The Chasm between Them and Us

Kadya Molodovsky, A Jewish Refugee in New York: Rivke Zilberg’s Journal Translated by Anita Norich The accomplished Yiddish writer Molodovsky wrote this novel in serialized form in 1940-41, knowing obviously what was happening at the…

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…

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

Hold It All/37

In the last thirty years of his life, [Jacob] Glatshteyn’s poetry became an incessant, internalized conversation on Jewish history, the lost world of European Jewry, the birth of Israel, assimilation in America, the tragic demise…