A Poem, a History, a Novel
This fall Dianne, Lynette and I are reading the following books:
Category: Jewish Tradition
“Everything Must Be Told and Written Down”
Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record: Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012). Laura Rockusch has performed an inspiring service in producing her book, Collect and Record. Contrary to many people’s assumptions…
“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/5
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… –H. Leivick
Yiddish Writers/4
I looked at myself in the mirror. A skeleton stared back at me. Nothing but skin and bone. It was the image of myself after death. It was at that instant that the will to…
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.)…
Yiddish Writers/2
I tried in my book Kiddush Hashem to picture Auschwitz in seventy pages. But I wrote the book over a period of six years, in pain and agony. And writing it I became a changed…
Yiddish Writers/1
If you’re looking to buy something, I’m afraid I’m all out of stock, unless I can interest you in some fine hunger pains, a week’s supply of heartache, or a head full of scrambled brains….
Learning by Heart, the Joy of Music, and the Power of the Prophetic
Dear Lauren, I received your letter today about the online Good News class and your hand-written adaptation of Kipling’s famous poem. The fact that you have had “If” as a companion in your work and…
The Way It Looked In 1968
Within a short period of time there will be no Jewish workers in Israel. The Arabs shall be the workers; the Jews shall be the managers, inspectors, officials, and policemen and mainly secret service men….