What exactly happens when private papers—letters, diaries, snapshots, unpublished fiction—enter an archive of a public university? Their relevance, their meaning, their status all shift from whatever they may have meant in the hands of their author or the family. Suddenly they become history. Joseph Butwin examines that transfer of meaning with particular attention to his mother, Frances Mazo Butwin. Her documentary history begins as Frania Mazo in Warsaw with diaries written shortly after the First World War when her family emigrated to Charleston to live above a delicatessen on King Street. At the College of Charleston she edited the literary magazine and began a lengthy correspondence with Julius Butwin whom she would marry and join in Minneapolis-St. Paul. They were active on the political left in the 1930s, owned a bookstore and together translated the Yiddish fiction of Sholom Aleichem in the early ‘40s.