Speaker 0 00:00:00 You are listening to right on radio on KPI 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected]. I'm Liz old tonight on right on radio. David FEDEC talks with Jana Larson author of real day cinematic essay, equal parts, memoir, mystery, reclaim screen, pay, play, and travelog real Bay charts. The author's unusual journey toward understanding another woman's life Larson holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Hamilton university and an MFA in filmmaking from the university of California, San Diego. She lives in Minneapolis and I'm Annie Harvey in the last part of the hour. Liz olds talks to Joshua M. Green about his latest work unstoppable Siggy B wills X astonishing journey from Auschwitz survivor and penniless immigrant to wall street legend, Joshua and green is a popular lecture on Holocaust history and an author slash historian whose biographies of SART sold more than half a million copies worldwide. A former instructor at Hofstra and Fordham. University's green is the recipient of numerous awards for his books and films. Green was honored by the New York public library, distinguished offer series. He currently teaches mindfulness in the workplace at the <inaudible> school of business, Hofstra university, all of this and more so stay tuned to write on Henri
Speaker 1 00:01:28 <inaudible>. Thanks, Annie. Hi Jenna.
Speaker 2 00:01:39 Hi Dave. Thanks for having me on the show.
Speaker 1 00:01:41 More thrilled to have you sounds like it's going to be quite a show from that introduction. So, uh, Jenna, I really hardly know where to begin, but so let's begin by maybe then talking a little bit about you. Tell us a little bit about your background. You're a writer, a cinematographer, and how you came to this story. It's amazing story.
Speaker 2 00:02:01 Well, Dave, I was in film school at the university of California in San Diego. Uh, when I, and searching for something to make my thesis film about, and I read this article in the newspaper that really captured my attention, um, about a woman, a Japanese woman named Takako Konishi, who extensively flew from Tokyo, where she lived to Minnesota and then took a bus into North Dakota to look for the ransom money that Steve Buscemi buried at the end of the movie Fargo. Uh, she died searching for whatever she was searching for the money. And so I decided that I wanted to, I mean, the story just captivated me and I thought it would be fun and maybe even easy to sort of retrace her steps, like fly myself to Minneapolis and get on a bus and do what she did. Um, and that it would turn into just a great little film. Uh, and, uh, that's kinda how I got hooked into hooked into the whole ordeal.
Speaker 1 00:03:12 And then you created this multi-layered story, which we're going to talk about, but before we do, I know you have a reading ready for us. Why don't we start with that reading and then we're going to talk a lot about your book.
Speaker 2 00:03:23 Yeah, great. So I thought I would just read the first page and then skip forward a little bit. So the first, the opening, if this book were a film, it would open on the black and white image of a woman walking alone on a snow covered road. She has seen from a distance, a dark impression against a frozen backdrop of wheat fields covered in white. A closeup reveals her hands bare, flushed with cold. She cups them to her face, mostly obscured by a Forline hood and exhales a cloud of steam trying to get warm. She looks out at the landscape in front of her. Her face is young moon shaped her pale skin framed by a straight black hair that goes blonde at the tips, wind stirs the fur trim on her hood as a prodding her to move on. She pulls a folded map out of her pocket and studies it then looks out across the fields at a wall of blowing snow that occasionally lifts since worlds into Eddie's.
Speaker 2 00:04:25 She pockets the map and starts to Wade through deep banks of white into the distance, her figure receipts until it disappears overtaken by an alternate geography of shifting drifts. This image first appears to you when you read a newspaper article with the title coroner, unable to find cause of death of Japanese woman, a small item published in the Bismarck Tribune on January 7th, 2002, you read the story and something about it catches and holds you. You look for more information and find nothing, but over the coming days, the image of the woman searching at the edges of nowhere, replays in your mind feels like a message
Speaker 2 00:05:06 Flash forward. One year I'll just read like another page. Uh, so this is, uh, after I've I've arrived, uh, um, arrived in Minneapolis. Bismarck. North Dakota is a six hour drive from Minneapolis, but it takes about 10 hours by bus. You sit toward the back next to an old man who sleeps with his mouth hanging open and an older woman with a red checkered shirt and dyed black hair in curlers. She reads a coupon circular, like it's a novel just in front of you, three Amish brothers talk among themselves in a thick, dramatic language. You eavesdrop and try to figure out what they're saying. It sounds biblical at first, but occasionally they say things in English like solid Oak door. And you second, guess that theory you settle in, take out your video and start to film the landscape going by out the window. You try to imagine you are Takako that you've watched the movie Fargo believe it's a true story.
