[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…
In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists. He got me back to Shakespeare and sparked…
Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist, playwright, attorney, and Jewish world gadfly in New York City.
It should never happen to you! Master of the universe, what have I done to deserve all this? Some people have all the luck! I swear, I wouldn’t wish it on a dog! What happened?…
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…
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…
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…
אָ מענטשהייט איך בין אײַער דאַנקבאַר זון יעדער מענטש מײַן טאַטע’ס עלטער איז מײַן טאַטע יעדער פרוי מײַן מאַמע’ס עלטער איז מײַן מאַמע אַלע די…
From Lionel Trilling‘s library to mine.