Word: yiddishe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...space of identity crisis fiction, unfortunately is marred by most of the major flaws of recent American Jewish fiction--not to mention a few offenses that are uniquely Mirsky's. "Lukshin Kugel" is sloppily sentimental, affecting an uncritical nostalgia for the ghetto, and is narrated in a shoulder-shrugging Yiddish tone that is not maintained consistently. In one moment, the narrator sounds like a much-oppressed peasant from the Russian Pale ("Myself, I say, you never know when a pogrom is going to come along. One minute you're in Minsk licking a herring, the next minute you're running...
Mirsky's inordinate use of Yiddish words; his extraordinary stress on Jewish self-abasement, passivity, and lamentation in Twirckoff's response to crisis; his condescending attitude toward his protagonist; and the intrusion of a phony mystical hallucination at the end to get Twirckoff off the spiritual hook--all of these flaws keep "Lukshin Kugel" from creating any unified effect...
...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...
When an obscure Brooklyn composer named Sholom Secunda was writing songs for the Yiddish theater in the '303, he and Lyricist Jacob Jacobs would peddle the copyrights to music publishers for $15 apiece, and they were happy to get the money. One day in 1937, Secunda heard a familiar sound coming out of the jukeboxes of Flatbush. The Andrews Sisters had picked up one of his tunes, cut a record for Decca with new lyrics, and all over the U.S. people were dancing...
Last week the original copyright expired and, according to law, the authors (if living) could renew it. Secunda, 66, now writes liturgical music, and in summer is music director of a resort hotel in the Catskills. Jacobs runs a Yiddish vaudeville house in Miami Beach. Secunda has signed a new contract with Harms, Inc., music publishers, and the partners are assured that Bei Mir Bist Du Schön is still worth at least $5,000 yearly. They shrug off the $350,000 they might have had. Says Secunda: "Mother was convinced that the big day would come...