The Real United States by Hedy Epstein
Not long after I came to the United States [later 1948], I began to work for the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA) near New York’s City Hall and later in the agency’s shelter…
Month: June 2019
Hasidism
You can take everything from me—the pillow from under my head, my house—but you cannot take God away from my heart. — Nahman of Bratslav Everything the true Hasid does or does not do mirrors…
Internationalista (Daydream/2)
It’s Nablus spring 1989 The intifada is in full bloom And there’s always something happening in and with and from the resistance International delegations come and go 10,000 photos are taken of David (A Palestinian…
Surplus You Can Count on in the Soviet Union
“We’ll run out of potatoes before spring. Same with bread. Same with firewood. The only thing we won’t be short of is grief.” — Marya, in Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad
Doctor Shmoctor
This afternoon I was perusing Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made, and came across the following skit of Lenny…
Glatshteyn
Janet R. Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn Twayne Publishers, 1980 Having read translations of Yankev Glatshteyn from Howe and company’s Modern Yiddish Poetry, Whitman’s Selected Poems, Zumoff’s I Keep Recalling, and also Fein’s Selected Poems, I treated…
In Today’s News…
Come you masters of war $8.7 Trillion
Hold It All
In [Proust’s] work we come across an absolute absence of bias, a willingness to know and to understand as many opposing states of the human soul as possible, a capacity for discovering in the lowest…
What Is Vaster
In the early 1980s Harold Bloom noted about his experience of decades at Yale University that “[t]here is a profound falling away from what I would call ‘text-centeredness” among the current generation of American undergraduates,…
What Is Vaster
In the early 1980s Harold Bloom noted about his experience of decades at Yale University that “[t]here is a profound falling away from what I would call ‘text-centeredness” among the current generation of American undergraduates,…