These are the hats that my mother and uncles bought when bartering to survive in Uzbekistan during the Holocaust years. My mother was only twelve years old and her brothers – 14 and 9 years of age – when she and her family left Horodenka, Ukraine in 1941 and took the long treacherous journey to…
This story is part of the Forverts series, “Our Favorite Heirlooms.” This stuffed raccoon belonged to my grandfather, Abraham Melezin, known to his close friends and family as Abrasha; I called him Papa. Here’s the story: A Holocaust survivor, Papa was born in Odessa and received a PhD in geography from Stefan Batory University in…
In the Chabad yeshiva in Crown Heights, where I was a student in the early 1980s, Yiddish literature was non-existent. Sure, we spoke Yiddish in school and we read the text of the Rebbe’s Yiddish sermons, but Yiddish literature was never mentioned. Then again, we didn’t read English literature either. We studied the Torah, Talmud,…
“Normally, a poster would not include so much empty space. But any poster about Lublin must contain empty space,” Robert told me. I was standing in the print shop of Dom Słów or The House of Words in Lublin, Poland, next to visionary printer Robert Sawa in his signature ink-stained apron, his long graying hair…
Read this article in Yiddish. Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century Gennady Estraikh Academic Studies Press, $119, 354 pp In the history of American journalism, the Forverts is a genuine outlier. Over the course of the first half of the last century, the…
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…
Norma Salz shares the story behind her favorite heirloom: a handwritten letter in Yiddish from Golda Meir in 1931.
In this clip of the Forverts cooking show, “Est Gezunterheyt,” watch Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz prepare a traditional dairy noodle kugel that’s savory rather than loaded with sugar – and fried rather than baked. Eve says it’s the only noodle kugel her mother and grandmother ever made. And check out the video’s new look!
When people today use the term “Yiddish comedy”, they usually mean a standup act or film in English with Yiddish words tacked on for comic effect. The online comedy web series, “YidLife Crisis”, created and starring Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, is completely different. As many of you saw with their hilarious clip on Jewish…
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…
Yisroel Leshes, assistant cantor of New York’s Orthodox Lincoln Square Synagogue, has released a cool, jazzy version of Morris Winchevsky’s Yiddish song, “Di Tsukunft” (“The Future”), which dreams of the day when “di velt vet vern frayer, shener, yinger, nayer” (“the world will be freer, lovelier, younger and newer”). The music video, accompanied by English…
