Category: Yiddish

Kafka, Sholom Aleichem, Peretz

In this respect Sholom Aleichem and Peretz are more like Kafka  than any of the three are like most modern writers. The Yiddish masters are largely unconcerned with the psychology of individual difference;   Kafka…

Then Things Changed

“I was prepared actually never to be translated, never to be known, to remain a Yiddish writer.” –Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted in Janet Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, 88

A Yiddish Counterculture

If you read enough of Peretz and the countless Yiddish writers who followed, a deeper vision begins to emerge: of a Jewishness infinitely more interesting, more challenging, and more relevant, rooted in tradition, shaped by…

A Mission

After the Holocaust, no further doubt was possible. Isaac said so explicitly: the work he wanted to fashion would also be a surviving testimony to a murdered people, a vanished culture, and a dying language. …

Today’s One-Liner (#137)

If we search for God and we are good to human beings, we are doing more or less our job. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell

Today’s One-Liner (#132)

We must collect all kinds of sayings and proverbs. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945 , edited  by David Stromberg

Genres

[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping.  A card index of all imaginable inhumanities.  Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…

Reading Jewish

In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists.    He got me back to Shakespeare  and sparked…