Itzik Gottesman

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Fusion Shmusion

By Itzik Gottesman

With a multitude of workshops for musicians and Yiddish culture buffs, the annual KlezKanada Festival takes place at the end of August in the mountains north of Montreal. This year, I was able to sit in on Josh Dolgin’s “Fusion Shmusion” class, whose catalog description started with the question, “Does most Jewishy fusion music suck?”Read More

A Yiddish Pilgrimage to Quebec

By Itzik Gottesman

For the first time, an international Yiddish theater festival will convene, bringing together troupes from Israel, Poland, France, Romania, New York and Montreal. The festival is sponsored by and will take place at the Segal Centre for Performing Arts in Montreal from June 17 - 25, 2009.Read More

Zvi Kanar, 80, Mime of Wonder and Shoah Horrors

By Itzik Gottesman

When Zvi Kanar, an internationally known mime and Yiddish writer, died April 18 in Tel Aviv, Israel, his friends were startled to learn that he was 80 years old. With his upbeat attitude and easy ability to be around the younger generation of Yiddishists and performers, it was assumed he was 10 years younger.Read More

Yiddish Poetry: Up Close and Personal

By Itzik Gottesman

While every process of translation involves a dialogue between the work and the person rendering it into a foreign tongue, many translators go to great pains to play down that fact and, instead, foreground the works themselves in the new language, hoping the reader does not even notice or remember that there once was an original and foreign source for what he is now reading.Read More

The Newspaper That Speaks Your Language

By Itzik Gottesman

In 1970, soon after my bar mitzvah, at the instigation of my uncle — late Yiddish linguist Mordkhe Schaechter — I joined in a demonstration with family and friends in front of the old Forward offices on East Broadway, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, demanding that the paper clean up its language. No, it was not a question of vulgarity in the language that offended us, but such issues as the use of an English word or two in every Yiddish sentence, what some called “potato Yiddish,” and the old-fashioned spelling in the paper that was heavily influenced by German and English. The Forward had lost touch with Yiddish orthographic changes over the previous 50 years and was a living dinosaur in that respect.Read More


 

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