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…
Today’s One-Liner (#178)
In our house learning was looked upon as the greatest wealth. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s Court
Find Your Book: A Summer Class in Recognizing and Embracing
Something that you feel will find its own form. Jack Kerouac I’ve shared Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones with a lot of readers, who went on to do writing practice or freewriting. But what does…
Two Types
We observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr. Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were…
Reading the Psalms
How I cried out to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David, those hymns of faith, those songs of a pious heart in which the spirit of pride can find no place!…
Today’s One-Liner (#177)
“I’d rather see a sermon lived than talked.” –An old woman from North Saint Louis, quoted by John Kavanaugh, The Word Encountered: Meditations on the Sunday Scriptures, 86
Effort
A professor had a wife who never had dinner ready on time and every day he had to sit around waiting. Suddenly it occurred to him that he could utilize this time and he began…
Up to Marcel
I knew that my brain was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of great price. But should I have time to exploit them? For two reasons I was…
Today’s One-Liner (#176)
Friends boasted that Proust could declaim whole pages of Balzac by heart. –Josef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, trans. Eric Karpeles, p. 33.
Open a Book
There was nothing to do but wait it out. My kind has to become accustomed to loneliness. And when one is alone there is nothing to do but study. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s…