Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukah! Loyal blog readers will recognize today’s featured immigrant – 96-year-old Hanna Bratman, a writer from the memoir-writing class I teach for older adults in downtown Chicago every Wednesday, grew up in a Jewish family who owned a butcher shop in Mannheim, Germany. “We had many Christian people working at the shop, […]

Next up in my series of writings featuring immigrants enrolled in my memoir classes: Mia Miller. For this installment, I’ll excerpt from one of her pieces. Mia was born in Egypt in the French speaking Jewish community of Cairo. Her family later moved to Paris, where she attended college and fell in love with Jonathan Miller, […]

Anna Nessy Perlberg was born in Czechoslovakia. Her mother, Julia Nessy, was an opera singer, and her entire family was devoted to the arts. Her father was Jewish, and when Hitler seized Prague in 1939 she and her two older brothers and their parents left their beloved city for New York. Anna met her poet […]

If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you know that Wanda Bridgeforth is a 95-year-old witty and talented writer who has attended the memoir writing class I lead in downtown Chicago for over a decade now. What you might not know about Wanda is that she is an immigrant: she was born in Canada. […]

A number of the writers in the memoir classes I lead are immigrants, and for the next couple weeks I’m planning to feature essays these wonderful writers wrote when I asked them to describe the role food plays in their holiday traditions. Let’s start with Annelore. She was born in Germany and met her American-born […]