...interviews, which I then went back and edited up, and it was pre-technology. I used to type out the whole thing and cut things up with scissors--
Oh my goodness!
--and use my floor and just move things around until I had things the way I wanted them.
Literally cut and paste.
Literally. It was fun I loved it.
Yeah, well I like doing it digitally, it is a lot of fun. Yeah, I find that editing an interview feels sort of like carving something out of a block of --
Yes!
-- because you're chipping away all the stuff you don't need till you get to the good parts.
Yes. And it's funny that you should say that because my first editor at the army radio station in Israel, I brought him, happily, my first thing, which was so rough, it was the first thing they ever did. And I was 21 or whatever and he listened to it and he said, "It's wonderful. It's beautiful, but you have to be like Michelangelo, and chip at this to take away, take away, until only that's left is what needs to be there but be careful not to chip away too much." And I said, "How do I know if I've chipped away too much, until I've chipped away too much?" and he said "well luckily you can always put things back."
Right! Yeah, better than marble, you can put things back yeah, so you know exactly what I mean.
I do. Yeah.
[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. Theodore Bikel of blessed memory was an Austrian American actor, folk singer, musician, composer, unionist, and political activist. Jjournalist Amy Ginsburg Bikel is the wife of the late Theodore Bikel, and she brought to life to story, City of Light. Amy is a great storyteller in her own right. Join me for a heartwarming conversation with Amy about Theo's writing, and his legacy.
Amy Ginsburg Bikel, welcome to The Book of Life.
Thank you, so happy to be here.
Aimee,you are the wife of the late Theodore Bikel of blessed memory. I'm sure many listeners are aware of his career, but just in case, please tell us briefly about what made him so famous and so beloved, and what were a few of his most significant accomplishments.
It's always almost a Zen practice to try to tell about Theo's life briefly. There was nothing about his life, which could possibly be told briefly but yet I will do my very best. Theo, Theodore Bikel, who was a well known movie star, folk musician, and civil rights activist, started his career all the way back in Palestine but got a real start on the stages of London. His first big achievement, there was a starring role in Love of the Four Colonels by Peter Ustinov, a very major play. And he also was in Streetcar Named Desire opposite Vivian Leigh, directed by Sir Laurence Olivier, although he did play the lead role only once in a while because he was the understudy. Once in the United States, he became the original Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, very well known for playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, more than any actor ever, it was more than 2200 times in productions all across the United States. He's Oscar nominated for his role as a southern sheriff in The Defiant Ones. When I give those few points I'm leaving out multitudes of more films and more television shows and more plays, like for example The Russians Are Coming. If you turn on your television you'll see him every single day on one television show or another. But alongside his acting career he was a folk singer with twenty best selling records, who sang songs from all around the world, but his special specialty was Jewish and Yiddish folk music. And so he did a lot to keep Yiddish alive at a time when most Jews in America were doing their best to forget. And then, together with Pete Seeger he founded the Newport Folk Festival and so they gave us that delightful event throughout generations. And he was a very active and committed civil rights activist, he was one of the Northern allies of SNCC until they had a falling out over some ideological reasons but with John Lewis and with all the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He marched in the south many times, he personally brought Bob Dylan to the south for the first time, and was very involved in the Free Soviet Jewry movement, traveled there many times, very involved in the end apartheid movement. And then, if all of that was not enough, was a major labor leader and led the Actors Union for over 30 years as a president, as a whatever. He was also the vice president of the American Jewish Congress. The last years of his life he was the president of Partners for Progressive Israel and wrote op eds without stop and in his spare time, translated poetry, from many languages into English, and was a delightful beautiful friend, husband. So I know that wasn't very short, but believe me that was very short.
I feel lazy, just listening.
I know it's a little. It's a little bit hard to follow. Yes, yes.
Oh my goodness. Now you yourself are an award winning journalist So tell us a bit about yourself beyond being Theo's wife.
Mine is very easy to do short. I'm an American born, who lived in Israel for many years. In Israel I was one of the first feminist writers and journalists; my awards and all it's around that work for the status of women in Israel. At some point I had what some would call a spiritual awakening, coupled with immense pain and frustration over the political situation Israel. And I left to India, where I became the foreign correspondent for Yedioth Ahronoth, that's Israel's largest newspaper, and I served as the correspondent for Yedioth Ahronoth for about 15 years. And back in the United States after Theo died I founded the Theodore Bikel Legacy Project, it's a legacy organization devoted to music and art in the service of tikkun olam and in keeping Theo's legacy alive for as long as possible because it's such a beautiful legacy.
