My mother was a Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia. She was more comfortable with Yiddish than English so my brother and I were raised to speak Yiddish at home. When I was very little, she�d sing songs to me from her childhood in the 1930�s. Almost all of them were very sad – about lost loves, losing one�s home, loneliness, poverty. One song she sang was called �Papirineh Kinderlach Hub Ich� (I Have Paper Children), a mother�s lament that all of her children have grown up and moved away or died, and all she has left are their pictures. It made me cry every time.