Speaker 2 00:06:06 Believe there's a suitcase full of money, buried somewhere on this road and believe you can find it. Fargo is a black comedy by Joel and Ethan Cohen. It tells the story of a car salesman named Jerry Londa guard who hires two thugs to kidnap his wife so he can buy a parking lot with the ransom money from his rich father-in-law. It's a harebrained scheme that goes wrong in every way. Most pertinently for Takako story. One of the hired kidnappers played by Steve Buscemi varies a suitcase camp containing nearly $1 million in a snowbank on the side of a road. And then he winds up dead. That wouldn't mean much of the Cohen brothers hadn't claimed that Fargo was a true story quote at the request of the survivors. The names have changed out of respect for the dead. The rest has been told exactly as it occurred after the film came out in interviews and publicity, the Cohen brothers maintain that the film was definitely true. All true.
Speaker 1 00:07:05 Thank you. That was Jenna Larson, fantastic reading from real Bay, a cinematic essay, great choice of reading. Uh, give a sense, uh, to our listeners. What does story is about? I tell you I started reading that long before I should have, because I couldn't stop. I typically like to finish up my books near the interview, but I really couldn't stop it. It's really quite a compelling story. And there are a lot of levels to this story, Jenna, uh, it's a story about Takako, it's a story about B uh, you have to tell us who he is and it's a story about you. And if it's not, you certainly allude to the fact that it is. And then I would also suggest it's a story about the reader, because I think along the way, if we're really paying attention to this story, like to cock, like be, and perhaps like you, we start questioning our own sort of understanding about what existence is and what it means. Uh, at least that's what it was for me. So I'm a many layered book. Um, so let's talk about Takako and B N U, but uh, in, in, in terms of the layers of this story, uh, that's a really broad question. How fun is it?
Speaker 2 00:08:11 No, but I get what you're saying. So, I mean, it really is. It's a non-fiction book. It doesn't seem necessarily like that because it is so multilayered. Um, and, and there are spaces sort of carved out for fictions to emerge within the nonfiction book. But so I it's, it's a story really that follows to KACO's story through my own story of trying to make a film about Takako. And I refer to myself in the second person for a lot of the story or for the first half of the book, I refer to myself as you. And then, uh, when I moved to Japan, not to give too much away, but I ended up moving to Japan in pursuit, this story. And then I begin to refer to the narrator as B period, the letter B period. And so, um, at first, I mean it was kind of a technique to create some distance between the writer who would refer to herself as I and these characters in this story.
Speaker 2 00:09:16 It, and at first it was a bit of a technique as a writer, I needed to create some distance between myself and the story that was kind of about a difficult period in my life. But you know, it also kind of creates this distance is really part of the story. This is the characters both to Kako and my own character, which is you and B feels some kind of separation from life. And so in a sense, and the central image of the book, as I read in the opening is really of a, a character sort of receding into the distance until she disappears. And I've somehow like you and B those names that sort of distancing from, I kind of was one of the ways I went about kind of mirroring that image of a character sort of disappearing into the landscape.
Speaker 1 00:10:10 And of course, using a second person just sort of tricks the reader into becoming part of the story too, because we hear that you so often it starts becoming us. Right, right. Uh, so, um, do we want, do you want to tell us a little bit more about Takako and her arrival in his Mark and, um, how she ended up in Detroit lakes? Very sad story. Um, just to refresh people's minds, I'm sure maybe people are familiar with this story. Maybe a recall something when you mentioned that, but, uh,
Speaker 2 00:10:41 Yeah, so it became a bit of a, you know, news phenomenon we'll say, or an urban legend because when Takako, uh, arrived in Bismarck, she stayed in a hotel room for a few days, mailed a few letters and then went walking on a road, uh, kind of a small sort of service road along the highway and was hitchhiking. Some stranger picked her up, nobody knows who and drove her to the police station in Bismarck, North Dakota, where she encountered three very friendly police officers who apparently spent most of an entire day with her. My sense is that they were there with her from the morning until about seven o'clock at night, trying to communicate with her and understand what she wanted and what they concluded was that she was searching for something having to do with the movie Fargo. Um, she said, you know, Steve Buscemi and, um, Francis McDormand, like the names of the actors in the movie. And they concluded that she was searching for the ransom money, uh, that Steve was Shammy varied at the end of the movie. It's, you know, nobody knows for sure if that's true, but they dropped her, you know, at bus station and she continued on to, uh, Fargo and then from Fargo to Detroit lakes, looking for whatever she was looking for. And so a lot of the book is trying to understand, like who was to Kako and what did she really want? What was she looking for?
