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.

We Slept on Straw: A Jewish Home in Pre-War Lodz

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Jack Lewin—Yiddish poet and actor based in Los Angeles—remembers his childhood home in Lodz, Poland, including how he slept on the freshest hay because he had asthma.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Jack Lewin.

This excerpt is in Yiddish.

Jack Lewin was born in Lodz, Poland in 1928.

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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

No Sewage, but a Great Library: Memories of the Industrial City of Lodz

1 min 31 sec

Mathematics Was Taught in Yiddish Until Fifth Grade: The Medem School in Lodz

3 min 11 sec

Celebrating Passover for the First Time in the Lodz Ghetto

2 min 37 sec

Reading To Forget the Hunger in the Ghetto

3 min 14 sec

"My Kind of Kehile (Community)!": Secular Jewish Life in Melbourne

3 min 8 sec

"When Children Start Playing in the Street in Yiddish, Yiddish Will Live"

2 min 3 sec

He Was a Volcano On Stage: Remembering Director Sigmund Turkow

4 min 47 sec

Memories of the Industrial City of Lodz

1 min 31 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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