How did you and Theo meet and get together?
You know I used to be very resistant to answering that question when he was alive, we got asked it all the time and I always felt like why is everybody asking how we met? It's none of their darn business! He's been gone for five years now, though for me that's very hard to realize and to really accept in my heart. But as time goes by and there's, you know less people coming up to me in the street and saying, How did you meet, How did you meet, now I'm pretty happy to answer that question. My family lives in Los Angeles. I would come back every year to visit my family while I was in India for all of those years; I lived there for 17 years. And one of those visits, a common friend, a screenwriter and a producer, invited me to a Shabbat dinner to which I almost didn't come because it was my son's birthday. But the host convinced me to come, he told me Theodore Biekl was going to be there, which was interesting, but wasn't enough to get me to come. And then he told me that Judea and Ruth Pearl, Daniel Pearl's parents, were going to be there and Daniel Pearl was a colleague of mine in Mumbai, in India and so I loved him, and you know the pain over what happened to him was quite fresh and to meet his parents seemed very important to do. I got my son's permission and I left to the Shabbat meal, where Theo and I were seated opposite each other and it was just immediate, although you know in the beginning I never thought of it as anything romantic potentially; he was 38 years older than me. That's a rather large age difference, but the feeling of friendship, not everything has to be romantic right? You can be very attracted to someone that's nothing in the realm of romance so that was what I thought we were doing. I think that's what he thought we were doing too. But once I went back to India we started having Skype conversations and within a couple of weeks, I would say, we realized that what this is is actually romantic and let's not waste any time. And even though I loved India so much and my life was there for 17 years, that's a long time where I raised my children. I thought he's 88. Let us not waste a moment. And I left my career behind and I left my friends behind and I left India behind and moved to be with him very quickly. So that's the story of our love affair, how it started. Yeah,
It's very romantic.
It's very romantic, it checked a lot of boxes for, you know a girl who grew up on princess stories, I have to admit it. I was supporting both boys as a freelance journalist, as a successful one but you know, foreign correspondents that are not with the big American newspapers, it's a struggle. And I was raising my kids as a single mom, I was living in a small apartment in a jungle. You know I just moved a couple years earlier from my previous little crumbling house in the jungle that had termites in the walls and water from the wells. We heated our water for our shower on a kerosene stove, I mean it was pretty basic and I just recently moved to an apartment that had running water. I mean it was from a well still but it was running, and I had just got an air conditioner a few months earlier and things were looking up. And then I married Theodore Bikel, and moved into his life here in Hollywood. Yeah, like I said it checked a lot of boxes. Yeah.
That is quite a story. Now you've told us so much about him in terms of his public life. I know that it's again going to be very hard to sum up, but can you tell us just a hint of what he was like, just as a person.
So I'll put a disclaimer on top of everything: he was an actor and you know, a star and so stereotypically, not all and everybody's different, but stereotypically when we think of the performers, there's something maybe a little self involved or a little, you know. So he had all of that, I'm not going to pretend that he didn't. Now I'm putting my disclaimer aside. He was super curious about life, super curious, and that was very fun to be around. He was always interested in people that he met and their stories and phenomenas that he met and he read voraciously and he was very very kind, cared so much about people and he shocked me by his knowledge of his friend's nephew's wife's cousin's problems from 25 years ago that not only did he still remember but he was still willing to lend a hand. He had wells of inner joy that I do not, that was very inspiring, especially as some things got hard because he was ill in the last year and actually the joy was coming from him even more than from me. So he had wells of inner joy. He was a worrier, very committed to the causes of justice in his cells. It wasn't an intellectual stance ... so important to him to see a better world built on brotherhood and justice that he would sometimes cry. Sometimes he wasn't sleeping at night and I would come into his office, he would be watching news or old French chansons or reading Bertolt Brecht and weeping about the state of the world. So he really cared. He wasn't a cook. But he made great scrambled eggs. But just, yeah, really happy. He loved to sing, he loved to be happy, he was the life of every party. He was the last guest. Sometimes the host really wanted to go to sleep already but there was Theo still singing away. You had to kind of give him a little poke. That was Theo. Very generous, very kind, he took my kids in with such an open heart. No, no, I hope I summed him up.
