Word: yiddishe
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Singer had every right to act the celebrity, yet he was never at home in the modern style. His works were often published first in Yiddish in The Jewish Daily Forward and later in translation. Saul Bellow brought him wide recognition by rendering the poignant anecdote Gimpel the Fool in English. But royalties were slow to arrive, and for many years Singer lived modestly on the earnings of his second wife Alma, a buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue. Until late in life he kept his name in the Manhattan phone book, and at lunch hour he could be found munching...
...author, perhaps best known for his defense of Claus von Bulow, was a central character in the film Reversal of Fortune. Ron Silver accurately portrayed him as an amalgam of clenched hair and perverse brilliance. Those eager for a sequel have only to consult Chutzpah. The title is a Yiddish term that resists translation. In a word, gall. In two words, Alan Dershowitz...
Dershowitz eventually landed a teaching job at Harvard Law School. There, gratitude was not his long suit. Neither was tweed. He recalls his fellow Jews on the faculty: they didn't " 'dress British and think Yiddish.' They thought British too. Their Anglophilia . . . affected their mannerisms, their attitudes, their style of speech, their choice of metaphors, even their jokes." None of this for Dershowitz, then or now. His attire, jokes and attitude proclaim him as the peddler's militant grandson: out for social justice and civil rights, and along the way maybe a little advertising wouldn't hurt...
...ostensible argument of the book is that Jews should employ more chutzpah when it comes to standing up against anti-Semitism. ("Chutzpah" is an untranslatable Yiddish term describing qualities of assertiveness, demandingness and gall.) Dershowitz argues that Jews have too long allowed themselves to be trodden upon--to be treated as second-class citizens--because they are too concerned about making a favorable impression on their Gentile "hosts...
...Over our street" are the first words of the opera, sung by a chorus of exiled Palestinians; later the Israelis get equal time. Goodman combines flights of fancy with earthy images and expressions -- this must be the first operatic libretto in history to employ the word asshole and the Yiddish meshugaas. Yet, as in Marilyn Klinghoffer's homey pieta, Goodman can soar. "I have only a short time," the widow sings after learning of her husband's death. "What can part us while I live? I grieve as a pregnant woman grieves for the unseen long-imagined...