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....

On Monday, December 12, I set off for Montreal with Christa Whitney, the director of the Wexler Oral History Project, and Sara Israel, one of my co-fellows, in order to pick up roughly 1,000 reel-to-reel tapes and 300 cassettes from the Jewish Public Library of Montreal so that they could be digitized as part of the Frances Brandt Online Yiddish Audio Library....

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. 

In this video, meet Steiner Summer Program students as they describe their favorite Yiddish words. All material comes from interviews students conducted in their oral history practicum! Find out how to apply for this year's Steiner Summer Program.

I didn’t know anything about Ilene Gelbaum except that she was visiting the Book Center from California with her husband, and she wanted to tell her story for the Wexler Oral History Project. Ilene turned out to be a gifted storyteller with many stories to share. She talked about everything from meeting her husband in high school in Brooklyn, to her stint in the Peace Corps in Sri Lanka, to the five thousand (!) babies she delivered in her 40-year career as a midwife.