Poem of the Week by Charles Reznikoff
I went to my grandfather’s to say good-bye:I was going away to a school out West.As I came in,My grandfather turned from the window at which he sat(sick, skin yellow, eyes bleary–but his hair still…
Tag: Yiddish
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…
On-Going Introduction to Dear Love of Comrades
Yaele DiPlacido-Eastman questioned my title, which includes the trigger word–for someone who grew up in the Soviet Union–”comrades.” My choice of title stems not from apparatchiks of Stalinist oppression but from one of America’s greatest…
Envisioning Eutopia
I understand why Yiddish writers still draw on the theme of the old homeland, of the shtetl, where the people forged the treasure of their language and their lifestyle. But I believe that, no matter…
Hasidism
You can take everything from me—the pillow from under my head, my house—but you cannot take God away from my heart. — Nahman of Bratslav Everything the true Hasid does or does not do mirrors…
Glatshteyn
Janet R. Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn Twayne Publishers, 1980 Having read translations of Yankev Glatshteyn from Howe and company’s Modern Yiddish Poetry, Whitman’s Selected Poems, Zumoff’s I Keep Recalling, and also Fein’s Selected Poems, I treated…
Jew-in-the-Library, Jew-in-the-Streets
Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer, Henry Holt and Company, 1998 Portraits, bios, occasionally quotations form this coffee table book collection of Jewish writers, poets, novelists, scholars. Wiesel is here, as is his nemesis Hannah Arendt,…
“I’ll Never Know, in the Silence You Don’t Know, You Must Go On, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On”
Working on a kind of sequel to Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, I am imagining a character named Bella Levenshteyn, who in her twenties devotes herself to learning Yiddish, the language of her ancestors. At…
Yiddish Writers/3
Isaac Bashevis Singer was the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (Elie Wiesel, whose first book, And the World Remained Silent, was in Yiddish, was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.)…