The rhombicuboctahedronal National Library of Belarus sits on the northwest edge of Minsk, elevated above the surrounding landscape like a Brutalist disco ball. Few passersby would suspect that it’s home to some of the finest Jewish libraries of pre-war Paris, housing thousands of rare volumes that once inhabited the elegant studies and drawing rooms of…
Between 1929 and 1935, Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) published a comic novel called “The Zelmenyaners” serially in the Minsk-based Yiddish language monthly Shtern.The novel told the story of a family courtyard in Minsk, in Soviet Belorussia, which was being progressively transformed through aggressive Soviet modernization. As I will explain in an April 13 lecture…
Image by Ivan Dribas. Courtesy of Minsker Kapelye. There is a story in my family about my paternal great-grandfather Yosl (Yeysef), who served as a clarinetist in the Russian Army military band. During World War I, he was captured as a prisoner of war and was held in Germany until a year after the war…
On the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Dmitri Slepovitch writes about “Ikh vel nit ganvenen” (“I Will Not Steal”), a song he recorded in his native Belarus: I recorded “Ikh vel nit ganvenen” (“I Will Not Steal”) in Mogilev, Belarus, from Sterna Gorodetskaya, born in 1946 into the only Jewish family that got reunited…
די ווילנער דאָקטוירים יעקבֿ וויגאָדסקי און צמח שאַבאַד זענען אויך געווען געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע טוער.
יעקבֿ פֿינקלמאַן באַשרײַבט אויך זײַן לאַנגיאָריקן פֿאַך — ווי ער האָט צוגעשטעלט וויסן אין טעלעקאָמוניקאַציע איבער דער וועלט
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