Video: A Purim tale, ‘Drunk all year, but sober on Purim,’ in Yiddish with English subtitles
Master storyteller Shane Baker recites the classic writer I. L. Peretz's story of a would-be saintly man diverted by a turkey
I.L. Peretz
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Culture He was one of our greatest writers — so, why don’t people talk about him anymore?
A new book tries to reclaim the legacy of I.L. Peretz
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Forverts in English What does Yiddish scholar Samuel Spinner mean by Jewish primitivism?
Samuel J. Spinner Jewish Primitivism Stanford University Press, 272 pp. According to the Russian־Jewish art critic, Abram Efros (1888-1954), modern Jewish art needs to embody two principles: European modernism and Jewish folk art. In his article, “Aladdin’s Magic Lantern,” Efros wrote that “the face of modernism is turned outwards, while folk art turns inward.” Efros’…
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Culture How I Emerged From The Shadow Of I.L. Peretz
Although my name is Rogovoy, I grew up in an extended family named Peretz — my mother’s maiden name. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — I identified more as a Peretz than as a Rogovoy. On every family’s bookshelf were the same books: volumes written by and about the great late-19th / early 20th century author…
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Culture I.L. Peretz’s Bitter Critique of Passivity
This month, Anne reads “Bontche Shweig,” by Isaac Loeb Peretz (1852-1915) Did the Enlightenment come to the Jewish world like a thunderclap? Like a mist drifting in? Like an alarm clock penetrating a deep sleep? It doesn’t matter. It came, and with it a writer who could stand outside and inside at the same time….
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Culture The Greatest Yiddish Writer You Never Heard Of
● Memories and Scenes: Shtetl, Childhood, Writers By Jacob Dinezon Translated from the Yiddish by Tina Lunson Jewish Storyteller Press, 240 pages, $19.95 In “Apocalypse,” a short story by Yiddish writer Jacob Dinezon, three elderly Jews get to talking about the concept of Rothschild, and about whether such a person actually exists. “In reality there…
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The Schmooze Tannhäuser and the Jews
Three central Jewish thinkers, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz were all profoundly inspired by the medieval legend of Tannhäuser, a knight and poet who worshipped the goddess Venus. Herzl and Peretz were also fans of the 1845 opera based on this legend, by the notoriously anti-Semitic Richard Wagner. This paradox is explored…
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The Schmooze The Last Great Yiddish Modernist Poet
The Yiddish poet Yirmiye (Jeremiah) Hesheles died on October 16, 2010. When he celebrated his 100th birthday a group of dedicated Yiddishists, myself included, celebrated the occasion by paying him a visit at the New York State Veterans Home in St. Albans, Queens. A herd of geese, as if out of an Eastern European legend,…
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