Word: yiddishisms
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After all, it wasn't the prayers we didn't understand or the events at Mt. Sinai that made us Jewish--it was the family gatherings at Hannukah and Passover, the special appreciation of Woody Allen, the grandparents who used a bissel (a little) Yiddish. It was corned beef with mustard on rye, not with mayonaise on white. It was having Sunday brunch more religiously than Shabbat meals. It was seeing everyone we knew at synagogue twice a year, and pretending spare ribs didn't count as pork in the Chinese restaurant. And it was suffering an afternoon a week...
...Yiddish word kochleffl might well have been coined to describe Professor of History and Literature John Clive, who died last month. I never knew him in the classroom and never would have known him at all had he been able to keep his nose out of other people's business. Yet because he could not, he became one of the dearest people I knew at Harvard...
...everyone saw it that way. Lansky's first goal was to muster support from some of the large Jewish organizations with headquarters in New York City. "They all said the same thing: 'Yiddish is dead. Forget it.' " He refused to. Instead, he resolved to scratch along on whatever he earned, and packed off to Maine to work as a migrant blueberry picker for the summer. He made ( enough to have stationery printed. "I had a picnic table and a Government- surplus typewriter. I sat down and started putting out press releases saying, 'If you have old books lying around, send...
...expect the deluge to slow down," says Lansky. "Yet we're still getting 600 or 700 volumes a week." Late last year he visited half a dozen cities in the Soviet Union where Jews, taking advantage of the cultural freedom afforded by glasnost, have expressed an interest in establishing Yiddish libraries...
...first decade, the center's collection has grown to include 25,000 titles. The true measure of its achievement is comparative: scholars estimate that only about 40,000 works were ever printed in Yiddish. With these riches, the center has become a whirligig of cultural promotion, keeping pace with a resurgent interest in Yiddish around the world. It runs an adult-education seminar and a student-intern program, and, using Yiddish-speaking actors in Israel, is taping entire novels. This profusion delights Lansky, whose accomplishments were recognized last July by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago...