Yiddish literature
“I don’t know if Heaven is real. But I do know that there is a paradise on earth for children.”
The Nobel Prize-winner’s forgotten older brother.
“Short Friday.”
A literary summer in Tel Aviv.
And with the scope of Jewish, and human, existence.
The only Jewish personality who ranks with the Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz was Herzl, who devoted himself to a similar task in the political domain.
The great Yiddish writer envisioned an unbroken transmission of Jewishness through the generations, from biblical prophets to talmudic sages to literary giants like Heine—and himself.
“America was not a melting pot, but a laboratory of innumerable new combinations.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimple the Fool.”
The rebbe, the president, and the poet.
The ambivalent secularism of Chaim Grade’s quarrel.
Malines.
A far cry from the “bland exoticism” of the New York Times.