Yiddish Book Center Offers New Online Memoir Writing Course, Centered on Rokhl Feygenberg
This fall, the Yiddish Book Center is inviting writers and readers to explore what makes a life worth putting into words. Its new online course, “Memoir Writing Then and Now: Reading and Writing with Rokhl Feygenberg’s The Winding Road,” pairs close reading of translated Yiddish literature with hands-on writing exercises.
The course centers on Rokhl Feygenberg, a Yiddish and Hebrew writer and journalist whose autobiographical work started when she was young and grew into a significant body of literary and journalistic writing. Her memoir offers a window into the pressures and choices that shape a life story — what gets remembered, what gets left out, and how lived experience becomes narrative.
The class is taught by writer and teacher Rokhl Kafrissen, whose work focuses on Yiddish literature and contemporary Jewish life. No knowledge of Yiddish is required. Kafrissen described the appeal of teaching the book as partly its rare portrait of adolescence in a Yiddish-speaking shtetl, noting that the life it reveals is “deeply relatable, over a century later.”
Mindl Cohen, the Center’s academic director, said she values how the course blends reading with personal writing, noting that participants will use prompts drawn from Feygenberg’s century-old memoir to write about their own lives — and that doing so can shed light on why a teenager like Feygenberg might have chosen to write her own story in the first place.
The four-session course runs Tuesdays, October 6, 13, 20, and 27, from 7:00–8:30 p.m. ET via Zoom, with recordings available to all registrants. It’s part of the Yiddish Book Center’s ongoing Online Culture Courses series, which brings Yiddish literature and culture to English-speaking audiences through live virtual classes.
Memoir Writing Then and Now: Reading and Writing with Rokhl Feygenberg’s The Winding Road
Tuesdays, October 6, 13, 20, and 27
7:00–8:30 p.m. ET
Online via Zoom
For registration and details, visit the Yiddish Book Center’s Online Culture Courses
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This item, copy-edited with assistance from Claude.ai, is based on a well-written press release sent by the Yiddish Book Center.
