Working on a kind of sequel to Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, I am imagining a character named Bella Levenshteyn, who in her twenties devotes herself to learning Yiddish, the language of her ancestors. At…
I have often felt that instead of writing my autobiography I would like to write the biography of my poems. I mean, tell the life story of some of my poems… –H. Leivick
I looked at myself in the mirror. A skeleton stared back at me. Nothing but skin and bone. It was the image of myself after death. It was at that instant that the will to…
Isaac Bashevis Singer was the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (Elie Wiesel, whose first book, And the World Remained Silent, was in Yiddish, was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.)…
I tried in my book Kiddush Hashem to picture Auschwitz in seventy pages. But I wrote the book over a period of six years, in pain and agony. And writing it I became a changed…
If you’re looking to buy something, I’m afraid I’m all out of stock, unless I can interest you in some fine hunger pains, a week’s supply of heartache, or a head full of scrambled brains….
Dear Lauren, I received your letter today about the online Good News class and your hand-written adaptation of Kipling’s famous poem. The fact that you have had “If” as a companion in your work and…
Within a short period of time there will be no Jewish workers in Israel. The Arabs shall be the workers; the Jews shall be the managers, inspectors, officials, and policemen and mainly secret service men….
Liliane Dammond came to the United States in 1950, 25 years old, recently married and pregnant with my father. Learning English at 14 and studying in England, she was privileged to have no language barrier…
See, Wiesel has often made this claim quite explicit: I am above politics, my message is so precious and pure it cannot afford to be sullied by compromise. Such is the transcendent dignity of the…