Oral Historian Spotlight: Nina Pick
Featuring our Field Fellow, Nina Pick
This page highlights the work of one of our amazing field fellows: Nina Pick. Our field fellow program trains alumni of Yiddish Book Center programs to be oral historians for the Wexler Oral History Project, thereby expanding our collecting capacity and reach.
Nina first came to the Yiddish Book Center in 2005 for the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program and returned more than a decade later to join our team of oral historians. Since then she has recorded more than 100 interviews for the project. Nina has interviewed Yiddish actors, klezmer musicians, and Hebrew priestesses. Her interviews explore topics from Yiddish on stage to healing ancestral trauma, strengthening and diversifying our collection. Nina’s deep curiosity for peoples’ inner lives and her grounded presence have elicited many wonderful interview moments.
Drawing on her background as both a therapist and the granddaughter of Auschwitz survivors, Nina believes that “human beings are hardwired to transmit wisdom through storytelling and telling stories can be profoundly healing for both the storyteller and the audience.” Below is a roundup of some of Nina’s favorites, followed by our Q&A with her, where you can read more about Nina’s experience as an oral historian and her thoughts on oral history as “a radical, feminist, and subversive medium.”
Eleanor Reissa—singer, actress, and director in both Yiddish and English—describes how her learnings of the Holocaust have put the pandemic into context and how the resilience of Holocaust survivors inspires her.
Culture critic, writer, and historian Seth Rogovoy describes The Klezmatics concert that turned him on to klezmer music.
Francesca Ter-Berg, a cellist who specializes in klezmer music, explains the unresolved trauma that exists within her family’s history and how it affects her today.
Binya Koatz, an activist, writer, musician, and educator, describes her sense of Jewish identity and her thoughts on the inherent queerness of Judaism.
Engineer-turned-actor Bruce Sabath describes how performing in a Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof relates to his family history.
Christa P. Whitney: What is your personal history with the Yiddish Book Center?
Nina Pick: I first came to the Yiddish Book Center for the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program in 2005, when I was in college. More than ten years later, I saw that the Center’s Wexler Oral History Project was accepting applications for field fellows, and I knew right away that I wanted to participate. I trained as a field fellow that winter of 2016–17, and I’ve been recording oral histories ever since.
CPW: What in your background drew you to doing oral histories with the Yiddish Book Center?
NP: I was drawn for various reasons. As a therapist and writer, I’ve always been interested in exploring different perspectives, and I find people’s inner lives fascinating. I also think that as human beings, we are hardwired to transmit wisdom through storytelling, and telling stories can be profoundly healing for both the storyteller and the audience. As the granddaughter of Auschwitz survivors, I’ve felt compelled to participate in the healing of the Jewish lineage, and doing oral histories has been a big part of that. Also, my maternal grandparents spoke Yiddish, and unfortunately, it was lost in the family by my generation. I’ve felt a lot of grief about the loss of Yiddish in my family and in the Jewish community more broadly. Doing interviews has felt like an important reparative experience.
CPW: After doing as many fascinating and moving interviews as you have, I bet it’s difficult to pick one favorite. But looking back over more than 100 interviews, what’s one interview moment that sticks out to you?
NP: A favorite interview was with Rachel Epstein, a child survivor of the Holocaust who was saved from deportation by being sheltered by a French family. In her interview, she describes immigrating to the US and meeting her husband at the age of eighteen. They’ve now been married seventy years. At the end of the interview, she introduced me to her husband. Then together they gave me matchmaking advice. I’d like to say it led me to my beshert (predestined partner), but I’m still waiting for that part of the story to unfold. Nevertheless, to get relationship advice from a couple who’s been married for seventy years was pretty magical!
CPW: You’ve interviewed so many people with very different backgrounds through this work, but there’s always this throughline of Yiddish. What have you learned about Yiddish through this work?
NP: I've learned how it is truly the mame-loshn (mother tongue)! How people's relationship with it is intimate, erotic, musical, relational, conflictual, warm, and embodied. How language lives in the mouth, in the throat, in the breath, and throughout the senses. In interviews, when people talk about Yiddish, they often cry, laugh, sing, choke up, and move from elderhood to childhood and back again. We truly hold the language of our ancestors in our bodies.
CPW: There’s a methodology to oral history that we train in, but there’s also an art to it, inevitable ways our personalities impact our interviewing styles. I’m curious, has your approach to interviewing changed at all over the years? How?
NP: Yes, absolutely. I find myself more comfortable with pauses and more trusting in my intuition. While I go into the interview with research and an outline, I’m also more willing to follow my instinct about following various threads that emerge during the interview process itself. The interview always begins with a question about the ancestors, and I now use this question as a way of grounding the interview process and invoking the guidance of my own ancestors. Especially as we’ve moved to doing interviews on Zoom, I’ve found it useful to draw on the tools I use as a somatic therapist to stay grounded and embodied during the interview. Feeling my feet on the ground or my back against the chair and being aware of my breath help me to stay fully present with the narrator and the interview process.
CPW: From your perspective, why is oral history important?
NP: I love oral history as a form because, as I see it, it is a radical, feminist, and subversive medium that allows historical narratives to be told by the people who actually lived it, including by women and other historically marginalized people.
A recorded oral history includes the body—the way that we tell stories not only through our words but through our emotions, intonation, gestures, and breath. It includes what we ate, how we dressed, who we loved. It’s a rich, nuanced, and multi-synchronous tapestry of experience that encompasses not only the history the narrator is describing but the time of the interview itself, the relationship between the narrator and the oral historian, and the space in which the interview takes place. And I love that it’s a form of historical narrative that can also include singing, playing instruments, telling jokes, crying, and dancing!
CPW: Well, Nina, a groysn dank! Thank you so much for your incredible contributions to the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project. I love talking to you about our intersecting experiences doing this very specific work. Here’s to many more interviews to come!