The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

Arlo Guthrie's Grandmother

Watch now:

Diana Bregman Feld, daughter of Yiddish poet Edith Kaplan Bregman, recounts her experiences getting to know the the poet and songwriter Aliza Greenblatt, who was Arlo Guthrie's grandmother. Diana recalls translating some of her works from Yiddish into English.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Diana Bregman Feld.

This excerpt is in English.

Diana Bregman Feld was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1931.

Jump to map

This interview is part of the Beyond the Books: Yiddish writers and their descendants series.

Other video highlights from this oral history

The Family Almost Made Aliyah

1 min 57 sec

"At Home and at Peace"

1 min 9 sec

The Little White Goat

1 min 25 sec

Yidishe Bikher (Yiddish Books): A Poem about the Yiddish Book Center

1 min 32 sec

Es benkt zikh

2 min 36 sec

She Was a Bohemian

2 min 14 sec

My Mother's Poetry

1 min 58 sec

"My Poems": A Poem by Edith Kaplan Bregman Read By Her Daughter

1 min 14 sec

My Mother's Childhood

2 min 56 sec

Collecting Money for the Jewish National Fund

1 min 31 sec

Publishing Her Mother's Writing

1 min 20 sec

My Grandmother, a Midwife and a Comedian

1 min 51 sec

Studying in Israel in 1949

3 min 5 sec

"He Was a Prince of a Man"

1 min 55 sec

Encounters with Anti-Yiddish Attitudes in Early State of Israel

1 min 30 sec

"Otherwise I Might Have Been a Sabra"

1 min 4 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

Themes: