Jewish Languages

Our Dreams of Home

When I think of home, I imagine the physical space I return to at night, the one with the white-washed ...

An Ancient Oath Renewed for Labor Day

Often reality is stranger than fiction; The vote for one of the first major strike in American history was taken ...

Maimonides’ Home and My Grandmother’s Song

Ladino first cast its magic spell on me in childhood. It always struck me as a graceful, rolling language, one ...

¿Cómo te llamas?…How Do Latino Jews Identify?

I’m a Latina Jew. I live in New York City, famous for the diversity of its population; after all, 37 ...

Feeding Other Writers, and Myself

A few days ago my novel,  Fields of Exile , was published in the USA, and this month marks exactly ...

The Gift of Generations: A Mother’s Song

Mom. Mommy. Ima. Madre. Mother. No matter how many ways I say it, the concept still catches me by surprise ...

The Beginnings of A Bintel Brief

In January 1906, a woman wrote a letter to a Yiddish daily newspaper called the  Forward , to complain that her watch ...

Publishing the Unpublishable

It took me more than three years to finish  Shlepping the Exile . I had a job as a researcher ...

Normal English and the Novel

Plot was the last thing on my mind when I sat down to make a novel out of the stories ...

Is “Schmuck” a Dirty Word?

One of the points I make in my book is that what’s dirty in Yiddish isn’t always dirty in English, and vice ...

Lithuania’s Past and Present

In my last blog post, I recounted the background of Yiddish linguist Dovid Katz, who has been reporting on troubling manifestations of ...

Ladino Pregnant Pop

“Ensuenyo Te Vi” Three words that normally don’t go together: Ladino, Pop, Pregnant. But in my world they make a ...