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Yiddish
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 ...
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 ...
Is that baby DELICIOUS or what!?
When my siblings and I were little, my mom used to grab our chubby arms and pretend to munch on ...
The Jews of Poland: Recollections and Recipes by Edouard de Pomiane
When I was researching my last novel, my friend Michael Rohatyn found a book at the Strand he thought I might ...
On Writing a Novel in Two Cultures
Yesterday I wrote that my novel, The Golem and the Jinni , is “pretty darn Jewish.” In truth, that’s only ...
Dreaming in Mother Tongues
Zi kholmt – she dreams. In Irena Klepfisz’s remarkable poem, “Etlekhe verter oyf mame-loshn / A few words in the mother tongue,” the ...
Yiddish and Us
The three of us waited expectantly and somewhat nervously in the seminar room, wondering why we had been summoned by ...
Yiddish and Me
When I first began studying Yiddish, I felt like I was remembering something I already knew. It was a lovely sensation, ...
The Workmen’s Circle in Birmingham
The Workmen’s Circle—Arbeter Ring in Yiddish—is a Jewish fraternal organization devoted to progressive politics, the labor movement, and Yiddish language and culture. In its ...
Speaking Backwards
I’ve been told that students in my college courses sometimes have trouble following what I’m saying because I speak backwards. ...