Itzik Gottesman
By Itzik Gottesman
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News Vitka Kempner Kovner, Vilna Partisan, Dies
The legendary Vilna partisan Vitka Kempner Kovner died on February 15. Widow of the poet and partisan leader Abba Kovner, she was born in the Polish town of Kalisz in 1920 and escaped from there to Vilna when the Germans invaded Poland. Vitka Kovner was among the founding members of Abba Kovner‘s partisan organization, the…
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News Tsirl Waletzky, Papercutting Pioneer, Dies at 90
One of the major artists of the American Yiddish cultural world and an innovator in the art of Jewish papercutting, Tsirl Waletzky, died on December 8 at the age of 90. Over three decades, her many drawings, paintings and papercuts illustrated book covers, Yiddish children’s magazines, primers and textbooks, becoming nearly synonymous with the art…
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The Schmooze Israel’s Only Secular Yiddish Publication Celebrates 60 Years
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. In May 1951, a group of immigrants to Israel, mainly Holocaust survivors, founded a social, political and cultural group based on the model of the General Jewish Labour Bund of pre-war Poland. That group, which became the Israeli branch of the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, bought a building…
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Books Joachim Neugroschel, Prolific Multilingual Translator, Is Dead at 73
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. The son of the Yiddish Galician…
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The Schmooze A Yiddish Opera for Cuba’s ‘First National Hero’
A Monument to Hatuey in Baracoa, Cuba. Photo by Michal Zalewski. A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. In 1931, Yiddish poet, journalist and editor Ascher Penn published “Hatuey,” a 126-page epic poem about a Taíno chieftain who fought against the Spanish invasion of Cuba at the beginning of the 16th century, and who…
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News A Poet of Jewish Spiritual Life and World Literature
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…
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The Schmooze Shifra Lerer, 95, Yiddish Star of Stage and Screen
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. On March 12 the Yiddish theater lost one of its most beloved stars. Shifra Lerer, an Argentine-born actress who toured the world and who later appeared in films by Woody Allen and Sidney Lumet, died in Manhattan at the age of 95. I met Shifra during my…
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News Family Secret: My Mother-in-Law, the Accused Spy
On Saturday, February 26, my mother-in-law, Judith Socolov, died peacefully in her sleep at age 89. Her death was covered extensively by The Associated Press and The New York Times, and reporters openly discussed her “infamous” past as part of a Cold War drama that had long been forgotten. As a 28-year-old State Department employee…
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