Speaker 1 00:12:11 That's a powerful theme of the whole book. What was Takako looking for? What was be looking for in parentheses Jana? Um, do you think Takako found what she was looking for? And then I'm going to ask you the same question.
Speaker 2 00:12:28 Wow. That's a really difficult question. I feel like I spent the whole book, you know, trying to understand what she was looking for. And I want to say that she did. I want, I mean, I, like, I deeply want, you know, I've pictured so many different endings for Takako story and I really wanted it to be like this beautiful scene. That was everything she had ever imagined that it would be, but I don't know what she was looking for, honestly. I mean, both spoiler, nobody nobody knows except for Takako what she was looking for. Um, did I find what I was looking for? I think so. I mean, a friend, I went for a walk with a friend who had just read my book and she said the coolest thing to me, which was that, you know, it's a bit of a page Turner in her.
Speaker 2 00:13:23 That's what she described it as. Like it's a little bit of a mystery and the mystery is the artistic process in a sense. And how are you going to sort of achieve this impossible feat of this film that you're trying to make? And then at the end, she's like, I don't want to, like, I'm not going to like spoil the ending or whatever, but she said for her, the ending was holding the book in her hands as an object. And it was like this crazy, like 3d 4d moment where she could feel that what the, whatever the character was searching for, if it wasn't sort of completed in the book itself, it was completed by the fact that here's this book like clearly the character figured it out. Wow. So that, that was, I loved that. I thought that was really cool.
Speaker 1 00:14:09 That's a nice insight. Uh, it is a bit of four ending to, uh, movies are such a big part of this book. They're obviously a big part of your life. Um, I became a little bit obsessed with the movie Wanda, which I had not heard of before and I desperately want to see, but I can't figure out how to see it. Um, and I found myself listeners and you will too, if you're movie fans, jotting notes to yourself of all the movies you have to watch, because the book is just chockablock with, uh, movie references. Um, did, they was just come to you. Did you work hard to plug those in? Is that reflection I view or is that a reflection of the character? Who is you?
Speaker 2 00:14:48 Well, I mean, there's not that big of a separation between
Speaker 1 00:14:56 It's about what's real or not in this book to tell you the truth.
Speaker 2 00:14:58 So it's true. All true. It's completely true. Yeah. It's completely true. It's not fiction. It is. Non-fiction it's uh, it's uh, I mean, it's kind of like a memoir really, but it just doesn't, it reads more like a story. Um, yes, the, the films, of course, the main character B is a film student. She spends all day long watching films. And because she's trying to solve this problem, this to make this impossible film, she's looking at every film as if it could be an answer to her problem, you know, or like give her some new spin or some new insight, you know, and occasionally I, the character would see a field and be like, yes, exactly. That that's what, that's what I need to do, you know? And I had a million of those moments. And so, and especially with Wanda, I mean, I think in the film, I say something like the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
Speaker 2 00:15:56 The first time I saw this particular shot in Wanda. And it's sort of like in reverse a character in white walking through a dark background, you know, a tiny, tiny character sort of disappearing, almost disappearing into this huge landscape. And, um, and it was in there, there were things that Barbara Loden really did with that film for her to the story she was telling was about a woman she read in the newspaper, um, that she related to in some way. And so she made this film, but she also played the main character in the film. So she played this character who was really a version of herself. And, um, and it's, it's, I mean, I highly recommend, I do think it's one of the greatest films ever made. So I highly recommend searching it out and finding it it's out there now. It used to just be sort of, you couldn't find it anywhere. And then it was reprinted. It's kind of like small printing and people exchanged like copied DVD of it, you know, and now it's of a real DVD, like sort of remastering and release. So it's, find-able now
Speaker 1 00:17:05 I will find it. Um, we are speaking with Jenna Larson about her book, real Bay, a cinematic essay that's R E Bay. Let's talk about that title. Um, it's maybe not the title we would expect for this book, maybe Takako or something, but the real Bay, why real Bay?
