Thomas Goltz Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Thomas, welcome to Berkeley.
Pleasure to be here.
Where were you born and raised?
Complex ... I was born in Japan, but I have no memory of that. I left when I was six months old and ended up in North Dakota, where I was raised and lived until age eighteen, nineteen.
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?
Marginally. I was just a North Dakota kid. The one connecting link there is, if today I am proud of the number of languages that I speak and use when traveling and writing, the first one was German, because I had this memory that my father spoke German. And so at age nineteen or twenty, when I was living in New York, I decided to teach myself German. I rapidly discovered that my father did not speak German.
Oh, I see. So there you have it. Where were you educated?
I was part of that generation in Fargo, North Dakota, attending a local Catholic high school, and precisely at that time when the powers that be decided that foreign languages were completely unnecessary in the education of a young man or a young woman. So I went through my entire junior high and high school experience without having studied any languages whatsoever. Only, as I say, when I moved to New York as a young actor, oddly enough, did I discover that I had an aptitude for languages, and then I pursued that over the years. It began with German. After that, it was Arabic. And from Arabic to Turkish, from Turkish to Azerbaijani, from Azerbaijani to Russian, and then Chechen -- marginal Chechen -- Georgian, and various other languages.
It sounds like you're saying that your background was provincial -- or it prepared you to be provincial. You wound up making a cosmopolitan leap, so to speak.
Yes.
Where did you do your undergraduate work?
I was a latecomer to the university. Initially, when I left my folks' home and started wandering away from Fargo, I was working in a factory for a while and then because I'd always had a theatrical urge, I bounced from Fargo to Minneapolis, from Minneapolis to Chicago, where I studied at the Goodman School for one year and joined a troupe of players under the late great Bill Russo.
And the Goodman School is where?
Chicago.
Chicago.
Now it's Chicago University's Theater Department, but at that time it was an independent entity. I studied there for a year, and then joined this troupe of players to go off to New York City with the late great Bill Russo; went off to embark on a career as an actor and playwright. That's an important thing, because I've always written. My first, if you will, commercial writings were some relatively obscure plays that were produced off-off Broadway in New York.
Only after that, I went and lived in Germany for a while, was a house painter, and, as the Germans say, "Anstreicher und Landstreicher" or "painter and bum." Then I hitchhiked to Africa and became a one-man wandering Shakespeare player in Africa. That's the first time that I encountered Arabic and, I guess, the Middle East. So when I came back at age twenty-three, twenty-four, I entered into the university system in New York and studied at New York University, picking up a B.A. I excelled, and then picked up an M.A. then in Middle Eastern Studies.
What did you major in?
Middle Eastern Studies and German.
It's intriguing. I just interviewed Studs Terkel; he is a journalist of sorts or an anthropologist, but he started as an actor. So I'll ask you the same question that I asked him. Acting is different from being a journalist, because a journalist is somebody who wants to listen [for content], whereas an actor, as part of his preparation, has to listen to different voices. Do you make any kind of connection like that, or you just decided to give up acting?
I'm only half-serious about this, but you might say that I discarded stage acting to embrace real-life theater.
So let's talk about what you became, a journalist. Why did you wind up doing that?
It just seemed to be the natural conclusion of myinterests in travel and ability and facility with language, as well as the fact that I'd always written, whether it was plays or poetry. I never studied journalism for an hour at the university. Rather, I went to the school of hard knocks. The first job was in Istanbul writing for a dumbed-down version of the AP, as an insert for a local Turkish newspaper. After that, I worked for UPI. After that, AP again. So it was sort of a natural progression of these three major interests -- travel, writing, and facility with language.
Next page: Being a Journalist
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