The education of Spock/ The Final Wexler Oral History

Leonard Nimoy was one of the most famous people to walk the earth during the height of his career. He gained fame for playing the pointy eared Spock on the original iteration of the beloved show Star Trek. Nimoy was hailed as an American treasure, however Nimoy's origins are everything and anything but American. In his interview with the Wexler Oral History Project, Nimoy transitions between English and Yiddish seamlessly, a highlight was him reciting a quote from Hamlet, in Yiddish. This is because Nimoy was a first generation American, his parents were Jewish immigrants from Western Ukraine. Nimoy's parents had a rather intense immigration story, even for Jews escaping the "Pale of Settlement" a largely Jewish region in Russia/Ukraine. His father walked from Western Ukraine to the Polish border, while his mother and grandmother hid in the back of a merchants wagon underneath hay, all the way to the Polish Border . For all their efforts, they eventually made it to America and settled in Boston.

Leonard Nimoy was born in America, and his early life is a reflection of what we have read about urban Immigrant life during the 30's and 40's. He details how the floors of his childhood apartment building in the West End of Boston, were segregated between Jews and Italian immigrant families. "You could tell who was where from the smells that came through each door." He talks about how his childhood group of friends was had a unique and diverse ethnic background. Yiddish speaking Jews hailing from Ukrainian & Russia, both Northern and Southern Italians, all in one neighborhood. "The Italians spoke Yiddish, the Jews spoke Italian." In many ways, he speaks of a first hand experience of the "Gumbo" of America, a concept that I find to be more appropriate than the "melting pot." The Gumbo analogy fits because these unique groups retained their unique cultures or flavors, while these flavors all combined to create a fantastically diverse neighborhood.  Given that experience, it is perhaps apt that his defining role as Spock came in such a diverse show. Star Trek was a show that advocated for pluralism by featuring a literally multi racial crew from blacks, to Scots, to Russians, to yes, "Vulcans." Nimoy further remarked on how his life prepared him for a connection to the character, because "Spock is an alien wherever he is...and I knew what it meant to be a minority, in some cases an outcast minority." A point that many viewers could identify with, which is likely responsible for the characters enduring popularity.

Here is the video itself