Speaker 2 00:17:23 Well, real Bay is what to Kako wrote on her entrance visa when she came to the us as her destination. So where she was going was real Bay, far comma Fargo, a place that does not exist, not exist. It does not exist as far as I can tell, as far as the police and their research, we cannot find a place with this name. And, and so for me, I couldn't, I mean, I played around with different titles, but for me that was the title, because it's about this desire to get somewhere that like maybe doesn't exist. The main character is full of this longing for something that like, it is real, but not real. And so, you know, and it's almost like I describe it somewhere in the book has like this desire to like, be other than this to get, to get to sort of like almost pushed through the screen into another, you know, universe it's like this. So it's trying to understand the mind of a character that wants to get in there, whatever that is, um, which Takako called real Bay. Um, so yeah,
Speaker 1 00:18:38 Yeah. Uh, uh, agenda and you write this book, it's a cinematic essays. So we have script writing in here. Um, we have reported gene here. We have memoir type things we have, the second person is so much going on. Uh, the script writing was kind of cool. There's just so many different ways to get into the character as you were describing. Do you think if there wasn't this Fargo connection really care as much about Takako or would it just be another sad story? And I hate to say it like that. It is a profoundly sad story in many ways, um, as mysterious as it is and quirky as it is in some respects, it's sad. Would we care if it wasn't about Fargo?
Speaker 2 00:19:18 Well, I don't think we would've heard of it if it weren't about Fargo. I mean, I don't think we would've heard of it if, if, I mean, that is what really captured people's imagination that turned it into this article now, you know, that's sort of, you know, at a certain point I realized it's kind of not about the movie Fargo. It's really about what this character wanted, which I think had to do with films in general. And the idea of cinema in general, not maybe, maybe about Fargo, but maybe I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 00:19:53 So
Speaker 2 00:19:55 I, I feel like, um, we would, yeah, we would never have heard about Takako and her sad story if it weren't for that connection. Yeah. I don't think that's why we care about it in the end. I think that's fine.
Speaker 1 00:20:07 That's right. And thanks to you. We don't, we care about her and really it's a beautiful, beautiful book and your story is also very poignant, uh, your time in Japan. Uh, I wanted some of that to be fiction because I wanted you to be happier in some of these moments. It was hard. Uh, so we have such precious few minutes left. Um, uh, I wanted to say one thing and then ask you about what you can be working on, uh, is that as I was reading this, I was thinking I'm going to write a follow-up to this or a companion book called looking for Douglas in about a minute. Tell us, tell us who Douglas is and why we should care. Well, Douglas
Speaker 2 00:20:48 Is possibly, uh, to KACO's romantic interest, who was a man, an American married person. Um, and his phone number was written on the, the sort of holiday in receipt where Takako stayed because she called him right before she went on, on this walk. And so it's, you know, I CA I've, I've called Douglas several times in Singapore, but he's never picked up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 00:21:22 That's a fascinating element as a story too. Um, again, we are fast approaching the end. We were speaking to Jana Larson about real Bay, a cinematic essay, um, before, and he gives us the, um, whatever that is cut off. What are you working on now?
Speaker 2 00:21:37 Well, it's a book about, uh, an axolotl, which is a type of salamander, um, native to Mexico city, uh, which is now extinct and the artist, the conceptual artist, Allan Kaprow, who is the inventor of happenings. Uh, and it's sort of about those two characters and what I, what I tell him the space that exists between them. Wow.
Speaker 1 00:22:07 Yeah. An extinct salamander. Well, there had to be something sad in there, but the, well, this is fascinating. So where are you in terms of the story? Where are you at? Could we almost done?
Speaker 2 00:22:21 Oh no. I just was organizing my notebooks yesterday and thinking, I need to like go through and start organizing this into something. So I'm at the point of having taken a lot of notes, but not really started to piece, piece them together.
Speaker 1 00:22:41 You will let us know when that comes up. We're going to have you back. Are you working on any new movies? Is that movie still in your heart? You still,
Speaker 2 00:22:48 It is kind of, if somebody gave me a bunch of cash, I would definitely make this into a film. Now,
Speaker 1 00:22:55 Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it. She's looking for DOE come on. Someone do it. So you would make this real Bay into a movie. I would, that would be amazing. That would be, I hope it happens. It needs to happen. Uh, yeah. So, uh, again, I'll remind everyone that's generalist and real Bay, a cinematic essay. This shows right on radio. We have a podcast, ladies and gentlemen downloaded on your electronic calls, whatever these things are and tell people about it. Jen has been a treat.
Speaker 2 00:23:27 Thank you so much for having me, Dave, what a pleasure.
Speaker 1 00:23:29 Absolutely wonderful book back to you, Annie.
Speaker 0 00:23:46 Joshua. Are you there? Hi. Hi. How are you doing tonight? You'll just find thankless. Well, thank you so much for joining us on right on radio. Would you like to start with your reading on ready when you are? We are ready.
