Last week the prompt for my Wednesday memoir-writing class was, “How I Got through a Transition in Life that Wasn’t my Choice.” An overwhelming number of Chicagoans had voted against the new president, so I reasoned a lot of my writers might be concerned about Friday’s inauguration.  “For next week I want you to look […]

Recognizing that last year was not everyone’s favorite, the Chicago Tribune asked readers to submit stories for the paper to publish as a collection of short pieces defending poor 2016. Sharon Silverman submitted a shortened version of an essay she’d written for one of the memoir-writing classes I lead here in Chicago, and of course […]

Brigitte Erbe’s family was relocated from Germany to Tetschen, Czechoslovakia towards the beginning of World War II when her accountant father was assigned a job working for the German government. Brigitte was born in Tetschen and lived there until the day of her fourth birthday, December 5, 1944, the very day the invasion of Russian […]

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, […]