The Luck of the Yiddish
If you look up “translate” in a dictionary, you may be surprised to find that the first definition is “to bring into the afterlife, without causing death.” This isn’t as peculiar as it sounds. The rabbis teach us that our world is like a vestibule, a waiting room where we prepare ourselves for the World to Come. As the last survivors
Learn From Their Mistakes? Not These Lusty Dreamers
The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor’s Son By Sholem AleichemTranslated by Hillel Halkin Yale, 325 pages, $29.95. * * *The World According to Itzik: Selected Prose and Poetry By Itzik MangerTranslated by Leonard Wolf Yale, 249 pages, $29.95. * * *|In the past hundred years, two Yiddish writers
