Interview with Dan Walden

ALB:

First of all thank you so much for agreeing to do this. I have some questions, but I would like us to just chat. May I ask that you keep in mind the following quotation, which you wrote early on as the editor of SAJL.

DW:

Sure.

ALB:

You approvingly cite Abraham Joshua Heschel who wrote the following: "For the present is not apart from the past." You said, "We take literature to heart and we pass it on seriously for the present is not apart from the past." This appears in "The Silver Mosaic: American Jewish Literature in the New Millennium," SAJL 19 (2000).

DW:

Very nice quotation.

ALB:

I think that SAJL illustrates the fact that you do take it seriously. So anytime you want to refer to that, please feel free to do so.

DW:

Sure.

ALB:

We can digress or add to my questions.

DW:

Certainly.

ALB:

I want to start with some autobiographical issues: biographical issues for me, autobiographical for you. Where were you born?

DW:

I was born in Philadelphia, a section called Logan. And sometime very early we moved to another location, actually just about three blocks north of Temple University, 2321 North Park Avenue. It was a first-floor apartment.

ALB:

Was your home a religious home?

DW:

Yes and no. That is we belonged to a conservative synagogue, Adath Jeshurun. I do not remember if my father ever went to services, but I know that he must have gone occasionally. He seemed to know the prayers pretty much by heart whenever they were recited. But it was a semi-religious home, and yes I went to Hebrew school. I became a bar mitzvah, as did my older brother.

ALB:

Then you of course went into the service.

DW:

Yes.

ALB:

When did you serve in the armed forces?

DW:

I graduated high school, Northeast High School, in 1940. In 1942 I volunteered, I joined the reserves, and in 1943 I was activated. I went first to [Fort] Indiantown Gap [in Pennsylvania].

And then from there I went to Camp Crowder, Missouri. I elected to go into the signal corps and to learn radar repair. I was then sent to Camp Murphy, Florida, somewhere between Miami and Boca Raton. There on the shore was a secret base where I attended school for about six months, leaning what was then a very avant-garde radar repair. Then we went from there to New York. We boarded a troopship in 1943, which took us across the ocean, and we landed in Wem, England. It is in the north of England, not too far from Chester. We stayed there and did all our training as we prepared for the invasion. We started south about the day the invasion began. We went across the Channel two weeks after the invasion. Then I served in France, Germany, Holland, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

ALB:

What was your experience during the time that you were in Europe? Did that impact your decision to pursue a career in Jewish literature or to teach?

DW:

I started studying voice when we lived in Philadelphia during my high school days. When I was in England I sang solos in several churches in Chester, England. Then when we came back I was interested only in theater. And so in 1946 after I was decommissioned, and honorably discharged, I went up to New York and studied voice and theater and movement and all sorts of things. Then I did summer stock in Gilford, Laconia, New Hampshire. We did ten plays and musicals in ten weeks.

ALB:

Interesting.

DW:

Yes, it was rigorous, pretty draining. Then I went to the Roxy Theatre and then I went in 1948 into Annie Get Your Gun, the Irving Berlin musical. The Annie was Mary Martin. We toured the country for a year. We left New York and went on to Cincinnati and then Cleveland, and six months in Chicago, then Denver, then San Francisco and Los Angeles. And then I flew back after that. We traveled by theater train.

ALB:

Could we go back...