Word: mosaic
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...student Twirckoff, Yom Kippur was always a day of dread." Thus begins Mark Mirsky's short story, "Lukshin Kugel" (in English that's noodle pudding). Twirckoff's dread--What does it mean to be a Jew?--sets the tone for this second issue of Mosaic, a literary magazine published by the Hillel Society...
...Mosaic includes three articles on religious subjects, a number of poems and stories, and two book reviews, but Mirsky's story is easily the most interesting piece. Harvard student Twirckoff (no first name) is Jewish, a senior in Eliot House; he wears Brooks Brothers clothing, professes agnosticism, and scorns his bourgeois antecedents (he won't even eat his mother's noodle pudding). In all these matters Twirckoff reminded me of Richard Amsterdam, the socially ambitious protagonist of Remember Me to God, the best-selling Harvard novel of a few years ago. But the basic difference between Richard Amsterdam and Mirsky...
...Begins, a novel of Russia's New Class by Abram Tertz that was smuggled out of the Soviet Union early last year. Perhaps because the subject is non-Jewish, Miss Robinson's writing is restrained and modest, avoiding the self-indulgent, sentimental egotism of some of the writing in Mosaic...
...poems in Mosaic, two are especially appealing, one an excellent translation of a Yiddish poem, "The Prayer of Ivan the Drunk," the other a delightful short poem by George Blecher, a junior in the College...
Hopefully, in future issues Mosaic will devote less space to translations of already established Jewish writers and more to creative writing on Jewish themes by undergraduates. Also, the editors of Mosaic should guard against a tendency toward parochialism. Some of the writing in the magazine, most notably Miss Kegan's essay on Hasidism and neo-Hasidism, reads as if written primarily for Mosaic's editors and writers, rather than for the general Jewish audience. Only self-indulgence by the editors can justify the magazine's almost exclusive concern with the Yiddish, eastern European aspects of Jewish life, feeling, and culture...