After Kishinev
I’ve shared this story with hundreds of friends and students over the years. After a pogrom in Russia in 1903, the author was invited to contribute to a literary collection to be circulated to aid…
Category: World Literature
“Did You Watch the Debate?” “No, I Got Caught up in an Old Novel”
And if that wasn’t funny, there were lots of things that weren’t even funnier. [The doctor] was a very neat, clean man whose idea of a good time was to sulk. Fortunately, just when things…
Only Connect (and Hold It All)
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews Edited by Gauri Viswanathan Pantheon Books (2001) With four friends (from St. Charles, Troy, and Los Angeles), I am reading and discussing the recently published collection of…
Melting a Heart of Ice
Late in life, I got around to reading Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman (translated by Hillel Halkin, who suggested it was “possibly the greatest of all Jewish novels”). It sounded funnily familiar…. Flogging a dead…
Summer Reading List
Sholem Asch Yankev Glatshteyn Vasily Grossman Malka Heifetz-Tussman Dovid Katz Irina Klepfisz Koheleth Kadia Molodovsky Leib Rochman Chava Rosenfarb
Envisioning Eutopia
I understand why Yiddish writers still draw on the theme of the old homeland, of the shtetl, where the people forged the treasure of their language and their lifestyle. But I believe that, no matter…
“If Not You, Who?”
Having recently read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, I thought of Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, volume 7 in his In Search of Lost Time. 1. As for the inner book of unknown symbols……
A Monument Made of Words
Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s Court June 1998 After we had left Warsaw (during the First World War), we continued to hear news of him from time to time. One son died, a daughter…
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…