by Lawrence Bush on May 20, 2012
by Marek Breiger
“All men are Jews, though few men know it.” —Bernard Malamud
For those of us who came of age reading Bernard Malamud, it seems impossible to contemplate the present situation in which, only twenty-six years following his death, many American Jewish college students and indeed many American Jews under the age of 50 have not read this crucial Jewish writer. For Malamud (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) was and is the essential first-generation American Jewish novelist, the writer who more than any other built a bridge between the East European Yiddish masters and the experiences of American Jewish life — and did so with compassion, empathy and artfulness.
In Malamud’s world, comedy and tragedy are inseparable, and the human ability to transcend suffering is a given, as is the knowledge that life has meaning and is not a cosmic joke, and that humans are engaged with one another and our choices matter. He teaches these eternal lessons in a voice that incorporates, as in music, both sounds and silence.There is a clarity of sound in his narratives that evokes both the crowded tenements and American open spaces, the rush of New York City and the lonesome trains winding through twilight in the Northwest. One reads Malamud as one hears both the Gershwin of “Rhapsody in Blue,” the Copeland of “Appalachian Spring,” the Bernstein of “West Side Story,” and the Marx Brothers in “Go West.” His landscapes are setting where human beings struggle with their destiny and their fate. [click to continue…]
by Alice Rosenthal
I am standing on rising ground overlooking a large expanse of green that blankets this corner of the northwest Bronx. I’ve come back to revisit this distinct patch of time and place from almost a lifetime away and a distance of 3,000 miles. I’ve come to honor it — and to grieve for it — as an American and a Jew. Something I couldn’t have dreamt of doing in those years I lived in it. I look back with love to this time, though my actual memories are the vivid sensory ones of a young child; but with all the advantages and revelations of hindsight I see here, in 1946, in this comfortable, unglamorous, urban community, the blossoming of a vigorous and hopeful democracy. Its emblem and its heart are our park.
Van Cortlandt Park embraces the neighborhood, reaching north to the very edge of New York City, and before it can become a memory, it is caught up by more parkland in Yonkers — the passing of the green, like a torch that is never dropped, from one group of civic custodians to another.
A few centuries ago, this area was a large tract acquired by the Van Cortlandts from the original Dutch settlers. They knew what they were about, those shrewd Van Cortlandt’s, and they lived on this capacious estate during the Revolution and through most of the 19th century. One of the sons built a family home up here, still preserved as a museum in the park. Van Cortlandt Mansion is actually quite modest compared to the ostentatious houses of the Gilded Age that came later. It does not scream to be envied or admired, nor does it invite close inspection. The pristine rooms are roped off and only the polished and buffed surfaces of existence can be seen. Except for a basement kitchen, we see nothing of workshops, fields, or any evidence of the underbelly of backbreaking labor necessary to run the place. Quarters for servants, bonded or otherwise, are not preserved for our view, yet it is the descendants of slaves and bonded servants, and their first cousins, the waves of working class immigrants and their children, who will later become denizens of this stretch of green. [click to continue…]
by Lawrence Bush on May 11, 2012
Sheva Zucker, editor of Afn Shvel (On the Threshold), the all-Yiddish magazine published by the League for Yiddish, launched a blog of Yiddish poems about mothers in February, in memory of her own mother, Miriam Pearlman Zucker, who died on January 25 of this year.
Sheva has given Jewish Currents permission to post these translations, along with the Yiddish originals (and in transliteration) at our website. This is our sixth entry. We urge readers to visit her blog as well as the website of the League for Yiddish (for non-Yiddish speakers, the website can be viewed in English).
This is the second poem we are selecting by Rashel Veprinski. The translation is by Sheva. Happy Mother’s Day, all! [click to continue…]
by Lawrence Bush on April 29, 2012
Sheva Zucker, editor of Afn Shvel (On the Threshold), launched a blog of Yiddish poems about mothers in February, in memory of her own mother, Miriam Pearlman Zucker, who died on January 25 of this year.
Sheva has given Jewish Currents permission to post these translations, along with the Yiddish originals (and in transliteration) at our website. We urge readers to visit her blog.
This fifth poem, “My Mother,” is by Celia Dropkin, whom Sheva describes as follows: [click to continue…]
For those of us who came of age reading Bernard Malamud, it seems impossible to contemplate the present situation in which, only twenty-six years following his death, many American Jewish college students and indeed many American Jews under the age of 50 have not read this crucial Jewish writer. For Malamud (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) was and is the essential first-generation American Jewish novelist, the writer who more than any other built a bridge between the East European Yiddish masters and the experiences of American Jewish life — and did so with compassion, empathy and artfulness.