Speaker 4 00:24:03 All right. This is on the opening chapter of unstoppable and our protagonist Siggy will Zig is that just arrived in America, age 21, having been through two years of forced labor, two years more and Auschwitz, and then on death marches weighing 88 pounds. When he was liberated by the American army, he walked out of the Ellis Island immigration building into the worst snow storm in recent history and boarded a ferry that soon arrived on the Manhattan side. The snow storm that becomes so intense that volunteers use sleds to move the suitcases from the dock waiting buses. You boarded a Greyhound bus and got off an hour later at a hundred and third street in Broadway. Or he entered the lobby of hotel Marsay since the stock market crash of 1929, 11 story Bozart hotel built a brick and limestone and crowned with a sloping mansard roof had lost most of its charm.
Speaker 4 00:24:58 The 40 year old building was now a dilapidated halfway house for refugees. So he look out from his window down onto pedestrians, heading home through blinding snow amazement over being in America was quickly giving way to harsh realities. What now he wondered he had nothing, no resources, no credentials. He spoke with a thick German accent had only a grade school. Education stood five feet, five and one half inches short and years of torture and starvation were still fresh in his mind. He had here, he was still breathing, staring out the window. It's snow covered. New York streets that comparison with the past, everything here was a paradise. The bus ride to Harlem from Ellis Island had been paradise. The neighborhood grocery stores, high rise, apartment buildings and beer trucks for paradise. His smelly room in an overcrowded hotel with cockroaches scurrying across the scuffed hardwood floor, the heavy snow fall outside his window.
Speaker 4 00:25:52 The 200 remaining dollars in his pocket, which was soon disappear. If he didn't find work, it was all paradise on the street below his window. Weary pedestrians fought driving winds and six foot high snow drifts evoking for Siggy harsh memories of other blinding storms. When starving men and women trudged forward on death marches wearing nothing more than thin prisoner uniforms, traffic in the New York streets, snarled and drivers honk their horns and patients to get to wherever they were going. Even to a 21 year old newcomer like Siggy. It was clear that Americans who never knew the inside of a concentration camp were alive in every sense, moving purposefully toward some vision of tomorrow. He liked that he would do that to grasp opportunities and not allow the darkness of the past to Rob him of a bright future. And that seminal moment he made three first.
Speaker 4 00:26:43 He would never go hungry again. Second, he would marry a Jewish woman, have children and rebuild the Jewish people. Third, he would preserve Holocaust memory and speak up. Whenever he witnessed injustice, he had no illusions about such vows. He knew better than had to think he could change the world. Antisemitism would never go away and Jews would always be persecuted. That was just business as usual. It's still the old mighty had saved him. And now his job was to grab whatever scraps remained from the rubble of his life and cobble them back together into an edifice of yet to be determined, size and shape.
Speaker 5 00:27:18 Thank you. That's Joshua Green author of unstoppable about Z willful <inaudible> um, why don't we start? Uh, this is a little broad, but, um, Steven Spielberg has done, uh, a watt of amazing stuff to forward memories of the Holocaust and making sure that, uh, those memories continue. Uh, and, uh, I think one of the main ways you, uh, kind of in your own heart conversed with the, was through one of those interviews, is that correct?
Speaker 4 00:27:55 Yes. Um, I've took seven years to write this book and I never met him in person, but I feel like I've known him all my life and the research included, um, screening several times the 15 hours of video testimony that he gave for the Spielberg show of foundation. That's one of the longest testimonies in their 50,000, uh, testimony, archive that plus transcripts of lectures he gave at West point and, um, various other universities and synagogues and churches. Um, there was quite a cache of material that his children were able to provide me. And, uh, that kind of testimony is critical. You know, it said that, um, statistics don't bleed, we can't really understand the number like 6 million where we can understand one man's story, one woman's story, one child's story. And that's what we have here.
Speaker 5 00:28:54 And as we get further along and time, uh, the survivors are passing cause they're getting old. And, uh, it seems to me that that is incredibly important in terms, as you say of the historical, uh, importance of remembering the Holocaust and never forgetting,
Speaker 4 00:29:15 Is it, it's a big question. It's a big issue now that the survivor generation is fading so completely way who will tell the story, which version of the Holocaust will they tell through, what medium will they tell it? Will it be through film? Will it be through arts paintings, literature, novels, music, dance, for which audiences and for what intended impact on those audiences for myself as someone who's been working in this arena for quite a while, I find that video testimony and memoirs such as this book unstoppable, um, are the most powerful way of we who were not there being able to come closer to the experiences of those who work. Yeah.
