Fraidy Katz

Jewish music has enriched my life since I was a child in Rochester, New York, where my mother, a devoted fan of "The Jewish Hour," never missed a Sunday morning broadcast. Although my father and grandfather were funeral directors, my father loved to sing (he often sang the same song all day long!). Even as a very little girl, I was coached on quiz show questions and songs to perform for my parents' friends.

Yiddish was always the secret language in our family, yet during the folk music "craze" of the 'Sixties, when I began to teach myself to sing Yiddish folk music and accompany myself on the guitar, nobody was able to help me learn the language. I studied German my last year of high school and would sing Ruth Rubin's transliterations with a German accent. "The melodies are beautiful," my Zeyde would say, "but I don't understand the words."
Although I continued to sing and act in both musical and dramatic productions throughout the world and over the years, it was not until I was living in Somerville, MA, teaching English to Russian immigrants at Brookline's Hebrew College that I found a Yiddish class in the Adult Education Program. Inspired by my students' profound interest in Jewish history, culture, and traditions, I became a graduate student in Jewish History and Yiddish at Brandeis University. My German studies, coupled with the Summer Programs of the Max Weinreich Institute at Columbia University in 1981 and 1982, enabled me to study Yiddish literature independently with several scholars at Brandeis. A group of khaveyrim in the Boston area formed a leyenkrayz which met faithfully over several years, sharing literature, conversation, cookies, and simkhes.

Today I teach both English as a Second Language and Yiddish. I have taught Yiddish at Brandeis, Hebrew College, MIT, Tufts, Boston University, and other institutions in the Boston area, as well as at UMASS Amherst, the World Fellowship Center, and the National Yiddish Book Center, where I was Bibliographer from 1986 through most of 1987. I also translate books, printed articles, letters, memoirs, and other manuscripts from Yiddish into English. My biggest challenge as a Yiddish translator involved preparing articles for The Forward's 100th Anniversary Edition in less than two weeks, while on vacation in the former East Germany.