Word: yiddisher
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Wiry, crew-cut Gene Ferkauf (the name is pronounced Fur-cowf and means "sell" in Yiddish) started out in a Manhattan loft 14 years ago with a total capital of $4.000. Today he rules a fast-growing retailing empire that consists of 17 stores in the Northeastern area between Hartford, Conn., and Harrisburg, Pa. In the past nine months alone, Korvette's profits have risen 81% to $4,268,000, and the company's sales in fiscal 1962 will amount to $230 million. All this Ferkauf has accomplished by pursuing a business philosophy that...
...which is to whimper at Meaninglessness. The late Nikos Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation of Christ; St. Francis) was such a God-obsessed artist, and so, in a slighter and less intense way, is Isaac Singer, 57, a Pole (now a U.S. citizen) who lives in Manhattan and writes in Yiddish. His subjects are usually lowly Polish Jews, important only to themselves, God and the Devil; the mark of his skill is that he makes them-and makes God and the Devil-important to secular readers...
Though Isaac Bashevis Singer still writes his short stories in Yiddish, and though his style and subject matter place him in the great tradition of Yiddish writing, Kenneth Rexroth has called him "certainly one of the most remarkable American authors who has ever lived...
...stories are almost always set in the shtetlech, the self-contained little communities in which most Eastern European Jews lived until the Second World War. They draw deeply from Hasidic and cabalistic lore and they are full of remnants of the folk tales which are the primary sources of Yiddish literature. Yet, Singer's conviction that the demons he writes about are real is balanced in his fiction by a wholly modern psychological skepticism. He has been condemned by many Yiddish critics for the same qualities that critics like Rexroth, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe find praiseworthy--a lack...
Singer's reading went beyond what was prescribed. He studied Spinoza, and still remembers many passages by heart. He read the Continental classics; "I read your Jack London in Yiddish and Poe in Polish." He has translated many Western classics into Yiddish, most recently Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain...