Moving Tales: My Journey from Victim to Victor

Moving Tales is the autobiography of Shirley Primack Azen, first born daughter of a Russian, Jewish family who had immigrated to Canada in 1910.

This moving autobiography describes how Shirley used humor to survive family oppression and abuse in order to raise her family and achieve her academic dream. Shirley received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1991, at the age of seventy-eight years. Her dissertation was an interesting, non-contemporaneous exploration of how the common people use humor to survive in times of oppression, just as Shirley survived and ultimately conquered her trials and tribulations to emerge victorious in the fulfillment in her life.