Yiddish literature
The dramas of Vilna in the 1920s are not so far removed from the dramas an Orthodox rabbi’s wife sees playing out in the 2020s.
S. Ansky’s radical yeshiva boys used to seem unreal. But observing today’s political scene has taught me to understand them.
Moshkele Ganev.
“He told me, looking over his shoulder though no one was eavesdropping, that he liked Reagan.”
A story.
“There is only one joy: to increase and not to lessen the world’s joy.”
Moshkeleh the Thief.
Four generations of Blinkens.
A great Yiddish poet’s tale of defiance in the death camps, and a Jaffa cafeteria.
The author of “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner” was alienated from traditional religion not because of Orthodoxy in general but because of his yeshiva’s misanthropic separatism.
Hersh Rasseyner is inescapable. The guy-yelling-at-you figure reappears in each generation, going back to when even Moses pulled a “Hersh” for the entire book of Deuteronomy.
“If Jews had the fortitude to believe in victory over the Greeks, then we could not now surrender our trust in defeating our enemy.”
The first complete translation of the Yiddish classic, in which former classmates rediscover one another after the Holocaust and resume their old debates about God, man, and history.
How I came to translate one of the greatest stories in all of Yiddish literature, a work that I believe uniquely illuminates the debate at the very center of Jewish modernity.
