Literature 83 Graduate Work with Professor Joseph Silverman 105 Narrative Evaluations Instead of Grades 107 A Brief French Lesson 109 Life as a Graduate Student at UCSC 115 More on Serving as Translator for Eugene Ionesco During his Visit to UCSC 134 More on the Dissertation and Joseph Silverman 140 Early Theatrical Productions 152 Key Colleagues and Inspirations 203 Teaching 205 The UCSC Colleges 248 La Maison francophone 251 Key Colleagues 254 More on the International Playhouse 257 Reflections on UC Santa Cruz 287 Au revoir 291 Appendices 295 Accolades 295 [Abbreviated] Cumulative Bio-Bibliography. MIRIAM ELLIS, Lecturer in French 302 About the Interviewer and Editors 325 1 Introduction “Bonjour, Monsieur Cameron, ça va?” “Oh, Bonjour Madame Miriam, ça va bien.” And then when I left her house, or we hung up the phone, “Bonne journée, be safe, see you soon” to which I would say, “Si, es un plan—hasta muy pronto, no? Cuídase.” In order to understand Miriam Ellis and all she has to teach, the more languages you have, the better. Miriam is a linguistic gran dame with a small encyclopedia of tongues that she switches between with a fluidity that many of us struggle for even in our first language. And she isn’t only a speaker of these languages, but a beloved teacher and a gifted translator of them, working with everything from Grand Opera arias to the plays of Lope de Vega. When I first moved to New York City in 2013 for graduate school, I lived in an institution called International House, and I would hear people in the corridors exchanging the words that evoked home. With Miriam Ellis, it was rather like that whole thirteen-story building was rolled up into one woman sitting in her living room. Miriam exercises her polyglot chops with a palpable, infectious joy. I’ve been in circumstances where it can feel someone is showing off or being snobbish, looking down at someone who doesn’t have the same proficiency. But that ain’t Miriam. She rolls between languages, her eyes sparking and giving one of her expressive shrugs, and I always had the feeling that she was choosing that language in that moment because it was the right fit, that French or Spanish or whatever it was had the best exact color to bring out the nuance and sheen in what she was communicating. In fact, Miriam has a love of human communication, of our efforts to reach one another in an often fractured and uneven world. I think she has a strongly felt sadness for the suffering that come when such communication fails—she grew up through World 2 War II—and a profound happiness when it works, when recognition triumphs from one soul to another, whether through one of Molière’s great plays or in a classroom of a Tuesday. This oral history is a chronicle of Miriam’s own journey as a gifted communicator, with a primary focus on her almost-fifty years at UC Santa Cruz. Miriam Ellis was born in New York City in 1927 and was raised in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush. She was the child of Jewish immigrants who left what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While the family struggled financially in the Depression, Miriam’s route to the world of language and interchange was laid out from an early age. As she puts it, “Our house was always open to immigrants, and so they came with all kinds of languages: German, Russian, Polish, or Hungarian, and I don’t know what all else.” As she says, culturally speaking, “the Other” wasn’t some feared or shadowy figure; they were always a human being, a guest there in her living room. Her father also had a remarkable gift with languages, speaking perhaps seven or eight, and her mother was such a well-known social and connective presence in the community she was nicknamed “The Alderman.” As for Miriam, she fell especially in love with French language and theater through a program that was offered during WWII by the Free French government in exile; it was designed to preserve and promote French language and culture while France was occupied. The program included major prewar French film and acting luminaries. There, Miriam was exposed to Molière (“the love of my life”), Corneille, Racine, and other great French playwrights; for her, the love of language and love of literature, creative expression, and culture have long been intertwined. When she was twenty-one, Miriam went to France for the first time to volunteer in a postwar displaced persons camp, serving refugees who had been driven from North Africa and parts of the Middle East by fascist occupation and war. There, while struggling 3 at times to understand the many cultures at work, her own feminist consciousness was shaped by seeing that women in the camps were often marginalized or mistreated. After the war, she came back home with her first husband, a veteran of the Royal Air Force. With kids in tow, in 1955 they drove across the country and set up a new life in Southern California. As her husband ran an auto business specializing in working on British cars, Miriam was at home raising their three children. Miriam says of being a homemaker, “I loved it jusqu’à un certain point, up to a certain point.” While she loved her children, in the era leading up to Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, Miriam knew “I wanted more than just being a mother or a wife of a businessperson. I needed more than that.” In the forties, Miriam had completed high school prior to going overseas, but hadn’t been inspired by a brief stint in college at the time. As a mother of three, she picked back up and started taking night classes in 1957. She then spent the next twenty-two years gradually and steadfastly working through a series of degrees while balancing her many other obligations. She also kept up her passion for theater in these years and acted in regional productions. Miriam secured a bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude) and master’s degree from CSU Northridge (then San Fernando Valley State) by the mid 1960s, when she was in her late 30s. Miriam had a special passion for connecting and working with international students, and soon added another responsibility to her list: she joined the staff at the university as director of the Office of International Programs. Like her own parents, she invited people from all over the world into her home to talk, share culture, and socialize; as she puts it, “The Other was very welcome.” Miriam fought a hard uphill battle for international student programs at a time when then-governor of California Ronald Reagan was slashing budgets; ultimately, faced with an unsupportive and sexist 4 supervisor on campus and declining statewide support for the very idea of international exchange, she stepped down from her position. It was then the late 60s and early 70s, a “time of great foment” in America. Miriam felt that “zeitgeist” too, and she decided start yet another chapter of her life. In 1971, she came north to UC Santa Cruz as a PhD student studying primarily French and Spanish literature. In time, she and her husband divorced; Miriam found herself on a young, still- forming campus—it was just six years old at the time—where two of her children also went through as undergrads. They were all part of the incredible spark of the original UCSC experiment. Miriam herself was inspired, saying, “Incroyable, j’étais absolument frappée, incroyablement…and to see those trees, those magnificent trees, and thinking, immediately being transported to the idea of being able to sit under those trees and open the books and pursue knowledge in a setting like this. How could one fail to be inspired?” Miriam has stayed ever since, and has left an outsize mark on the campus. She completed her PhD and her twenty-two year journey as a so-called “re-entry” student in 1979, at age fifty-one.1 She recalls thriving as a grad student in what she remembers as a joyous, small-scale, and creative atmosphere.