A Forgotten Land: Growing up in the Jewish Pale

A Forgotten Land: Growing up in the Jewish Pale

by Lisa Cooper

Many of our Jewish immigrant ancestors refused to talk about life in the old country  Unfortunately their choice to forget the unhappy times of pogroms ,wars and poverty left us with few memories of Eastern European shtetl life.  But, for Lisa Cooper this was not the case.  Lisa was fortunate that her grandmother, Pearl, was a great storyteller. Later; Pearl’s son, Lisa’s father, made recordings of these stories before Pearl died.   Lisa asked her father to translate the recordings (from the Yiddish)  Based on these recorded conversations Lisa Cooper’s father had with his mother, about her early life in Ukraine Lisa wrote a book. She will discuss her  book A Forgotten Land  ,the story of one Jewish family in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Bio

Lisa Cooper is a British writer, journalist and artist. She studied Russian at Edinburgh University and spent a year in the Soviet Union as a student. Armed with an address dating from the 1960s and a family tree, she made contact with cousins in Kiev, then part of Soviet Ukraine, who introduced her to a web of relatives she knew nothing about. The experience helped breed an interest in both family history and Ukrainian Jewish history. Her book was originally conceived as a dissertation for a Master’s degree in Russian History. You can read her blog at www.lisa-cooper.com/blog