Word: yiddishe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Fool to the latest story, hot off the presses, is amazingly of a piece. Three basic formulas are constantly repeated. Unrest stirs a rural Polish village, thanks to the mischief of its inhabitants and their attendant demons. An aspiring young author passes his time in Warsaw visiting the Yiddish Writers' Club and storing up everything he hears and does. An older incarnation of the same man, expatriated from Poland and living on Manhattan's Upper West Side, submits willingly to readers and strangers who come to his door bearing strange tales. From these premises, Singer continues to construct an apparently...
These three types of Singer stories share a sharp urgency, a sense that time is too precious to waste on flowery descriptions or circumlocutions. One character commands another, "Speak simple Yiddish," the language in which all these tales were originally written, and the English translations by the author and others do their best to obey the spirit of this injunction. Storytellers appear suddenly, with scant preamble, and seem eager to get off the page as soon as possible. They punctuate their narratives with such remarks as "To make it short . . ." and "Why drag it out?" The Trap involves yet another...
...campaigner, she is a definite asset. In Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, she switched into Yiddish at appropriate moments. While she can be just as unexciting as her husband when delivering a scripted speech, she turns * spontaneous and exuberant when she breaks away from the text, bringing applause from charmed audiences. If she becomes First Lady, she is certain to break the set-in-aspic mold of Nancy Reagan. She has little tolerance for what are known as "silly wife questions," which have always pursued political spouses. When a woman reporter wanted to know, "How do Michael's shirts look...
...banana and nuts. Lender's has just introduced Big 'n Crusty, 50% larger than its regular product and looking like a sort of dimpled Superdome modeled in dough. Brothers Murray and Marvin Lender have recently expanded their Connecticut-based chain of bagel restaurants, S. Kinder (a play on the Yiddish Ess, Kinder ((Eat, children))), into Manhattan, where they offer a blueberry-studded bagel. Says Murray Lender, son of the company's founder: "The Brooklyn traditionalist would probably break out in hives at the mention of a blueberry bagel...
Since September the venture has acquired some new features and a few additions to the "Board of Mavens" (Yiddish for self-appointed experts). The panel now includes cellist Yo-Yo Ma '76, violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Boston Celtics' Red Auerbach, the owner of Boston's kosher Milk Street Cafe, and Sheldon Cohen of Out of Town News...