Yiddish literature
“I am on my own lady messiah.”
Rabbis had figured previously in Yiddish literature, but they were usually secondary characters.
“Bontshe the Silent” and the inner lives of the Jews.
A kind of mystic.
There’s more to the Yiddish writer than “combining shtetls, demons, and sex in a small bowl, mixed well.”
Moyshe Kulbak’s Childe Harold.
Disposable Jews.
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.
