Word: yiddishisms
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Janus discovered a generation gap among the comedians. Most who reached prominence before the 1950s grew up in large, Yiddish-speaking immigrant families in Brooklyn or on Manhattan's Lower East Side. About 80% came from kosher homes and 90% later anglicized their names. Younger comedians are better educated, have less contact with Jewish ritual and are more likely to break away from traditional Jewish humor to deliver social or political messages in their acts. Says Janus: "The older ones changed their names and relieved their tensions with booze. The younger ones lie about their age and dabble with pills...
Isaac Bashevis Singer, storyteller and novelist (Shosha) whose Yiddish characters bare universal passions: "A writer, like a woman, never knows why people like him, or why people dislike him. We never know...
...patience of Florence Nightingale, and George is purer than the infancy of truth and madder than his true love (Julia Duffy). Through simple unpollutable honesty, George becomes chief of staff to a manic-depressive studio mogul, Herman Glogauer. George S. Irving plays this role as if he were a Yiddish Mussolini...
Isaac Bashevis Singer's constant readers know well what his books promise: the sense of returning home to a place and a time that few now living ever inhabited. Over the breadth and span of nearly 30 volumes, writing originally in Yiddish, Singer has resuscitated the Poland that existed before World War I and then, precariously, between the wars. He has peopled his land with the folk he knew when he was growing up among them, creating in the process a nation of characters. Their names have changed from book to book and story to story, but they have...
...himself. Growing up in Warsaw in the early years of this century, Aaron slowly disentangles himself from the strictures and teachings of his rabbi father and becomes attracted to secular philosophy and literature. As a young man he lives penuriously on what he can get by writing for the Yiddish-language newspapers. His other support is the warmth offered by a succession of women. Chief among these is Betty Slonim, an American actress with an old, wealthy impresario boyfriend and an itch to star on the Yiddish stage. With Hitler's invasion of Poland imminent, Betty represents Aaron...