Word: yiddishisms
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...previously allowed him to imitate Satan, fools, saints and, on one occasion, a rooster. True, his gift has been squandered on a man with no redeeming features, but for once Singer is not out to charm his readers. He and his penitent seem content to prove the old Yiddish proverb "Going backward is still a form of travel...
Ozick is currently translating poetry for a new Penguin edition of Yiddish verse, edited by Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse. It is a labor of love. "It's so wonderful to make another poem in English and to set yourself up in rivalry with the original. It's the only writing I find enjoyable. All other writing is so painful; I would do anything to avoid writing. That's probably why I read so much. But reading inspires and leads to hope for more writing...
...folk-singing choir who loved picnics, baseball and Joseph Stalin, roughly in that order. Paul Isaacson (Mandy Patinkin) was the party's star tummler, strutting as vivaciously on Death Row as he would have on the Borscht Belt. And Rochelle (Lindsay Grouse) was a righteous, steel-rimmed Yiddish mama...
Like all of Allen's best work, Zelig is, finally, a comedy of manners-public manners in this case, not private ones as in Annie Hall or Manhattan. In Yiddish it means blessed, and Zelig is, surely, in the midst of a typical American summer at the movies when almost everything is a loud assault on the senses, a benison. It is both a welcome wooing of sensibility and intellect and a film that will be recalled long after Labor Day has come and gone. -By Richard Schickel
...never mind." In the epoch of the Romanoffs, wisdom was the only thing that was shared equally. Cossacks who conducted pogroms and victims in the shtetls flavored their remarks with the same sour salt. Russian: "The rich would have to eat money, but luckily the poor provide food." Yiddish: "If the rich could hire others to die for them, the poor could make a nice living...