Speaker 5 00:30:08 Um, let's see. Um, there's so many questions I have, um, unstoppable the title. Let's go there for a moment. I'm curious, among other things, if you know this, um, why of all the things that Ziggy could have chosen to do as a person who is, uh, thinks that everything is a miracle, as you said, in the Lear reading, um, why did he choose the banking and the oil as opposed to, I don't know, uh, um, other things that he could have done.
Speaker 4 00:30:45 Yeah, good question. When he came over here, his, his first job actually in America was shoveling snow and his next job was cleaning toilets and sweatshops. I don't think he envisioned when he first arrived ever becoming a, a mogul, you know, a Baron in oil and banking. Um, but he was fearless and unstoppable that that really describes his character. So whenever opportunity presented itself, he grabbed it. And when he went from cleaning toilets to selling neckties, he took whatever small commissions that yearned and started buying, uh, inexpensive stocks. He found this one oil company called Wilsher oil of Texas bought a few shares. And coincidentally happened to have met a more savvy investor from wall street who had some of the same stock. This older man saw in the young refugee, this young immigrant, the kind of Moxie that he, um, admired and said, maybe you're the right guy to have the takeover of this oil company.
Speaker 4 00:31:55 They've got lots of potential, but, um, the board is very old school and they're, they don't have any energy for doing anything. She saw this as a chance to get out of this small time world of ties and notebooks and things that he was selling from the trunk of his car, managed to get friends and neighbors to go in with him, buy enough stock, to get some seats on the board. Eventually was elected president, chair and CEO because he built it so rapidly into a big success. Then he wanted to build it bigger and realized I need access to cash. I want to drill oil Wells and, and, and, and do exploring you didn't think you need a lot of cash into that. So, uh, an advisor said, well, banks have cash. They should. So he did the same thing. He found a trust company in New Jersey, same, same situation with an old kind of fuddy-duddy board, got his friends and neighbors to go in with them on buying stock, became president CEO and chairman of the board and build trust company from $181 million to a bag with assets of more than 4 billion. Wow. And, uh, and he loves his life. Oh my gosh. What a, what a joyful man. Um, seven years. I've never gone so fast. That way
Speaker 5 00:33:19 I can see by the pictures that he was very just unsolvable.
Speaker 4 00:33:25 It was brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. He would stand up in the middle of a restaurant. We'd be out at dinner with his family and start singing and dancing. If I were a rich people would look at his children and say, does he own the restaurant or something? And say, no, no. He just loves his life. Yeah.
Speaker 5 00:33:42 It wasn't that kind of just theme song. You would sing it whenever the kid
Speaker 4 00:33:47 Theme song was actually the impossible dream, the dream, the impossible. So that was, that was that summed up. That was the, you know, the, the Anthem of his life. You know, that, uh, if I only remained true to this glorious quest, I know they, my heart will lie, peaceful and calm when I'm laid to my rest, that he, he lived his life like that for noble causes
Speaker 5 00:34:16 Must have been what his heart. I mean, I know that song wasn't written yet when he was in the camps, but that must've been where his heart, that must've been how he survived, I would guess.
Speaker 4 00:34:29 Well, he was a very religious man. And, um, he always said, look, I never had more than a grade school education. I mean, the Nazis shut down all the schools for Jews. They weren't allowed to go to school anymore. And they said it wasn't brains. Now I don't have a lot of that either. It was a hand of the almighty, but he was cunning. He had what he called Fox like instincts. Let me, can I give you one story? Sure. They were on a death March from Auschwitz to Malthouse in January of 1945, freezing cold winter rags. He's wearing freezing cold. And the wooden clogs that they'd given him to her were deteriorating falling off. The shoelaces had deteriorated and the cold and the snow and the wet and without shoes he'd get gangrene and he would die. His body couldn't fight off infection. So what to do when they, when the guards, when the Nazi guards bedded the prisoners down for the night, he saw there was a little sapling, not far away.
Speaker 4 00:35:27 And when no one was looking, he went and crawled over, took a little spoon that he had taken with him from Auschwitz and started stripping off pieces of bark from the tree. Then he rubbed them between his palms to warm them up, twine them together, wrapped them around his shoes, like invented shoelaces and gingerly, tried it out. And sure enough, they held literally a thread of bark saved his life. And I think if you were here, he'd want people, he would say to people, he'd say several things. He would say, don't give into despair. If you, if you know that is it, uh, it is a benign and beneficence universe. There are powers that will come to your help if you're fighting for that noble cause look for that little thread. It's there. Just look for it. That would be one of his messages. Certainly.
