Stern's father and mother, 1940's.

"My mother was born in Bialystock, a city in Poland where the Polish movement of solidarity got started. Although the Jews in northern Poland identified with the Lithuanians and they called themselves Litvaks, not Polish Jews. She was born in 1900 and was brought to America when she was five years old. My father was eight years old when he came to America and he came from the Ukraine, a little village a shtetl, about fifty miles from Kiev."

-Interview with Stern by Eve Grubin for Lyric, 2003.