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.

My Family Wasn't in the Eishyshok Book

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Ron Finegold - former employee of the Montreal Jewish Public Library - discusses being unable to find his father's family names in Yaffa Eliach's book There Once Was a World: A Nine-Hundred-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, even though they were from there.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Ron Finegold.

This excerpt is in English.

Ron Finegold was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1938.

Other video highlights from this oral history

Genealogy and the Importance of Being in the Present

1 min 55 sec

"Fifteen years of recorded programs of Jewish interest": the Montreal Jewish Public Library's collection of recordings

1 min 35 sec

"Let's do our own little cottage industry of taping all the Yiddish classics": recording Yiddish talking books at the Montreal JPL

2 min 41 sec

Describing the Canadian-Jewish Writer A.M. Klein

3 min 37 sec

A.M. Klein and other Jewish figures as "khappers" (promoters) at Bronfman's Seagram Plant During U.S. Prohibition Years

2 min 44 sec

Memorable Events He Recorded While Working at the Montreal Jewish Public Library

3 min 6 sec

The Petlura Pogrom in Proskurov: My Mother's Story

3 min 21 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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