Yiddish

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For Afro-Yiddish Performer, the Past is not Past

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past…”When William Faulkner wrote these words in Requiem for a Nun, I’m pretty certain he ...

The Yiddish Author You Never Heard Of, And The Southern Jewish Man Who Will Introduce You To Him

One of my favorite things about my new role as a full-time historian at the ISJL is getting to meet ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

Yoda’s Yiddishkeit: Jewish He Seems, Hmmm?

The month of May, known as “Liberation Month,” contains Cinco de Mayo (celebrating Mexico’s liberating victory over the French in ...

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