About the Author

Ze'ev Orzech was born in 1926 in Wiesbaden, Germany. In 1936, when attending public school as a Jewish child became impossible, his parents enrolled him in a Jewish boarding school in Bex-les-Bains, Switzerland. In 1938, he rejoined his family on their way to Eretz Israel (then Palestine). After graduating from Balfour College in Tel Aviv in 1947 he came to the United States to study economics at the University of California in Berkeley. In 1957, he and his wife, Mimi, moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where he began a teaching career at Oregon State University from which he retired after thirty-two years. In 1974, Mimi and Ze'ev were among the founding members of Beit Am, the Jewish Community in Corvallis and have been much involved in its activities ever since. After retirement, Ze'ev started editing Kol Ha'am, the monthly community newsletter, from whose columns this book was created.