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....

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. 

Three weeks ago, while our wonderful volunteers sorted through books and journals, I took off on a last minute trip to New York City. When I returned the following day, I had brought back three more boxes to add to their "to-do" list...
 
 

As I was straightening books, I saw several in a row that looked very familiar. They were the same size and color as a book that I have seen in both my parents’ and grandparents’ homes, as well as my own apartment. It was the Moyshe Kats-bukh, a collection of writings by my great-grandfather, Moishe Katz.