Speaker 5 00:36:23 I imagine that this writing this book must have brought up a lot of emotions and feelings. I know it did for me as I, as I read it. Um, how did you go through those and cope? I don't think is exactly the right word. How did you embrace the feelings to write such this book really moved me. Uh, yeah.
Speaker 4 00:36:47 Wow. Boy, Liz, you asked a lot on a first date. Don't you? Well, how did I deal with it? Well, I guess I dealt with it by taking my inspiration from the man himself. You know, he said something that really marked me when an interviewer from the Shoah foundation asked him, do you have nightmares? He said, um, so they're, they're terrible. I can't talk about it every night. He says, every night it started to cry and they said, but now I'm going to tell you something I've never said before. I don't think I could live without my nightmares because they give me a ultra realistic sense of the meaning of life, the beauty of life, especially as a Jew. And I would never, ever give that up. So I'm thinking to myself, okay. Wise guy, if, if he can go through what he went through and find joy for life in a way to manage his nightmares.
Speaker 4 00:37:53 What's my problem. So there was some inspiration, I think just from his example, also as an author, I, I feel an obligation to my readers. You know, I mean, I I'm old enough to remember when going to a bookstore was like going into a toy store. Oh yeah. Books were friends, you know, and, Oh my gosh, just, you know, getting a book was every day was Christmas. If you can get a book. And I wrote this with that remembrance in mind of a time, when a book was a friend, a book was someone you could go to for solace for, for, for good advice for, for just losing yourself in a good story. And, and I, I tried to achieve that here. So the challenge also helped me, um, to deal with the experiences that Sigi went through. Also, it's only the first quarter of the book, that's his Holocaust experience. So the book is this, you know, explosive out of the starting gate, you know, from cleaning toilets to having dinner with the president, then the white house.
Speaker 5 00:39:09 I liked that the, that line of pictures of Carter and Bush and yeah, all of the presidents up until he passed away, he, he had relationships with them and it's just an amazing guy.
Speaker 4 00:39:25 He was, yeah. He helped build the Washington Holocaust museum. He was a huge supporter of, of charitable causes and philanthropic causes and raised a lot of money for the state of Israel. And, um, constantly lecturing, constantly, constantly lecturing all the time, all the time, wanting people, young field people in particular, to understand the history of the Holocaust in high schools and colleges, they were up to him and he would have made it mandatory. And he would never, he w he never stopped teaching. He said, the day we stopped teaching about the Holocaust is the day we welcome in fascism and racism and bigotry and violence. You may remember the footage from January 6th when the riders are storming, the Capitol pulling down the man with that sweatshirt, with the words, camp, Auschwitz, and blades on it, and a death head and saying, this isn't going away. It's racism. And the anti-Semitism are at the heart of what we've been confronting here.
Speaker 5 00:40:26 So in that vein, who do you feel like the, who do you want to reach with this book? Is it more, you want to reach those of us who already understand what happened, or do you want to reach people who are just learning about this? And maybe, I mean, I know people practically my own age who go really, that really happened, you know, I'm 64 and there's people that don't get it. You know, even people who are just like second generation away from it, you know? Um, so who are you? Who do you feel you want to read specifically?
Speaker 4 00:41:01 I, I, I, I'd love to reach people who don't have much understanding of the Holocaust. And then again, I'd like to reach all the people who understand the Holocaust quite well. Your question is this, uh, this meant story needed to be told. I was done. Look, here's, here's the backstory. I never thought I was going to write this book. I didn't want to. I had written maybe a dozen biographies of survivors of war crimes, trials, uh, the Nazi guards and officers. I was done. It was all darkness. Then Siggi's son had read some of my books and they called me and he said, I think you're the guy who needs to write my father's story. And he told me about his father, Sam. So I got to stop you right there. His name is Ivan that I haven't, I got to stop right there. I'm I'm done with the darkness.
Speaker 4 00:41:53 I don't want this anymore. It's too difficult. And he screamed, screamed at them on the phone. Let's say Ivan has inherited his father's talent for, um, energetic, vocal expression, a little polite about it. He's yelling into the phone. You don't get it. My father was a torch, a Torchlight for every immigrant. Whoever came to America, he came with nothing and he built, he was going on and on. And so I did the research and I realized Jesus is true. This man deserves to be his story needs to be told. And I had fun with this. And I think people reading his story will have fun with this because he was so outrageous to build his bank. It was one customer at a time, and he would use the most outrageous tall Siggy wills. His tall tales were so tall. They make normal, tall tales look short. That's helpful.
