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TI: So today is Tuesday, May 21, 2013, and this is the second interview with Roger Daniels. And we are in Seattle, on camera is Dana Hoshide, and interviewing is me, Tom Ikeda. And so Roger, in the first interview, we jumped more to your graduate studies, or how you first got into the Japanese story, then your graduate studies, and talked a lot about that. For the second interview, I actually want to backtrack a little bit and start with some of the biographical information that we didn't do in that first interview. So I'm going to start with some basics. So, Roger, can you tell me when you were born?

RD: I was born on the 1st of December, 1927, in a hospital on the Lower East Side of New York City.

TI: And in New York City, where did you live?

RD: At that time my parents were living in Greenwich Village. Later we moved to Chappaqua, New York, which was a little bit upstate. My father was a freelance writer, my mother had worked in publishing, but stopped working when I was born or shortly thereafter, or shortly before. I'm not a good witness to that particular period.

TI: So it sounds like your mother and father were very much into books. Do you recall lots of books growing up?

RD: Oh, yes, yes. Lots of books. My mother read to me and made me read to her. She was not a particularly religious woman, but she thought that the King James Bible was a wonderful thing to know, so I read to her a chapter of that every day aloud, two chapters on Sunday. If you do that, you're supposed to be able to get the whole thing in a year. And we did that at least twice. There were books everywhere in the house, and as soon as I was seven or eight I had my own library card and read voraciously. I was quickly allowed by the librarians to take out adult books. I can remember my mother reading to me. My father died when I was six; I have no, very few real memories of him. Both of my parents were immigrants, but each was brought to the United States very early in their lives, so that technically, I'm a hakujin Nisei, but really I'm a Sansei in culture, because neither of my parents had any foreign culture. My mother came, was brought here by my grandmother when she was a babe in arms, but she was Hungarian, although the family name was Polacheck, which suggests a Polish origin, they were culturally German Jewish landowners in Hungary and fairly prosperous. One of my mother's uncles became very successful in the United States and was president of a large corporation. My father's people came here in the 1980s.

TI: In the 1880s?

RD: 1880s, I beg your pardon, and settled in Western Minnesota, and their first two children were born there. They went broke in the early '90s with large numbers of other people, and went back to England where my father was born. He was born actually in Wales although they weren't Welsh. Why he was born in Wales, I have no idea. And then the family returned and settled not on the frontier, but settled in Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan where the fourth and fifth of their children were born. So four children born in the United States and the middle one born in England, but he was an immigrant, no two ways about it. He was not an American citizen, and had to take out papers. And he somehow felt an attachment to England because he served in the British army in the First World War. I tried to find his records and didn't do a very good job of it. But he was gassed and had a withered arm, and apparently lost part of a lung, which resulted in his death at forty-three. He was a successful writer of fiction. He was Christian, he'd done public relations work for the Episcopal Church in the United States. And my mother's family was Jewish, although not religious. I'm not sure that they were members of any synagogue. And my father had the view -- he'd become very disillusioned with the church, having done public relations work for them, the details I don't understand, have no knowledge of. But his view was that children didn't need a religious education and should make up their own minds when they became an adult. My mother insisted that although in Jewish law... I want to get this right. Jewish law holds that what's important is the mother, and that a Jew was a person who was the child of a Jewish mother, and has not renounced his or her religion. She thought I didn't have to be a Jew. She thought that she never renounced the religion, told everybody she was Jewish. She said, "I didn't have to; I could be anything I wanted to be." I eventually decided as a young man that although I knew very little about the Jewish religion, I certainly had cultural roots that were Jewish, and that at a time when being Jewish could be a distinct disadvantage, it would be cowardly for me not to say, if anyone asked, that I was Jewish. So I've considered myself, since I was a young man, as being Jewish culturally, but I have no particular desire to be involved with Jewish ritual.

TI: So when you say culturally but not with ritual, so things like a bar mitzvah, you never did that?

RD: No, no. And my children were not. At one time we had thought, Judith and I -- and Judith had a, more of a formal Jewish background than I did. Both her parents were Jewish, her younger brother had a bar mitzvah. She did not have the bat mitzvah, which was less common but did exist when she was growing up. It was certainly an option for some people, but neither she nor her parents did that.

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