Itzik Gottesman
By Itzik Gottesman
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Culture A Yiddish Pilgrimage to Quebec
For the first time, an international Yiddish theater festival will convene, bringing together troupes from Israel, Poland, France, Romania, New York and Montreal. The festival is sponsored by and will take place at the Segal Centre for Performing Arts in Montreal from June 17 – 25, 2009. This historic event will also include lectures, films,…
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News Zvi Kanar, 80, Mime of Wonder and Shoah Horrors
When Zvi Kanar, an internationally known mime and Yiddish writer, died April 18 in Tel Aviv, Israel, his friends were startled to learn that he was 80 years old. With his upbeat attitude and easy ability to be around the younger generation of Yiddishists and performers, it was assumed he was 10 years younger. Kanar,…
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Culture Yiddish Poetry: Up Close and Personal
With Everything We’ve Got: A Personal Anthology of Yiddish Poetry Edited and Translated By Richard J. Fein Host Publications, 218 pages Hardcover $35.00, Softcover $17.50. While every process of translation involves a dialogue between the work and the person rendering it into a foreign tongue, many translators go to great pains to play down that…
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News The Newspaper That Speaks Your Language
In 1970, soon after my bar mitzvah, at the instigation of my uncle — late Yiddish linguist Mordkhe Schaechter — I joined in a demonstration with family and friends in front of the old Forward offices on East Broadway, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, demanding that the paper clean up its language. No, it was…
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News Journal Editor, 102, Devoted to Yiddish
Everyone active in the world of Yiddish culture has to have shoulders broad enough to carry the weight of history, but Itche Goldberg, who died December 27 at age 102, had the broadest shoulders of all. As editor of the journal Yiddishe Kultur, Goldberg found the energy, even in his 80s and 90s, to maintain…
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News Folksbiene Spins Revolving Doors of Comedy
For its 89th season, the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater is presenting Leon Kobrin’s comedy on immigrant life — “The Lady Next Door” (in Yinglish, “Di Next-door-ike”). The Folksbiene is the only professional Yiddish theater in America, and its performances and future plans are particularly significant to the Yiddish cultural world. This year, for the first time,…
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News The Last Professional Yiddish Theater Looks Ahead
Leon Kobrin’s classic Yiddish play “The Girl Next Door” (“Di Nekstdorike”) revolves around the question: Who would make a better wife — an observant and modest, pretty shtetl girl or a sleazy, shameful adulteress who pretends to be an American “lady”? It seems that for poor Velvele, the choice is not so cut and dried….
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