This past December I flew to Washington D.C. with the other four Fellows, Yiddish Book Center Bibliographer Catherine Madsen, and Christa Whitney, Director of the Wexler Oral History Project, to attend the Association for Jewish Studies Conference....

In December, I had the privilege of interviewing my mother’s cousin, Sherrie Poplack, for the Wexler Oral History Project. I had joined Jordan Kutzik and Christa Whitney on a trip to the Jewish Public Library in Montreal, to pick up Yiddish audio books and to conduct oral history interviews with members of the Jewish community. I went to college in Montreal, and couldn’t wait to return – to eat bagels, get a taste of winter weather, and interview Sherrie....

At the beginning of November I interviewed Arnold Friedman, Emeritus Professor of interior design at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Born in 1925 in Nuremberg, Germany, he grew up under the Nazi regime....

Alicia Brudney interviewed Alice Ahart, who was visiting Amherst for her great-niece’s bat mitzvah.  In addition to describing her childhood in Ontario and her move to Detroit and then Tennessee, Alice told this humorous story about her mother's practice of keeping a live carp in the bathtub on Shabbes.