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 […]

My “Me, Myself and I”memoir-writing class meets this morning at the Chicago Cultural Center. Ages in that class span from 66 to 96, they’ve lived through a lot of election cycles, and it’ll be interesting to hear what they have to say about the decisions made yesterday. I sure can’t think of anything myself to […]

Have I told you that one of my sisters is enrolled in the memoir-writing class I lead in Printers Row? It’s true! Cheryl chose to write a “letter to dad” for this week’s assignment just like guest blogger Bruce Hunt did yesterday. I was so young when our dad died that I don’t remember him, […]