By Ross Perlin
It could be the world’s most implausible opus: the first Yiddish-Japanese dictionary. Its publication crowned decades of work and includes 28,000 entries.
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By Allison Gaudet Yarrow
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘Middlesex’ crafts a college love triangle in his new novel. When he saw ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ he thought it was about Greeks.
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By Mikhail Krutikov
In the poem “Dream,” Boris Slutsky laconically summed up two defining facts of his generation: “Nineteen is the year of birth, age twenty-two in year forty-one.”
Best known in Russia as a poet of the Second World War, Slutsky belonged to the first — and last — generation of writers whose lives were spent completely under Communist rule. Like most members of that generation, the war split his life in two.
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By Allison Gaudet Yarrow
Lev Grossman doesn’t object to his best-sellers being dubbed ‘Harry Potter for adults.’ The books are filled with magic and wizardry, but they don’t shy away from grown-up nastiness.
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By Josh Lambert
Just because people don’t know a language doesn’t mean they won’t use it in all kinds of crazy ways. Cartoonists use Yiddish icons without understanding them.
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By Adam Rovner
Jews didn’t flee Europe because of pogroms. They moved to all corners of the world to find economic opportunity, writes Gur Alroey in a new book.
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By Itzik Gottesman
The prolific literary translator Joachim Neugroschel died on May 23 in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 73. Neugroschel translated more than 200 books from Yiddish, French, German, Russia and Italian, including the work of Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti. His legal guardian and former partner, Aaron Mack Schloff, confirmed Neugroschel’s death.Read More
By Allan Nadler
A vast, heartbreaking and, to English readers, inaccessible Yiddish and Hebrew library — of some 1,000 volumes, studded with unique memoirs and rare photographs — known as
yizker-bikher, or memorial books, is devoted to eternalizing the legacies of the myriad cities and towns of Jewish Eastern Europe destroyed by the Holocaust. These books were collaboratively produced, mostly in the late 1950s through the early ’70s, by the survivors of those Jewish communities. But with the exception of a half-dozen or so, they are not the product of critical historical scholarship, and only three have been fully translated into English.
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By Ross Perlin
Every year, hundreds of thousands of interns in the U.S. work without pay or for less than minimum wage. Many of these unpaid or underpaid internships are at for-profit companies and closely resemble regular work: thousands upon thousands of labor violations each year, hidden in plain sight. In certain for-profit industries — fashion, publishing, entertainment, journalism, to name a few — demanding unpaid internships dominate, with illegal situations possibly constituting a majority of all available opportunities.
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By Ilan Stavans
The death of Brazilian fabulist Moacyr Scliar, at the age of 73, on February 27, in his native Porto Alegre, represents the loss of Latin America’s most popular Jewish writer of his generation, and the most influential.
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