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 Mother Married an Actor and My Grandparents Didn't Approve

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Shura Grinhoyz-Turkow—Yiddish actress and activist born in Bialystok, now living in Israel—talks about how her mother's parents wanted her to marry a professional but she fell in love with a poor actor and was estranged from the family as a result.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Shura Grinhoyz-Turkow.

This excerpt is in Yiddish.

Shura Grinhoyz-Turkow was born in Bialystok, Poland in 1925. Shura died in 2020.

This interview is part of the Yiddish and the Arts: musicians, actors, and artists series.

Other video highlights from this oral history

Multilingual and Full of Actors: Shura Grinhoyz-Turkow Remembers Her Childhood Home

58 sec

Memories of A Great Yiddish Theater in Bialystok

1 min 11 sec

Bialystock Was a Jewish City: Memories from the Interwar and Immediate Post-War Periods

2 min 3 sec

Jews Always Find Ways to be Creative: Rebuilding Life in Lower Silesia Post-WW2

3 min 53 sec

It Started On Stage: My Great Love with Yiddish Actor, Itzhak Turkow

59 sec

I Cried the Entire Time: A Successful Yiddish Actress's First Year in Israel

1 min 38 sec

Ida Kaminska and Yiddish Theater in Post-War Warsaw

1 min 35 sec

I Played in Yoshe Kalb with Maurice Schwartz

1 min 45 sec

He Made the Difficult Switch from Yiddish to Hebrew: Zygmunt Turkow's Theater Career

1 min 17 sec

A Career Yiddish Actress on The Current State of Yiddish Cultural Production in Israel

2 min

Sholem Asch's House in Bat Yam

4 min 44 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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