Thank you for sharing that. That's lovely. Yeah. Let's talk about the book, The City of Light. So the book has both your name and Theo's name on the cover. So, what are your two roles in bringing this book to fruition?
Yes. So in 2014 Nadine Epstein the editor in chief and publisher of Moment magazine and also a friend, she contacted Theo and asked him to write a short story for Hanukkah for a series that Moment were doing together with NPR. And they had asked maybe eight or so prominent people to write a Hanukkah story which would be read on NPR by a celebrity and published in the magazine. So, Theo said sure I'll give it a shot and he went into his office and he came out with a very short story, which is the heart of this book. It was very surprising, one would never think of him writing a children's book. He was an only child and so he was an adult when he was a kid, he always talked about his parents as "us." You know his mom, dad and him, always, he wasn't much of a kid. So he didn't have that special touch for children, so one would have never thought he would write a story for children. And actually, I'm not sure he meant to write it for children, he more like was writing it about himself in the third person, he wrote about the boy, it was very, very beautiful. In the years that we were together I was his editor, which was a great privilege and honor, so we worked on it together, you know tinkered with the ending and with a substance, and then it was read it was published it was beautiful. And the beginning of last year, Nadine approached me and said that Moment had just started an imprint at Mandel Vilar Press and they would like to publish that story. So we all realized that it's too short as it is and not complete enough to be a book. So first of all, I added quite a bit to that original story and it was very easy to do it in Theo's voice. I was shocked, how easy it was. And actually, there's some way in which I'm almost possessed by him since he died and I don't mean that in any creepy way at all. But I've noticed that when I give interviews and I've done a lot of appearances I travel around the country -- well, I did before -- and I give appearances and so often, especially during the question and answers I find myself sounding just like him, sharing his anecdotes, but I am quite stuck on him and so I have imbibed a lot of him. You know, read everything that he wrote and listened to everything he recorded, so it is in me and then while we were together we talked a lot. We were only together for three years but in those three years we just really never stopped talking with each other. So it was very easy to speak in his voice because I know the stories. And then on top of expanding the book, I added in my own voice and introduction and an afterword and I wrote those three glossaries at the end, and it was beautiful, to work together with him in that way it was very healing, you know, it was a soulful treat to have another kind of a chance to officially merge in some way, you know, always finding tricks how to merge with they who are already on the other side. It's not necessarily so easy and here I had a chance to sit with him in this way.
So, as a memoir of a childhood affected by World War II, what makes this book especially appropriate for Hanukkah?
When we published it we said Hanukkah Hanukkah Hanukkah. Some months after that someone approached me from the Washington Post and said, Oh, it's too bad I would really wanted to have reviewed this but now we're like four months past Hanukkah and this is a Hanukkah book. And then I sat down with the editors and we thought exactly about your question and we realized that it's not really only a Hanukkah book and it is definitely appropriate for so many other special days of the year. That being said, there is definitely a theme in our book of choosing light over darkness, again and again. Even when it seems practically or completely impossible to do so. And even though, different streams of Judaism would argue that that's not necessarily the message of Hanukkah, you know, Hanukkah is so open for interpretation. Definitely that's how I've always celebrated it and celebrated it with my kids in the jungles of India, and that is how Theo has always celebrated as well, and many of us and many of the listeners. That darkness is upon us, and all there is is a one tiny little flame left but we don't give up, and we open our hearts again and again to the light. So in that way it is Hanukkah story, there's just so many other elements in it that could be suited for other days as well, of course you know Holocaust Memorial Day comes to mind immediately but but other days as well.
Tell us a little bit about the story, just the elevator pitch. What is it about?
This is the story of a boy, we only know him throughout the story as "the boy" but now we know that that actually is Theodore Bikel, who is living in Vienna, which again in the book is only called the City of Light. He's a happy Jewish boy who loves his family. He loves his culture. He loves the stories that his father shares with him so generously. He thinks that being Jewish is wonderful and he doesn't really understand the antisemitism all around him and his parents' explanations fall flat. And he watches with increasing confusion and horror. Change and the change and the change until actually the Anschluss when the Nazis marched into town and everything changes overnight, his neighbors who had been friendly and warm, literally the day before, today are happy to see him killed. There's a bit about his experience of being bullied sanctioned by the teachers and the principal of his school. It's his Bar Mitzvah and all throughout the book is Judah Maccabee, who was his favorite hero from the children's books that he used to read, and his intense anticipation that perhaps, perhaps there will be some rescue, he dreams that they are rescued and when he wakes up it was only a dream, and eventually they leave. It tells just very briefly, the book itself is like the Japanese drawing, just touches of the paintbrush, it actually ends on a beautiful note of love and redemption, open heart, a desire to bring hearts together and to move on into a place of acceptance and of love and of peacefulness.
