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.

The Unfinished Story of My Grandfather’s Letters

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Miriam Oles, granddaughter of Yiddish writer Eliezer Schindler, recounts how her parents found a massive box of letters to her grandfather that he had stored in a Munich library in the 1930s. These letters, most of whose authors -- fans, publishers, fellow Olim Movement sympathizers -- perished in the Holocaust, are mostly in Yiddish and are sitting stagnant, waiting to be read and researched!

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Miriam Oles.

This excerpt is in English.

Miriam Oles was born in United States in 1947.

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

Other video highlights from this oral history

Singing Zmires (Shabbes Hymns)

1 min 13 sec

"My Mother was an Orthodox Jewish Feminist Way Before I was"

6 min 20 sec

"That feeling, that people have been doing this for thousands of years"

1 min 32 sec

It Helped Them Find “Confidence and Consolation” In The Death Chambers: My Grandfather Eliezer Schindler’s Poetry Was Recited During the Holocaust

2 min 56 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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