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A Book of Insults — Exploring Yiddish Curses

By Teddy Wayne

If the classic Yiddish imprecation has an inverse, it is the Irish blessing. While the Gaelic bards gaily start benedictions with “May…” before politely wishing their recipient good fortune (“May the wind be always at your back; May the sun shine warm upon your face”), the Yiddish curse is a spell of invective, typically cast with the conditional “You should…” prior to the litany of ill tidings (“You should get windburn and a melanoma”).Read More

Chagall’s Political Art

By Jeri Zeder

Suspended in white space, a goat romps and a rooster struts across a modest book cover. Beneath them, running right to left, is the Yiddish word “mayselekh” — less a title than a simple description of what’s inside: two little stories for children. The book, which is more like a pamphlet, is small enough to slip into a greeting card envelope. Inside are 15 pages of rhyming Yiddish verse, plus eight black-and-white drawings. The book was printed in Petrograd, published in Vilnius (commonly known to Jews as Vilna) in 1917 and written by Der Nister, pen name of the avant-garde Yiddish writer Pinkhes Kahanovich (1884–1950). The illustrator is Marc Chagall.Read More

Ruth Wisse: Generous Mentor, Worthy Adversary

By Josh Lambert

In September 1976, Commentary printed the letters of three novelists who had taken umbrage at appraisals of their work, in a previous issue, by a relatively unknown Yiddish professor named Ruth Wisse. Cynthia Ozick, the most fervent of the respondents, judged Wisse guilty of a “fundamental (and, for a good reader, unforgivable) critical error”: confusing literature with sociology.Read More

Theatrical Translations

By Laura Collins-Hughes

It’s a funny thing, the way a young artist’s raw vitality is often forgotten in posterity, obscured by the seemingly tamer, more popularly appealing self that emerged later. Seven decades after “Our Town” was a Broadway hit, for example, almost no one remembers Thornton Wilder as an experimental dramatist, though he once was one. These days, we perceive him through muffling layers of homespun hokeyness.Read More

Women’s Work

By Chana Pollack and Myra Mniewski

Each month, a handful of New York feminists, who are also students of Yiddish, get together in each other’s homes to read the work of Yiddish women writers. Several writers, a couple of filmmakers and librarians, a culinary scholar and a singer/songwriter form the core of the group. Our population, however, expands and contracts, following cycles of visiting researchers, friends and the occasional curious academic.Read More

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