Well maybe what you just described is the moment that I was going to bring up. For me the most touching moment of this story is in the afterword when we learned that 75 years to the day after Kristallnacht that Theo brought a message of peace to Austria's parliament. So can you talk about that event?
Yes, I will. I'll share with you something that I've never shared in an interview before but like I said as time goes by, I'm more and more willing to share things that I used to keep private. But actually, when I first met Theo in Los Angeles and we went out to have a meal one time he told me that this was going to be coming up, it was about eight months before the 75 year anniversary of Kristallnacht, and he already knew that he was going to go and do that. And we were sitting in the cafe, I remember where, I remember the moment, and he told me. And when he told me that I heard a kind of a like, gong in my head and I've heard that gong a few times before in my life and that is the gong of: this is your destiny. And here I am taking the story from place to place from stage to stage and writing about it in a book, it's that important in my soul, this story. So Theo was invited by the president of the Austrian parliament to come at the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht to Vienna to the parliament to the actual Parliament not a room on the side, the actual Parliament Hall, and gave a concert to commemorate the day. They were already in touch with Theo several years earlier because he received the cross of Arts and Sciences, which is the highest civil award in Austria that they grant to their you know like we get here the Kennedy Awards or I don't know, Freedom Awards, right, so it's a huge award from the government. So we traveled together with Theo's friend and accompanist on the accordion named Merima Kljuco. The parliament was not in session so they brought in many of the parliament members but also the Vice Prime Minister of Austria and the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor of Austria and the President of the Parliament, and many ministers, Education Minister the Foreign Minister and there was the Chief of Staff of the Army in his uniform, and the Chief of the Vienna Division in his uniform and maybe six or seven other men and like full uniform, you know, and ambassadors, so the hall was packed. And in my feeling, they were tense. You know, 75 year anniversary to Kristallnacht and here's a Jewish folk singer, I would imagine that their assumption was they were about to be shamed. Maybe this is my imagination but it felt to me like they had the body language about them of people that had no choice but to take what they were about to be given and get it over with. That's what I felt there was something a little bit tense. And then Theo who draped his tallit over the speaker's podium, said thank you so much for having me as your guest on this momentous occasion, the 75 years of Kristallnacht. The significance of this day is not lost on me that here we are, and the mass murderers are gone. I'm the one here, singing my people's songs of peace and of freedom. And then, he told them about how he lived there as a child and how he loved it and how it was his city of light and the culture and the waltzes and the songs and the cakes, he had been enchanted by that city his entire childhood, he loved it, and how he'd become a refugee, how in one way or another, he remained a refugee for the rest of his life, even though he'd had a good life in America and in the rest of the world. And then he's saying to them his first song was the Yiddish song Kinder Yorn, which means childhood years, and he sang to them in Yiddish the song about his childhood years. And then he went on in his beautiful way, because Theo was nothing but beautiful, he was physically gorgeous, he had his beautiful crown of the most beautiful white hair you've ever seen. He was gorgeous. He was full of joy. He was heartful, he was a consummate performer, and he sang in his many languages, Theo used to sing in 22 languages perfectly, but in the concert he did five languages, I think, French, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, English so there was five languages. He went from song to song happy, sad you know love songs, French songs, Russian Gypsy songs which is one of also his specialties that people remember him by, and the audience was charmed. They were tapping along, you know, slowly, they relaxed. The room as I think I write this in the book. I started to feel that I wasn't in a parliament Hall in Vienna I started to feel like the room was elevated almost galactic, I was like in an intergalactic convention