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.

1937: They Gave a Directive to Round up Six Enemies of the Soviet State From Our Shtetl

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Iosif Lakhman, z"l, native Yiddish speaking journalist who spent most of his life in the Soviet Union, tells how his shtetl responded to a directive to turn over enemies of the Soviet Union and how his father, who was known to be anti-Soviet, was spared.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Iosif Lakhman.

This excerpt is in Yiddish.

Iosif Lakhman was born in Ukraine in 1921. Iosif died in 2017.