Today’s One-Liner (#231)
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 imagination work, he gives you wings, and you see…
Category: Yiddish
Kafka, Sholom Aleichem, Peretz
In this respect Sholom Aleichem and Peretz are more like Kafka than any of the three are like most modern writers. The Yiddish masters are largely unconcerned with the psychology of individual difference; Kafka…
Today’s One-Liner (#222)
You never know where the Angel of Death will make a date with you. –Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, Shprintze, 96
Then Things Changed
“I was prepared actually never to be translated, never to be known, to remain a Yiddish writer.” –Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted in Janet Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, 88
A Yiddish Counterculture
If you read enough of Peretz and the countless Yiddish writers who followed, a deeper vision begins to emerge: of a Jewishness infinitely more interesting, more challenging, and more relevant, rooted in tradition, shaped by…
A Mission
After the Holocaust, no further doubt was possible. Isaac said so explicitly: the work he wanted to fashion would also be a surviving testimony to a murdered people, a vanished culture, and a dying language. …
Today’s One-Liner (#137)
If we search for God and we are good to human beings, we are doing more or less our job. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell
Today’s One-Liner (#132)
We must collect all kinds of sayings and proverbs. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945 , edited by David Stromberg
Today’s One-Liner (#117)
The more man plans, the harder God laughs. –Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, translated by Hillel Halkin
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…