happening you know somewhere in the galaxy, you know, zoomed there by the Enterprise or something, or by some magical device, because it was historic, and it was holy. The room was full of some energy that one cannot touch but feel where something is falling into place in a different way, a new ending is emerging, love is is is emerging where there was no love before, hearts are meeting where they were not met before, and something is growing from the depths of the heart. I mean it was incredible. I was with goosebumps the whole time. And then it was time for the very last song. And by then everybody was swaying and happy and he wasn't talking about what had happened, he was just swaying and singing and then he said, Now this last song is only sung standing, and only listened to standing so will everybody please rise. And they all rose at attention. The Austrian parliament, the Chancellor's Chief of Staff of the Austrian army with their insignias. And they all rose. He said, this is the survivor song of my people, of my brothers and my sisters who fought to survive throughout the Holocaust. And he sang in Yiddish "Zog Nit Keynmol." That's the song that is always sung at Holocaust gatherings, on Holocaust Day. It means "Never say never, you never say it's over. We're still here. We're still here." And that was the partisan song that came out of the ghetto in Vilna and and and that's the song that was sung, in Yiddish, as the peak experience of a concert in the Austrian parliament on the 75th year anniversary of Kristallnacht. We all take it for granted that things ended as they ended but there's no reason to take that for granted. Things could have ended, very differently. And the 75th year anniversary of Kristallnacht could have been, God forbid, a very different celebration in the Austrian parliament with very different symbols on the wall, right, but that's not what happened. What happened was Theodore Bikel was there singing the partisan song in Yiddish with them all standing at attention. And when that was done he said, I am a Cohen, what that means is I am a priest, from a long line of Jewish priests, and that used to mean a lot thousands of years ago but now all that really means is that we bless each other in the synagogue and at home on the Sabbath, and really Jewish priests only bless other Jews, but because of the enormity of this occasion. I've taken permission from the Chief Rabbi of Austria who was there also at the event, to bless all of you with the Jewish priestly blessing, so that you should continue to lead your people in the past of righteousness and kindness and love among everyone. And he pulled his tallit off of the speaker's podium, which, we could all be sure that was the only time there was a tallit on the speaker's podium of the Austrian parliament, and he got under because Theo was a showman If nothing else, right. And so he got himself under the tallit. I don't know if you've ever seen a traditional birkat kohanim, like nowadays the rabbis they do it rather simply, but he got under the tallit with his hands you know sticking out from it, and he gave the entire Austrian Parliament and the entire Austrian country the priestly blessing. Later that night in our hotel he was very tired, he was already 89 years old and he already had an illness, deep in his bones. But he said, as Moses said everybody was made for a reason and I think that it was for this concert that I was made. And I did make a vow with that moment that this is a story that I will take with me throughout my life and tell it to as many people as I can in as many places as I can you know for the rest of the days of my life.
Thank you for sharing that story and for sharing it so beautifully. You are an amazing storyteller yourself. And I got goosebumps. So, yeah.
Thank you. It needs to be told, we need to know it. I believe that that is Tikkun Olam, that was the most by far profound experience of Tikkun that I have ever been privileged, like I feel blessed and chosen by God, I mean just so privileged to have been there, a privilege of 100 lifetimes. To experience tikkun, now do I know for a fact that the people that were there went on to change? I don't think it works literally like that. But I know for a fact that in a cosmic sense a correction happened. And that's what tikkun means is a correction, a correction of the world. Thank you for giving me the chance to tell it.
Oh, well. Absolutely. That was, that was worth the price of admission as they say. So a little bit more about the book itself. There are a lot of goodies, at the back of the book, sort of Hanukkah gifts for readers. So tell us about what we'll find there.