Speaker 4 00:42:52 And Oh, Oh, I see your son. He sees a picture on a potential customers. Won't see, your son was a swimmer. Oh, are you in swimming, Mr. Woolsey? Oh, when I was a boy and no one was a better diver than I was, I was at Harvard. I was on the Olympic team. He never finished grade school. So then he, then he would come clean. He would say, I never was. It was, there was no diving teams in Auschwitz. And then obviously you were in Auschwitz. That was the moment. That's what Siggy was waiting for a chance to build a personal relationship by sharing his experiences, educating someone, letting them understand you, dealing with someone who's seen life's worth. I'm here to give us life's best. I, I just, I love doing this project. I think it's, if I may, if I know very immodest to me, I think it's a great story because he's a wonderful personality. And, uh, I think people who like a good story will enjoy it.
Speaker 5 00:43:55 I, it's funny. I was talking to my spiritual director yesterday and she was talking about a pilot light in the world that you can hang on and be a pilot light until such time, as you can turn the stove on and then everything lights up. But you kind of say that's the Ziggy.
Speaker 4 00:44:15 Uh, that's a nice analogy. Sure. Well, except that he was always on high power. Um, the late great radio talk show, host, Barry Farber once told me, everybody is some of light. Somebody's a match. Somebody else's table lighter. Somebody is a blowtorch torch was, it was a volcano. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's, that's what he was like. He inspired people. He was a yellow. I mean, sometimes people didn't understand why he was yelling at them, but he would yell at them for their benefit. You know, he had been yelled at, in Auschwitz, by guards who wanted to kill him. So he took that a strong voice. If his one person called it Shakespearean and he would convey these ideas to people, you know, you may be a great doctor, but when you're an idiot, when it comes to investments, give me all your money and I will help you. I got to give you a, what do you call it? A financial animal, come here. I'll help you. And he did. If people stuck with him, they made money.
Speaker 5 00:45:31 Well, and one of his big things was he wanted the, uh, the Jewish people to be strong and to build back, I guess, after, after Hitler and Germany to build back the Jewish people.
Speaker 4 00:45:49 Yes. Yes. That's quite right. Sometimes people, there was a rabbi from Passaic, New Jersey came to Heshie Hertz to look, we need money for a mikvah, you know, ritual immersion, bath that women use for marriages and so on. And we don't have any collateral. We don't have any way of getting the money. And so you said like you are that you've dedicated your life to rebuilding the Jewish people. I'm going to help you. So he would make loans and that, and the became one of the largest, fastest growing Jewish communities in the States, thanks to Siggi's support. He didn't make decisions the way normal business people make decisions. He had these amazing intuition. So remember, this is a man who survived by his instincts. He would look at someone who was looking for a loan. And if he saw some behavior that was suspicious, like the man was constantly tapping his toes or looking around, furtively left it, right. Thinking would say, ah, excuse me. My, my car just blew a tire. I got to go ahead and fix good luck. And he would walk out of the room because he, he sense that I can't really be comfortable lending this man money. On the other hand, if someone was sincere, if their purpose was good, there was a young man who wanted to build housing for the poor people in his town. She immediately gave them a loan. He had no experience, but it was a worthwhile cause. And see, he was there for that.
Speaker 5 00:47:26 Well, your book really brought Ziggy to life and appreciate
Speaker 0 00:47:30 It very much reading it. We have pretty much run out of time, which is too bad. Cause I got like a whole book full of questions left to ask you. But, uh, I certainly appreciate you taking the time to come on to write it on radio tonight and thanks for the wonderful, wonderful conversation. I, uh, I enjoyed it very much. Uh, I'm sure our listeners did too. Uh, you're a wonderful interview with wonderful questions. I'm delighted to be your guests. Thank you very much. Well, I hope you, uh, you got okay. Stru our first date. Thanks a lot, Joshua. You bet. Bye-bye, we've been speaking with Joshua M. Green author of unstoppable. The story of Ziggy will a Holocaust survivor who became an investment banker. Pretty amazing story. So, uh, um, I will turn this over to our engineer and now this
Speaker 0 00:48:59 You are listening to right on radio on cafe 90.3 FM and streaming live on the web and kfh.org. I'm Annie. I'd like to thank our guests tonight. Joshua M. Green and Jana Larson. Plus our listeners without your support and donations KFA would not be possible. You can find more news about right on radio at cafe i.org/program/rate on radio. Plus listen to recent episodes on our podcast, found on Spotify, iTunes, and anywhere podcasts can be found.
