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.

Explaining Baseball to an Egyptian General, and Other Encounters From My Travels in the Middle East in 1947

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Michel Araten, banking/operations researcher by profession, recalls his travels through the Middle East and North Africa in 1947, when his family went to visit relatives in Mandate Palestine and then spent several weeks in their former home of Casablanca, Morocco.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Michel Araten.

This excerpt is in English.

Michel Araten was born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1940.

Other video highlights from this oral history

Speaking Hebrew in My Sleep

1 min 15 sec

They Spoke What I Swore was German: Growing Up in a Multilingual Home

1 min 29 sec

"Michalina, Daughter of Israel": My Great-Aunt's Abduction by the Catholic Church

10 min 42 sec

Fleeing the Vichy Government in Morocco to Manhattan: My Father, the "Undocumented Alien"

2 min 20 sec

Witnessing the Aliyah of Soviet Jewry

1 min 46 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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