Category: Yiddish

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…

Sholem Aleichem-isms

It should never happen to you! Master of the universe, what have I done to deserve all this?  Some people have all the luck!  I swear, I wouldn’t wish it on a dog!  What happened?…

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…

Endings/Continuings

The end of Yiddish, except as an academic pursuit or as a final nostalgia, is not at all Kafkaesque. Jewish history has many ironies and countless sorrows, as well as a panoply of cultural achievements…

Yiddish Writers

H. Leivick 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… Sholem Aleichem…

First Draft of a Translation

אָ מענטשהייט איך בין אײַער דאַנקבאַר זון   יעדער מענטש מײַן טאַטע’ס עלטער     איז  מײַן טאַטע     יעדער פרוי מײַן מאַמע’ס עלטער איז  מײַן מאַמע            אַלע  די…