Two Books I Finished Reading Today
A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night: A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life [A commentary on Shantideva’s great manual], by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. We Were in Auschwitz / 6643…
Category: Khurbn
Recent Reading
Sunday 11 April 2021 Dear Sarah, Thanks for your question about what I’ve been reading. Sometimes I make a plan, then other times I act entirely on instinct. So what follows are examples of each….
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…
History from a New Perspective
Dorothee Soelle, Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian A series of short 3-6 page chapters proceeding chronologically from growing up in Germany, through the war years, to her education, her intellectual influences, especially, existentialism;…
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…
Remembering Shammai
Shabes morning I fix a period for reading My three “rabbis” recently deceased— Harold Bloom, whose extended family on both sides perished in Europe Every boy but one in George Steiner’s lycée lived after the…
A Youth
The Daily Mailby Hedy Epstein In those first years of the Nazi regime, it was hard for me to grasp the import of politics writ large. However, I would soon come face to face…
Morning and Night
After finishing Hilberg’s trilogy this morning, have spent the evening with the poets: Eluard, Cardenal, Heifetz-Tussman, Glatshteyn, and Brecht.
The Imperative To Remember
Anyone who does not actively, constantly engage in remembering and in making others remember is an accomplice of the enemy. Conversely, whoever opposes the enemy must take the side of his victims and communicate…
The Chasm between Them and Us
Kadya Molodovsky, A Jewish Refugee in New York: Rivke Zilberg’s Journal Translated by Anita Norich The accomplished Yiddish writer Molodovsky wrote this novel in serialized form in 1940-41, knowing obviously what was happening at the…