Today’s One-Liner (#117)
The more man plans, the harder God laughs. –Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, translated by Hillel Halkin
Tag: Sholem Aleichem
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…
Sooner or Later, We All Know Somebody Like This
“… and you know I’m not a father who goes around bragging about his kids–but on the subject of Beilke …” Tevye, in Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, translated by Hillel Halkin
Oy Vey Iz Mir
“If it didn’t work out God mustn’t have wanted it to. You, Tsaytl, just weren’t meant to be a fine lady with a house full of grand things and two parents who could finally enjoy…
Responding to a Pogrom
Violence was much on Tolstoy’s mind. Some eight months before Bryan’s visit a terrible pogrom against the Jews had occurred in Kishinyov. Horrified by this event, Tolstoy readily lent his name to a protest signed…
These Are a Few of Our Favorite Things—A Winter Class to Take Us into Spring
Somehow [Bonnie] forced you to see yourself at your most amazing. Most precious. And believe in what you saw. She saw. A ll obstacles fell into shadow, disappeared, backlit by the blaze of what could…
A Paradise for Perusers
I have given away four copies of James Mustich’s chef d’oeuvre, 1,000 Books to Read before You Die: A Life-Changing List, before I bought and kept one for myself. I became acquainted with Mr. Mustich…
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…