By Itzik Gottesman
One of the major artists of the American Yiddish cultural world and an innovator in the art of Jewish papercutting, Tsirl Waletzky, died on December 8 at the age of 90.
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By Itzik Gottesman
The prolific literary translator Joachim Neugroschel died on May 23 in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 73. Neugroschel translated more than 200 books from Yiddish, French, German, Russia and Italian, including the work of Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti. His legal guardian and former partner, Aaron Mack Schloff, confirmed Neugroschel’s death.Read More
By Itzik Gottesman
Maybe it’s a
sgule — a remedy prescription, for long life — to become a Yiddish writer. Itche Goldberg and Mordkhe Tsanin both died at the ripe old age of 102 a few years ago; poet Avrom Sutskever died in 2010 at 96. Now the New York Yiddish world has lost another wonderful poet, Jeremiah Hescheles, at the age of 100.
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By Itzik Gottesman
On Saturday, February 26, my mother-in-law, Judith Socolov, died peacefully in her sleep at age 89. Her death was covered extensively by The Associated Press and The New York Times, and reporters openly discussed her “infamous” past as part of a Cold War drama that had long been forgotten.Read More
By Itzik Gottesman
Each summer, it seems, it gets harder to keep track of the Jewish culture and klezmer festivals around the world. This summer, we saw Klezfest London, the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, and then — starting at the end of August — New York’s Yidish-Vokh, KlezKanada in Quebec and Ashkenaz in Toronto. These are being followed, for those whose juices are just beginning to flow, by major events in Hamburg, Warsaw and Vienna.
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