Okay. Oh I love the glossaries, what a joy they were to make! Our three goodies. So, after my afterward which you just heard a lot about, we have three glossaries. The first one is a Yiddish dictionary. Theo loved Yiddish. For him it was the language of a beautiful gorgeous culture with beautiful literature and songs and you know the language he spoke to his father, not as much to his mother, but the language of the Jews, the language of his people, how they spoke how they shopped how they joked how they cursed each other how men and women made love -- their language, Yiddish! And he was terribly pained that because of the Holocaust, the language went away he thought, What's the connection, it doesn't need to go away. He was always angry at Ben Gurion who he used to say outlawed the language of the Jews in the country of the Jews, because the original Zionist movement in Israel, very much fought to keep Yiddish out because they saw it as the language of the diaspora, that had no place in the new land of Israel. So the last thing I'll say even if Yiddish is the language of the victims Why should we ourselves, cut off our own language, in some kind of a self act of harm? So he spent his whole life trying to keep Yiddish alive and thankfully many others, of course it wasn't only Theo and there's a whole Yiddish revival movement. Nowadays, if you ask people, did your parents speak Yiddish? They would say, only when they didn't want me to understand, or the grandparents everyone said I mean that's across the board. So I decided to give the kids a chance to have their own secret language, maybe teach their parents, and hopefully they'll take their learning further and learn more Yiddish. The second glossary is Theo's grandmother's honey cake recipe, a teeny bit revised for modern times. Most balabustas, most homemakers in previous generations, they did a little bit of this and a little bit of that. So I had to get amounts exactly right. Theo loved his grandmother's cooking. She made honey cake for his Bar Mitzvah, which is told about in the book. And I encourage everyone to make honey cake and to have their house fill up with that delicious delicious smell which makes the book also appropriate for Rosh Hashanah, we could say. And the last glossary. It's a song that Theo recorded right before he passed away at the urging of Craig Taubman our dear friend that many of you know. Craig is always doing incredible interesting projects and he was approached by the son of the man who'd written I Have a Little Dreidel and it turns out that he'd written a lot of other holiday songs as well and Craig decided to try to do a recording and revive those songs. And so he gave Theo the assignment of this song that's in the book, Little Candle Fire, and it was recorded immediately after a very difficult health care session. He was very weak, it was very close to the end of his life. But he loved it, it says "on this night let us light eight little candles fire. They say fight for the right say little candles fire." So, for Theo that was a really good song to be singing. The way it was recorded was with a very simple background, it's beautiful to hear. The book has a link to go online and hear Theo singing it. [MUSIC CLIP]
I've spoken to a few middle schools, and when I do we put the slide of the song up on the wall. It's a really quick song to learn. So I've had the kids sing together with Theo. And the sound of the kids singing together with Theo never fails to get my tears flowing. But I'm also hoping that people will adopt the song and start to sing it on Hanukkah, it's a really lovely song.
Craig Taubman has been a guest on The Book of Life too so it's --
There you go!
It's nice to tie back in with that. Now you already talked about the the legacy project. Is there more that you wanted to add to that?
Yes. Theo died in July of 2015, the fifth of Av. And I realized that it was important for me to have some kind of a body in which I could house all of the different aspects of Theo, and what was still left to digest. And it wasn't ready to be done. I might be ready to be done at some point as happens with any great, but wasn't ready yet, he left things behind that still needed to be published to be said, his papers, a lot of articles that I've already written, that still need to be written, to put out ideas that he wanted out there. So I founded the Theodore Bikel Legacy Project. We have a beautiful board of directors and what we have done are all kinds of civic events that call to activism around topics that were very important to Theo, and we add our voice and add our support to different civic causes that are happening mostly in Los Angeles because that's where I am, but also all around the United States. And mostly with the idea of bringing in music and art as a voice for what needs to be said. Theo, like many other musicians and artists, never held back his opinions and believed with all of his heart, that if you don't raise your voice, then you cannot be absolved of what is going on. He used to talk about all the nice people in Vienna, you know all the people around them that didn't do a thing to save them. And he said he's sure that a lot of them in their hearts thought oh yeah this is terrible you know what's happening, but they didn't do anything. And so they let it happen. And in that same way all of us when we don't speak up, we're letting it happen, that's a hard truth to accept. We feel helpless often we feel despair we feel very involved in what's happening in our own families for good reason. I have so many responsibilities on a daily basis. We're so tired, so it's hard for us to accept that fact that if we don't do something, then we're letting it happen, by definition, so we need to encourage each other at all times to speak up in any way that you have. So, with a project I just find different ways to speak up and then besides that I also just more simply indirectly, have been traveling and talking about Theo's life and legacy, telling the story of the Parliament and many other stories. We also put out a small documentary film about his life together with the Milken Family Foundation's Jewish Music Archives. We've curated Theo's amazing archive, which was acquired by UCLA. And we still have more things to do, like I said, nonprofit, so support for us is always very welcome and always very needed. You can find us at Theodorebikel.org, or you can find us as a tab on my website Aimeeginsburgbikel.com and you can also as a way to help our work, purchase Theo's, some of his albums I still have, some of his CDs, his own autobiography called Theo, our current book, all kinds of recordings, the recordings are starting to run out, all kinds of things that I had plenty of, I don't have plenty of anymore. That's an invitation to help out our work.
I will link to that Bookoflifepodcast.com.
Thank you. [SEE PART 2 FOR THE CONTINUATION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, https://otter.ai/u/oL1X6CJk9srFGzSOkwKAdlYbBDw]