Alyssa Quint
By Alyssa Quint
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Culture How Yiddish Blossomed After the Holocaust
Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture After the Holocaust By Jan Schwarz Wayne State University Press, 360 pages, $46.99 In 1954, while passing through the Uruguayan capital city of Montevideo, the Yiddish literary editor Mark Turkov met a Jewish journalist from Paris who had begun writing a book about his experience in Auschwitz. Turkov invited him…
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Culture How YIVO Became a Lasting Cultural Center
YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture By Cecile Esther Kuznitz Cambridge University Press, 324 pages, $95 As it stands today, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is the brick-and-mortar memory of East European Jewry. Photographs, letters, theater placards, diaries, institutional records, and rabbinical responsa are just some of the documents in its collection….
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Culture Tracing the History of Jewish Autobiography
Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography By Marcus Moseley Stanford University Press, 650 pages, $70. * * *| ‘This is the Life Story of Judah Aryeh…. Few and evil have been the days of my life in this world… on Monday the 28th day of Nissan — corresponding to the 23d day of…
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Culture Beyond Bubbeleh: Reading Real Yiddish
These days, books about Yiddish have been hamming it up for the mainstreamers. A slew of new books have arrived to decode the cultural essence of the language of Ashkenazic Jewry for an audience of non-Jews and Jews (both of whom appear equally innocent of Yiddish these days). “Yiddish With Dick and Jane” is only…
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Culture Asch’s Diamonds
Maybe it’s the fallacy that rewarding literature must be difficult that explains why no scholar has lingered in the literary universe of Polish-born American Yiddish novelist and playwright Sholem Asch (1880-1957). Asch, who published alongside Isaac Bashevis Singer and other luminaries in the Yiddish Forward, was considered a master of Yiddish fiction until a literary…
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Culture Beyond Research: Ansky’s Chronicle of Tenderness
The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I By S. Ansky Edited and Translated By Joachim Neugroschel Metropolitan Books, 352 pages, $30. * * *| On January 1, 1915, an article was published in a Warsaw-based Yiddish newspaper that appealed to its readers to record their…
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Culture Sealed Mit a Kiss: Yiddish Love Poems
Simkhe: epistolarishe libe-lider (Celebration: Love-letter Poems) By Troim Katz Handler, translated by Shimon Beyles International Association of Yiddish Clubs, 73 pages, $18. * * *| No one who has drunk from the cup of Sappho, much less from the bounty of today’s literary erotica, will blush over “Simkhe: epistolarishe libe-lider,” or “Celebration: Love-letter Poems,” by…
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News Fiction’s Feminine Side Gets Equal Time
Alyssa Quint regularly contributes to the Forward. Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories By Sandra Bark Warner Books, 352 pages, $14.95. * * *| According to Fanya Glants’s husband, the celebrated American-Yiddish poet A. Leyeles, she was a genuine artist whose bond with literature was both intimate and…
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