By Itzik Gottesman
Maybe it’s a sgule — a remedy prescription, for long life — to become a Yiddish writer. Itche Goldberg and Mordkhe Tsanin both died at the ripe old age of 102 a few years ago; poet Avrom Sutskever died in 2010 at 96. Now the New York Yiddish world has lost another wonderful poet, Jeremiah Hescheles, at the age of 100.
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By Jeremiah Hescheles
I looked around — and saw that half of my years are fading on the dirt road;
that over my life, there closes, from my burial shroud, the first pale fold.
So I doubled up like a swallow, that no longer finds her nest under the roof.
From youth I separated in mute language —
as a cow that accompanies her calf to the slaughterer’s knife.Read More
By Shoshana Olidort
Perhaps the greatest American poet ever to have lived, Walt Whitman was not always regarded as such. Thanks, in part, to the emergence of modernist forms in poetry toward the end of the 19th century, Whitman’s work did not attract critical attention until after his death in 1892. But for Jewish immigrant poets living in New York City at the turn of the century, Whitman was an iconic figure — a poet and even a prophet.
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By Brian Diamond
Yankev Glatshteyn (Jacob Glatstein) was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1896 to a religious family. In 1914, he immigrated to the United States under the pretense of enrolling in law school but almost immediately dropped out and became involved with the burgeoning Yiddish poetry scene in New York City’s Lower East Side, where he would live the rest of his life.
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In this Passover episode of the Yiddish Forward’s online cooking show, “Eat in Good Health,” Rukhl “Ray” Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz prepare gefilte fish.Read More
In this Purim episode of the Yiddish Forward’s online cooking show, “Eat in Good Health,” Rukhl “Ray” Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz prepare a Purim feast.Read More
In this episode of the Yiddish Forward’s online cooking show, “Eat in Good Health,” Rukhl “Ray” Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz’s prepare cabbage strudel.Read More
By Jeri Zeder
Suspended in white space, a goat romps and a rooster struts across a modest book cover. Beneath them, running right to left, is the Yiddish word “mayselekh” — less a title than a simple description of what’s inside: two little stories for children. The book, which is more like a pamphlet, is small enough to slip into a greeting card envelope. Inside are 15 pages of rhyming Yiddish verse, plus eight black-and-white drawings. The book was printed in Petrograd, published in Vilnius (commonly known to Jews as Vilna) in 1917 and written by Der Nister, pen name of the avant-garde Yiddish writer Pinkhes Kahanovich (1884–1950). The illustrator is Marc Chagall.
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By Josh Lambert
In September 1976, Commentary printed the letters of three novelists who had taken umbrage at appraisals of their work, in a previous issue, by a relatively unknown Yiddish professor named Ruth Wisse. Cynthia Ozick, the most fervent of the respondents, judged Wisse guilty of a “fundamental (and, for a good reader, unforgivable) critical error”: confusing literature with sociology.Read More
By Laura Collins-Hughes
It’s a funny thing, the way a young artist’s raw vitality is often forgotten in posterity, obscured by the seemingly tamer, more popularly appealing self that emerged later. Seven decades after “Our Town” was a Broadway hit, for example, almost no one remembers Thornton Wilder as an experimental dramatist, though he once was one. These days, we perceive him through muffling layers of homespun hokeyness.
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