He Must Go on, He Can’t Go on, He’ll Go on

Everything was doomed [in 1943]: [Yankev Glatshteyn’s] people, his tradition, its language, his artistic freedom, his chances of contributing to a continuing literature. Even his awesome responsibility as the chronicler of the last days of…

Denying Adorno

I have no idea that at the same time in the United States of America, Theodore Adorno has come out with the sweeping statement that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. A meaningful, powerful…

Two Books I Finished Reading Today

A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night: A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life [A commentary on Shantideva’s great manual], by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. We Were in Auschwitz / 6643…

Recent Reading

Sunday 11 April 2021 Dear Sarah, Thanks for your question about what I’ve been reading. Sometimes I make a plan, then other times I act entirely on instinct. So what follows are examples of each….

Keeping Their Language Alive

Joseph Leftwich, Great Yiddish Writers of the Twentieth Century The writer wakens you, the reader, he rouses you out of your indifference, he shows you the things you had not seen before, he makes your…

History from a New Perspective

Dorothee Soelle, Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian A series of short 3-6 page chapters proceeding chronologically from growing up in Germany, through the war years, to her education, her intellectual influences, especially, existentialism;…