What’s Possible
1. If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge of it is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an “artless art” growing out of the…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
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…
“Did You Watch the Debate?” “No, I Got Caught up in an Old Novel”
And if that wasn’t funny, there were lots of things that weren’t even funnier. [The doctor] was a very neat, clean man whose idea of a good time was to sulk. Fortunately, just when things…
Sages of the One-Liners
Guy Davenport, Herakleitos and Diogenes Grey Fox Press, 1981 Scholar and translator Davenport retrieves from the ancient Greek world two thinkers who have the knack for concision. The following is a small culling that may…
Share the Wealth with Avis Meyer: Seeing the World
Avis Meyer, professor emeritus, taught journalism, literature, editing, writing, and film classes at SLU, from 1974-2016. He was also the adviser to the school’s weekly student newspaper, The University News, during the same period. He…
Only Connect (and Hold It All)
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews Edited by Gauri Viswanathan Pantheon Books (2001) With four friends (from St. Charles, Troy, and Los Angeles), I am reading and discussing the recently published collection of…
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
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…
“If Not You, Who?”
Having recently read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, I thought of Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, volume 7 in his In Search of Lost Time. 1. As for the inner book of unknown symbols……