Diana Bregman Feld

Yiddish Book Center (Allie) · September 13, 2011

Diana Bregman Feld is the daughter of published Yiddish poet, Edith Kaplan Bregman. In this interview, Diana talked quite a bit about her mother, who was born in Telekhany, a shtetl in Belarus. Edith moved to the United States, to New York, with her family when she was thirteen. She read voraciously (Dreiser, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, all the Yiddish writers) and began writing poems as a teenager. She went to Palestine in the 1920s to take part in building the Jewish state, and there she met and married Diana's father, who was from Russia and had been part of the Poale Zion. Edith and her husband came back to New York (first to the Bronx, then Brooklyn) and Diana was born in 1931. Diana was raised in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Her father made reels and cases for the motion picture industry, and her mother wrote prolifically (primarily in Yiddish) and became close with a number of important Yiddish writers and editors. Edith was, according to Diana, ahead of her time - a bohemian. Diana was an only child and her parents saved their money to give her many opportunities, especially in the realm of arts and education. She took dance lessons and music lessons, and she went to Yiddishe shule five days per week. Their house was alive with the Yiddish tam. There was always lots of singing, and they went to the Yiddish theater constantly. Diana's parents belonged to the Labor Zionist movement, and always thought about going back to Israel. Diana herself belong to Habonim, the Zionist youth group, and when she was 18 (in 1949), she spent time in Israel studying at Hebrew University. Diana studied Jewish education at Hebrew Union College and worked as a religious school teacher for 20 years. She also had a parallel career teaching in the New York City public school system. She has two daughters, both of whom are involved in various ways with Jewish culture and education, and with Israel. Today, Diana and her husband split their time between Lee, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, and Boynton Beach, Florida. In both communities, they do a lot of volunteer work and they are actively involved with many Jewish organizations and arts and cultural organizations. Diana also performs (she is a singer and dancer, her specialty being Yiddish and Hebrew music) and gives lectures about various topics including her mother's poetry. In recent years, after her mother passed away, Diana put together a collection of her mother's poetry and family photographs. This was a major effort of collecting, sorting, and translating, and the result was a large, self-published volume, including "everything but the kitchen sink," and distributed primarily to family members. The book is divided into sections, including poems from the shtetl, Holocaust poems, etc. Diana hopes that at some point she can work with a real editor and publisher to edit the volume and publish it for wider distribution. Many of her mother's diaries, letters from Yiddish writers, and other documents remain untranslated. Toward the end of the interview, Diana talks about why she feels the arts and creativity are so important, about the legacy her mother and father have left her, and about her hopes that young people (including her grandchildren and future great-grandchildren) will carry on the Yiddish language and culture. To cite this interview: Diana Bregman Feld Oral History Interview, interviewed by Lesley Yalen, Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project, Karmazin Recording Studio, Yiddish Book Center, July 19, 2011. Video recording, http://archive.org/details/DianaBregmanFeld19July2011YiddishBookCenter ( [date accessed] )