• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Interview with Cat Yronwode Interviewer: Deborah Altus May 29, 1996 Q: This is Wednesday, May 29th, and an interview with Cat Yronwode. Well, I'd love to start by just hearing some about your background, and what you feel are the influences that led to you living communally. A: Okay, well, let's see, I grew up in a liberal, left-wing, culturally but not religiously Jewish household. My father is Italian, but an atheist, and he was completely from my life from when I was four. So there's absolutely no Italian influence on me. My mother, although you've interviewed her now, and see a person who's pretty well at ease with the world, when I was young, she was still suffering what would be called post-traumatic stress syndrome, from having been a refugee in Germany. She was a much more um, gloomy, frightened, and depressed person to be raised by. Although she gave me an awful lot of books and stuff -- she was a librarian, and was always surrounded by books -- there was this real sense that she conveyed to me that the world was filled with, um, I don't know whether I would use the word "stupid," or the word "fascist," or just "fascist stupid people, " or "stupid fascists," but something like that. And this was also during the McCarthy anti-communism era. And I remember when I was very young, her saying things to her upstairs neighbors, the Fineburgs [?], because there was this thing called the "loyalty oath" they were requiring from the people at the University of California, and she was studying at Cal at the time, there was a big flap about it. And I remember her and Harry Fineburg saying, where would they go next? Where would people go next. Now Harry Fineburg was Jewish, but he was not an immigrant like us. But they were pretty serious about that stuff. This was when I was around five. So I always had the idea that the culture that you were in was not necessarily the best culture to live in. Um, and when I say I was Jewish, by the way, I have to explain, I have never been in a synagogue in my life. I'm completely culturally Jewish, not religiously. And I have been in some Christian churches, so. But not [unintelligible]. So, um, the idea was that I felt really strongly growing up was that there were better ways to do this -- there had been the Vomer [?] Republic, there had been socialism before the Bolsheviks [?] took over there with the, there was Trotsky. And I had good friends who were Trotskyists, and you know, there was, all this stuff was being talked about. So I thought it was all kind of optional, the culture that you had was optional. I didn't think of it as something like, you're born in Kansas, and you grow up doing what your grandparents and your parents did. I just didn't, I thought it was all optional. And all my mother's friends were bohemians. A lot of them were in academic Bohemia, in other words, they were librarians. They had bohemian aspirations, but they earned their living by using their minds for academic bean counting, or whatever, cataloging books. My mother's semi-fluent in a bunch of languages, so she got to be the person who cataloged books that came in that were in other languages, because she could do Latin, and from there all the romance languages, and the Germanic languages, and she could, "Oh, we've got to catalogue something in Portuguese, okay," and she'd look at it until it made sense to her. She can't speak Portuguese. I kind of got the idea that you could be a person of the world, that you could just do anything. Of course, growing up in Berkeley, my peers were of that type too. All of my childhood friends, with a very few exceptions, were the children of bohemians, and academics, or both. Children of folk singers. Children of professors, and children of school teachers and librarians. That was sort of the world that I grew up in. And I was a very lonely kid. I was an only child until I was 14, so I consider myself as being raised as an only child. And I read at least one, sometimes two books a day. And we spent a year in Europe. My mother got money from the German government, called Liedergemachen [?] money, which was, "to make it good again." And uh, around the same time, oh, her father had died. I don't know, she just decided to go back and see Interview with Cat Yronwode Interviewer: Deborah Altus May 29, 1996 Germany. And we . first went to Italy, which was the place she really liked. She had wanted to be a professor of Renaissance art, I mean I think that was her ambition -- her other ambition was to be an opera singer, but her more realistic ambition she had had would've been to have been an art historian. And that was terminated because of Hitler, she ended up being a maid in England and then coming to America. But she still liked Italy. So we went to Italy, and we went on this tour. My stepfather, who was, had bohemian aspirations and pretensions, but was not from the kind of culturally free and intellectually educated family that my mother was from, um, but he didn't own like a lot of that stuff, I think he was a little out classed by her, but anyway, we traveled around Italy, and she would take us from one place to another. Now she had been there in the '30's, when she had -- I don't know if she's told you all this? Q: No, she didn't. A: In the '30's, she couldn't go to college in Germany. And so her parents were very, very, very, very wealthy, and they sent her to Italy to study Renaissance art history. Q: And that was because she was Jewish, she couldn't go to college? A: Yeah, right. So she went to college in a little town called Perucha [?], there was a university there, the University of Perucha. And she lived there. And then I think what happened, and you'd have to check with her on this, but I think Mussolini signed some sort of pact with Hitler at one point, that Jews could no longer go to college in Italy. And she came to America. Once she went back to Germany or back to Italy, and then she had a, terrible things happened to her. She had an illegitimate child who was born prematurely and died. I mean, she just was, basically, her life came apart. She was 18 around this time, 17 or 18 years old. She ended up in England as a maid, and then eventually got a visa. Her uncle, one of her many uncles, lived in America. And this family had been very wealthy, they were very wealthy, they were bankers and lawyers, and Uncle Arthur lived in America, her Uncle Bruno lived in England. He had been captured in WWI, and uh, he had been an officer, he had been captured in WWI, and had married a nurse who'd nursed him back to health, a Christian woman. This whole family, I have to explain, was a very, um, uh, . assimilated, upper-class, German Jewish family. They were so assimilated that, my mother to this day, like when people say, "Do you speak Yiddish?" she goes, "Why would I speak Yiddish? I speak German?" I mean, they were not ghettoized at all. So, she ended up in America, very poor, and um, met my father, who was an Italian-American, and was on this bohemian quest as an artist. And they lived in Greenwich Village. And they were very bohemian. Anyway, they eventually came to California during WWII, and then I was born after WWII. So anyway, to get back to this, my step-father, my mother, and I went to, um, Europe, and spent a lot of time in Italy. And um, they simply took me out of school. They didn't make a pretense of having me do homework, or anything like that, it was like, "Now you're going learn about art history, and this is it, and about other cultures." And they colluded with me, and basically lying to the Berkeley school system and telling them I was doing some sort of home study program. In essence I skipped a grade by simply just dropping out for a year and then coming back and rejoining my classmates. And we went into Austria, and then we got into Germany, and my mother was hit by a car. She and my step-father were crossing the street, and a car hit her. She was in the hospital for four months. So at that point we kind of stalled out in Germany. And we were staying, at the time that this happened, at my grandmother's house. My Interview with Cat Yronwode Interviewer: Deborah Altus May 29, 1996 grandparent's had been given their old house back after the war. And they lived there half the year, and the other half of the year they lived in New York. So I ended up, like staying in Germany for awhile . And that's when I became really aware of the arbitrary nature, and this is a word you're going to hear me say a lot: "arbitrary," the arbitrary nature of the culture in which I had been born.

Load more

  64

Copy Link