Mara Sokolsky
By Mara Sokolsky
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Forverts in English Remembering Gella Schweid-Fishman — a Yiddish teacher we teen girls could relate to
This month marks the yortsayt of Gella Schweid Fishman. She was a Yiddish teacher, archivist, poet and, together with her late husband (the sociolinguist Dr. Joshua Fishman), a fierce advocate for the language they loved. As my teacher, she tried hard to pass some of that love and reverence over to me. I first became…
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Forverts in English Our grown children and their dating apps
This is part of a series called “Yidn in di yorn” (“Jews getting on in years”). If all of your adult children are happily partnered (married, even!) and you actually like their respective partners, count your blessings! But if, like me and many others, you’re still waiting for your (good-looking, kind, smart) offspring to find…
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Forverts in English How we Jews deal with forgetfulness and other signs of aging
Last summer, as we hosted a number of friends for brunch at our new home in Newport, Rhode Island, there was one question that kept coming up. After the initial “How was the traffic?” and the well-known COVID-related question, “Are you hugging these days?” we would walk out onto the patio, make ourselves comfortable and…
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Forverts in English Jewish couples in love even after decades together
As the Yiddish proverb goes: “Hob mikh veyniker lib, nor hob mikh lang lib – love me less, but love me long.” I don’t see this as a popular saying among millennials, just as it wasn’t for us yidn in di yorn (Jews getting on in years) when we were young ourselves. Being swept up…
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Forverts in English Leaving our treasured houses behind
Some years back, I wrote a column for the Jewish Exponent entitled “Mid/Yid.” I examined middle age using Yiddish words and expressions as a springboard. Being then in my fifties, I talked about kids leaving home, bodies slowing down, beauty fading, and long-term relationships changing. Now I’m at it again, only this time I can’t…
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Culture Feeling at home in my Yiddish-speaking bubble
Up until COVID, I started my Tuesday evenings shlepping on the subway to the mid-Manhattan Workers Circle for a Yiddish class. As a child, I’d studied the language in an afternoon shule/school in the Bronx. Now, decades later, I felt a quiet pull to study it once again. Kolya Borodulin is the director of Yiddish…
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